Earlier I said that M’s abduction left us speechless (I should add that my world fell apart). I am going to recount the moment I found out. One afternoon I heard someone knocking at my front door; still, nothing seemed particularly urgent that day. I dressed slowly, wondering who it could be; when I neared the door the knocking began again. I opened the door reluctantly, only halfway. It was my neighbor, who was about to leave. As he turned he said impatiently, “Hurry up, now, you’ve got a call.” We started walking, him in front and me behind. It had been quiet inside my house, but out on the street everything was jarring. I tried to excuse the delay, saying, “For what it’s worth…” “So don’t give out the number,” he responded, and he was right. We got to his house and I walked… back along the walls; one burned from the hours the sun had been at work on it. I got to the kitchen, where they kept their telephone. Up to that point everything was normal, even predictable: the untended plants, the two old plum trees out behind the house, the smells of the kitchen, where they were just sitting down to eat (my standard joke: I would be there in a minute). A friend was calling, to let me know. That’s what he said: To let me know. This friend, named A, sounded like an idiot. How could he say “to let me know”? (Someone, someone else was speaking through him; he could not be saying that.) He said he couldn’t believe what he was saying (what he was letting me know). I could not believe him, either. Some of the details were absurd, fragmentary, unclear. We didn’t know what to do, him on his side and me on mine, which was demonstrated by the silence we maintained for a few long moments before hanging up. I remember a parenthesis opening up as I put the phone back on the receiver; something was interrupted, for how long, I don’t know. Some time had passed when I came around, but my neighbor and his family, who were waiting to eat, the bottle of soda water sweating on the table, were looking at me as though I had just hung up. Something had happened, they could tell, and they were waiting for me to explain it to them. The meal didn’t matter; they could wait in silence for hours until I was ready to speak. I regretted the silence, and regretted in advance what I might say. I muttered something about the soda siphon, that it was getting cold; that the bottle was getting cold because the soda, as it warmed up, let go of the cold it had absorbed in the refrigerator. I had wanted to say something about the food, which was steaming (and actually getting cold), and tell them that I didn’t want to bother them any further (this is what I was regretting in advance: that I would sound like my mother with her overly emphatic courtesy). I had wanted to say that the food was getting cold, but seeing the perspiration on the siphon, I felt utterly defeated: not only had something terrible happened to M, I thought, but on top of it all the sweat from the bottle was pooling on the table. And so, with those disjointed words I left, flustered and impatient, not knowing where I was headed. I went back through the house. I crossed the stone patio and walked along the wall, which was giving off a more intense heat than before. I stepped into the street and was pained to see that things were going on as usual, when the worst had come to pass. Everything expanded around me; time took on intolerable, immeasurable dimensions and nothing seemed to have an end. I went over what had happened; the notice from my neighbor, our conversation; I was ashamed that I had been so leisurely in the way I dressed and so cavalier when I greeted the family. And, on top of it all, the worst thing imaginable had happened to M. Outside, the sun was hard at work. My mind was an intensely white screen, as bright as the chalky wall behind me. Strangely enough, my first impulse was toward calculation: I wanted to guess how long it would take the bus to reach the corner, how many cobblestones fit on one street, how much heat it would take to melt these walls, and the houses along with them, once and for all. These calculations were a way of stopping the advance of time, anyone could have seen that, but there was still a time that evaded me: it was the moment itself, in which something was beginning that I did not understand, something born of abandonment and also, although it sounds contradictory, a double life. (I mean that I felt M’s life in danger within me; of the few duties and sensibilities he had chosen for himself, I decided to follow and complete the greatest number possible. It was a means of survival. Later on, I will explain how.)
One afternoon, weeks after the explosion, I ran into his mother on calle Acevedo. She was distracted, not looking where she was going and wrestling with her bag; one of those that can be used either for shopping or as a briefcase (I remember because it seemed very large to me, empty; a flaccid weight hanging from her arm). This woman, about whom I knew so much, seemed to know very little of herself. The dense trees formed a tunnel of shadow, the exact center of which was occupied by her weary approach. Her disarray did not surprise me; it was the outward sign of a trait shared with something, many would say with someone, that was irrevocably absent. Beginning with M, I had noticed certain attributes in each member of the family, the presence of which affirmed that they belonged to the same clan: disorientation, dishevelment, and a particular vacillation that persisted even after they had made a decision. M’s mother remained true to her nature, but there was a nuance to her demeanor that had not been there before. I did not realize it at the time; I only came to recognize it much later, thinking about that encounter in the course of one particularly long night. This new trait was not something commonplace, but a profound weight; it was the mark of accelerated aging. I am not referring to the signs of her pain, which were evident. To say it in a direct and slightly arbitrary—perhaps even fallacious—way, one sleepless night my mind happened to linger on the memory of that encounter, and the obvious truth that had been hidden finally dawned on me: the body of M’s mother was smaller that afternoon; she had been reduced. On Acevedo I had only noticed something strange which, coupled with the familiar, became mysterious. This union of the strange and the familiar was, I believe, the first effect of the tireless labor of M’s absence. The familiar accommodated the strange, and the strange took over the familiar. The former absolved the latter, and the latter pardoned the former. (The familiar was M, the strange, death.) When I saw her, almost at the end of the block, I said “There is R, M’s mother,” and nothing happened. I recognized her gait, the family’s shared demeanor of tribulation and bewilderment; I thought about the son and was saddened by all that familiarity, which had been divested of its origin and purpose. What was I thinking as we approached one another and I tried not to look at her? I remembered the number of times M and I had walked down that street, on that very block and in that same direction, and lamented that chance had brought his mother and me together in that moment. Our paths crossed. She did not see me and I did not stop her, and we passed one another. To speak with her would not only have meant interrupting her distraction—her momentary unawareness of evil—and restoring the absent image of her son, but also drawing attention to a disruption imposed by circumstance; for these reasons, I did not.
Yet it is also true that it was a mistake not to face her. A mistake and, if it does not sound inappropriately elegant, a gaffe. It was to turn my back on M, who had brought about the encounter (I don’t mean this only in a figurative sense). Mute, with his mother already behind me and probably on her way home, I immediately regretted what I had done—or, rather, what I had not done. So I ran, wanting to make it all the way around the block—Padilla, Gurruchaga, Camargo—and force a new encounter, which this time would be unequivocal. Despite the fact that it was planned, and something of a ruse, it was more real and natural this way. Distracted, I turned the last corner and saw her walking toward me, as I had moments earlier, watching me. Now she, too, was ready to acknowledge me. Sometimes we need to shield ourselves from spontaneity in order to endow our actions with a measure of truth. Never before that afternoon had I seen a face that showed so much, forgetting