durée. Now Raquel and I are heading out into the icy dawn, toward Raquel’s car, parked on the other side of the deserted avenue. The interior of the car is freezing. As the motor warms up, Raquel lights a cigarette and passes it to me, and then lights another that she leaves hanging in her mouth. Now we have pulled up in front of my house. You’ll laugh at me, she says. You’ll tell me not be pushy, but this is stronger than me. You’ll be wanting kids one of these days, sometime, with someone, I say. She says she’ll be at the station the day after tomorrow, at ten to twelve, to see me off. And now that I am lying down, smoking, through the window I see the cold blue sky, a ray of sun, full of a million dancing particles, passing through the glass to draw a clear circle on the parquet. My clothes lie on Cat’s untouched bed. Standing next to the desk, I see, through the window, the white apartment block, vertical and full of dark rectangular perforations, the municipal building. Now I’m looking at the ferns on the patio, the flowerpots lined up along the yellow walls. There is light in the patio, but not a single patch of sun. I am standing next to the counter at the bar, in the galleria, looking at the cashier dressed in green overalls. The owner of the bar comes out of the back room with an empty glass in his hand, which he puts down on the coffee machine. At the bottom my cup still holds a trace of coffee. The owner of the bar says something to me, in a vague way, which is typical of him, I think because he is never sure whether he is talking to me or to Cat. He talks about the explosions, doubting the results: they should have waited, he says, until the water got to the highest point, but — he looks at the empty patio, over my head — who could tell what the highest point would be? What could be used as a reference? The past? There was a flood in aught five, in twenty-six, in sixty-two; those were the biggest ones. None of them got up to the same point, they were all different. He falls silent. When they rise, slowly, over months, burying entire provinces beneath dark water, those chaotic rivers take not only our lands, our animals, our trees, but also, and perhaps in a surer and more permanent way, our conversations, our courage, and our recollections. They entomb, they disable our communal memory, our identity. And, although it is cold, the May sun shines down on the empty red metal tables arranged on the patio. There is a sunny silence. There is a fixed green stain, the cashier sitting upon a stool, one hand resting on the lever of the cash register. The murmur of the city, intermittent and continual, comes to me mutedly. Now that I let myself be consumed by the crowd, on the corner by the bank, standing immobile, smoking, I think, unpremeditatedly, about the empty bar in the galleria, about the sunny patio, about the green stain that is the cashier, his hand resting on the lever of the cash register. They will persist, empty, without me. Suddenly, smoothly, standing fifty centimeters from my face, a man, with a rosette in the lapel of his overcoat, clean shaven, about thirty years old, pats my arm, smiling, his head somewhat bent toward me and his green eyes half closed: what am I so pensive about standing on the street corner at eleven o’clock in the morning, although getting a bit of sun is certainly worthwhile. His face is somehow familiar to me. He must be, I think, one of those friends that Cat makes every time he goes on a bender with Tomatis or with Héctor, at the Progress Club or at Copacabana. One of those who thinks that Cat has forgotten about them — Cat never forgets anyone who has spoken two words to him, ever — when they confuse me for him on the street and I receive them coolly. Now he has gone. People pass around me, on the sidewalk and on the street, and when I throw it, my cigarette hits the curb and keeps smoking on the asphalt. Bringing a piece of warm meat to my mouth, in the restaurant, at the same table where I ate yesterday with Héctor, before Héctor’s empty chair, among the muffled sounds, I stand still, not suddenly, midway, recalling the shaved face, the green eyes, the gray coat, the lapeclass="underline" accustomed to his mistake, about to leave, with my suitcase packed beside the bed, the plane ticket, exhausted, I see that failing to recognize the man on the street corner by the bank as the painter Héctor introduced to me, fleetingly, in the restaurant, shows that I can only conceive of being recognized for myself with uncertainty or disbelief. I shake my head, laughing; I swallow the mouthful. The taxi driver stops before reaching the bridge, when the policeman seems to want to come out of the sentry box to signal to him. Vehemently, looking at me from time to time through the rearview mirror, where a fragment of my face appears at one of the angles, the driver, whose bald oval head seems incapable of sitting still for even a moment, has been telling me that the explosions were a faulty measure, proposed by the army, and that now those breaches will stay open for years. I pay him and get out. Until he has seen the car turn around, after two or three laborious maneuvers, and take off down the boulevard, the policeman doesn’t look at me. In the siesta sun, a head taller than me, hands held away from his body, dark face below his visor, body covered in the maroon overcoat belted by a bandoleer, legs akimbo, the policeman, because he is far from me, seems more precise, more perfect. He uses not only his gaze, but his whole body to watch the car depart. Now his sparkling boots scrape threateningly as he turns toward me. Yes, there are steamboats and canoes going out to El Rincón. You get off at La Guardia, there is a motorboat pulling a barge, and then, at the entrance to the town, a canoe. Out of habit he stands at attention, unostentatiously, at least it seems to me, when I leave. The breeze cools the light in the middle of the bridge, a weak platform above the water, which dominates everything, and from which emerge, intermittently, trees, posts, buildings. Below, against the central column, currents, visible on the surface, intertwine, breaking the smoothness of the great liquid expanse, lifting crests that shudder, rugged and foamy, as if around the column there were, so to speak, a deep hole into which all of the water had come to fall. From the bridge, before reaching the other end, I see the Boating Club building, red tiles and white walls, half submerged: water comes and goes through the doors, through the windows. On the other side of the club are a ravine and a narrow path that runs along the water among the trees. Soldiers, people, canoes, and a steamboat are visible. An officer directs the embarkation. There is a strip of dry land thirty feet across and no more than six feet wide. I approach the group, keeping quiet: almost no one speaks. Some have boarded the steamboat. Others prepare to get on. Others watch, as if they weren’t going themselves. Suddenly, a telephone rings. I see then that the officer, elated by his job and the general situation, jumps toward the side and plunges his feet into the water, and I can make out, upon a slim, narrow little table, the telephone. With my eyes I follow the cable, which, going over the tops of the trees, disappears into the Boating Club. The officer speaks into the telephone for a moment, his feet sunk in the water. When he’s finished, he returns to directing our embarkation. Now, searching blindly, having left the shore, for what, until a few months back, was the path of a stream, we sail, precariously, slowly, crammed into the little steamboat, the rhythm of its motor broken, intermittent, in the middle of the great aquatic expanse from which tall tufts of paja brava grass, camalote and, far off, ranches and trees, half flooded, jut forth. Next to one of them I can make out, now almost stripped of paint, the metal of its roof eaten away by rust, a minibus submerged in the water. We get off at the asphalt road. There are people waiting for the steamboat on the shore. The motorboat is nowhere to be seen. When the steamboat’s motor cuts so we can dock, and we are slowly approaching the shore, the silence is so great, so vast, that I sense, for a fleeting moment, arduously, completely, growing, the exodus, the general dread, the distress, the death. Touching land, I trip and fall forward. Someone holds me up — there are exclamations and a few laughs. Many of those dark faces, that all look alike, are familiar to me. Some greet me. The majority of those waiting on the shore get onto the steamboat. Soldiers, a non-commissioned officer, direct the embarkation. Off to one side of the dock, hastily reinforced with wood and sheets of zinc, precarious, is a drink stand. Someone says that the motorboat has just left for El Rincón and won’t be back for another hour. Others talk about the explosions, the bulletins, the military. An entire family that didn’t manage to get onto the steamboat and now stands on the shore, waiting for its return, ask a soldier for information about the encampment at Boca del Tigre. From the way he answers them, vaguely, quickly, indecisively, I sense that the soldier doesn’t even know the encampment exists; the totality of a catastrophe is the privilege of its spectators, not its protagonists. At the drink stand I have a gin, between two men speaking in low voices. I buy a bottle for Cat. There is something else I catch, for a moment, in the flavor of that gin drunk in the cool, sinking sun, other than the years I’ve already lost, other than a certain forgetfulness and a certain immobility, a certain objection, and it is, mixed with the scent of water and the scent of poverty, something invisible and ironclad like a root, food, a preexisting relationship through which my separation is not the division of two distinct parts which coexist, in enmity, inside me, but the end of a marriage to something that, for lack of a better word, I call the world. Needles, as you might say, of gold, still high up, draw lines across the blue sky. Before the motorboat, sending up its weak, regular explosions, arrives, again, full of people, coming slowly to dock, sailing over what used to be a street in La Guardia, fragile, old, the steamboat. With the glass of gin in my hand, I see, from among the group that has crammed onto shore preparing to board, people jumping to the ground. Now I am standing on the barge pulled, laboriously, by the motorboat, and I grab hold of the crosspiece, looking at the fields on either side of the road. Not too high, contained, but demonstrating, nevertheless, through that calm, that it will be the last to withdraw, the water covers the fields, coils around the trunks of trees, hammers, imperceptibly, against walls, bridges, embankments. The asphalt is stained with mud, detritus, debris. In Colastiné, on a relatively elevated point around which the water nibbles tranquilly, there is another encampment. The motorboat stops; children and dogs run from the tents toward the people getting off, and women and men, busy boiling water, chopping wood, interrupt their work a moment to look in the direction of the trailer. Soldiers walk idly among the tents, around which accumulate, in disorder, baubles, blankets, and basins. Then the orange motorboat starts up again, with the driver, who holds his back, covered by a short wool jacket, rigid, before me, and a soldier who accompanies him, standing in the front, his face ruddy from the cold air. All these months I’ve gotten no impression of any sort of violence from the water, but rather, and even more when its habit of growing had settled down inside us, of discretion, placidity, silence, and I have had to see the people at Boca del Tigre, in Colastiné, in encampments, piled up in front of the slate at