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The parents ca
FIVE
Despite the hazy origin of our friendship, which lacked a precise moment in my memory and was, like so many other adventures, mixed up in a bundle of circumstances in which very little is clear, I retain a vivid image of the gradual approach or affinity that, following the involuntary and somnolent rhythm of schoolchildren, would grow into a relatively close relationship. And yet sometimes I give in to a false notion: that our friendship began when I received his photo and M mine, not before. I convince myself of this. This conviction is so vivid that it veils all thought in one single color; I am unable to think otherwise until a while later, when I realize my error — that is, when I remember. Like any ceremony, the exchange was meant to inaugurate a new time, to divide a before from an after. Yet instead of indicating a begi
I am going to recount, as I remember it, something that happened on the night of June 20, 1973, while I walked with M in the early hours of the 21st. Public transportation was not ru
We walked from Mataderos to Villa Crespo; the same funereal silence inhabited every neighborhood, every block. We met with a dual intimation and an ambiguous beauty in the dark streets. A few hours earlier Perón, the political leader, had returned to Argentina; a throng of people had gathered to wait for him, but the desert around us brought to mind a city that had obliterated its inhabitants. The great mass of porteños slept, protected by walls and roofs, on beds tucked behind the façades of their houses, as we walked. Like ships, M and I floated along a surface composed of silence, the rough and the smooth of things, with the disciplined fatigue of the traveler. The shipwrecks were the others, the ones who waited, like the woman with the illuminated face.
That night, M and I talked about virginity. Not about our experience with it — it was still of longstanding relevance to one of us, though I will not say which — but rather, in anticipation of the truth, about the false promise hidden in its loss. One of us attempted to deny any change, and to this end alluded to a number of impossible absolutes. Experience, as the different pressures, sensations, and temperatures to which our skin is submitted, did not matter; the memories that could be etched into the mind on the basis of these circumstances mattered even less. Their triviality was absolute. The moments of a life, which, by the same mystery that allows it to unfold can take on significance despite being the pi
M and I sensed an abyss that divided us from the masses; this might have been due to our natural condition as members of the minority. Of all possible emotions, the masses inspired in us more sympathy than mistrust, more disbelief than fascination. The majority, overwhelmed by its own numbers, was unable to recognize the same essence from which it drew its own strength in the scarce, the brief, and the scattered. Yet one dreamed of joining those vital swells, the very identity of which pulsated in the form of a crowd, because they offered the possibility of giving in to the current and floating along without a care for the truth. Now, as I have been saying, the sea that had been swelling at the outskirts of the city to the southwest of Buenos Aires had dispersed in all directions.