After was after: days, weeks, months, years that started to pile up as Giovanna endeavored to disappear. Or maybe I was the one who, driven by a zeal for forgetting, finally started to emerge, thinner and beardless, from an even deeper neglect. Something in me seemed determined to do battle against that great farce of anonymity with a showy dramaticism. The museum had accepted my proposal, and the exhibition The Invisible Border was scheduled for the following year. Giovanna still called, but now nothing was the same: more than collaborators, we were like old lovers doomed to invoke the past and its now inaccessible nights of passion. Months would pass without a word from her, and part of me was relieved. Months during which I toyed with the little jade elephant I’d stolen from her. I fiddled with it just as she had, with unconscious worry, while I set to organizing the exhibition that was slowly starting to take on the shape of my ambition: I played with the order of photographs, switched out texts, I amused myself by sprinkling human gazes among that great parade of animal eyes. She disappeared for months and I swore she was headed for the jungle, that she was hacking through the weeds at night to reach the camp where an insomniac subcomandante’s eyes would receive her. I merely followed her travels from afar, tracked the path of the subcomandante’s poetic pronouncements, waiting for the day when the newspapers would announce the surprising meeting between a fashion designer and a leftist leader. I laughed at the thought of the barbarities the right-wing press would suggest: the love affairs they’d imagine, the perverse stories of corruption they’d weave around a simple and innocent image. Still, the months passed and nothing happened. She’d come back from her long trips thinner and more evasive, as if the project were now growing behind my back and the secret turning deep and unpronounceable. The idea, always present but ignored, that her destination in those months of silence could be another hospital ate away at me from inside. Our conversation continued naturally, but I felt that everything had ended some months ago, with Giovanna on the phone nodding yes. I felt that we were only there as part of a ghost story just reaching its denouement. What I liked most of all was to go out walking to the bar in the Bowery. I liked to sit there, and, freed now from curiosity but still accompanied by the newspaper reader, I worked on the exhibit with an absolute voracity, the same voracity with which, a few tables over, the woman devoured the news with a gaze I now knew was empty. I knuckled down over my red leather notebook and sketched out crazy ideas: bringing a live animal to the museum, creating an anatomy of the gaze, filling the hall with portraits of eyes until the gazes got confused and no one could tell which ones were animal and which human. I worked intensely until exhaustion or the image of a sick Giovanna came to me and stopped me in my tracks, and the idea of continuing became unbearable. Then I’d take the train, and when I got home, I’d fall deeply asleep as I hadn’t in a long time, placidly surrounded by thousands of eyes, faint and indistinct, that seemed to keep watch over my dreams.
We expected the end times and what we got was a pointless hangover, said Tancredo. I nodded, not wanting to contradict him, but inside I was thinking that finally my time was coming. Something had changed irrevocably, though it had nothing to do with the end of days. Something had mutated and the shell had broken. Spring could already be glimpsed, and while the bars were full of people drinking, I told myself that now was the time for sobriety, the moment to grasp the reins and finally take a risk. I felt at ease, at peace within that strange habitat I had managed to build for myself. I had turned into a rare bird, an insect that buzzed its wings incessantly to keep from falling, but that, little by little, had learned such speed wasn’t necessary; it was enough to keep up a moderate but practiced pace. Patience, I’d say to Tancredo, as I thought about how the metaphor was wrong, how it wasn’t that I had spent years unnecessarily flapping my wings, but quite the opposite. I’d spent my time in stillness, to the point of disappearing entirely from the landscape. Only now, slowly, with reptilian stealth, was I starting to emerge from that lair I’d constructed so carefully. Haven’t you heard of Gestalt psychology? asked Tancredo. Whenever one figure appears it’s because something else has disappeared into the background. Something in me fearfully intuited the consequences of my awakening.
Whenever one thing appears it’s because something else has disappeared, background and figure, repeated Tancredo, while in my mind the image of Giovanna returned me to a childhood memory. I thought back to the afternoons when my father took me to the zoo. I wasn’t interested in the marquee animals—I was bored by the elephants and lions, the zebras and monkeys. I was saddened at the sight of their supreme boredom, where, now that I think of it, I saw glinting a kind of vulgar portrait of the adult world. I loved, on the other hand, the vivarium: those visual Pandora’s boxes of hidden, living enigmas. I would stand fascinated before the boxes, and without looking at the name of the animal, try to decipher what it was all about. Life as a puzzle or a stereogram. In some cases, the answer was obvious: you could see the sinuous, damp shape of the snake on the dry trunk, the fluttering presence of the butterfly, the sinister tedium of the solitary iguana on the rock. But in other cases, you saw only absolute emptiness on the other side of the glass. As if the original animal had died and the zoo employees had forgotten to replace it with a new one. And I would hover in front of those apparently empty boxes, waiting for the figure that had been hidden to suddenly emerge: the singular butterfly that blends with the branches, the laborious ants in their heretofore unseen labor, the same iguana in whose stillness I now saw impudence instead of boredom. I loved those little captive tropics where nothingness at last became visible. And so I detested the impatient children who, seeing nothing behind the glass, dared to tap on it in a desperate attempt to make something show itself. I remember being in front of one of those tropical theaters where nothing seemed to be happening in spite of the other children’s impatient tapping. Positive that nothing was there, they soon went on to other boxes. But I stayed where I was, in spite of my father’s insistence; like the others, he thought nothing was there. Then I’d seen it slowly emerge: not merely the animal within the landscape, but the animal-landscape, the animal that was itself the landscape in which we’d looked for it. I turned to find out the precise name inscribed on the plaque: “Mula del Diablo (walking stick), Costa Rica.” Below that, a subheading that stayed with me long after, read: “Phasmid.” I had seen that small phasmid emerge with the impression that this was no typical camouflage, but rather something more sinister: an animal that, little by little, was devouring the landscape with the secret ambition of becoming the scene. Years later, in a book by a French philosopher, I would discover the concepts necessary to grasp what simply unfolded that day: the copy was devouring the model. But that would come later. The twelve-year-old boy who stood before the empty cage that afternoon had a different impression: that he was facing an extraordinary animal, one more frightening than any other precisely because its ambition was not necessarily to survive, but to transcend life. A second discovery overwhelmed me as I got closer to the glass: this wasn’t just one creature, but rather dozens of tiny insects that melded together until they created a kind of collective body seemingly set on emulating an absent landscape. A horrible confusion kept me awake that night as I tried to understand exactly what it was I’d seen. What had become visible, and what had remained unseen? During that now distant spring, the image of a swarm of insects stayed with me as a kind of warning: what appears out of nowhere is always something close to nothingness itself. A terrible nothingness that still aspires to encompass everything.
As I thought back to that day I was certain that Giovanna and I were something like those phasmids, a paired background and figure, our secret ambition to meld with absolute nothingness. And thus the spring lengthened out like a tightrope between all and nothing, while I tried to convince myself that the only way to truly keep Giovanna company was to learn to lose her. I saw her return from one of her enigmatic trips, thinner and paler, but I soothed myself by saying it was all pure illusion. Soon we would change perspective and the real image would emerge, masterful and precise: we would realize that her thinness was nothing but one side of another, more ferocious reality, one that impelled her to meld into the landscape with the strength of that elusive insect from my childhood. Whenever one thing appears it’s because something else has disappeared, background and figure, asserted Tancredo, while in my mind it wasn’t the real Giovanna who was disappearing, but the ten-year-old girl she’d been.
One might say, then, that the project dissolved as spontaneously as it was conceived. It could also be said that, to this day, I don’t know what the project really was. My life was interrupted by an early-morning phone call, and after two years I still wasn’t clear on where the thing was going. I liked to think that one day we’d see the subcomandante in some more fashionable ski mask, something colorful and flashy. And beside him, Giovanna would laugh into the camera as if she were looking at me. I smiled at the thought of how it would irrevocably interrupt the war, just as a simple call at five in the morning had disturbed my life. But my hallucinatory comedies were never acted out. The war went on being a war, in a far-off country and a new century. And, just like that, the project vanished like a dream.
The last time I saw her she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Or she was, but only half-done, as if she’d tried to remove it quickly but had stopped halfway through, maybe when she heard me knock at the door. She was dressed in black as always, but it was a tired black that now extended to the roots of her hair, which, neglected, seemed determined to return to its true color. I felt that her disguises were fading away, and perhaps very soon I’d have the real Giovanna in front of me. She, however, seemed resolved to remain unchanged. She told me something about her travels, and went to sit down in one of the many chairs. On the table there was a pile of puzzle pieces whose box was propped beside the fish tank. The fish floated above the box as if they belonged to its world. The puzzle depicted one of Monet’s luminous scenes: a garden of little flowers with petals where the purple seemed to flirt with turning white. Breaking the painting into a thousand pieces made it clear: most of them just suggested a touch of purple. That was when she made her move: in a very light voice, she suggested that the project was coming to an end, and said she wouldn’t need my help in the coming months, as she planned to spend some time abroad. She used that word, abroad, and it struck me as a strange expression, an old-fashioned word. Then, smiling, she picked up a greenish piece—a leaf, I thought distractedly—and fit it into a small fragment that was starting to take shape. I imitated her, not thinking it necessary to even reply, understanding that she was not asking a question but only offering information, a sentence she tossed into the air for it to hang just so. That’s how we spent the rest of that night, reconstructing a painting of weightless flowers, wrapped in a tense silence that insinuated a slight dispute. It would have been more appropriate, I thought, for us to play a game of chess that night, or, better yet, one of those board games I’d liked so much as a boy: a game of war, with the world map drawn in colors and little soldiers jumping borders. Something, I repeated to myself, that would have made it clear that what we were playing was a final game. But that wasn’t Giovanna’s style. Hers was a lighter and more subtle approach, like that of the Monet painting we were reassembling, which seemed to be drawn by the delicate hand of a terribly bored god: here a stroke of purple, there a touch of white. One of those terrible exercises in patience that she liked so much. We kept it up until the early morning, when Giovanna fell asleep. I stayed half an hour longer, trying to finish the puzzle, but then I thought the appropriate thing was to leave it just like that, half-finished. I looked at her sleeping like a little girl while I tried to convince myself that endings never happen just like that. Something is always left behind. On my way out I noticed it was already dawn.