Rayuela

Would I find La Maga? It was a question that hung in the Parisian air, a city that was a map of our casual meetings and deliberate avoidances. Often it was just a matter of going along the Rue de Seine to the arch leading to the Quai de Conti, and there she would be, a slender form against the olive-ashen light floating on the river. We met on bridges and in cafés, convinced that appointments were for people who needed lines on their paper. We did not look for each other, but we knew we would meet, and in that knowledge was a kind of freedom. I remember a cold March sunset in Montsouris Park when we sacrificed a broken umbrella she had found, flinging it into a gully like a doomed ship. We embraced like wet trees, laughing as we got soaked, in love with the park, with the moment, with the noble death of a useless object.

Our life together was a kind of necessary disorder. In my room on the Rue de la Tombe Issoire, a forgotten bidé became a storage place for records and unanswered letters. We didn't love each other, so we made love with a critical virtuosity, but then we would fall into terrible silences where the world seemed to petrify. I had come to Paris to escape, but I felt myself a witness to my own life, watching myself from a distance. La Maga was my spy, my mirror, though she never knew it. She would say to me, "You think that you're in this room, but you're not. You're looking at the room." And she was right. I was always looking, searching for a center, a unity that would make sense of it all, while she simply existed, a materialized nebula, a fish swimming downstream.

At night, our friends would gather in Ronald and Babs's studio, a mossy space smelling of vodka and candles, which we called the Serpent Club. We listened to old jazz records, the scratch of the needle a constant presence, a sound from another time. Bix Beiderbecke's cornet would cut through the silence, and we would talk of art and metaphysics, of the writer Morelli, whose work we tried to piece together like a puzzle. La Maga would listen with wide, beautiful eyes, understanding nothing and everything. She did not know how to think, but she knew how to be. She was always reaching those timeless plateaus we all sought through dialectics, closing her eyes and hitting the bull's-eye without ever knowing it was a target.

Then Rocamadour, her baby, was brought from the country. He was sick. The disorder of our lives curdled into something else. The room filled with the smell of medicine and the sound of his wailing. La Maga became a mother, a fierce, clumsy animal tending to her cub. I felt myself penned in, my search for freedom turning into a grubby domestic cage. One night, the Club gathered. We drank and listened to Bessie Smith sing of empty beds while in the other room, Rocamadour lay silent. The fever had broken, but not in the way we had hoped. He was dead. La Maga let out a shriek and rolled onto the bed, clutching the indifferent, ashen little doll that had been her son. I watched her from a distance, through a wall of smoke and my own cold detachment, and then I walked out, leaving her with her grief and our friends.

My return to Argentina was not a homecoming but another form of exile. On the docks, my old friend Traveler was waiting, and with him his wife, Talita. The moment I saw her, a strange doubling began, an echo in a maze of mirrors. She looked like La Maga, not in her features, but in a way that was deeper, a resonance, a posture of the soul. I was a ghost haunting my own past, and now I had found a new ghost to haunt. The city of Buenos Aires was a grid of old memories and new alienations, a place where I was a foreigner in my own land, selling bolts of cloth from door to door.

Traveler, Talita, and I formed a strange trinity, our lives orbiting each other with a tense, magnetic pull. We got jobs together, first in a circus, then in a mental asylum run by the same owner. One sweltering afternoon, we built a bridge of wooden planks between my hotel window and theirs across the street. Talita, terrified but obedient, crawled out over the void to bring me a package of yerba mate. From our separate windows, Traveler and I watched her, suspended between us, and the words we exchanged passed over her head, a duel of ghosts fighting over a living soul. She was the bridge, the meeting point of our two worlds, and for a moment, it seemed she might fall.

In the asylum, the line between sanity and madness blurred into a gray fog. The place was a labyrinth of corridors and whispers, of patients in pink pajamas who seemed saner than their keepers. One night, I saw La Maga again, or Talita, playing hopscotch in the moonlit courtyard. I went down to the morgue, a cold, quiet place, and she followed me. There, among the freezers holding the dead, I kissed her. But it was not her I was kissing, and she was not kissing me. We were mediums for an impossible meeting, a ceremony for our masters who could not be present. Later, I barricaded myself in my room, stretching a web of threads and setting out basins of water on the floor. Traveler came, wanting to talk, to bring me back from the edge. I sat on the windowsill, looking down three stories to the courtyard where a hopscotch pattern was drawn in chalk. Below me stood Talita, who was also La Maga, looking up. It was the final square. Heaven. All that was needed was to lean out a little farther and let myself go.