forgot that it might only be a coincidence; they imagined that someone or something—even they themselves, though they found it hard to believe—had guided their steps toward that place. When they finished their story, they waited for the old man’s verdict. The noise of the street returned, distant but vital. While the man reflected, they gave themselves over to the gradual diffusion of their surroundings: the plastic bags and bits of cloth, the dirty wall on which he leaned, the municipal building and its complex, the dilapidated neighborhood and the city as a whole, with all its flattened expanses, were held in suspense. But it was not that the scene was actually dissolving; it simply was not of interest. What mattered was the two of them, after so many years, finally being understood for the very first time. Perhaps the old man had the answer. After talking for a long time, mostly about a few strange moral episodes that he had experienced in own life, he made his decree: “Go to the river. If one of you catches something, come back right away, but if three hours go by without a bite, you won’t have anything to worry about anymore.” Miguel and Sergio looked at each other. They were disappointed by the enigmatic nature of the task; having expected a solution, even if only a bit of advice, they found themselves confronted with an order. They gathered from the words of their maestro that it would be preferable not to catch anything, so they chose to go at night, when they thought there would be less chance of landing a fish.
They arrived after midnight. The wind was blowing from the east, off the banks of the river, making the darkness even more still. Impassive, they supported the weight of their bodies on the rails of the jetty charged with protecting them from the abyss. Anyone would have realized that they were not fishermen and that, if they were fishing, they were doing so against their will. Gradually, they grew bored, observed the serenity of the air, the water lapping an unknown distance below, the unmatched depth of the darkness. A life of indeterminacy had emptied them of all interests, nothing really mattered; it had been a long time since the future held any tension for them. Five minutes were the same as two weeks, and two weeks the same as three years. But it was also true, as they had proven, that an essential element of friendship was tedium: knowing how to share it and how to tolerate it. This brought them back to the original problem, their mutual indistinguishability. And so, as they ruminated, they allowed themselves to be distracted by the lights they saw nearby: the wavering lanterns of the fishermen, and the ones further off that belonged to the ships.
At one point, an unexpected movement jerked Sergio’s line. He froze, unable to react. The silence and the darkness would have kept the secret, but the pressure on his finger would not allow him to ignore the situation. After a while he exhaled and said, shakily, “I think something bit.” “What do you mean, something?” Miguel asked, unsettled. “How should I know? Something, I don’t know.” “What is it doing?” “What is what doing?” “It, the thing you caught,” said Miguel, “it must be doing something.” “Nothing” replied Sergio, “it’s tugging.” They started to reel the line in slowly, hoping that their prey would break free; so slowly it did not seem like they were bringing anything in at all. The fish could have grown old and Sergio, in his anguish, would have offered it some of his own time—entire years, if it would have made a difference—for it not to appear. These lines seem short, he thought. They were both nervous; a profound shock heaved them out of the dark night they knew and into a darker one they did not. Miguel prayed that he would not have to take Sergio’s place although, in reality, it was actually Miguel who was reeling in and Sergio who was grateful he had not had a bite. They finally saw, tangled in the line, a rain boot. It was hard not to be disappointed by the climax. Having expected, though it would have complicated matters, a real fish, a real body thrashing about in a fight for its life, the river answered their hopes with a rubber boot filled with mud. They immediately began to analyze the nature of their trophy; while on one hand it could hardly be considered the spoils of fishing, it had, on the other hand, obviously come from the river. Fear, and the desire be free of their problems, as the maestro had predicted they would be if they failed to catch anything in three hours, impelled them to continue fishing. That was their mistake: they stayed there with their poles at the ready until—once the three hours had come to an end—a storm surged up along the river. The wind blew with an extraordinary force and the water turned rough, threatening to topple the jetty. The waves seemed to be reaching out for something: they broke high and scattered like horizontal rain. Miguel and Sergio wanted to leave, to go back to that which could be called “the city” (so different, under the circumstances, from the place they found themselves, which could not be named). But going back was the last thing they could do; the darkness had closed in around them so completely that the rain, the wind, and the howling of the storm cut them off from any spatial referent. Even the location of the river: it could have been at their backs, alongside, or even in front of them. And so it was that the water took over everything; by now the river was flooding. The two obeyed their mandate: they did not move, staying with their equipment until the last moment, but at the height of the storm a wave dragged them down to the riverbed. And so it was that Sergio and Miguel met their anonymous end, absorbed by a confusion not unlike the one to which they had exposed themselves as children, and which had perhaps marked them for a long time before that. With the boot, the wise old man would have solved the mystery for them: the one who was able to put it on and walk in it would be Miguel, since he had lost it in a previous life and it had later been thrown into the river by an angel so that one fateful night, if he passed the test, he would be able to recover it. But since this required the trust of both—they were still indistinguishable from one another—and such a thing did not exist, the two ended up being punished by an undefined, though evidently quite effective, authority. This authority may have been religious, or it may have been nature in general, their own desperation, or anything, really; the problem, if there was one, resided in the fact that it was both superfluous and inevitable, just like the lives of our two heroes.
The other listened to M with particular attention throughout the story. From time to time the bus would slow down, until the driver noticed the delay and drove at full speed for a few blocks, only to slow down again later. When M finished, the other reflected on the obvious: that he could not find any connection between the story and the matter of more or less authentic Jews. It’s strange that you don’t see it, said M. It’s not the story itself, but the insecurity about one’s own nature, one’s own identity. The Jews are like Sergio and Miguel, each believing he’s the other, before or after, less or more than himself; they pass through life in this indecision, some with faith and others in puzzlement. When they take steps to discover the truth, everything becomes distorted. The universe that brought them to question their condition is disturbed and they remain adrift, somewhere in the expanse, while fear goes to work inside them. The Jews were never certain of their origins, which is why they found themselves surrounded by insecurity: both that of the world they believed they were observing and to which, despite everything, they were certain they belonged, and that of a more palpable and menacing sort, the kind represented by hostility.
The Orthodox Jews had passed and their long coats were probably already being illuminated by a different light, but they were nonetheless still among us, summoned by the narrative and the conversation. M could make any number of arguments, including contradictory ones, in favor of the authentic nature of religious Jews, but I sensed something in everything he said that exceeded the literal: a desire for the words to become something else, to reach another level, an auxiliary plane on which they did not need any proof to assert their truth. The subaltern and equivocal character of his language, paradoxically, turned the moment into an absolute truth. It may seem mysterious, but the excess borne by that which accompanies the voice is the substance to which images, commentaries, and influence yield. In this way, more than for what he actually said, M was credible because of these intimations, despite that fact that one—in this case, me—was only in a position to judge what was actually heard. “It is the phrase,” he would say to the other on more than one occasion when they returned to the subject, “not the word, that establishes a prior truth” (understanding a phrase to be the combination of things that accompany the word).
The religious Jews could have been anywhere at that moment, but there was no question that an imagined pattern connected their bodies with ours, which were now walking down the wide sidewalks of Villa Urquiza along calle Altolaguirre,
