COMMON FACTOR

Sergio Gaut vel Hartman

 

The house wasn't bad. Perhaps it had more rooms than necessary and a gloomy character that could be corrected with flowers and plants and some children running through the hallways and the patio. I wondered if I would have the opportunity to find something better and also how many other cloying real estate agents they would have to endure before finding the ideal house, the dream place.

"What do you think?" said the salesman, rubbing his hands. He had fashioned a smile so false that it threatened to perpetuate itself on his face, condemning him to rigor mortis in life. "You won't find anything better," he insisted after reading my thoughts. Salesman's tricks, I suspected; I'm too childish in such matters. I was going to retort, I swear, but at that moment the guy's cell phone rang, and after muttering an apology, he withdrew to the adjoining room to answer the call.

I was left alone and dedicated myself to observing the high, white ceilings. Plaster moldings clearly marked the separation from the ugly, hastily painted walls. I thought it was an original, extravagant house, perhaps concocted by a snobbish architect. I took a few steps towards the next room, moving away from the salesman. The place seemed illogical in a way, and it reminded me of a story I had read some time ago. For a moment I thought I could get trapped in that singular geography, lost in spaces I was completely unfamiliar with, but I immediately dismissed those silly arguments. The salesman was still talking, perhaps arguing or receiving instructions to close the deal, so I refocused my attention on the house. There were too many rooms, I repeated to myself; the walls oozed dampness, the floors were uneven, and ventilation was scarce. These reasons led me to decide that I had enough to end the whole matter right there. I approached a door and opened it. It led to an empty room. I retraced my steps and opened another door. This smaller room was populated by moth-eaten, decrepit, foul-smelling furniture; I felt nauseous. Just about to emerge into a patio where a mass of golden light had accumulated, I noticed a door disguised behind a tattered, dirty blue curtain. I hesitated between going out to the patio, clearly the blind end of the line, since an unlimited number of rooms couldn't exist, or concentrating my attention on that door. The second idea won.

I fumbled for the doorknob behind the curtain and felt the coldness of the bronze; as I imagined, it wasn't locked; none of the house's doors were, after all. I opened it and faced the first surprise.

The natural assumption, I don't know why, had been to think that the room was empty and that the light from the patio was obliquely filtering through a window, illuminating dust particles and delineating a trapezoid of clarity on the dark floor. It wasn't like that.

The room had no windows. The stark white of several fluorescent tubes shone on the objects, denying them the right to shadow. But these details were nowhere near as extraordinary as the rest. Sitting in a high-backed chair, with his elbows resting on a wooden table and his fists under his chin, was a man of indefinable age, with graying hair and a network of wrinkles on his face that seemed to mimic the labyrinth of the house. He looked towards the door, as if he had been waiting for me, but upon seeing me, he didn't even blink.

"Good afternoon," I said. "I didn't know anyone was here."

"Evening. I'm Juan Salvo," he said, slurring his words. I mentioned my name and he shrugged. I remained rooted to the floor for a few seconds, paying attention to the noises, barely rustles, coming from an adjoining room that communicated with ours through a doorless opening.

"Is there anyone else?" I said, pointing to the opening.

"Yes," Salvo said, "Guevara; he's preparing mate. We're waiting for Rosa to start." He seemed to observe me more closely for a second, but immediately lost interest. "We weren't expecting you. Were you supposed to come? Who sent you?" The words denoted suspicion and distrust, but the tired tone belied any nuance in that direction.

I didn't know what to answer, so I put myself on the defensive, with my guard up. "Who are you people?" I asked, always attentive to what this Guevara was doing in the neighboring room; apparently, he was in no hurry. Two or three times I heard clinking, as if a teaspoon was hitting a glass.

"I already told you: Rosa, who will arrive any moment, Guevara and I, Salvo. Sit down, don't stand there. Are you sure no one sent you? Maybe Guevara knows."

I spotted a chair identical to Juan's and dragged it unceremoniously to place it next to the table. I sat to one side, with my back to the wall facing the patio and facing the archway through which, at any moment, Guevara would appear.

"You mention the names of these people," I said, "and your own, but they mean nothing to me. Should I know them?"

"Yours means nothing to me either," Salvo said. "What does it matter? If I told you that Guevara and Rosa are fighters, people who have imagined a better world and are trying to force things to make it happen, would anything change?"

I looked at Salvo disoriented, searching my memory for a logical reason to fit the nonsense the man suggested. "Wait a moment," I stammered. "If what you say were true, you'd be talking about people who died years ago. That Guevara died in Bolivia, in the mountains, a long time ago. And I don't even dare to think that the Rosa you mention is the revolutionary, the German woman from the early 20th century who fought..."

"She's Polish, not German," Salvo said.

"She isn't, she was. She's dead," I insisted. "Rosa Luxemburg." I savored the name, an epic name, like Dolores Ibarruri, like other quixotic ladies of history. The guy was crazy.

"Alive, dead," Salvo said, shaking his head. "What do you know?"

"You don't expect me to believe he's a ghost." I tried to laugh, but my lips twisted abnormally and formed a sneering grimace.

"For now, my friend," Salvo said, "I expect nothing." Salvo seemed at that moment overwhelmed by a weariness greater than any man could bear, as if a long and useless struggle had consumed him. I was going to retort; I am a rational person and that kind of superstition disturbs me beyond words, but things didn't turn out as I expected. A crash forced me to turn my head. The windowless wall opened as if it were the diaphragm of a camera. Click, clack. The patio was never seen, and in any case, what I could perceive was, like a flash, a dark volume crossing the iris with a firm step, as if the wall simply didn't exist.

When I could turn my whole body, I discovered next to me a young woman, about twenty-five years old, perhaps less; she was petite, with very white skin, and moved nervously, as if she lacked time to do everything she had planned.

"Hello, Rosa," Salvo said, as expressionless as ever.

"Hello, Rosa," I repeated; I could afford to be polite. I was fascinated by the idea that this woman was the mythical Rosa Luxemburg, the founder of Spartacism. But Rosa had been assassinated in 1919, how was that possible...?

The girl looked at me, surprised and irritated. Apparently, she didn't like an intruder occupying a place around the table, much less being treated with familiarity, as if I had known her before. She put her arms akimbo, in a pose so affected that it seemed like a movie heroine, and pointed at me by moving her chin.

"Where did this one come from, who is he?" she said with a strong German accent, which confirmed, in a way, what Salvo had stated.

"He must be someone visiting the house to buy it," Guevara said, coming out of the other room with a thermos under his arm and a leather-covered gourd in his left hand. He didn't look at me; perhaps he was looking beyond the wall, the patio, or beyond the house, a landscape invisible to me. Apparently, these people knew and could do things that were forbidden to me. Guevara sat down and gestured to Rosa to drop that austere gesture, similar to that used by a fanatic when with someone who does not profess their faith. Then he placed the gourd in a tiny wicker basket and poured the water in a single, precise stream, showing that his pulse was trained; he took three long sips without moving the container and refilled it, pushing the gourd towards Salvo.

"Is he useful to us?" Rosa said. Although her features had softened a little, the girl's hostility could have been caught in the air with a slap. I felt the urge to jump up and leave without saying goodbye, but the mystery was too precious, like a gem.

"Do you have a mission?" I said without thinking, a pure intuition like pure water; an absurd and unfounded intuition. But all three raised their heads and fixed their eyes on me. Even Salvo seemed to lose the skin of apathy that enveloped him, and Guevara put down the thermos, and Rosa leaned her small body forward, almost touching me.

"What do you know about all this?" Guevara said. "Who told you about us?"

"We all have a war to fight," I said, blindly, hoping that path would lead somewhere. "I'm looking for mine."

They all sighed with relief; it was almost comical. Salvo shook his head and I thought he smiled. Rosa put her hand on my arm and squeezed, as if wishing to erase all previous distrust with that gesture.

"I highly doubt this is yours," Guevara said. He poured water into the gourd again and offered it to me. Although I don't usually drink mate, I accepted. I sensed that if I yielded to these people's ways, my chances of understanding what was happening would increase.

"To know if we are in the same war," I said, at random, "we would first have to define who the enemy is."

Contrary to what I expected, none of them answered me. Perhaps my question had been too direct, and that put me under suspicion again. Was I spying on them? I knew I wasn't. Rosa released my arm; only then did I notice that she had been squeezing so hard that her nails had pierced the fabric of my shirt.

Guevara prepared himself as if he were about to lecture a group of anxious and ignorant young people.

"Do you know what happens?" he finally said, though without looking at me, after taking two long sips. "The enemy... it doesn't matter much who the enemy is. We can put our heads together and believe that the enemy is one, and in a way it is, but the struggle must take place at every point, at every intersection, do you understand? Then it matters less. You fight your own war and each of us will do something similar. We have met by chance; perhaps we don't even belong to the same time, we haven't been able to find out yet. In reality, we just get together to drink mate." He laughed strangely.

"It doesn't escape you that I don't understand what you're talking about," I said.

"No, it doesn't escape me," Guevara said. "It was a possibility. Do you know who I am?"

"Should I know? Are you someone... important? If you were the same Guevara... it would be impossible." I didn't want to say that that Guevara was dead; it seemed rude to me.

Guevara smiled. Then he patted his thigh.

"Juan knows much more about this than Rosa and I because he exists on another plane, independent, closer to central knowledge," he said. "He says that in some lines I am someone important, perhaps decisive, or at least influential. But lines are just that, lines. You walk down a hallway, open a door, and enter a room. Maybe I'm there, maybe not. Maybe I triumphed or was assassinated or wasn't born, do you understand?"

"No. Why doesn't he explain it to me?" I said, pointing to Salvo. "If you yourself admit that he knows much more than you."

"We're wasting time," Rosa said. She had regained her previous expression, though intensified by an urgency that came from fear, as if the whole scene risked bursting like a soap bubble.

"Time is not lost," Salvo said, "we are the ones who get lost in time." I was getting tired of those empty, deliberately enigmatic phrases, designed to impress me. I began to think that, beyond the trick of Rosa and the wall, of the mentions of war or whatever they intended to do, a terrorist act, an ambush, an assassination, these people were concealing a concrete operation: occupying the house to use it as a base for their activities, or something similar. The memory of the Process times suddenly came to me and I was afraid.

"Do you have authorization from the owner or the real estate agency to be in this place, or are you common intruders?" My phrase sounded insipid, and they, all three, even before I finished the paragraph, began to laugh.

"If you only knew how defeated your words sound," Guevara said when he could compose himself. "This is an inflection point, an anomaly. Do you think something as trivial as squatting in a house can prevail over the phenomenon that brings us together, here, now, all four of us?"

"You spoke of a war," I said, trying to regain my footing.

"You spoke," Salvo said. "For us, war, any war, took a back seat a long time ago. What kind of war do you imagine? One with soldiers, planes, tanks, missiles? I'm sorry to disappoint you; we don't have those kinds of wars in existence." Juan's words were accompanied by such a high degree of bitterness that for a moment I thought he was going to explode, splashing me, soaking me in blue, lethal poison.

"Is any of you going to tell me clearly why you are in this place?" I half-rose in my chair; I was determined to press them and define, even at the cost of leaving some shreds in the attempt.

"I already told you," Guevara insisted, "we just got together to drink mate." Rosa was even more eloquent: she drew her finger and pointed it at me, accusingly, although I suppose she didn't even know what she was accusing me of. She said two or three words in German, I suppose; they sounded like an insult.

"Rosa, please," Juan Salvo said wearily, "let's leave those silly things."

"If you explain the trick of the wall," I said, not paying attention to the girl who kept gesticulating, despite Salvo's reprimand, perhaps stuck for lack of words in our language, "I'll leave and let you be. I found you by chance and I'm not interested. I'd rather be in the library, reading a good book. Do you realize? Besides, the salesman must be looking for me."

Salvo looked at Guevara, as if asking for help, but he made an eloquent gesture, downplaying its importance.

"The salesman is dangerous, he is the enemy, since you wanted to know," Guevara said.

Then Salvo stood up and, placing his fists on the table, spoke like a political leader negotiating support for his worst adversary.

"It's time, sir, the greatest impostor, a fiction. Get out of here, while you can, before you get caught in the web of facts. Do you think I was always this pale shadow? I am a man of action and I await my opportunity. But you disturb me, you hinder me."

"Who are you?" I repeated for the umpteenth time, almost furious. I also had my fists clenched, and despite always having been a peaceful person, I felt like running them over, forcing them to explain the whole story to me.

"We already told you," Guevara said; he seemed to be very patient, a guy accustomed to complicated ventures.

"Names are not enough for me; I don't know who you are by knowing your names, which, by the way, could be mere pseudonyms. It's very common lately."

Rosa seemed, for the first time, at peace with herself, but she refrained from speaking.

"Let's suppose for a moment," Salvo said, "that we are independent avatars who met, who by pure chance found the common factor that allows them to coincide in a fictional space, is that enough for you?"

"Avatars? They talk as if this were a game. No, it's not enough for me," I said, and I was sincere; I was as much in the dark as at the beginning. Perhaps I am a limited person to understand the abstract or the fantastic, but I couldn't connect these three people; perhaps I wouldn't have been able to even knowing their motives and passions. "Okay, tell me your stories, one of the three stories, at least."

"No," Guevara said, breaking a silence of several minutes, "we don't have time left." He tried to pour water into the gourd and discovered that the thermos was empty. Without hesitation and without looking back, he headed towards the other room. As I watched him disappear, it occurred to me that he had the answer and was hiding it, or that he was provoking me. With a jump, I crossed the space that separated us without Rosa or Juan trying to stop me. I reached the archway and received a devastating impact: Guevara was walking towards a mountain of oxidized bushes, under an ashen, weak sun; beyond, by a stream, a kind of camp was visible where some men and women surrounded a bonfire. I called out to him, but he didn't even turn around, as if he were traversing a space without connection. I realized that I had lost a third of reality, perhaps forever, or perhaps it wasn't real at all, it never had been, how to know? I turned abruptly, prepared to discover that the archway leading to the house I had intended to buy had disappeared, but no: the archway was still in the same place; fortunately, I wasn't lost in an alternative universe, with no possibility of return. I hesitated for a second. I would ruin everything if I didn't make the right move, but I also couldn't continue living with the doubt on my shoulders.

However, when I looked back into the room, Rosa and Salvo had disappeared. The room was empty, like so many others in the house. There were no traces of the table and chairs, and a huge window overlooked a patio where the last vestiges of a coppery light wrinkled like the skin of a rotting fruit. The door opened and I heard the voice of the real estate agent.

"Sir?" he said hesitantly. "Are you here?"

It wasn't possible, nothing was possible. I went outside and looked towards the camp. Guevara had already gained a good hundred meters on me. But reality is tied to logical laws, I told myself; people can't just appear and disappear like that.

"Yes, I'm here," I said, entering the room resolutely. The salesman sighed with relief. "I was just looking around," I added.

"This leads to the park," he said, pointing to the archway through which Guevara had left. I adjusted the idea in my head. Calling a mountain of bushes with its own stream a park seemed absurd to me, but it was the real estate agent's logic, not mine or the others'.

"Beautiful park," I said for lack of anything better. I moved to get past the salesman, but he grabbed my arm.

"Did you see something you shouldn't have?" The guy's expression had changed drastically. The plastic smile gone, he looked at me harshly, brazenly, as police often look at a suspect. The pressure on my arm intensified; I thought of Rosa and how everyone seemed interested in keeping me restrained, not just in that house and at that moment.

"Are you going to let me go? What do you think you're doing?"

"No," the guy said, stubborn; now it was hard for me to think of him as a simple real estate agent; he was something else, no doubt, as Guevara had said; the salesman is dangerous, he said, he is the enemy. The salesman confirmed it immediately, with four enigmatic and conclusive words: "Who is the woman?"

"What woman? I didn't see any woman."

"Don't be an idiot." He increased the pressure on my arm even more and with a dizzying movement pulled out a weapon and pressed it against my forehead.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm not playing; neither are they. Didn't they tell you this is a war?"

I laughed as naturally as possible. "You're crazy! I came to buy the house."

"That was the original idea, but things changed since you met those three." The forcefulness of the statement shattered my scheme. He knew everything, it wasn't a trick; he could read minds with absolute efficiency. I decided to make a drastic change, a desperate move.

"Oh, those people, I was just going to ask you. Is the house occupied? How do I get them out of here? If I buy it, will I get involved in legal issues?"

The guy let go of me and stepped back, though without ceasing to point the weapon at me.

"What were they doing?"

"They're out there, drinking mate," I said as naturally as possible. "Didn't you know? Weren't you the one who reads minds?"

"Me? How do you know?" The hesitation lasted an instant, but apparently in free zones, that's enough. A wall opened again like a diaphragm, click, clack, not the same one, where there was now a window, but the one leading to the hallway, but this time I could see it without difficulty. Rosa jumped like a panther and grabbed the salesman's hand that held the weapon. But that wasn't all. There was another click, clack, on the ceiling, and Salvo descended in slow motion, as if sinking into a large volume of swan feathers. That slowness didn't seem important, as the salesman was paralyzed. His face had frozen in an expression of astonished terror, as if his brain was incapable of ordering anything else. Salvo brandished a wide-bladed hunting knife, and used it to open the guy from navel to neck.

"Watch out, it's coming out!" Salvo announced.

From inside the salesman came a monstrous creature, a saffron-colored spheroid, a being unlike anything that lived on Earth. The monster had no limbs and clumsily fell to the ground without making a sound. I didn't know whether to be surprised by what I was seeing or by the way Rosa and Salvo handled the situation. It seemed incredible to me that the creature was housed inside a human body and that, perhaps, I don't know, I conjecture, it had taken possession of it to manipulate it.

"Leave, if you're impressionable," Salvo said. "I'm not lying if I tell you that what follows is quite unpleasant." I was about to ask what he meant by that, when Guevara re-entered through the same place he had used to leave. He carried a black plastic bag and without any explanation poured its contents over the creature. A white cascade fell over the spheroid, which began to shrink, while it broke apart, turning gray and emitting a nauseating smell, the same one I had perceived in the room full of furniture.

"Is it salt?" I said, stupidly.

"It's cocaine," Guevara said. "It's not a cheap war. Each of these bugs costs us a fortune." The creature soon dwindled to a pile of ashes.

Salvo crouched to remove the remains with the knife. Rosa took care of the salesman, but I had to look away; it seemed as if the monster that had harbored inside him had devoured his organs. To say the guy was dead was an understatement.

"So this is the war," I said.

"One of the wars," Salvo said.

"They used me miserably," I protested. "They knew the guy would come looking for me; they were baiting the trap."

"Baiting traps, brewing mate," Guevara said. "What can you do? There are worse things. Do you know what would happen if these things managed to reproduce?"

"No, but I can imagine. I see a legion of real estate agents advancing on the great capitals."

"Are you stupid?" Rosa said. When she got angry, her German accent became very noticeable. For a moment I thought I might know who these three really were, although history was never my strong suit. Perhaps they were just the ones from the books, with full names and surnames and deeds.

"I'm not one to give advice," Guevara said, "but I'm going to give you one: don't buy the house if you don't want to live in the middle of a battlefield." He gathered what remained of the creature using the plastic bag in which he had brought the cocaine and wrapped it without touching it with his hands. Then he took out a roll of packing tape and gave it several turns. The whole package was not much bigger than a soccer ball.

"You took away my desire." I tried to smile and couldn't.

"Then I don't know if we'll see each other again," Salvo said, extending his hand to me. I shook it. Rosa shook her head and was the first to leave the room. Click, clack, you know.

"Mine is a bit more complicated," Salvo said. "It only works when no one is left." I didn't ask any more; surely the ceiling, converted into a large mouth, would swallow him. I saw Guevara leave through the archway, as all the other times, and a couple of pieces clicked: they could only meet in that place, at that intersection point, and that's why they had needed me to attract the salesman. I still felt like garbage.

I left the house and resolved to follow Guevara's advice to the letter.

CANDIES

 

Now everything is distorted, like in a badly remembered dream. But while it was happening it followed logical rules, it had a certain inner coherence, it was believable.

It began when we had been married only a few months. Back then we had so little money that our only entertainment consisted of strolling along streets and avenues, looking at shop windows. Irma endured the torture of not being able to buy anything with admirable good humor. We invariably returned home with the feeling that we had lost something along the way.

One afternoon, tired of tunics and sandals –but silently, because we had nothing better to offer each other– we stopped in front of an old shop, with dirty windows and poor lighting that nevertheless displayed a good number of modern-design armchairs. There were armchairs upholstered in corduroy and satin, leather ones, some with wooden frames, others in chrome, and a wrought-iron set with red silk cushions. An enormous variety of armchairs filled a space that any clever merchant would have turned into three separate shops.

It struck us as odd that there were no salesmen in sight, but curiosity got the better of us and we went in.

“Is anyone here?” I called out. Irma clutched my arm, uneasy.

“What’s the point of calling if we’re not going to buy anything?”

“I’ll ask a price and we’ll leave. I want to see the salesman’s face.”

“Let’s go now. This place frightens me.”

“If we leave without asking something we’ll look ridiculous.”

But two or three silent, motionless minutes passed, serving only to increase our discomfort. Irma stared toward the street with wide eyes while I tried to determine whether the shape lying on a blue divan at the back of the room was the blessed salesman taking a nap. I gathered my courage –though I knew the only thing to overcome was my shyness– and walked between the armchairs, dragging Irma along.

I had taken no more than five steps when the salesman got up, rubbing his eyes, and looked at us in confusion. He had been using a bag of candies as a pillow, and the irregularities of the cellophane had marked his face like scars.

“What do you want?”

“A set of armchairs,” I said. “In imitation leather, like those.” I pointed to a pair of brown armchairs, vulgar and graceless. The salesman nodded without looking at them and, after a pause, quoted a figure. It was a very high figure, somewhat more than Irma and I earned combined.

“It’s very expensive,” Irma said. “We’ll think about it.”

“Yes, yes,” the salesman said. “Come back whenever you like.” It was obvious he had realized we were not buyers even before interrupting his nap, but he did not seem to resent it. He smiled halfheartedly and we could see he was not much older than we were.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said, turning away, and taking Irma by the hand we walked toward the street. “Good afternoon,” I murmured.

“Wait,” the salesman said. “Take some candies.” He grabbed the bag and tore it open brusquely. “On the house.”

“Please don’t trouble yourself,” Irma said.

“We’re not fond of sweets,” I said distrustfully.

“Please,” the salesman insisted. There was something pleading in his tone. I went back, put my hand into the bag, and took one candy.

“Thank you.”

“Take more.” Now his tone was firm. “You too… miss. Or wife?”

“Wife,” Irma said, extending her hand.

“Take some for the children,” the salesman said.

“We don’t have any,” I replied.

“You will. And there are always nephews, friends’ children… Don’t be shy.”

We ended up taking a dozen candies. We ate several on the way home, laughing at our own foolishness. That autumn we remembered the episode from time to time, and it always served as an excuse to laugh and eat candies.

“We don’t have anywhere to put things,” Irma complained.

“Get rid of some old clothes,” I said distractedly. Irma looked at me for a moment, as if justifying the shift from annoyance to sympathy.

“You know that’s not a bad idea.”

She went through the closet thoroughly. An hour later she had a pile labeled “this might still be useful” and a small heap labeled “this is completely useless”; she had wasted too much time considering possible alterations without considering the years and the pounds that had passed.

“Do you remember this jacket? Around the corner they do alterations…”

“It’s out of fashion, Irma. You don’t expect me to go to the office dressed like a tango extra.”

“They’re worn tighter now.”

“Do me a favor! Throw that relic in the trash.”

Irma shrugged resignedly. She held the jacket by the lapels, perhaps imagining the fabric could be used to make shorts for one of the children. Clothes are so expensive! Finally, she decided to accept my opinion, but after placing the jacket on the “useless” pile she changed her mind.

“What are you doing?” I asked, peering over the newspaper.

“I’m checking the pockets. You have the habit of forgetting money everywhere.”

“If you find anything it’s sure to be demonetized. Do you know how long it’s been since I wore that jacket?”

“Years.” She frowned and took something oval from an inside pocket.

“What is it?”

“Do you remember these candies?”

“Yes. It’s one of the ones the furniture salesman gave us. I thought we had eaten them all.”

“Apparently not. How funny. Do you want it?”

“Give it to the children.”

“One candy? So can they fight? Besides it’s old. You eat it–you have an iron stomach.” Irma carefully unwrapped it and handed it to me. But I noticed something on the paper that caught my attention.

“There’s something written here,” I said.

“It must be a little cartoon, like the ones in chewing gum.”

“But the others weren’t like this.” I read with difficulty; the print was almost microscopic. “How strange. It’s an invitation to a country party.”

“What a pity! Then we missed it.”

“It’s for next Saturday,” I said in a somber tone.

“That was like five years ago. It must be wrong.”

“It’s printed clearly. Saturday, November 14. Unless it’s a mistake.”

“If it were a mistake, it wouldn’t say Saturday. Five years ago, November 14 was a Sunday.” Irma spoke confidently about mathematical matters. She was a high school teacher, and when it came to numbers she easily outdid me. She had a perpetual calendar in her head and handled an abacus more skillfully than I did a calculator.

“But the mistake could have been made the previous year.”

“You’re wrong. Six years ago, November 14 was Friday because leap years skip a weekday due to February 29. The last time November 14 fell on a Saturday was in 1970.”

I gave up. The little paper invited us to a country party to be held in two days in a place in western Buenos Aires Province I had never heard of.

“Let’s go,” Irma said, against all logic.

“You’re crazy! We don’t know where it is, or who they are…”

“You went into the furniture shop out of pure curiosity. Here a very precise meeting point is indicated, and now I’m the one who’s intrigued. It would be interesting to see whether they keep their promise after so long. Come on.”

It was absurd. And not even an amusing absurdity. But I had no arguments strong enough to make her give up. When my wife gets something into her head, it’s a matter of going along or facing the consequences.

“In any case, I think there won’t be anyone there,” she insisted, justifying the whim.

“You’re capable of getting us up early on a Saturday–the only day we can sleep without guilt–just to check whether a scrap of paper… Please!”

“It’s not that early. The paper says eleven o’clock, if we get up at nine… We can make good use of the day… If the meeting turns out to be a joke we can go to your union’s country house in La Reja… I’ll make empanadas.”

I gave in, all hope lost.

At least it wasn’t a joke. I had never seen the Pringles bridge so crowded. It looked like a political demonstration, and the faces that seemed familiar to me had already surpassed half a dozen. People from the neighborhood, surely.

“Irma!” exclaimed an older woman I recognized by sight; a teacher from the school, I thought.

“Raquel! What a surprise to find you here!” Irma was delighted. “How did you hear about it?”

Raquel told a confused story: a cousin, a phone call… The children asked me for candies, and I missed the rest of the explanation.

When I came back from the kiosk, Irma was talking with a woman we had met the previous year while vacationing in Necochea. I began to suspect that some large secret organization, perhaps a sordid religious sect, was behind the whole affair.

“And the children?” Irma asked.

“I brought them. Look at them.”

There were two men with the appearance of union officials sitting on folding chairs and leaning on a small table. They answered people’s questions rudely, but they seemed to be the only ones who knew what was going on. I approached them ready for confrontation.

“Are either of you a piper?”

“No,” said the heavier one, puzzled. “Why?”

“For no reason. And Hamelin, does that ring a bell?”

“Not at all,” said the other, short and bald. But the question must have amused him, because he smiled.

That was the proof I needed. Until that moment I had felt like a poor paranoid, an exaggerator making a fool of himself out of sheer lack of imagination. But these were professionals. They knew how to handle us.

“There’s something fishy here,” I whispered to Irma, squeezing her arm. “We’re not going.”

“You’re crazy! Almost all the teachers from the school have come…”

“And many neighbors from the block who have known me since I was a child. Still, we’re not going. It’s a trap.”

“Please! I have the tickets.”

“You even paid?”

“They’re free tickets. What’s gotten into you?”

The children were running back and forth across the bridge. More people kept arriving. At some point the short, bald man stood up, folded his chair, and pointed to a rusty, ancient metal staircase that I swear I had never seen there before. People began to go down, and Irma was among the first, so I had no choice but to follow her.

We emerged onto a narrow, precarious platform made of planks laid over a tubular structure. The human mass pushed in every direction, and despite my efforts I found myself separated from Irma and the children. I regretted not having at least one of them in my arms; I imagined them suffocated by the crowd. Yet Irma seemed calm, constantly waving at me and smiling. I tried to move against the current, but the bags of clothes and food complicated the task. When I realized it would be impossible to reach her, I chose to shout that we would meet on the train, that I would occupy the necessary seats with the bags, that they shouldn’t rush, that they should let the rest of the people board. At that very moment the train entered the “station.”

Wedged between the high walls and the cars, squeezed by the crowd, I felt like a character in a Losey film. I am the other Mr. Klein, I thought. At any moment the Gestapo will arrive and sew a Star of David onto my sleeve… This train has an unusual itinerary in store for us: Moreno, Luján, Dachau, Treblinka, Auschwitz.

That kind of self-pity did not seem the best way to lift my spirits. Fortunately, the door of the carriage was near where I stood, and I was among the first to get on. I took a triple seat and leaned out the window after arranging the bags. It struck me how few people were boarding, but I attributed it to the crowding and confusion. Five minutes later the carriage was still almost empty, and the only passengers were solitary men, separated from their families. We were as if cornered, in a precarious situation, shouting over a sea of heads. We looked like confused recruits about to be sent to the front without military training. Several times I tried to arrange alternative meeting points with Irma, but she seemed farther away, and my words, mutilated by distance, probably reached her broken and imprecise.

At last, I realized that we were indeed moving farther apart because the train had silently begun to move. The rear carriages reached the end of the improvised platform, and the station was left behind. I lost all sense of caution and tried to throw myself off the train, but a series of factors as simple as they were unforeseeable conspired to prevent it. I was in the middle of the carriage and large piles of bags blocked the way in both directions. When I managed to get past the obstacles, I found the doors on that side jammed. And then it was too late: the train was moving at such speed that jumping would have been suicide.

I dismissed the idea of abandoning the train and decided to wait for a stop or the end of the journey to return home on the first available train back. For the moment there seemed to be no better distraction than observing my fellow sufferers. Almost all of them looked sallow, wilted. Yet, though confused and discouraged, they did not differ from the kind of passengers who travel by train to work. They had accepted the strangeness of the situation with philosophical passivity, and as far as I could see none of them had tried to jump. It seemed fair to admire them silently. They gazed at the landscape through the windows with absolute detachment, as if instead of traveling into the unknown they were strolling through a shopping arcade. Or as if those parallel gray lines disappearing behind us were part of a daily routine. And yes, I thought, why not; when I boarded there were several passengers already seated who could very well have gotten on at the terminal, mistaking it for a regular suburban train.

But the train did not stop at any station.

It’s an express, I thought, trying to encourage myself. There was no point tormenting myself with negative ideas. The train would reach its destination…

The landscape shifted: cardboard shantytowns, sheet-metal shantytowns; residential areas, industrial zones, fields stretching to the horizon. It distressed me to think that the farther that damned train carried me, the longer it would take to reunite with Irma and the children.

Some of my companions read newspapers and others dozed off. I did not dare address anyone. Finally, I decided to move to the next carriage; perhaps there the people would not be so apathetic and someone would have an explanation for what was happening to us.

In the next carriage there were women –not many– as if some logical but unknown arrangement had separated the victims by sex. They had ordinary faces, almost blurred, the kind that is difficult to remember once one closes one’s eyes. Instead of people they might just as well have been the product of a nightmare.

And so, the idea that had been struggling to enter the circle of consciousness finally imposed itself: I was dreaming. One of those vivid dreams that seem real and can incorporate reflections on the nature of dreams had taken hold of me. I was trapped in a nightmare capable of feeding itself and at the same time destroying all my attempts to wake up.

“Excuse me,” I said to a middle-aged woman who seemed trustworthy. “Do you understand this?”

“Yes?” She did not take her face from the window; she seemed hypnotized. The high-tension wires undulated in parallel rhythm between the towers, forming a pattern of rhythmic, inhuman isolation. I realized I would get nowhere with her and approached another woman.

“Did they catch you with the candy trap too?” I asked stupidly.

“Hmmm?” The woman looked into my eyes and my eyelids fell; I noticed her features had vanished. Or perhaps not, and my senses were beginning to betray me. I saw planes intersecting at distant points outside the train, forming blurred, unfinished angles.

When I managed to recover and was about to move to the next carriage, I noticed that the train was slowing. I leaned out the window and saw that we were entering a small-town station. From the travel time I deduced that we could not be beyond Merlo, but the short, irregular platform did not correspond to any place I knew. Perhaps, I told myself, we took a branch line; that must be it.

I tried to read the sign that usually stands at the ends of platforms or above the stationmaster’s office, but I saw nothing. An anonymous place. The train had stopped on a single track that vanished into the horizon, and its arrival must have been an important event because a crowd had gathered to receive it. Men and women waved their arms joyfully and shouted names I could not make out. My fellow passengers, on the other hand, seemed stunned. A few had risen from their seats and stared outside in surprise, as if the situation had nothing to do with them.

I grabbed the bags and got off the train.

I walked a few steps along the platform intending to ask at the ticket office whether that or another train returned to Buenos Aires and when. Given the long chain of unfortunate events that seemed to be pursuing me, I was prepared to accept answers like “tomorrow,” “in a week,” or “that was the last run”…

A young woman with long black hair detached herself from the crowd and came straight toward me, interrupting my thoughts.

“Bela, at last!”

When she said Bela I felt a chill run down my spine. Could she be referring to me? I looked around and saw that I was the only passenger who had gotten off. But my name isn’t Bela. Until that moment I was certain my name was something else, though I could not remember it. Bela sounded Hungarian to me, a ridiculous name, like something out of fiction, perhaps suitable for a horror-film actor, not for an ordinary person.

“My dear!” the woman exclaimed, embracing me fervently and kissing me on the mouth. I felt her sharp tongue forcing its way between my teeth; she tasted orange. “Aren’t you happy to be home again?”

“No. I don’t know,” I stammered.

“Bela, always the same fool. Come on, don’t just stand there like a turkey.”

Laughing shamelessly, she tugged at my hand. She was a woman of wild, aggressive beauty who in other circumstances might have attracted me irresistibly instead of intimidating me. I simply followed her.

As we left the station I looked back and discovered I was the only one who had got off the train. The crowd was dispersing silently, and the celebration could be considered over. The train started moving. It was clear that I had acted too hastily and was even more compromised than before.

The woman led me down the town’s only street to a sort of supermarket on the corner, across from the station. We passed a pile of empty crates, and she pushed open a glass swinging door. At the register stood an older man, about sixty, who looked at us expressionlessly. We crossed the sales floor without greeting anyone, almost at a run, and climbed a staircase hidden among cans of quince paste. The staircase led to a mezzanine that bordered the entire store, but that did not seem to be our destination. The woman stopped at another door and opened it with a key she took from her jeans pocket.

“Come on,” she said, tugging at me again. It was a provocation. I knew what would follow, but I still had not managed to organize my thoughts enough to ask a coherent question.

She took me into a dim room, quite clean despite being crammed with merchandise. I set the bags on a table and approached her. She guided my hands to her breasts and prompted me to squeeze them. That behavior disconcerted me so much that I moved clumsily and kicked a row of empty bottles. The bottles rolled endlessly and fell to the ground floor, shattering with a great crash. Contrary to what I expected, no one seemed concerned, and no one reprimanded us; I even thought I heard amused laughter and suggestive comments, perhaps referring to what we might be doing upstairs.

“You have no idea how much I missed you,” the woman said, pulling off her wool sweater. As I had imagined, she was not wearing a bra. Her breasts were teardrop-shaped, with tiny nipples and areolas.

“Do you think this is a good place to do it?” As I spoke, I felt a tingling in my tongue. A portion of my mind was thinking something else, perhaps an appropriate reply, something like: You couldn’t have missed me because we don’t know each other.

From that moment on the entire scene unfolded on two parallel planes: I said something different from what I thought, and to her it seemed the most natural thing in the world. We had known each other for several years, we were married, we lived upstairs in the supermarket–although during my absence our room had been used for storage–she was the owner’s daughter and her name was Mari.

“Did you make a lot of money in Buenos Aires?” Mari pressed her breasts against my arm; I felt the hardness of her nipples, though I tried to suppress my arousal so as not to lose my head. I still hoped to explain the truth of the situation to her, that she was mistaken…

“Some. But you know that a kiosk selling cigarettes and candy isn’t the kind of business that makes you rich quickly.”

“You didn’t write me a single letter.”

“I had the kiosk open day and night. I slept there.” I wanted to tell her about Irma, about the children; to say that I worked in a real estate office and that my name was Abel, not Bela. Now I no longer thought in terms of nightmares, but of a long amnesia, a bifurcation somewhere along the way. Yet I retained my past; I remembered my childhood years.

“Bad. You didn’t even bring me a candy.” That was the last straw. I checked the pockets of my trousers and found the candies I had bought for the children at the corner of Pringles bridge. I gave her one.

“How nice!” Mari said. “There’s a good-luck message on the wrapper.”

“I didn’t know candies came with messages,” I whispered. Mari finished reading the paper and a shadow crossed her face.

“Idiot!” She threw the wrapper down and ran out, breasts bare, detached from human dramas, happy. I picked up the paper and read the message: “This man is cheating on you with a woman named Irma.”

I went downstairs trying not to attract attention. When I reached the registers, I saw Mari talking to a young man I had not seen when I entered; the man did not seem impressed or upset or excited by Mari’s bare torso. She did not even look at me.

I went out into the street and saw that the sun was setting. There was no point in returning to the train station, so I left the town cross-country. In the distance I spotted a highway with cars and trucks passing by.

It was not difficult to get a ride with a vegetable truck driver heading to Buenos Aires.

Were things finally falling back into place? I hoped Irma had not become overly anxious when she saw me leave on the train, though I still did not understand why she and the children had not boarded. I counted the minutes separating me from home. Everything would be resolved.

The truck driver was very talkative and constantly interrupted my thoughts. I tried to be polite, nodding and smiling occasionally. He talked about vegetable prices, wholesale markets… Perhaps something he said, or my own nerves, led me to a discovery. Bela is nothing but an anagram of Abel. And Mari of Irma! Now the dream’s features have grown clearer. What meaning could there be in finding oneself separated from one’s family because of a candy wrapper, put on an irregular train, forced to make a senseless journey to a town that does not appear on maps, dragged along by a madwoman who claims to be your wife…?

He dropped me close to home. But I felt lost, as if I had been away from the city for a long time, not just a few hours. I arrived home around nine. The doorman was taking out the trash and did not even look at me. My heart pounded; I was very anxious and it seemed to me that the elevator moved with exaggerated slowness.

When at last I reached the apartment, I stopped listening. Apparently, no one was there. They must all be at Irma’s mother’s house. I put the key in the lock and turned it. I did not live there. I had never lived in that place.

An older woman approached me, terrified.

“You…?”

“Ma’am,” I managed with difficulty, “forgive me; I must have made a mistake… I’m new in the building, you see? I don’t understand what happened. My key opens your door… It’s a coincidence.” I held out the key, but the woman withdrew her hand. The key fell silently onto the carpet.

Was the dream still going on, the nightmare? The woman backed away as if I were an apparition. I turned and ran out.

I went down the stairs and hailed a taxi when I reached the sidewalk. I would go to my mother-in-law’s house. It was the only logical place. I did not want to think about what had just happened in the apartment. I would speak with Irma, and everything would become clear.

But the feeling of anguish returned before the bronze knocker on my mother-in-law’s door.

Now I knew what it was about. Something was irreparably out of sync in the way events had unfolded, and an extra sense, a capacity I had not known I possessed until then, was alerting me. I was beginning to decipher the messages.

Fortunately, it was Irma who answered the pounding of the little bronze hand.

“My dear!” I exclaimed, trembling. “At last!” Irma looked at me, first with surprise, then with horror.

“You… who are you?”

“Irma! It’s me, Abel!”

“I don’t know you. What do you want?” Her tone was harsh. I could have been a murderer, a drunk; anything but Abel.

“Listen,” I insisted. “I don’t know which side of the nightmare I’m on, I don’t even know if it is a nightmare. But let me come in, let me tell you what happened from the beginning.”

“No. I have nothing to talk to you about, and I’m not interested.” Irma tried to close the door in my face. She hesitated.

“Give me a minute. Pretend I’m a stranger who stops you on the street…”

“No!” Irma repeated. She closed the door.

“I am…” I was nothing anymore. Would Irma believe a story because we had met at a dance seven years earlier, that we had dated for three years, that at first she had had difficulty getting pregnant…? The events of the day had more consistency. Mari, the good-luck candy with that ridiculous message. I turned around. I did not know whether I would get drunk, go see a psychologist, commit suicide, or in what order I would do those things. Then the door opened and Irma leaned out timidly.

“Wait.”

“Yes?”

“I remember a dream,” Irma said. “A train station and a lot of people. The strange thing is that there was a man very much like you. He was calling to me from the train, saying something, but I couldn’t understand him.”

I said nothing. I lowered my head and walked away. I was certain Irma was struggling against the desire to call me back, to continue asking, perhaps out of sheer compassion. She was no longer frightened. But all my proofs were like mist, or worse, like stigmas.

I walked a block with my fists clenched in my pockets and thought of the characters in literature, those who visit an impossible place and always manage to bring back a witness object, proof that they were there. Not in my case. It did not help to have my pockets full of candies, the candies the children had never gotten to eat.

I seriously considered the possibility of returning to Mari’s town, but I had no idea how to travel there. By crossing a mirror? By taking a ghost train departing from the twentieth floor?

It is useless. The situation has no remedy. My fleeting existence will have ended when the dreamer wakes up in the morning and forgets me between the first sip of coffee and reading the newspaper.