Authors: Tomás Eloy Martínez
Unchanged? I don’t know how to lift his spirits anymore, Bruno. His spleen’s distended, he hasn’t passed water for days, he’s all swollen. Three days ago he seemed to
have revived. Around six in the evening he wanted me to sit down beside him. We were talking for an hour, maybe more. He taught me how to memorize numbers and combine them. Three is a bird,
thirty-three is two birds, zero three is all the birds in the world. It’s an ancient art, he told me. He combined ten or twelve numbers in different ways and then shuffled them backwards. He
was speaking in that monotonous rhythm that croupiers use in casinos. As if he were performing. I didn’t understand why he was doing it and I didn’t want to ask.
Maybe to feel alive. To remember who Martel had once been.
Yes, that must’ve been it. He wants to get up soon, and sing again. He asked me to book Sabadell for a recital on the Costanera Sur. It’s an illusion, you realize. He doesn’t
even know when he’ll be able to stand. What happened on the Costanera? I asked him. That place is a desert now. What do you mean, Alcirita, he answered. Didn’t you see it in the paper?
I remembered finding a clipping in the pocket of the pants he was wearing when we brought him to the hospital, but I only managed to see the headline. Something about a naked corpse among the
reeds.
Has he gone downhill since then? Did you say he’s worse?
That very night he took a turn for the worse. He’s having trouble breathing. I think they’re going to open up his airway. I don’t want them to torment him further, but I
don’t have the right to say so either. I’ve spent years by Martel’s side but I’m still nobody to him.
Tell them how you feel anyway.
What I feel.
Yes, doctors always try to keep people alive, here and everywhere. It’s something to do with pride.
I feel that there’s no reason for him to die now. Should I tell them? They’ll laugh behind my back. I’m not thinking about death. If they want to cut his throat to stick a tube
in, how can I explain to them that the voice would disappear, and without the voice, Martel would be another person? He’d let himself die as soon as he found out what had happened. That
afternoon, three days ago, I told him about you, I told you, didn’t I?
No, you didn’t tell me.
I told him that you’d spent months searching for him. Now he knows where I am, he said. So, let him come and talk to me. Bruno can come whenever he wants.
They wouldn’t let me see him.
Not now. You have to wait for another resurrection. If you were there all the time you would have seen him come back sometimes so strongly that you’d think: That’s it, he’s not
going to have any more relapses.
If only I could always be at the hospital. But you know it’s not up to me.
I looked at her for a long time as if I didn’t want to part with her. The tiredness in her eyes kept me there, her smooth skin, her dark hair disordered by the hurricanes of her soul. It
seemed to me that those marks of identity summed up those of the human race. Sometimes I stared at her so intensely that Alcira looked away. I would have liked to explain that it wasn’t her
who attracted me but the lights that Martel had left on her face that I could half make out, the reverberations of the dying voice that were inscribed on her body. Suddenly, Alcira bent over to tie
up the laces of her flat, white nurse’s shoes. When she sat up she looked at her watch, as if she had just woken up.
Look how late it is, she said. Martel’s going to be asking for me.
You’ve only been here for five minutes, I said. You used to stay longer before.
None of what’s happened had happened before. Now we’re all walking on broken glass. Five minutes is a whole lifetime.
I watched her go and realized that I had nothing to do away from her. I didn’t want to go back to the hotel through bonfires and beggars. At least I now knew Martel had indicated another
point on his hypothetical map: the Southern Shore, where I’d been wandering unknowingly on Saturday night. A naked body in the reeds. Perhaps I could find the facts in the archives. I
remembered they were all closed and the fires had even reached the doors of one of them. The incident that Martel mentioned, however, probably wasn’t so distant. The clipping was still in his
pocket. For a moment I hoped that Alcira might let me see it, though I knew her incapable of such disloyalty.
I opened the newspaper she’d left forgotten on the table and I too turned the pages dispiritedly, glancing at the gloomy, bloodstained news. A long article caught my attention, illustrated
with photos of barely-dressed children and men among heaps of garbage. ‘I turned around and saw they were bullets,’ said the defiant headline. There was a more explanatory caption
above: ‘Fuerte Apache, two days later.’ It was a detailed description of the neighborhood where Bonorino and my other neighbors from the boarding house had ended up. It seemed that the
first supermarket looters had come from there and now they were holding wakes for their dead.
According to what I read, Fuerte Apache must be a fortress: three ten-story tower blocks joined together on a ten-hectare lot, six blocks west of General Paz Avenue, on the very edge of Buenos
Aires. Around the tower blocks they’d been building long three-story houses they called ‘strips.’ I thought of the librarian moving from one shack to the next with his string of
index cards, like a mole. ‘At all hours,’ the article said, ‘music boomed.
Cumbia,
salsa: the kids dance on the mud sidewalks with
litronas
of beer in hand.’ I
wondered what
litronas
were. Perhaps the young kids’ slang was infiltrating the newspapers. ‘Fuerte Apache was planned for twenty-two thousand inhabitants but at the end of the
year 2000 there were already more than seventy thousand living there. It’s impossible to get an accurate figure. Neither census takers nor police would venture through those hallways.
Yesterday, at the entrance to the strips, there were ten makeshift funeral chapels. In some of them they were holding wakes for slum-dwellers shot down by the police or supermarket owners during
the looting; in others, for victims of stray bullets or fights between rival gangs in the tower blocks.’
At the bottom of the article there was a list of the dead in a succinct inset. I was astonished to discover the name Sesostris Bonorino, municipal employee. A series of memories flashed through
my head like a reproach. I remembered the rap the librarian had sung to hand claps, before we’d said goodbye in the boarding house:
In the Fort there’s
no
place to run / Life gets blown to kingdom come / If I live, it’s where it smells like dung / If I die, it’s a bullet from a stranger’s gun
. I should have realized at the time
that such an extravagant scene could not have been a coincidence. Bonorino was alerting me to the fact that he’d seen his own finale, that he couldn’t avoid it and it didn’t
matter to him either. Against my clumsy suppositions, it was possible, then, to read the future in
the small iridescent sphere of blinding light.
The aleph existed. It existed. I regretted
that the newspaper’s epitaph was so unjust. Bonorino had been one of the few privileged people – if not the only one – who, contemplating the aleph, had come face to face with the
shape of God.
I had an urge to go to Fuerte Apache to find out what had happened. I couldn’t understand how such an innocent being had met such a brutal death. I contained myself. Even if I managed to
get into the funeral chapels, there would be no point now. I gradually resigned myself to the idea that the librarian had been able to see everything: my night with El Tucumano in the Hotel Plaza
Francia, the treacherous letter I wrote and the useless consequences of my betrayal. I was disconcerted that, even knowing that, he had trusted me with the accounts ledger with the notes for the
National Encyclopedia, which was his life’s work. What good could it do him that I or anyone else had it? Why had he trusted me?
The only thing that made any sense now was to recover the aleph. If I found it, not only could I see both the foundations of Buenos Aires, the muddy village with its stinking saltery, the
revolution of May 1810, the Mazorka’s crimes then and again a hundred and forty years later, the arrival of the immigrants, the Centenary celebrations
17
, the Zeppelin flying over the proud
city. I could also hear Martel in all the places where he’d sung and know the precise moment when he’d be lucid enough for us to speak.
I got onto the first southbound bus I saw, then walked, almost breathlessly, towards the boarding house on Garay Street. If anyone was still living there, I’d go down to the cellar on
whatever pretext I could come up with and lie flat on my back, raising my eyes up toward the nineteenth step. I would see a whole universe in a single point, the torrent of history in an
infinitesimal fraction of a second. And if the place was shut up, I’d break down the door or open the old lock. I’d taken the precaution of keeping my keys.
I was prepared for any eventuality, except the one I found. The boarding house had been reduced to rubble. In the space that corresponded to the reception desk sat a sinister-looking digger. The
first flight of stairs that used to lead to my room was still standing. At the edge of the street yawned one of those dump trucks used to cart away demolition wreckage. It was late at night by now
and the site was unguarded by lights or men. I crawled blindly through the beams and chunks of masonry, knowing that here and there would be holes and if I fell into one I would fracture something
fatally. I wanted to get to the cellar no matter what.
I dodged a couple of bricks that fell from the skeleton of the wall. Even in that desolation with all points of references obliterated, I was sure of being able to find my way around. The
counter, I told myself, the remains of the banister, Enriqueta’s little cubicle. Ten or twelve steps to the west should be the rectangle through which I’d seen Bonorino’s bald
head peek out so many times. I jumped over some boards with nails and jagged glass sticking out of them. Then I stumbled into a wooden frame, beyond which opened a pit. The darkness was so dense
that I intuited more than I saw. Was it really a pit? I thought I should go down and explore, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I picked up a piece of rubble, tossed it in, and heard it
echo off other stones almost immediately. So it wasn’t very deep. Perhaps with the help of a flashlight, I might be able to get down there, no matter how precarious it was. I didn’t
even have a damn match with me. The moon had gone behind a heavy swell of clouds long ago. It was waxing, almost full. I decided to wait until the sky cleared. I touched the fence and my hands felt
a crumpled, sticky piece of paper. I tried to get rid of it but it was stuck to me. It had a thick, rough consistency like a cement bag or cheap cardboard. The fleeting light from the headlights of
a passing car enabled me to glimpse what it was. It was one of Bonorino’s index cards that had survived the demolition, dust and mechanical diggers. I could make out three letters: I A O.
Maybe they didn’t mean anything. Maybe, if they hadn’t been etched there by chance, they referred to the idea of the Absolute found in
Pistis Sophia,
the sacred books of the
Gnostics. I didn’t even have time to ponder it. At that instant a break appeared in the clouds and the pit appeared, unmistakable, in front of me. From its dimensions and position I could see
that the excavation occupied the same place as the old cellar. Where the nineteen-step staircase had been I could now make out a vertical railing. Just when no one would consider building anything
in a crumbling Buenos Aires, my boarding house had been pulled down by bad luck. The aleph, the aleph, I said. I tried to see if there was any trace left. I desolately contemplated the mounds of
turned earth, blocks of cement, the indifferent wind. I spent a long time among the ruins, incredulous. A few weeks earlier, when we were saying goodbye in the boarding house, Bonorino had defied
me to lie down under the nineteenth step, flat on my back, sure I wouldn’t do it. Since he knew everything, he also knew I wouldn’t take him up on it. He’d seen the hustle and
bustle of the diggers over the rubble of the boarding house, the void, the building that hadn’t yet been constructed and the one they’d put up a hundred years later. He’d seen how
the small sphere that contained the universe would disappear forever beneath a mountain of garbage. That night in the boarding house I’d wasted my only opportunity. I’d never have
another. I screamed, I sat down to cry, I don’t even remember what I did anymore. I wandered aimlessly through the Buenos Aires night until, shortly before dawn, I returned to the hotel. I
faced, like Borges, intolerable nights of insomnia, and only now can forgetfulness begin to seep in.
The day following this misfortune was New Year’s Eve. I got up early, had a quick shower and just a cup of coffee for breakfast. I was in a hurry to get to the hospital. I left a message
at the intensive care unit telling Alcira that I’d be waiting for Martel’s summons on the steps by the entrance or in the waiting room. I was determined to stay right there. Messages,
services, everything seemed to have gone back to normal. The previous night, however, the pots and pans had resounded once again. The umpteenth explosion of popular rage had removed the Joker from
power, along with his string of collaborators and ministers. I wondered whether El Tucumano would have returned to his unstable job at Ezeiza, but immediately discarded the idea. A sun that has
shone so brightly won’t be dragged down.
On the trusty 102 bus there was talk only of the Joker, who had also fled – like the president in the helicopter – from the country in ruins. No one thought it could rise out of such
prostration. Those who still had anything to sell refused to do so, because no one knew the value of things. I felt outside of reality now, or rather plunged into that alien reality of the fading
life of a tango singer.
I walked through the hospital corridors without being stopped by anyone. When I entered the second-floor waiting room, I recognized the shaven-headed doctor I’d come across a few days
before. He was speaking quietly to two old men who were crying with their faces in their hands, ashamed of their grief. As he had done with Alcira, the doctor patted them on the back. When I saw he
was going back to work, I caught up to him and asked if I could see Martel.