On my desk there’s hardly anything but my inherited tea. Lately there’s some doubt too: who said no, who spoke for me? Did saying no make me think I was embracing him, looking at him, and telling him not to leave? Saying no, in order to have him here with me.
If I don’t have children, then he’s the only father, and I’ll have him forever. Even if it’s only the blank silhouette of a passionate and unreliable choice made by my mother, the impression of an impression.
But this red hair is mine also, the scarlet crown of a prince who resists the throne, my own private Elsinore. Am I an impression? Is it the determination of memory that forces me to be an impression?
On my desk there’s hardly anything, and each morning a man who appeared from a scattered past sits down in front of it. A leopard in a cage made from redheaded bars, a force of nature reduced to a body of nothing. Does anybody see me?
Hardly anything. I thought it was depression; I thought it was anger. Hardly anything.
One day I got fed up with hearing slogans like “We have the best dead people.” One day I got sick of building my own disappearance. I thought it was hardly anything; that I was depressed and that was logical.
I thought it was depression.
Maybe I wanted to get to the surface so that I could breathe that portion of the world’s air that belongs to me with my mouth wide open. I had become used to thinking that the beautiful young woman had been weak, that she had been strong. But weak for who? Strong for who? Who thought those things inside me, and how were those thoughts built?
Hardly anything, I thought. A bit of depression. Who didn’t feel like a huge ice cream soda? Who didn’t want a beautiful young woman to look at him, just one time and with all her difficulty and all her utopia? Who didn’t want her to outline that tiny body with her eyes and place it on the Earth?
I lived in fury, drowning from being the perfect son, of participating in the murmuring of that which didn’t even need to be said: everything is settled between broken and loyal people. I never heard anything more Catholic than that; I never heard anything more macho or papal. There’s no new man returning from among the dead. Not now and not two thousand years ago. There’s a beautiful young woman lost forever in horror and a broken man who is drowning and can’t distinguish his memories.
I’m a great diver, and I understand things better underwater. There are things that are nearby that seem far away and things that seem two arm strokes away and turn to water the very moment you try to touch them.
Once we went diving from a little boat in the north of Brazil. We were a small group in frogs’ legs, a shoal of neoprene fascinated by the turquoise streaked brilliantly with light, of beautiful colors and expressions, of fauna that seemed undeniably happy. I love diving; in that universe everything seems united. Before taking the plunge, the leader of the group went through common issues to keep in mind: how to regulate pressure, how to come back to the surface safely, how deep to go. But in that environment everything is easy, everything embraces, in just one second you can find everything. I thought of kicking a little, and then I saw it all: the turquoise darkens concentrically and kindly, you don’t have to do anything more than let yourself be. It’s complete. Breathe? Be a good son, a good grandson.
Fabiana appeared from behind with her commanding presence and distracted me from my liquid Orpheus, we swam around a couple more times before coming up together. Once we were up on deck we spoke with ample enthusiasm about how fantastic that submerged world was and how fascinating it was to suspend yourself before the void. I think we became impassioned enough to sail right through the fascination that Fabiana celebrated in our conversation, but beneath it all she was furious in the way of a woman who has to share her man with a lover.
There’s not much mystery to me: the thing is I can’t stand it.
Even though my life is little more than a miserable empire of justifications, the thing is I can’t stand it. I can’t.
I don’t want to be the son of a body in the days between kidnapping and the end. I can’t stand it, I can’t carry it inside me, I can’t bear having survived that beautiful young woman and knowing everything that I don’t know. I can’t be the son of that woman who is smaller than me in the face of the void. I can’t stand it. I can’t. And I’m not interested in living to tell the tale. I can’t. I can’t.
Papa?
(Is this my only private possibility of truth and justice, even though the first has to fold itself into me to release the other?)
I won’t pronounce it like a silent psalm to hold me to this complete nothingness. The cult of the absent one. If there’s so little there, I want to live among the dead.
I was too sure I’d never hear it.
Now I hide so I can tremble without anyone seeing me. And what if someone says it to me one time, eyes looking up at me, looking up from some tiny little shoes?
What if someone who has returned looks up at me?
On my desk there is hardly anything but a photo. A frame made of strips of lacquered wood with a stand on the back to hold it up. It’s a black-and-white photo with the wind blowing in my face and blowing everything away. A photo where the wind whips through the thick black hair of that woman with pale skin and makes the expression on her face difficult to see. We’re both in shorts, but I’m also wearing a sweater, a cable-knit sweater that she’d made for me. We’re both wearing sandals, she’s wearing a white blouse that sticks to her body on one side and on the other seems like it could blow away.
I don’t remember who took this photo of us with our Kodak Fiesta camera, standing there calmly in the face of a wild landscape like a wall of low clouds, a tempestuous prophecy of the sky. Standing in the middle of pale grasses, the two of us looking at the camera, on the way to Mar del Plata from Chapadmalal. We were on vacation at the wonderful hotel built by Perón in 1945 for the Metalworkers’ Union. A huge mass of towers, like a hospital or a prison, a mass of buildings full of harsh, soviet luxury. Everything was huge and magnificent and austere, and all of us who were there were like comrades in something, as if we were all from the same school. I remember a feeling of shelter, seven possible days of vacation with my mother, seven days among equals.
We had gone out for a stroll, one of those outings where I knew I would have to depend on every last ounce of patience I had, even though my mother made it sound like a safari full of adventures. It was strange to hear how she tried to talk me into an outing that would be torturous and would never present me with zebras, lions, or elephants.
My mother wanted to make me walk, strengthen me somehow, and I suppose to avoid me asking her to take me to the arcade games on a cloudy afternoon.
“You see? That way is Mar del Plata,” she said to encourage me on a walk along the barren cliffs. I didn’t complain. I stretched my strides as far as I could to catch up to her pace and so she wouldn’t scold me, and every now and again I stopped to watch the albatrosses that glided alongside us on the cliffs.
At one point we came across a huge construction site. We had been walking for a long time, and we stumbled upon a concrete staircase in the middle of nowhere, set into the ground and leading down toward the sea.
I never knew exactly what that was, but it seemed to be the same type of construction as the hotel: enormous, sprawling, harsh. There was nothing at all where the staircase began. It was strange, as if the staircase had been built well before the attractions from which people would descend to the beach. But there was something stranger still: there was no beach down there.
Hand in hand, we began to descend the stairs. My mother’s tone of voice changed and she must have felt some apprehension because she told me to hold her hand tight, and she leaned in close to go down the wide stairs. All of a sudden it became clear what was so confusing: not only was there no beach, but it was just a cliff. It was a sumptuous staircase leading to the mouth of a precipice, without protection, without any warning of the danger. The staircase ended suddenly, messily, unmade, as if the workmen of this Potemkin had undertaken the construction without knowing about the abyss and had thrown themselves over the edge while the foremen packed up and moved on to another project.
The staircase led to the void. A wide staircase for visitors to reach the sea of the people’s summer. No need to bomb the main square in the face of this national architecture for suicidal lemmings.
On my desk there’s hardly anything but a photo in a frame. Beyond that frame made from strips of lacquered wood there is a window. Beyond the window are the crowns of the plain trees, the airy crowns of the hardwood trees from Tucumán with its branches like women’s legs in black stockings. Further beyond, the wall that separates the street from the large lot where there used to be a wine bottling plant, the warehouses where loads of Cuyo grapes were delivered, the long queue of trucks that were followed by bees, chasing after a home from which they had already been turned away.
Who was that beautiful young woman?
In those lots you could build things that no longer exist. In those lots you could build a happy cemetery where we choose to lay our memories to rest, an expanse of lawn that stretches all the way from the sea to the mountains where the ideal world they dreamed of still persists.
Beyond the warehouses are the train tracks, a huge space covered in grass and crossed with silver rails on which the trains arrive at the capital, the nexus of worlds. Where a factory stands now, there were once dark cities, the warehouses were once barracks that were captured and emptied and captured again. That wire where socks and shirts sit drying awaits its gallows, waiting for more trucks, the ones that will inject a new mix of concrete to construct shining cities where there was once a blur. Where there were once factories and the Middle Ages, new, ultramodern buildings with views of the river will rise like Transformers.
How powerful the urge to put on a clean shirt.
And what would that woman with noble and bluish skin, so distant from mundane trivialities of the world, think of all this?
What would she think of the lapacho flowers, for example? Would she be enchanted by them if we walked through a park in the last of the evening, the only time of the day that the trees stand calmly?
If I bring my eyes back from the window, the photo frame with the strips of lacquered wood reappears, the harsh photo that displays my face, and hides the expression on my mother’s face, her hair as sumptuous as a bullfighter’s cape in the wind. The two of us in shorts. Me in the cable-knit sweater she made to shelter me and her in the blouse that holds her back and sets her free.
Should we speak of the scent of white soap, its modest, antifascist, undefeatable cleanness?
Outside the photo there are piles of books that spill over scraps of paper covered with unreadable messages. Things that I wrote down urgently and that I now cannot understand. There is always a cup of tea on my desk, a revolution that didn’t last me very long and with time revealed its conservative tradition: black tea, piping hot, a heaped spoonful of sugar, and a streak of fresh, cold milk.
Where could it be, what could have become of that thick, woolen, cable-knit sweater?
It was summer in that photo, but there was so much wind around the cliffs. You can see my whole face, and it seems expressionless, or with an expression that says I knew, without knowing, that I was approaching the unknown peak of her tiny body on the edge of the void.
In my room there is nothing, not even hardly anything. A desk where I sit each morning, opposite the window, a mess of papers, but nothing really. On the walls there are no Aztec suns, no fields of poppies, no tulips in the foreground that hide the image of a little row of Dutch houses. I don’t like to travel, every geography ends up seeming like the edge of a cliff for me.
I want a room with walls that say nothing, a room with a window that lets me see a wall where every day something is written over the top of something else that was written the day before. A room where the world outside resounds and all of a sudden makes me head down the street, just as I am, in shorts, my hair in a mess from having recently got out of bed, in flip-flops, running in a lively impulse that I can’t contain because I heard laughter, and I went to the window to see, but that wasn’t enough. Heading out into the street to breathe in a huge mouthful of air, to approach those girls who laugh like brooding hens. These girls no older than fourteen, the straps falling off their sweaty shoulders. Those girls who laugh as they pull along a massive cart full of cardboard in the street among the cars. Those happy dark-skinned little girls who fight over an ice cream that melts while they laugh, from all the effort of hauling that carriage of cardboard by the wall in the street, the crib of a baby sleeping off its drunken nursing. And me running with my mouth open to breathe in all the air of that laughter, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know what to do, and I call out to them, and I catch up and stop, almost breathless, and I crouch down before looking at them, before I ask them what they’re laughing at.
And the girls, surprised, turn around and stop laughing and look at me crouching and heaving, and maybe they’re angry because they’ll have to start hauling that heavy mass again after I made them stop with my shouting, and they look at each other because they don’t know how to react, and then they look at me again. And they roar with laughter full of air. They look at me, and they burst into laughter. And I breathe.