He met M when the two had just grown out of childhood. Several years before the abduction, they sealed the friendship with a classic rite of communion: they exchanged portraits. (It was more than a fad, but not as deeply rooted as a custom; the youth of the time were of a particular sentimentality that combined emotional impulses with a nonconformist—and often heterodox—attitude. Although this could be said of adolescents in general, at the time this energy was directed toward the unification of tastes, opinions, and ideas. They often spoke of whether they could be considered to be under the influence of the masses; they were young, but they were also foreign; they were amphibians. Inhabitants of a secondary nature, they adopted beliefs in a way that immediately exposed them as inauthentic, or mildly or profoundly out of place—depending.) M’s portrait was an enlargement of part of another photo, taken on calle Humberto I, in the neighborhood of San Telmo. The magnification of his face blurs his features and the rough grain of the photographic paper lends him a dramatic, if somewhat less than spontaneous, expression; his open mouth reveals his distinguishing feature: the hollow of a missing incisor. Partly because of the enlargement process, and partly due to his expression, his face seems on the verge of forming a grimace; almost, but not quite, due to the very circumstance that produced the effect: the false proximity of the camera.
Before giving it to me, M wrote the phrase “buffeted by the wind” like a title or an emblem on the back. I turned the photo over and saw him: he was standing on a fence and holding on to the railing, precisely as though he were being buffeted by the wind. In the interest of simulation, someone else might have pretended that he were leaning out over a precipice or some other thing one might expect to find on the wrong side of a fence, but M had chosen the least likely option: a vague idea of questionable representability. Of all the scenarios he could have depicted, his expression hinted at the violence of imagined gusts of wind and his grip on the bars, which were barely visible, spoke of its incredible force.
The day we exchanged pictures, M declared, “I don’t believe in photographs.” He did not say this to detract from the exchange, but simply to express that, in his opinion, photos did not have any documentary value whatsoever, and for that reason he doubted that they could carry a complementary emotion. As was often the case when he spoke, his words were aimed at refutation rather than persuasion—nevertheless, I was persuaded. I looked at him without understanding: where, if not toward the traces of our lives, private or shared, could we direct our emotions, apart from other people, I silently wondered. M did not hear me, but went on speaking as though he were responding to my question: Photographs are evidence of a momentary reality, inherently archaic and out of place, he repeated (in different words); but for this very reason they are also useless as documentary records. Relics as soon as they are processed, they are mute, a bridge between the past—the circumstance depicted in the photo—and the present—the moment of its viewing. And what is there between the past and the present? he asked, raising his voice. Nothing, just a chasm open at your feet; if we believe photos to be auxiliary truths, either truth itself is nonexistent or reality needs no proof. As we know, there was no wind and that fence is just a collection of posts so thick you can barely tell what they are. The weather that day no longer exists, and the noises we heard have long since faded. We’ll keep these photos as talismans, but not as proofs. “Let’s keep these photos as talismans, but not as proofs,” I repeated, as though the words were a prayer or a line of verse, trying harder to convince myself than the occasion demanded. I could sense, in this insistence and excess, a religious undertone of guardianship. Something between protection and adoration, at least; if the figure in the photo no longer existed, and neither did the sounds of the street or that particular palette of light, as is the case in any place and time, that afternoon the secret value of the image, the photo, lay in its power of conservation rather than in the representation of an origin. Years later, my photo would lack the protective qualities he had tried to assign to both. But “my photo” was not my portrait, but M’s. Just like “his” was not his, but mine. Which of the four photos retained that power? His in his possession, mine in my own hands, the picture of me that he held on to, or his in my possession (which I still have)?
After the abduction, I took refuge in the house of a friend who had the same name as M. I met my mother from time to time in a nearby café; she wanted me to leave, I didn’t respond. My mother would smooth her hair and ask how long I was going to go on like this. I remained silent. Then it would begin all over again; the same dialogue repeated two or three times in different words, followed by the same silence. Then, with a sudden movement, which in its swiftness conveyed both annoyance and concern, she would take out a little money and tell me that she would not be able to go on offering it for long. I am sure it was not easy for her to come by, but the supposed tact of calling “offering” what was so obviously “giving” seemed both unnecessary and inappropriate; it was the introduction of courtesy into a situation that rendered courtesy trivial, even insulting: the circumstance, as she herself acknowledged with her concern, simply did not allow for social graces or attempts at elegance. How, if not like alms or a tip, was that money handed over to me? I was in no position to turn it down, but she insisted on the word “offering” time and again; in a way, the care with which she tried to protect my supposed pride showed just how far apart we had grown, how divergent our paths had become. It was on one of those days—when I would walk from café to café, my mania fueled by fear, exhaustion, and boredom—after seeing my mother, that I read about the explosion in the newspaper.
M lived on a street that was divided in two by the railroad. Whoever wanted to cross the tracks had to do so by following its old-fashioned walkways in the form of an S, which would force them, precisely, to slow down. The house was thirty meters from the tracks; cars hardly ever drove down his block, which was lined with trees and façades so similar they seemed indistinguishable, interchangeable. To get to M’s house, one had to walk down a long hallway that extended almost to the middle of the block. Every few meters a door would appear on the right—these were not only similar, but in fact completely identical. His family lived behind the fourth. The door opened on to a patio, which was the nucleus of the house. There were a few plants and large flowerpots in it, which at first glance seemed to be scattered about at random. M’s room was reached by climbing a narrow staircase that rose up from the patio next to a large sink and doubled back above it (so closely you had to stoop over to do the wash). I remember my surprise looking down for the first time through the steps of iron grating, just like the ones found on countless railroad bridges. M should feel lucky to have his own room, I thought the first time I visited, especially one so isolated from the rest of the house.
The residence, which was nothing special in itself, took on an enigmatic quality the moment M’s family moved in. It was not just the building or the apartment, as I will explain later on, it was also its location. Even though it was in a mostly Jewish neighborhood, the house was in an area that was not considered as such. The proximity of the two, as is often the case, made the differences between them even more pronounced. The opposite can also occur, as it did with my family, which did not live in a Jewish neighborhood but drew little attention just the same. Invisible from the street, in an area that seemed strange to my inexperienced mind, M’s house was ensconced within the very heart of the block, surrounded on all sides by other houses and other families. This confinement, which shaped the family’s daily activities, proved that “confinement” was not really the right word for it; more accurately, it was an excessive form of cohabitation and a different sort of abundance, though it was foreign to me. It was the realm of the diverse, the disparate. I should say that the “geographic” oddity of the house represented only my first concern; a second arose when I met M’s parents, who spoke without any particular accent. I still remember my surprise at hearing his father speak;