The Absent City

by Ricardo Piglia

  They left the train station and walked across to Plaza San Martín. The girl was very attractive, but distant, and she gave off an air of passivity, almost of indifference. As if nothing in the world had any importance. Apathetic. Or maybe afraid, Junior thought. Strange and very beautiful, with a tight Mickey Mouse T-shirt and faded jeans. Right away she began to recite her story. Mike had been wrong and had died because violence only leads to more violence. He lived clandestinely, he commanded several armed operations, he retreated from military activity, moving from one house to another twice a day, until they finally caught him. “In’73 the way I interpreted reality was much more driven by emotions than by political rationale. Today my view of the past is completely different. We were living in the midst of ideological fanaticism. I think the revision needs to be based not only on these last few years, but that it must go back much further. We grew up in a political culture and with a civil conscience both of which were totally wrong. We had to live through this catastrophe in order to learn the value of life and how to respect democracy.” She repeated her story like a parrot, in a tone of voice so neutral that it sounded ironic. She had repented. She had attended self-help groups. It was impossible to tell if she was being sincere or if she was schizophrenic. She walked distractedly, every once in a while looking up at Junior.

  “Do you find me attractive?” she asked suddenly. She pressed up against him without any warning, and right away moved away, and then walked on, near the wall. The story of her life was the way she had of getting people to love her, immediately she became submissive and started in with her confessions. You could tell she was naive and gullible, but she was not dumb. Frail and pliable, she could have been his daughter.

  “Of course,” Junior said, and felt a strange emotion stir within him. He had thought about his daughter because it could have been his daughter who had come back, like many others, ten years later. Fourteen years later. But it was not his daughter, and that is why Junior had that strange sensation. It was like an emotion, and yet it had a cold quality, so perhaps it was not an emotion at all. He simply liked to be seen walking with the girl and have people think he was sleeping with her. He was amazed at himself, at how simple everything was. “You escaped from the Clinic,” he said to her.

  “No one escapes from there,” she said. “You go there because you want to, when you can’t get off the stuff, then you have to go. There’s no such thing as willpower, if you get into it you’re lost, it’s this stupid thing they’ve invented to make you kill yourself.”

  She was not dumb, Junior thought again, only inexperienced. She wanted to help him and told him so right away. She had read Junior’s reports, he did not know the whole truth, she had just come from there.

  “From where?” Junior asked her.

  “Don’t be a smart-ass,” she said. They had no references in common, everything was simultaneously the same and yet different, as if they spoke two different languages.

  Junior had to move slowly, let her take the initiative.

  “I like it around here,” she said after they sat on a bench facing the Círculo Militar. “Enemy territory. See the kinds of places they have, always out of sight, they lock themselves inside those galleries and spend their lives training. I’ve seen them,” she said. “My father was in the military. They practice fencing their whole lives and then shoot you down with real bullets. Do you know how much I’m risking by being here with you?”

  “Of course I know,” Junior said.

  He decided to keep quiet, to let her develop her strategy.

  “I’m going to confide in you,” she told him. “That’s why I called you. Do you know the Engineer?”

  “Yes. I mean, they’ve told me, I’ve never seen him.”

  “Do you want to see him?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Here,” she said to him. “This is for you.”

  It was an airmail envelope folded in half.

  “Don’t open it here,” she told him. “Put it away, you can open it later.”

  “I’ll put it away,” Junior said, and put the envelope in a coat pocket.

  “Where do you know him from?” she asked him.

  “Everyone talks about him. But I saw the night watchman at the Museum, a Korean guy, Fuyita.”

  After Junior told her what he knew, she confirmed that the Engineer lived in what was practically a subterranean fortress, that he lived locked up in there, that he was an affable man and very intelligent. He was trapped because the authorities accused him of being irresponsible and criminally insane. They wanted to put him in prison.

  “The Engineer never sleeps,” she said. “He lives for his experiments. And that’s why they say that he’s crazy.”

  Junior wanted to know what the experiments were.

  “Verbal,” she said. “Proofs of stories about life, versions and documents that people take to him so that he can read and study them.”

  The Engineer received many letters and phone calls, everyone wanted to interview him. Junior had to hope he would have good luck, and count on the contacts that Julia could get. They were going to enter through a clandestine network while all the foreign correspondents and the official newspapers waited their turn. They had to find a place to hide and wait until tomorrow. She spoke so clearly, in such an indifferent tone, that he ended up believing she was telling the truth. They slept together in a hotel on Tres Sargentos, after eating at the Dorá. Julia seemed simultaneously removed and experienced. She took off all her clothes and hugged him before Junior had finished checking out the room. There was something distant yet real about the girl. Her body was full of scars and she moved skillfully in bed, like a professional pretending to be scared. Junior had to wait for her in the hotel, she told him as she smoked a cigarette, she was going out to get a contact. It was dangerous, but he had to take a risk if he was going to make any progress, and he took the risk. He had let himself get hooked, but he did not regret it. In the morning he was awoken by loud knocks on the door. They said it was a routine inspection. Julia, who came in with the policemen and who had perhaps turned him in, looked at him as if she did not recognize him. He saw her smoking at the window again, as if she had never left. The guys from Narcotics had brought her back. They accused her of dealing and thoroughly searched the room and Junior’s clothes.

  “You’re English,” the policeman said.

  “My parents were English,” Junior responded.

  “You worked on the Museum series, for El Mundo.”

  “I still work there. I can make my sources available to you. Call the newspaper if you want.”

  “A routine question,” the officer said. “Who won the war?”

  “Us.”

  The officer smiled. They wanted to control the principle of reality.

  “That’s funny. Us who?”

  “The Kelpers,” Junior said.

  The officer enjoyed the answer. Amused, he turned around to one of his assistants. Then he lowered his head and looked at Junior.

  “Do you know that this girl is Article 22?”

  “Article 22?”

  “Street prostitution.”

  “That’s why she was with me,” Junior said. “A hundred dollars a night.”

  “I’d rather not be touched,” the girl said when the officer approached her, keeping an absent air about her the whole time. “I make a living my own way, and that’s all I care about.”

  “I won’t touch you. Her problem is not political. It’s her hallucinations.”

  A woman cop joined the others now. She was fat and had a face that made her look like an evil character in a TV series, not even a Nazi, something worse, more mechanical, smoother.

  “You’re ill, child,” she said. “You have to go to the hospital. They’ll cure you there.”

  “To which hospital?” the girl asked.

  “The neuropsychiatry clinic in Avellaneda.”

  “Bastards,” the girl said. “Let me call a lawyer.”
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br />   Now that she knew what awaited her, she was in shock. She stood still, withdrawn. Then she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. She had learned to save her strength and was getting ready to face what she knew she would soon be up against without any illusions.

  “She believes in the Engineer, but it’s really an illusion. The Engineer died years ago, there is no factory, she can’t accept reality. She’s psychotic,” the officer said. “She’s been hospitalized in Santa Lucía since she was seven years old, she’s schizo-anarchoid. That man doesn’t exist, there’s a doctor who she calls the Engineer, there’s nothing else to it, it’s a clinic. She dreams that she moves around in that marginal world, like a messenger, when in reality she’s a prostitute who passes information on to the police.”

  “Maybe, maybe, maybe,” Julia sang out. “He’s there, I know it,” she said. “When I get out I’ll take you.”

  “See? She has been able to adjust to living out in the real world completely, except for that one fixed idea. It will never disappear, it’s indispensable in the balance of her life. But she has to learn to relate to reality, not to a fantasy. And that’s what we’re here for. To think that there’s an internationally renowned physicist hidden in our country. It’s an innocuous idea and it helps her survive. But it’s false and cannot be propagated. She lives in an imaginary reality,” the officer said. “She’s at the external phase of the fantasy, an addict running away from herself. She interjects her hallucinations and must be watched.” This was the kind of crazy lingo that the police were using now, psychiatric and military at the same time. This was how they intended to counteract the illusory effects created by the machine. Junior remembered his father’s ideas about deliriums associated with simulations, and thought that the officer had a removed quality, perverse, as if he thought that simply by being there, alone in his office, he was capable of excluding himself from the world.

  “The police,” he said, “are completely removed from all the fantasies. We are reality. We are constantly obtaining true confessions and revelations. We care only about real events. We are servants of the truth.”

  Junior looked at him, but did not say anything.

  “We need to verify a few facts,” the officer said, “and then we’ll let you go.”

  “And the girl?”

  “The girl stays, you go. There always has to be some kind of exchange.”

  “I don’t like it,” Junior said.

  “I didn’t ask you if you liked it, I asked you to tell me your sources.”

  They made a phone call to the newspaper and immediately released him. He was unable to see Julia. They only allowed him to leave cigarettes and some money for her, although he knew for certain that the same guard who took them would steal them as soon as he left. Junior went out to the street. The buses were heading out toward the city suburbs full of men and women just getting off work. He was at the corner of Paraguay and Maipú. The girl had not turned him in, they had gotten her because of the drugs. The police had not bothered to requisition the papers that she had given him, they had not even opened the envelope. It looked like a blue filing card, with a few facts typed on it. There were a few references to Richter, the Engineer, a German physicist. Then numbers and quotations from several stories, especially from “Stephen Stevensen.” That was the point of departure.

  2

  He spent the next two days alone in his room. He went over the entire series of stories again. There was an implicit message that linked them all together, a message that was being repeated. There was a factory, an island, a German physicist. Allusions to the Museum and to the history of its construction. As if the machine had built its own memory. That was the logic being applied. The events were being directly incorporated, it was no longer a closed system, it was weaving in real facts. She was influenced by other forces — external ones — that entered into the program. Not just situations in the present, Junior thought. It narrates what it knows, it never anticipates. He went back to “Stevensen.” It was all there already. The first text demonstrates the process. He had to continue searching along these lines. Investigate what was being repeated. It builds microscopic replicas, virtual doubles, William Wilson, Stephen Stevensen. Once again this same point of departure, a ring at the center of the story. The Museum was circular, like time in the plains. He went back to the story, to the beginning, to the first phrase of the series. “My name is Stephen Stevensen. I am the grandson and great-grandson and great-great-grandson of sailors. My father was the only deserter, and that is why he lived his entire life with the same woman and died a miserable man in a hospital in Dublin. (Stevensen’s father had refused to go into the British navy, breaking the very ancient family tradition, and had become an Irish nationalist. His mother’s ancestors were Polish. A sarcastic and elegant woman who spent the summers in Málaga, or in the British Museum.) Stevensen was born in Oxford and every language was his mother tongue. Maybe that is why I believed the story he told me, and why I am here, in this lost cattle ranch. But if the story he told me is not true, then Stephen Stevensen is a philosopher and a magician, a clandestine inventor of worlds, like Fourier, or Macedonio Fernández.”

  Junior was starting to understand. At first the machine would get it wrong. Errors are the first beginning. The machine “spontaneously” breaks up the elements of Poe’s story and transforms them into potential fictional nuclei. That is how the initial plot had emerged. The myth of origin. All the stories came from there. The future meaning of what was occurring depended on that story about the other and what is to come. Reality was defined by the possible (and not by what was). The true-false opposition had to be substituted by the possible-impossible opposition. The original manuscript was coiled in a tin cylinder. He was having a hard time reading with his glasses. I am getting more and more myopic every day, Junior thought, moving his face closer to the glass box. It looked like a strip of teletype. “I first arrived here on Wednesday May 4 at three in the afternoon, on a train that was continuing on to Pergamino. I had been invited by the Academia Pampeana and the Jockey Club to spend three months in the large ranch and study the projects of the Scientific Society. I am a doctor (and a writer), I have been in this town for months. I want to meet Doctor Stevensen. He is one of the major English naturalists of the century, Argentine by choice, a descendent of European travelers and researchers who came to these plains to study the habits of the natives. I admired his books, I had read his marvelous Mechanical Birds, as well as his biological essays, and his extraordinary White Voyage. It has been so long that everything seems unreal to me. But perhaps instead of talking about unreality, I should talk about inexactness. Truth is exact, like the circumference of the crystal glass that measures the time of the stars. The slightest distortion and everything is lost. Lying is no longer an ethical alteration, but rather the failure of a steam engine the size of this fingernail. What I mean to say (Stevensen used to say), is that truth is a microscopic artifact that serves to measure the order of the world with millimetric precision. An optical device, like the porcelain cones that watchmakers adjust on their left eye when taking apart the invisible gears of the very complex instruments that control the artificial rhythms of time. Stephen Stevensen has dedicated his existence to building a miniature replica of the order of the world. As if he wanted to study life in a dry aquarium, the fish opening and closing their mouths in the transparent air for hours on end. He actually decided (I think) that I was part of his experiments and that he would study my reactions. Now I understand that he has been watching me, that he has been observing me ever since I arrived. Or maybe from before, since I took the train in La Plata, and maybe even from the moment I left my house. He lived in the old buildings of the La Blanqueada ranch immediately before me. The morning I arrived he left me the house and moved to the Hotel Colón, with all his papers and machines. He did not return to Buenos Aires, he extended his stay in the town with some sort of trivial excuse (having to do with his sister). Stevensen’s invisible pr
esence accompanied me from the very moment I first entered the large house. I felt like someone who enters surreptitiously into the soul of a stranger and rummages in the night trying to discover the stranger’s secrets. At first I thought that Stevensen, out of an aristocratic carelessness, had left traces of himself throughout the house. Now I know that it was not out of carelessness. This is a provisional list of the objects I found when I searched the house on the first day.”

  The story exhibited Stevensen’s marks. Junior found the black coat with the leather elbow patches hanging in a closet out in the country. He found a magnifying glass, a train schedule, a monogrammed ring and a bar of sealing wax. On the desk was the draft of the second page of a letter by Stevensen, written in blue ink on a piece of notebook paper: “I like this place, because it has managed to stay just as it was at the precise moment in which it was rebuilt. I feel as if I were living in another time, as if it were the landscape of childhood, but also the abstract and anonymous landscape that old people see in their dreams. The town was completely destroyed in the war.” Impressions formed a part of the building of history. It was not possible to adjust to a set time, space was at once uncertain and detailed with minute precision. There was a map of the countryside and a photograph of the station in Necochea. The town was near Quequén, the borders of the large cattle ranch stretched out as far as the sea. On the back wall he saw the photograph of the building, with the covered porch and the water tank. On a counter covered with sand was a replica of the establishment built to scale, with the wire fences and the front gate, the long house, the quarters for the workers, the corrals facing the railroad tracks. If he lifted the wooden roof he could see the layout of the rooms inside the house. A corridor, the adjoining rooms that faced the patio, the kitchen, the long foldout table. On the other wall there was a map of the town, with numbered streets that ended at the port. To the left he saw the dock and the lighthouse, and to the right the wooded road that led to the Hotel Colón. To a side were Stevensen’s record player, along with a tape recorder and a radio.