Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  JORGE PINEDO PULLS THE TAB on his beer can. The froth rises, swells like a wave, and spills over the sides, flooding the top of his desk and drenching printouts with handwritten notes in the margins. Pinedo stutters a curse. Jumping up from his chair, he asks a colleague for some paper tissues. She opens her leather bag once more, smiling to herself as she considers the possibility of starting to sell them around the newspaper office. For an embarrassing moment, he is torn between staring at his colleague’s lips and blotting his desk before the liquid spreads to the keyboard.

  Once he has sat down again in front of the screen, he rereads a news article about the projectile dug up at Sendai airport, in northeast Japan. The missile, Pinedo copies down, is undetonated, weighs a quarter of a ton, and resembles the bombs used in World War II. It was discovered while the airport was being reconstructed, after it was damaged by the earthquake and the tsunami.

  Next Pinedo checks the article against other sources, and changes his summary. Official statistics estimate that each year around two thousand defective bombs are found in Japan. In fact, not long ago they discovered yet another in the center of Tokyo, close to a busy subway station. The area has been cordoned off, and they still have to decide whether to remove the projectile or carry out a controlled explosion. Experts, he finishes typing, estimate it will take several decades to unearth the remaining bombs.

  Pinedo takes another sip of his beer. He closes the windows and prints a copy of the document. Then, with a sigh, he quickly reads over the piece he was supposed to be working on for the next day’s newspaper.

  * * *

  Avenida Belgrano has the air of a smoker’s lung: as the traffic strains its capacity, it fills with gray fumes. The falling rain is mixed with lead.

  Pinedo looks at the night sky, the X-ray of Buenos Aires. He pulls up his lapels and walks away from the building that both feeds and devours him.

  They have been saying for a while now that the offices will move after the newspaper is bought out, but so far this hasn’t been finalized. He fears that moment as much as he desires it. As soon as it becomes a reality, he will take advantage of the personnel purge and negotiate his own departure. He needs to write in a different way, at a different pace, from another perspective. With an objective that isn’t the electric amnesia of current affairs.

  But what about money? Pinedo wonders for the umpteenth time. How long could he make it last? Nothing lasts very long, he tries to answer himself, we here know that full well, and maybe knowing this is an advantage.

  He presses on, dodging umbrellas. Every bus that passes is overflowing, its passengers hanging from handles like acrobats. The lines at the stops discourage him. He could try the subway but he calculates that, having to change lines, he would miss the last train. He gloomily scans the mass of windshields: downtown on a night like this, a cab would be a miracle. His phone announces a minimum half-hour wait. He keeps to the smaller roads of San Telmo, avoiding Avenida Independencia, in the hope he might find a recently vacated cab. Finally he gives up, accepts that the rain is his, and walks down Calle México toward the river.

  He crosses the main artery of Paseo Colón, the hidden Calle Azopardo, and turns into Avenida Ingeniero Huergo, the back of the neighborhood, the city’s border. Here grows an alien, wealthy area, where, in the end, he might find it easier to catch a cab. Or, if all else fails, a film at the Dársena Sur movie theater. He makes the final stretch of Calle Chile, which naturally extends from a police station to the Catholic University. He walks along Avenida Alicia Moreau de Justo, and so, by way of this patriotic cross between socialist feminism and patriarchal neoliberalism, his face dripping wet, he reaches Puerto Madero.

  Pinedo vividly recalls the years before the real estate boom in the port. His not so terribly athletic youth on the playing field. His erratic jogging sessions past the customhouse, the unchanging brick of the warehouses. This is why he finds it impossible now to avoid a sense of unreality every time he walks through the landscape of serial restaurants and pretentious towers. These streets, he reflects as he reaches a bridge, are still part of a design, a life-size model.

  Not that during that time of acne and literary aspirations the area possessed any great charm; on the contrary, it was an eyesore. Yet with urban development, Pinedo muses, its hideousness hasn’t diminished, it merely raised its price.

  On the far side of the bridge, a dog is chewing on an empty plastic bottle. Seeing Pinedo approach at a brisk pace, it lifts its muzzle and looks at him defiantly as though warning: Don’t even think about stealing my void.

  * * *

  With some degree of frustration, which he regrets he is growing accustomed to, Pinedo wonders if he will ever finish this investigation into nuclear disasters, which should culminate in a series of articles. At least, that’s what the newspaper had approved. The problem is that his focus is expanding at the same speed as his research, and the horizon is broadening more quickly than he is able to take notes. The more he writes, the more he has left to write.

  First he read about the atom bombs. Then he moved on to Fukushima and its suspicious circumstances. Soon he began to connect them to the anniversary of Chernobyl. At that point, it was impossible not to continue with Three Mile Island and other past cases, which he’d investigated until he forgot why he was investigating them.

  In comparing these histories he has become obsessed with the collective memory of disasters; the way that countries forget the pain they have suffered or caused, the way that all genocides end up resembling one another, plagiarizing each other, both here and in their antipode. He is amazed that what’s ours can be found so far away.

  Pinedo notices that the rain is helping him, the drops are threading his ideas, his mind is clearing.

  On the other hand, he tells himself, for a long time he has wanted to devote his energies to a project with no deadline, a book that is an end date in and of itself, the vanishing point of everything. The one that appears to survive in a larval state, a sort of fetal vampire that feeds off his current discoveries.

  Journalism would be its mouth, the first voraciousness. What would literature be? Probably the stomach, the absorption of all that material. He no longer believes that one medium works with more reality than the other. He rejects this notion, which he’d once subscribed to, and suspects that both deal with exactly the same thing at different stages. That’s why he questions the boundary between real events and fictions, between witnesses and characters.

  Pinedo recalls José Martí’s pioneering account of the Charleston earthquake, so powerful they said it’d caused a crack in the Florida peninsula. In Martí’s account, published in an Argentinian newspaper, you see the destruction, you hear it and touch it. And many universities, including Pinedo’s own, continue to study it as a classic in disaster journalism. Except for one small detail: The author wasn’t actually there. He wrote the article from New York, more than a thousand kilometers away. Does that make it any less valid as a recollection of the facts?

  He wonders what makes a reliable witness, how much of what they think they see is actually invisible. And what portion of those invisible facts is revealed thanks to conjecture, interpretation, imagination. Truth, Pinedo reasons, is important. Except that truth depends less on data than on underlying metaphors.

  * * *

  He wanders past the lit doorways of the docks, unsure whether to go in and have a drink. Inside the bars, floating heads watch him as they might a fish who has strayed to the wrong side of the tank. When faced with options he can never make up his mind, overwhelmed by the responsibility of weighing them before he acts. Similarly, he always hesitates before all the possible constructions of each sentence he utters, tormented by the prospect of stumbling.

  Treading on his own reflection, Pinedo wonders how much of his need to write is related to the stutter that causes him so much embarrassment. Could writing be his way of ceasing, if only for a moment, to stutter over everything? Or maybe it’s a way of using tha
t stutter to actually say something.

  As a child, when he had difficulty pronouncing a word, he would shut himself away and spell it on paper. He drew the letters, and plop! He marveled at its perfection, its roundness when written. Roundness when written, Pinedo repeats, noticing the tiny ridges on the roof of his mouth. He recalls when he first learned the word cacophony and to his surprise, discovered that, in addition to illustrating its own definition, this tongue twister summed up his problem with words. Tongue twister, the story of his life.

  He has found out recently that the adjective catastrophic was first documented in 1911, exactly a hundred years before Fukushima, but it was an earthquake in Lisbon that gave the word its current meaning. Prior to that, catastrophic referred only to the denouement of a story. The last great earthquake in Chile, Pinedo remembers, happened just when the official congress on the Spanish language was about to take place. The various academicians were going to present a new dictionary. Then the congress was canceled, and all those words had to wait.

  After several retreats and vacillations, he stops outside the Dársena Sur movie theater. Fiction has always helped him focus on his own life. He checks the movie times and confirms that tonight is not his lucky night: he has missed the last showing by a few minutes. The door is barred (barred with a lock, locked by a bar, a tongue twister bar), and there’s no one at the ticket booth. Pressing his nose to the glass, he tries to catch the attention of an employee he sees, who does his utmost to ignore him as he examines his cell phone.

  Pinedo walks back the way he came, and, as if his path were a sentence rephrasing itself, he thinks once more of Yoshie Watanabe. It’s not easy to tell an obsession from intuition, stubbornness from a hunch.

  He has to admit that as the emails, calls, and rejections pile up, his interest in Watanabe has become rather personal. He’s still trying to understand his hidden affinity to him, what the old man stirs in himself. In fact, the main reason he persists in pursuing him is to find an answer to that question.

  * * *

  Like an exasperated percussionist, the rain increases its rhythm. The water lashes. Shoulders hunched, Pinedo makes a dash for the nearest shelter and takes cover in a doorway with gold buzzers. He resists the temptation to flatten his hand against them, less out of respect than to avoid being chased off.

  He thinks of those four women about whom, as things stand, he knows quite a bit less than he would like to. For every little detail he discovers, he has to make up the rest. Could this be the formula for fiction? Real things multiplied by the workings of the imagination?

  Mariela’s case is different. Since she offered to collaborate with him, Pinedo has exhausted her with his questions. When something absorbs him, he finds it difficult to change the subject: his enthusiasm is monothematic. Is he imagining it, or is she returning his calls more slowly? He can’t blame her.

  Apart from being understandably weary, could it be that Mariela is a little disappointed? Did she perhaps offer her help to provoke some sort of intimacy? When they met at his mother’s birthday party, they’d hit it off right away and she’d behaved like someone much younger. They’d spent the whole party engaged in banter. His mother, he recalls, was uncomfortable with this.

  They’d exchanged numbers. They started to meet and stayed out late talking in cafés, went to the theater, shared books. He suggested she translate an article for his newspaper, which she did with admirable speed and elegance. Then he dared to reveal his ambitions, his deferred projects. Mariela encouraged him to persist. No one had ever listened to him before with such understanding.

  Until, one evening, she mentioned Yoshie Watanabe. He was captivated by her story. He immediately felt that it involved the stories of many others, that it fanned out in all directions.

  From then on, their relationship changed. Mariela drew closer and closer to him, stimulated by the reversal of their roles, which now made him her confidant. At the same time, almost unconsciously, he started to distance himself from her, so that he could break into her past. Like someone burgling a house little by little with the owner’s consent.

  * * *

  The rainstorm shows no sign of abating, so, famished and dripping wet, he finally decides to take refuge in a bar. He runs in sodden sneakers. As he splish-splashes toward the illuminated shapes flickering in the distance, Pinedo senses that he is being followed, observed from behind, or from above. That someone, somehow, is monitoring his movements. He blames this on his empty stomach. Or, more likely, on his tendency toward paranoia—a national tradition. But just to be on the safe side, he lowers his head and sprints.

  After all his hemming and hawing, Pinedo enters the first bar he comes across. This inevitably happens whenever he thinks too much before he acts: reality imposes its common sense on him, like a slap in the face.

  He crosses the threshold, shakes himself a few times, and chooses a table by the window, facing the door. Best to be vigilant.

  Upside-down umbrellas jostle in the stand, forming a ragged bouquet. On the television at the far end of the bar, people are talking soundlessly. For an instant, he has the impression that the missing noise from the screen has tipped over, as from a fish tank, into the venue.

  His intention is to have a snack, dry off a bit, and once the storm has subsided, to call a cab. Someone comes to serve him. He orders tea and a toasted sandwich. He tries to guess what they’re arguing about on the television. He thinks he understands. Then he becomes transfixed by the surface of the windowpane, the streaks of water, their ephemeral Morse code.

  When the plate and cup appear before him, Pinedo comes back to his senses. He raises his head, says thank you, and as he takes a sip of tea, spills half of it down his trousers.

  No big deal, the waiter says as he walks away. You were already soaked, so it’s hardly going to show.

  Pinedo notices someone staring at him from the adjacent table. The moment he stares back, the eyes move away. He is absurdly upset by this, as the illusion of his one-way mirror shatters.

  He tries to recover from the trivial, radical effect of someone else’s attention. He fixes his gaze on the same spot as before, but is distracted by the knowledge that he isn’t the only one observing; that to look is an action that can never be solitary.

  As his eyelids open and close, he feels he is taking on the other person’s point of view, absorbing it into his own consciousness, and that he can see inside as well as he can see outside.

  Then he cranes his neck, and he finds that the customer at the adjacent table has disappeared.

  Feeling a sudden urge to go outside and smoke, Pinedo rummages in his pockets as though missing items might respond to insistence. He can clearly visualize his lighter on his desk at work, mocking him.

  One of his pockets starts to throb. This isn’t an epiphany. It’s his phone, which has survived the rain and his clumsiness. Its tickle on his leg intimidates him. Except when work requires it, Pinedo tries to avoid phone conversations. Not just because of his stammer, but also because of the loss that phone calls highlight: you’re listening to an absence, feeling accompanied by someone who isn’t there.

  When he finally answers, the caller has hung up. He knows the number very well.

  He smiles and stares through the windowpane covered with hieroglyphs, at the distorted outline of the city.

  Like those trompe l’oeils he had difficulty focusing on when he was a child, the image escapes him, and Pinedo is once again looking in.

  He can see the bar’s floating interior, the furniture, the customers, their translucent bodies, his own tired face. He finds himself ugly, but he recognizes himself. He draws his mouth closer to give himself a taunting kiss. The glass mists up and his reflection is lost.

  The rain intensifies, punishes. He hasn’t seen such a downpour in years. As if all that research into foreign disasters had brought the apocalypse to his door.

  Sooner or later, Buenos Aires is flooded. And it always floats to the surface.

>   10

  LAST CIRCLE

  THE ENGINE STILL RUNNING, Mr. Watanabe stares at a fork in the road. Its choices diverge like a pair of trousers about to split.

  He feels the urge to go to Hirodai. He intuits that he should acquaint himself with it; that, in some sense, he is choosing between two directions in his memory.

  Ovine clouds drift over the car roof.

  He drives on, steering between the cracks. Soon the road begins to climb. The surface remains exactly as it was after the earthquake, when the ground ceased to be a ground and the present broke apart. The car advances with the rhythm of a horse, avoiding the fissures so the wheels won’t get stuck. It is more like a jigsaw puzzle of a path. Watanabe imagines that each piece contains the hint of a movement, a possible detour to somewhere else.

  He comes to a halt at the entrance of the village, which is located at the top of a slight hill. According to the GPS, at this very moment he is twenty kilometers from the nuclear power station, on the exact edge of the critical zone. Neither inside nor outside.

  He steps out of the car. This time he decides not to look at the dosimeter.

  * * *

  He begins to walk around Hirodai. The fact that this is the closest he has ever set foot to the Fukushima plant makes him feel he’s floating, and his shoes sink less into the ground.

  His first impression of the village isn’t the accumulation of things and spaces that comprise it, but the overwhelming sum of its silence. A very specific silence that Watanabe recalls having heard only once before in his life. There are peaceful silences that are a cure for noise, and others that emphasize absence.

  And farther away, in the distant background, the sea. The echo of the waves, which his experienced ear instantly associates with the swish of a cassette tape or the crackle of vinyl, just before the music starts.