A JOURNEY TO YESTERDAY

No one disputes that yesterday is a hostile territory—not even the new cybercafé poets, those who concoct their verses using electronic mechanisms implanted in their glottis, while they stumble forward through tons of technological garbage. But long before that, media hosts had already explained it from plasma television screens. And the lost addicts had written it on suburban walls, spraying the ruins with acid and gel, and the old pirate programs had sung it, corroded by rust. None of that matters, or else it’s another story.

Here and now, yesterday is the favorite subject of some pathetic messianic types—square-built men, very old, extremely old—dazed by coffee, nicotine, and other herbs in the famous bar on Corrientes Street, where they survive on sheer bravado.

“I remember,” said Fermín, drunk on generic pharmaceuticals bought from street stalls, “when the orchestras cried for the last time. I must have been… let me see… under twenty. The gray acid clouds hadn’t yet slid down the peeling walls of the buildings, and from the rooftops you could glimpse gentle nights drifting away like static noise, scratching at your mind from the inside—reluctant, I say, reluctant to die completely.”

“That’s exactly what I say,” Laureano agreed, staring with disgust at the implants they’d jammed into him at Argerich Hospital—second-hand implants, as always, obtained on the black market. “My romantic days ended, eaten away unintentionally by electronics and new forms of knowledge, you understand? I don’t know what cursed day bohemia dissolved into those phosphor-crystal images that burned our retinas and into those residues of black plastic, but I assure you something broke forever. Damn it all.”

They killed as they died, those old men. Nothing remained of the fragile youth they had once displayed in the era before software, networks, and artificial intelligence, but they were unwilling to surrender. As they downed glasses of recycled gin tasting of resin or slowly sipped the dark liquid distilled from black-bean slag, they imagined escaping into an alternate universe.

“All we have left is fantasy,” said Bruno. Bruno believed that all reality was trapped in the space between his lips and Mimí’s, a charming woman. But Mimí had entered the past, and it would be very difficult to pull her out from where she was.

“You can’t travel with fantasy,” Wilson objected. He was by far the most resistant to quests, the most skeptical. They called him Wilson because he’d lived in the Great Northern Country, or because he’d worked at the meatpacking plant of that name—it wasn’t entirely clear. His real name embarrassed him, and the others respected that.

“What shattered and gutted our dreams,” said Laureano, more to help Bruno than to refute Wilson, “was that we stopped believing in them. We thought electronic images were a good substitute, the method that would replace dreams—which are so often nightmares—and we grew tired of fighting. Now we’re too old to take up arms again.”

“At the bar in the southern neighborhood—you know, Boedo and San Juan,” said Fermín, as if he hadn’t heard them, “Morovic and his friends are burning illusion with synthetic dreams. They hook into the Borda psychotics’ network using thermal terminals pulled from the Dump, and they hallucinate clots of darkness, fractal tools, red mailboxes, and old toughs dying in the middle of their song.”

“How poetic, man,” said Laureano.

Encouraged by Laureano’s words, Bruno sang:

“Woman of my finest poem…

Woman, I never had a love…

Forgive me, if you are my ideal glory…

Forgive me, you will be my opening verse…”

Fermín’s voice, slithering through the drug-fouled atmosphere—the synthetic substances the Galician Mouriño mixed in the bar’s back room to add to the remnants of cognac he squeezed from nearly empty bottles—rang out forever, curved around Dorrego’s elbow, and plunged headlong into an August dawn, cold as an Eskimo’s nose, sixty years back.

“Did it work?” Wilson was bewildered. Corrientes Street looked like it had in Illia’s time, when the glow of Fellini’s films briefly dimmed the rage of the demented right.

“Of course it worked!” Bruno said. “This is why I never lost hope.”

To confirm it, Mimí walked into the bar, with her unmatched sway of hips. Her blonde hair fell over her shoulders, and a mischievous smile danced on her lips.

“Was it us, or did she come on her own?” Laureano touched the protrusions rising from his implants in two or three places; he hadn’t had those sixty years earlier.

“Didn’t I say you have to give love wings of fantasy? Didn’t I?” Bruno was euphoric. He went to her, embraced her, kissed her on the mouth and eyes.

“Did you say that? I don’t remember,” said Wilson, signaling Mouriño for a glass of water; he needed to swallow a few drops of hiadizine to be sure he hadn’t slipped into a new polymorphic hallucination.

“It happened when he sang,” said Laureano, pointing at Bruno. “Blonde and sweet Mimí, where had you gone?”

She stepped away from Bruno, still smiling.

“I was dead the whole time,” she said seriously.

“To hell with this!” Wilson shouted. He swept cups and glasses off the table with his arm and sent them crashing to the floor, forcing other patrons—absorbed in their own affairs—to look up. The liberated zone spread like a stain of melted polyethylene, and spirals of black filament rose toward the ceiling, forming an intricate web of reflections under the neon light of the shop window.

“Easy, man,” said Fermín. He couldn’t get out of his chair, but it was perfectly clear to him that what was happening he had already dreamed in Paris, back when he was a political refugee who’d escaped the fascist dictatorship just in time.

“Relax,” said Mimí. “I can explain everything.”

If the acid fog was capable of recreating without error the body and soul of the dead, the new artificial nightmare had them by the throat; a suffocating sensation enveloped them completely.

Wilson calmed down, picked up his chair, and gestured for the universe to stop.

“If I took you outside this place,” Bruno said with tears in his eyes, “would you keep existing?”

Mimí didn’t answer right away. She approached the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down, anticipating Laureano’s gallant gesture. There was a certain weariness in her steps, as if she’d been walking for years and years without stopping. The others sat as well.

“If I told you that the glory of the past is a synthetic drug, devised by a virus hastily created by those guys from the old café…”

“Don’t say that, Mimí!” Bruno moaned. “I can’t bear the thought that your existence depends on chemical engineering, or on a simulacrum created by dream designers—and even less on the whims of those… of those…”

“Why not? Would it be better if I told you it worked like a spell, old-style?”

Even Mouriño raised his eyebrows at the word that linked the world of the senses—the world that could be manipulated with synthetic substances and appropriate software—with the unpredictable, ambiguous magical realm.

“You can’t be serious!” Fermín searched with his eyes and found the only thing that fit the scene they’d created: a disruptive element, an unexpected random factor to abort the unstoppable advance of a false reality. Framed in the bar’s doorway, the hated figures of Morovic and his friends cast shadows over the faint phosphorescence. As always, they wore helmets connected to the Borda psychotics’ network, though to Bruno they looked like the ghosts of Burgess’s droogs, wooden clubs in hand, ready to wreak havoc.

Bruno was the first to grasp what was happening. He stretched out his arm to hold Mimí back, but his hand passed through her body. Still smiling, she was already beginning to say goodbye.

“It was beautiful, guys,” she managed to say. And before Morovic and his friends reached the table, she vanished into the air; a formation of chromatic neon reflections and blue crackles intertwined, occupying the space her body had filled an instant earlier.

Laureano, eyes bulging from their sockets, immediately noticed that the arabesque of watery fluids etched into the mist was the woman’s name—a name written by the hand of the past.

“At the old table in the café in the southern neighborhood, at San Juan and Boedo,” said Morovic without blinking, “we’ve engraved the names of every woman we ever knew. Do you realize what that means?”

Bruno let his arms hang limp, defeated. Had he lost her? Had he ever really recovered her? He had no strength left to fight Morovic, as he’d done so many times before—dialectical combat. What for? They were both too old to keep waging that war.

“Leave,” said Wilson. “Let him be.”

Morovic and his friends turned in unison, like mannequins mounted on chrome axes, and disappeared into the shadows of Corrientes.

“They’re going back where they came from,” said Fermín.

“Last night,” Bruno said mournfully, “the same demon, in another place. It’s a shadow that follows me.”

“You have to take some risks,” said Laureano, “if you insist on recovering the past.”

“Mouriño,” said Fermín, “bring us something strong, something that blows our minds, please, Galician.” Mouriño shrugged. The old men were good customers; they always paid, and never argued over the price. He mixed a little Pernod—kept for special occasions—with the contents of a packet of novizone. They wanted their minds blown? He’d give them what they asked for. He crossed the distance to the table and poured the mixture into the same dirty glasses coated with a thousand substances. What did it matter…

“When she goes back… when she goes back to the place she was…” Bruno choked on the Pernod; it would still take time for the novizone to take effect.

“She wasn’t anywhere,” said Laureano. “You’ll have to get used to living with the memory, as you always have.”

“Did you notice her fragile appearance, her smooth, incorrupt youth?” Bruno was on the brink of the abyss. Fermín urged him to drink the Pernod with novizone to the last drop, and succeeded. His will, weakened by the new reality beginning to take shape beyond the bar’s doors, evoked the perfumes and forms of the past. Fermín winked at Laureano, and a grimace—something like a smile, the closest the old man could manage—flickered across his lips for an instant.

“From one oblivion you can extract several memories,” said Wilson, no harsher than usual.

“From a woman who fell asleep unintentionally you can extract several virgin lives, unused,” said Bruno, as if he were returning victorious. The novizone was doing its job well, though almost certainly it wouldn’t allow him to see the light of the next day.

In the empty space, on slats of dull metal, among twisted cables and multiple synthetic-stimulation programs, the bearded messianics sang their final poems. They are almost blind and barely notice when yesterday’s café will miserably shipwreck in tomorrow. But I testify that it does. Punctually. Every day. At the same hour.

 

Original title: Un viaje al ayer

Translated from the Spanish by Sergio Gaut vel Hartman