The Lookalike
A friend of mine, a writer, having discovered his wife was cheating on him with a bank employee (when usually it’s the wives of bank employees who cheat on their spouses with writers), left his house one day and after wandering in the mountains for a while, working at a newspaper in Mendoza, The Andes, I think, and living off the beneficence of a wine merchant who supported poets and painters, disappeared completely, without dropping the smallest hint to me or to any of his friends about where he might be, until one morning in March when I was obliged to get up early (I live on the outskirts of the city, in the Colastiné Norte), when I opened the front door and suddenly found myself facing a man on horseback, who told me he was passing through the local post office and, when he mentioned he was headed in the direction of my house, had collected a letter for me that had been gathering dust at the post office for more than two months — it was airmail, because the fine paper envelope was bordered by red and blue stripes, and when I opened it I found that it held a postcard — Hans Memling’s Sybilla Sambetha—on the back of which my friend, from Bruges, Belgium, had written to tell me that he was very well, that he felt 10 years younger, and that he lived with a tiny Japanese woman who never spoke a word and who had learned to brew mate.
People who don’t live here can’t imagine how hot it is, even in March, so that the sun at eight in the morning had already sucked the dew off the leaves hours ago, and its light now roasted my scalp as I waited for the bus, looking at the portrait of the Sybil Sambetha, so familiar to me, though it was the first time I had ever seen it, that the face it reminded me of, even though I couldn’t recall exactly whose it was, grew within me from the wide and rigid stain of pink marbling, stretched even further because of her taught locks disappearing behind, gathered into a conical bun and covered by tulle falling in geometric pleats onto her shoulders, and because her dress, painted in a color I would call “oil,” opened at her throat into a circular collar. The revelation of that memory, the identity of that face, was on the tip of my tongue, if you could call it that, and with ever more effort I tried to figure out who it was, I tried to force that memory from the black backdrop into the great spotlight of my mind, so that it would change from the type of memory that didn’t need to be remembered into something palpable and real. I was still consumed with remembering when the bus arrived, half empty, slow, chromed, alone on the blue strip of asphalt, sparkling in the sun and full of the noise of metal and motors. I took out my ticket and was about to sit when suddenly I saw the Sybil, tranquil and alone, looking at me with her pensive little eyes from the back seat. The porous diagonal light of the sun fell on her face, so that the rosy, marble skin turned a resplendent gold. Her whole face was peppered with blackheads and pimples, some of them crowned with white jewels of pus. But the wide forehead was the same, and her neck rose, free, from the round collar of a cotton dress printed with red and green flowers. I had seen her many times, the disfigured face, the black hair pulled back, taught, her gaze more placid and pensive than one hand hitting the other with a wet wisteria vine — seated on the bench, looking at the river from the door of her father’s ranch, a fisherman whom I went to see from time to time to order a certain fish or a covey of wild ducks. I was about to show her the portrait, but I am a timid man, almost weak of character, and after all, what did it matter?
I’ve seen twins who look very much alike, but never as alike as Sybilla Sambetha and the girl from the coast. And yet, could there be two more different people? Nothing made me consider them so different as to see them looking so alike. For several days this likeness disquieted me and made me feel, by contrast, the reality of difference more than of similarity, because the reality of difference evidences the reality of uniqueness, what Marx mocked, and, melancholically, I thought much about the infinity of trees and of rocks, of faces, of birds, of excrements, of roots, each one unrepeatable and alone, unique; I experienced the clichéd impression of the ocean’s infinite waves and the uncountable sands, of the past, the present, and the future which flow, depending on how you view them, in different directions and crash into each other, forming knots and collisions that we think we can decipher, and suddenly (it was noon and I was lying naked in the sun so that its light would scorch me, my eyes closed and my pores slowly opening with a secret creaking), euphorically, I longed to be a special type of minstrel, the minstrel of the visible world, the minstrel of all things, considering them one after the other, the minstrel of the two Sybils, to give each thing its place with an impartial voice that would equalize and reclaim them, to display in the middle of the day an entire world in which every paradise, every leaf of every paradise, every vein of every leaf of every paradise would be present, so that the entire world could contemplate itself in every part by the light of day and nothing would remain anonymous.
Argument over the Term “Zone”
Place: A restaurant called El Dorado, on the other side of the suspension bridge, over the costal road — more precisely, in a rough-edged tin cubicle, split in two by a wooden partition, with a wooden balcony overhanging the road and a back patio full of trees, separated from the river by a log railing. Beyond the railing the ground slopes into a ravine, and then the river. On the opposite bank, houses raised on wooden stilts expose their fragile façades to the water.
Time: One day in February of 1967, two in the afternoon.
Temperature: 99 degrees in the shade.
Protagonists: Lalo Lescano and Pigeon Garay. They were born on the same day in the same year, 1940, but while the members of the Garay family can claim to be descendants of the town’s founder, Juan de Garay, the day that Lalo Lescano was born some local women had to take up a collection just to send his mother to the hospital as his father, a waiter in a restaurant, was several hours late getting home, and one can only suppose he spent them at the racetrack.
Setting: A farewell feast, because Garay is leaving in a few months for Europe, where he will be living for several years.
The argument begins when Garay says that he will miss this place and that a man should always be loyal to one region, one zone. Garay says this looking toward the water — they are seated at a table shaded from the sun by the trees — while, with his thumb and forefinger, he kneads a piece of newspaper that came wrapped around his grilled fish. Neither Lescano nor Garay are epicures by nature, but they go to this restaurant (though neither would admit it) because they know years ago it was a haunt for Higinio Gomez, Cesar Rey, Marcos Rosemberg, Jorge Washington Noriega, and others who passed for the literary vanguard of the city. When the piece of paper has been kneaded to death, Garay throws it in the direction of the river without bothering to see where it lands. Lescano follows the trajectory of the gray little ball with his eyes, and then says that there are no regions, or, at least, it’s difficult to pin down the limits of a region. He explains: Where does the coast begin? Nowhere in particular. There is no precise point where you can say the coast begins. Let’s take two regions, for example: the Pampa Gringa and the coast. They are imaginary regions. Is there a border between them, a real border besides the one that geography manuals have invented to manage things more easily? None. He, Lescano, is inclined to admit certain facts, that the earth is different, a different color, and that they grow wheat, flax, and alfalfa in the Pampa Gringa while, on the coast, it seems that the soil is better suited to rice, cotton, and tobacco. But, then, which is the exact point where people stop planting wheat and start planting cotton? Ethnically, the Pampa Gringa is made up primarily of foreigners, those being primarily Italians, while the coast is predominantly native-born families. But would you really say that there are no Italians on the coast and no natives in the Pampa Gringa? The Pampa Gringa is stronger economically, and we know, with precision, that the part of the coast closer to Cordoba is bordered by Entre Ríos and Corrientes. All of this suggests a principle of differentiation, I admit. But isn’t it also possible to define the Pampa Gringa as the part of the coast that lies beyond Entre Ríos (the part of the coast farther from Entre Ríos, let’s say), a part of the coast where, because of characteristics in the soil, they plant more wheat than cotton? I would admit that they belonged to different regions if there were a way of marking the borders with precision, but that possibility does not exist. Proximity to the river isn’t a good argument, because there are parts of the coast that are nowhere near the river, and those are still called the coast. There is no precise limit: the final rice paddy is already inside the wheat fields, and vice versa. I’ll give another example if you like: the city. Where does the city center end and the suburbs begin? The dividing line is conventional. Galvez Boulevard, let’s say. But any one of us knows full well, because we were born here and we live here and we know the city by heart, that there are many things north of Galvez Boulevard that could easily be in the center: multi-story houses, apartment buildings, businesses, respectable families. And the city itself, where does it end? Not at the checkpoint, because the people who live beyond the checkpoint say, when you ask them where they live, that they live in the city. So there can’t be zones. I don’t understand, Lescano concludes, how you can be loyal to a region, when regions don’t exist.