THE WATER RIPS THE SACK OF CLOUDS, slits it with its blade, runs through the thunder’s drumrolls and the lightning’s circuits, sews its stitches across the night sky, and dives headfirst into the sea like an acrobat from his trampoline.

The water punctures the ocean, probes it, turning small into big and narrow into boundless, flows among underwater tensions, Patagonian extremes, fractured channels, echoes around voiceless islands and bays, navigates the remotest capes, quenches the frozen fire scaling the heights, explores the Strait of Magellan, melts the borders uniting the Pacific and the Atlantic.

The water bursts against the surface, widening every circle of the River Plate, perforates its cloudy skin, churns the mud, disperses the residues and the toxic soup, merges with the current, splits into forces fighting one another, tests whirlpools, black weeds, and injurious fish, stirs up sediments, slime, clay, sand, with sewage waste and blood, the liquid from the sky doesn’t clean the river away, it simply rouses its memory.

The water lives, unfolding its wrinkles like an old sheet, swims toward the coast, slips between reeds, reaches the shore, makes land, impregnates the plain, advances toward the lights, those lights that ripple with an aquatic pulse, connects to the tips of fishing rods, trickles down anglers’ hoods, contributes to the sweat of a runner oblivious to the storm, to the fluid of lovers driving along the Costanera, to the plow of the tire, the sowing of brakes.

The water works the city, eroding its profile, slowly catches the sickness of Buenos Aires, drips its insomnia, is diluted in its glitter and its grime, resounds at the wrong moment above Luna Park stadium, sends a message from the former Central Post Office, marches around the Plaza de Armas, lays siege to the Casa Rosada, spins around the Plaza de Mayo, is deposited in the Banco de la Nación, bounces off terraces that never stop broadcasting rehashed news and laundered linen, floods the drainpipes, slides down walls, scrapes off the mold, filters through windows, invades homes and the lung of the bedroom, laps at every doorway, sits on the thresholds stained by footsteps, leaflets that sell nothing, and penultimate cigarettes.

The water lands, crashes into the pavement, spreads in countless directions, shatters like a succession of microscopic vases, gropes the ground, becomes elastic, picks up speed, circulates around the disorderly asphalt, bathes the network of streets, pumps its torrent, alters the beat of traffic, occupies avenues at widemouthed traffic lights, swamps the corners with their kiosks, their cats, and their mythologies, accumulates at the edge of curbs, and finally finds its course.

The water flows urgently along the gutters, pushes the column of fury, the decisive wave, reproduces both shipwreck and rescue, drags along garbage, broken shapes, scattered particles, traces of energy, takes with it the remains of the night, sweeps them to the mouth of the drains, those drains where all things end up, in the depths, the farthest depths, where the fragments reunite.