mate, one foot propped up on a half-buried car battery: they have said, yes, about the explosions; as far as the island, everything is underwater. A black dog jumps two or three times in front of the old man, and then stands on his hind legs. Don Layo refills the mate and offers it to me. Washington comes out of the house, with his own mate and another straw. I end up between the two old men who talk, tranquilly, about a catastrophe that, in one sense, doesn’t even graze them, me, who flees from it practically trembling. Two old men who speak serenely, respectfully, who have had time, paying for it with their years, to get to this point and in which, surrounded by water that is rising, and that will continue to rise, are standing, firm, polished, like bones, drinking mate in the cold sunlight of the morning, warmer, paradoxically, than at noon. Still, they offer, so to speak, no lesson. They offer nothing. More exterior than the house, the trees, the smoke, and more fleeting, they extract, even for themselves, no conclusion. Now I watch Washington suck the mate, put the silver tube in his mouth, sip, and sip for him, in him, while Don Layo, watching him, waiting, offers me the full mate again. I sip, in turn, from the other mate. Go take a look at the Federalists’ Wall when you get there, he tells me, at the door, as I am getting into the canoe. I tell him that I will go. Say hello to your mother for me, Don Layo tells me, when he leaves me at the road. And then, again, in an inverse sense, standing in the barge being pulled, slowly, by the orange motorboat, I retrace the path, seeing how, helplessly, dark, among the children, the dogs, the smoke, the tents slip away. And then: La Guardia under water, the bridge, the city. I cross, so to speak, a fixed place that I believe, because I am traveling, will stay behind. In the galleria, Elisa, in a blue dress, sits at a table on which there are two small cups, both empty. He went back to El Rincón, she tells me. I sit down in front of one of the cups; Elisa is sitting in front of the other. They went around looking for you, with Tomatis, she says. She looks at me. She thinks, even so, that I am not Cat. I ask myself what he has to go to El Rincón for, she says. Washington is with him, I say. In the silence that follows, monotonous, the proprietor’s voice comes from behind the counter, speaking with the cashier. Héctor’s elastic face, behind his pipe, appears in the corridor of the galleria, and when he sits with us, Héctor, after thumping me twice softly on the shoulder, asks after Cat: someone, he says, told him that he saw him around here yesterday. He returned this morning. He must have come to say goodbye to me, I say. Elisa says that she must get the boys when school gets out. Héctor gives her the keys. I don’t think I’ll be able to come to the station tonight, says Elisa, standing up. I feel, for the last time, against my arid cheek, her own, smooth, fleeting when I stand and brush, as a goodbye, my left cheek against her right cheek, after having brushed, quickly, for a fraction of a second, my right cheek against her left. Héctor is watching me as I remain standing, seeing her pass through the glass door, enter the corridor, disappear among the illuminated places, thinking, imprecisely, vaguely, that it is not love that awakens nostalgia, but, more mechanically, the experience, the perception, the familiarity even with that which rejects us, going around us, inert. Now the two of us are standing in the sun, on the sidewalk, the pipe that juts out of his elastic face emitting a weak column of smoke among the people who pass and who, inattentive, must change directions to pass the part of the sidewalk we intercept with our bodies. Now, after having rejected his invitation to go to lunch, saying I have mountains of things to get done at home, after having said goodbye until tonight at the station, I cross the sunny street, make it to the other side, walk through the murmur of the city as if submerged in a transparent river, dull, continuous, in the direction of my house. Now I am in the bedroom, standing between the two beds, seeing Cat’s, slept in, and mine, made up. On my pillow there is a note: I couldn’t find you anywhere. You shouldn’t have gone to El Rincón. We were looking for you, me and Tomatis. What about the explosions? Come back soon because out there you will find nothing. Send me your address so I can write to you right away. Hugs. Cat. One more thing: Since we didn’t have enough time to pay the bill — we ate at El Tropezón — I signed your name. Don’t worry, Tomatis will drop by to take care of it. More hugs. Now I am looking at the white municipal building through the window. It is immersed, so to speak, in the blue sky. I have come this morning from El Rincón, I have been with Elisa and with Héctor in the bar in the galleria, I have walked home, I have been in the bedroom seeing Cat’s disheveled bed and my intact one, I have read the note he left for me on the pillow, and now I am standing beside the desk, looking through the window at the white municipal building that shines in the noon sun and is immersed, so to speak, in the blue sky. Chewing with difficulty, slowly, listening to my vague story about Don Layo’s family and the submerged island, without much effort, my mother, younger than her salt-and-pepper hair, which gives her the air of a mature actress made up to play an old woman on television, conceals, beneath a thin patina of resignation, a certain indifference. A kind of tiredness prevents her from showing more effusion. We are delivered from this embarrassment, suddenly, by the telephone. The maid comes to say that it is for me. I am still swallowing when I pick up the earpiece and hear Tomatis’s voice. It, he says, is sinking. It is sinking. It keeps rising. Tonight they will blow up more of the embankments. The ones who are leaving are right to go. I tell him that I have been to El Rincón to see Cat and that Cat, on the other hand, had come to eat in the city with the rest of the tramps. Tomatis laughs: he had suggested to him, he says, that I might have gone to El Rincón. Well, Pigeon, says Tomatis, for the last time: give up this absurd trip! I promise, if you do, to wash away your sins with water, so much water. Your limitations, I say, are the same as the Devil’s: temptation is your only power. The only real power, says Tomatis: the rest is pure demagoguery. He too, will be at my sendoff, that’s why he’s called, he says, tonight, at ten to twelve, at the bus station, and between the end of his sentence and the sound of the operator cutting the line, there is a silence, a vacillation, something imprecise, as if his voice, already faint, were trying fruitlessly, indecisively, to say something and not at all to rectify, to distance himself, to console himself, but simply, almost mechanically, to continue talking a bit, to fill, with a pause, the duration, which is not more than a moment, in which his voice, fragmentary, sticks, just like my mother now, just now, delaying the end of dinner, offers me dessert, an orange, a coffee, to stick something clear, precise, formal, to the unmediated duration that, if you like, is no longer than a moment but as wide, even so, as time itself. Now the two of us are standing before the steel blue light of the television, seeing the bulletin. It is rising, and will continue to rise, says the bulletin. We see soldiers evacuate, to the north, an entire village: cots, blankets, heaters, animals, children pass by, precariously, in trailers, in trucks, are outlined, in single file, on the embankments, surrounded by water, against a background of naked trees and ranches in ruins, half submerged in water. Taken from the air, we see, on the coast, a strip that clearer and almost imperceptibly more serene than the two great plains that hem it in, the breaches in the embankment, and, beside the first, almost flattened against the pavement and the rubble, a black car and two human figures. After the image fades I recognized myself, retrospectively, standing next to Héctor as he contemplates, leaning over, the water flowing from the breaches. Now they show the breaches again, empty, always from above, and the image advances, devouring the road, the water, leaving it behind, until the tips of the towers of the suspension bridge come into view, its platform, seen from above, seeming level with the water; at the mouth of the bridge, heading out slowly toward the boulevard, a black car — us — and the first houses. I get up, intercepting, for a moment, the steel blue image. Slowly I cross the anteroom, the bedroom, and I see, from the window, the steel blue image, showing, flattened, from above, beside the breaches, two human figures, Héctor and me. Then I lay down and smoke, in silence, with the ashtray on my chest as I look at, without seeing, the ceiling. Strictly speaking, I think for fifteen minutes, while I smoke, about nothing. I am, so to speak, the center, the white wall, where images undulate like flags. Now I am passing again before the flickering steel blue screen, intercepting, for a moment, with my body, my mother’s vision as she fidgets, slightly annoyed, in her seat. Standing now, fixed, I am once again looking at the white municipal building immersed, so to speak, in the blue sky. An exceptionally small man, visible only from the waist up, walks in the sun, on the terrace, half of him erased by a white wall. He leans on it a moment and looks down. It is easier, like that, at a distance, to be standing, looking down, no vertigo, no memories, with the cold wind that should be blasting up there — more so since the light has begun to fade — in bursts, on his cheeks. He is relaxed, compact against the sky. Nothing at all seems to rise, from his toes to his head, nor does there rise, toward his muscles, his skin, the unstable, continuous murmur of his entrails working, complex, in the dark. He advances, perfect, opaque, indestructible, half of a dark figure emerging from the white wall, in the terrace, and now that I turn toward my desk he disappears, becoming a new memory that I carry with me and that begins to descend, like food, toward the combustion engine of memory that chews it, mixes it, polishes it, stores it in a great mobile enclosure in which all things, though they may change size and place, remain. From the third drawer in the desk, which is open, I am taking out reams of paper, tearing them up without looking at them and dropping them into the trash. I do that for half an hour. I look out, once in a while, at the flowerpots in the narrow patio, blocked off by the yellow walls. And now once again my body is intercepting the flickering steel blue image, in the room through which afternoon advances getting colder and darker. Her arms crossed over her chest, her salt and pepper hair, too smooth and well combed and parted to seem natural, immobile and half standing in the direction of the flickering image, my mother asks, distractedly, without listening for my laconic affirmative response, if I have everything ready. Now I am adjusting the collar of my overcoat as I go slowly down the stairs. When I open the door, the homogeneous murmur of the city becomes more varied and stronger than what had been coming to me as I descended, adjusting, unhurriedly and ineffectually, the collar of my coat. Innumerable, the city embraces me. It is more than the straight, gray sidewalks I walk along, more than the shop windows, diverse and packed with things, that flank me, than the people who come walking in the opposite direction on the same sidewalk, on the opposite sidewalk, who pass beside me, brushing me lightly, who cross the street, who stand before the shop windows and the cigarette kiosks, who watch me pass from inside the bars, who pass by driving cars, more than yellow, white, gray houses, one or two stories tall, and the bus and the cars that pile up on the main streets and wait for the signal of the traffic guard, their motors running, more than the sounds, the neighborhoods, the smells, more even than the memories interwoven in a common space that, even so, is not the same one where our bodies pass, more than the empty spaces, the water that rises, slowly, surrounding it, more than the opaque material that is always before our eyes and nevertheless refracts our memory, through which I advance, moving my arms and legs as if I were swimming, with my eyes open, in an ocean of stone. In a city without memory, those who remember, in your streets, direct like destinies, erroneous, fateful, they are mistaken, I formulate, attempting, fruitlessly, to memorize it as I arrive, walking slowly, at the bus station. In your straight streets — amended — continuous like rays, erroneous, fateful, they are mistaken. I pass through garages stained with oil, passing among the great yellow and red buses. Loudspeakers blare, confused, urgent. There are mountains of suitcases around the cigarette kiosks and newsstands. I argue for some minutes, leaning in front of the hole in the ticket window and manage, at last, urged discretely by the impatient line, to change my ticket. And now I am again, the cigarette smoke mixing into the weakest, most transparent of coffees, standing in front of the counter of the bar in the galleria, with my back to the full patio on which the cold clarity of the end of the afternoon falls monotonously, and already I am going up to the cashier in green overalls, the pads of whose tidy fingers brush the palm of my hand at the moment he returns my 100 pesos change. Those who remember, I settle on, at last, listless, weak, knowing that I will forget it, in your streets, direct like destinies, erroneous, fateful, they are mistaken. And now I am again climbing the stairs of my house, getting free of my coat, intercepting again with my body, for a moment, the steel blue image that flickers in the room, even darker, perceiving again, as I pass, my mother’s white head that nods a moment, to one side, losing no time to recover the image that I have blocked. Now the suitcase and the blue bag, on the bed. I see, through the window, on the sidewalk out front, repeated six times, in two rows of three, one on top of the other, the face of a man who speaks and then of a rapid cut, also repeated six times, to another face, its head covered by a military cap. I stand for a moment to listen as I am passing from the bedroom to the library: it is a colonel informing the populace: it is rising, and will continue to rise. They are evacuating Boca del Tigre, Barranquitas