All My Goodbyes Read online

  “The sun’s gone down,” I said, in a comfortably childlike way.

  But I didn’t dare touch him.

  “Yes. We should make a fire. I’ll find some branches.”

  Soon it began to smell of night, and Marco still hadn’t returned from his expedition into the woods surrounding the lake. The wind had dropped but it was too late to cross to the other shore—rowing in the dark would have been pointless and dangerous. An orchestra of crickets was playing nearby, and somewhere a dog barked impatiently. Nature was black and blue. Nowhere did I sense its atoms or covalent bonds; even the woods behind me seemed to have stopped exhaling carbon monoxide. Everything was paused. I rested my head on the grass and closed my eyes, trying to listen. I could no longer hear the Earth’s revolutions. I couldn’t even hear my own heartbeat.

  Marco returned when it was very dark, and told me he hadn’t found anything to eat. He made a nice fire and we warmed our hands.

  Why, or to what end? Sometimes I don’t know.

  In the Heidelberg bakery, if by some miracle a few minutes passed without any customers walking in, without the owner wandering out the front to check the state of the glass cabinet or behind the counter to check the state of the floor and the breadbaskets, I enjoyed looking out at the cobblestone walkway of the Hauptstraße, when it was empty and also when it was full of Japanese tourists, for example, on their way to the castle. In the three years I lived in Heidelberg I never went up to the castle, nor did I feel the need to: it was something I neither promised myself nor prohibited. Such things simply didn’t interest me, in spite of Alexander’s surprise, or perhaps because of it. But my curiosity knew no bounds when it came to watching the Hauptstraße, peering through the latticework of pretend cakes and decorations piled up in the shop window. These were precious minutes of innocuous daydreaming, during which I was safe from the treacherous mud of my own thoughts. I’d watch the Japanese tourists pass by in their invisible shoes, armed with their miniature cameras, imagining that they made no noise as they stepped over the cobblestones. I would happily suspend myself in that simple activity, thinking about the castle, about whether they’d like it, about what images they’d bring back in their cameras. It was a pleasant pastime. But, slowly, the empty lot of my head filled back up with volatile and unstable things, like methane gas. This is how it works: a pact is made, between ourselves and the world at large, and we step out of it onto the wicked path of introspection.

  In IKEA, too, when I was working as, or, if you like, when I was a shelf-stacker in the dining and kitchen area, I would sometimes snatch a moment to hunt for something, something I could lose myself in mentally, taking care not to drift too far toward melancholy, or the sleek fear that always accompanies stolen fantasies. But such moments were rare. More often than not the monotonous music they poured over our heads from four o’clock in the morning, when my shift started, spared us from the perils of meditation. It was such terribly nice, insipid, sycophantic music. Specifically chosen to accompany the shoppers who, at their own placid pace, would wander at length through the store, picking up an object here, another there, until they arrived as if by magic at the checkout and, barely conscious by this point, pay whatever amount the cash register dictated. In the palace of IKEA everything was swathed in color. But in us—or in me, at least—the lights and music had the opposite effect. They always had, ever since that first early morning when I’d entered the enormous complex by the back door to receive my yellow polo shirt with the logo on it, the one my coworkers were so proud of, and my blue pants. I was taken to the warehouse, where I was received by the assistant to the stock manager who, perched on a forklift, gave me instructions as I followed him up and down the looming aisles of shelves with their thousands of boxes, stepping in time with the rhythm of his machine so that he didn’t have to waste a single second on me. He seemed to have a taste for authority. Breakfast would be served at eight, he said proudly, and at five-thirty we’d get a ten-minute coffee and cigarette break. When I walked into the store, my female colleagues (who apparently didn’t care to mingle with their male counterparts and seemed for all the world like some kind of secret cult) showed me the shelves lined with cups and glasses. I was to devote myself to those shelves until breakfast. How was it possible that I hadn’t finished yet, they asked me when, silently, they stood up and abandoned the boxes that until a moment ago they’d been so immersed in; how was it possible that I hadn’t managed to finish the shelves? The boss was coming after breakfast to give things a once over. Which boss? My boss, and their boss, they grumbled. She was coming after breakfast and she’d hit the roof when she saw that the shelves of glasses and teacups were unfinished. And what about this broken plate? Despite my desire to communicate, I was incapable of explaining myself or asking for details. My tongue languished like a long worm at the back of my throat, neither able nor willing to articulate, comfortable in its placid barbarism.

  Arriving in Berlin turned out to be much easier than a lot of the other things I’d done. When I arrived in Berlin it felt like, for the first time, I’d done something right. I explored the city extensively, and right away I could tell that this was a place I could adopt, one that I could love in its entirety. I’m exaggerating, of course. But I enjoyed idealizing the people I saw in the streets, and I enjoyed the belief that, here among the apparent inequalities, the drunks, the drug dealers and their shabby clothes, there was something hidden, something buried like the old unexploded bombs from the war, some kind of magnet to which I might stick, like a noble metal. But we know from our hydrogen and our oxygen that we are water as well as dust. And water runs.

  I got off the train at Tiergarten and spent my first night nearby. I paid a lot and slept little, and dedicated the next morning to trawling the web of subway tunnels in order to track down a student hotel more suited to my budget on the other side of the city. In Berlin, the idea of “the other side” was true—in Berlin you could cross over, you could be either here or there simply by traversing the old border. I took great pleasure in this. Later, Julia insisted that I was the only foreigner in all of Berlin who could trace the precise location of the wall that now, twenty years after its fall, still stretched like a fine electric fence between the East and the West of what were once two Germanys. At any point in the city, Julia said (and it was true), I could place my foot down in the correct spot and say: East, West. Or I could cross over to one side and say one thing and then cross over to the other side and believe the exact opposite.

  “So you’re staying then, here in Berlin?” Julia would ask me. And sometimes I’d say yes in the East and also in the West. But other times no, and since we lived a block from one of the many curving edges of the border, overlooking the greenish arm of the canal, I would suddenly go out into the rain, or into the snow, which was almost always dirty and insufficient, and cross over to the other side to think the opposite. This mostly happened in moments of outrage, when my room in Julia and Kolya’s house seemed to compress suddenly into a tiny cube and I was forced to leave, regardless of what I had on—whether rugged up or not, whether in shoes or slippers—so that, if only for a few minutes, I could breathe once more the seemingly free air.

  I waste a whole morning on a single sentence. It takes me precisely five hours to invent a German sentence.

  “Where can I put glasses other side during the day that remains?”

  The boss takes a whole minute to turn and look at me, an entire minute with her back to me, even though I know she’s heard me.

  She looks me up and down. It doesn’t even qualify as disdain, the look she gives me.

  “Work?” she answers. She lifts a finger and points to a box filled with red and green cushions. I lower my head. Off I go.

  For Julia (who, unlike me, was good) it was sometimes difficult to understand. She would speak to me about my symptoms, about her patients, contemplating the point of a pencil with which she took notes at home. She would ask me questions in passing, weaving theories. I wo
uld seek revenge by locking myself in my bedroom for entire afternoons. Or at night, furtively, while they were sleeping, I’d steal to the kitchen and commit some random act of vandalism. But it wasn’t like that during my first few months in Berlin, when I still hadn’t met Julia and was working as a waitress, serving breakfasts in a Moabit hotel. One long and somehow bitter morning, gray and distant, a man who was drinking his coffee very early along with two other men in the hotel dining room asked me why I laughed when I served them the meager plate of provisions that passed for breakfast: two slices of bread, a slip of butter encased in plastic.

  “Why are you laughing?” he asked me. He was wide. He didn’t fit in the chair. He must have measured hundreds of meters in circumference.

  “I’m not laughing, I’m smiling,” I said.

  Then the man sitting beside him wanted to know why I was smiling at them, if smiling wasn’t a prerequisite for serving breakfast. Even though my tongue no longer dozed at the back of my throat like a dormouse in the winter, I didn’t answer them. I had nothing to say. They had snatched away all my reasons. It was true: I had nothing to smile about, considering I started work at six in the morning, rain or shine, then tidied up the kitchen after breakfast and set to slicing vegetables for the restaurant, then in the tedious afternoons reordered all the disorder until my legs and feet were stiff and painful. From that morning on I tried to remain serious at all times, but whenever I approached a table, occupied for example by Chinese diners, or German ones, friendly or unfriendly, my lips inevitably contorted into the same smile, which might well have been a plea for help. I spent countless mornings and afternoons trying to wipe that sad, servile smile off my face. Countless days pulling down the corners of my mouth, in vain. I was renting a room from a retired couple in Neukölln, the walls and doors of which seemed to be constructed of painted cardboard, with nothing but an old oven to heat the place, and I got to work at six in the morning, rain or shine, and the whole time I had this stupid half-smile on my face, and I got on the subway and I got off the subway, suspecting the whole time that something was wrong, but I tried and I tried, and I had a thousand arguments for anyone who disbelieved the authenticity of my grimace and the sincerity of my two windows.

  I rest my head on the grass and confirm that I can no longer hear the Earth moving, that, however impossibly, it seems to have stopped turning.

  My father was still alive then; it had been two years since I’d moved to Berlin, and seven since I’d left Buenos Aires. Not too long ago we’d spoken on the phone, avoiding any major reproaches. He told me about his grandchildren, with no great degree of complicity—he presumed I wasn’t interested in the charms of childhood. As a man of science he was wary of falling into sentimentalism, something he’d done very rarely over the course of his life, and nobody would dare accuse him of it, not I then nor anyone since. Between the silences and other trifles we hid our truths. He asked me where I was working, then laughed with tender sarcasm and repeated my answer: “potato and sausage vendor.” He liked poking fun at me. “So you’re a sausage peddler,” he persisted, his naturalist’s heart a little wounded—the same heart that had foreseen so much science in my future. And it was a relief to tell him that he was right and to accept, over the telephone, from seventeen thousand kilometers away, communicating by the grace of electromagnetic waves and orbiting satellites, that he held, and always would hold, the winning hand, that his litany on restlessness was like a salve to me because it was old and because I knew it by heart. At seventy-eight years of age, still a physicist and skeptic by trade, he told me not to persevere with my searching, he told me that the notion of space was as obsolete as that of ether. “Don’t persevere because it doesn’t make sense,” because on no continent, on no planet, did there exist, strictly speaking, a position like the one we were habituated to; strictly speaking, nowhere existed anywhere. I didn’t want to speak strictly. But what did I do? I agreed with him. From seventeen thousand kilometers away I set in motion an electromagnetic wave to tell him: yes.

  But I didn’t go home when he died. I went afterward, and only to witness the death of another. Having spent ten years in Europe, I only visited Buenos Aires for a few weeks before continuing south. I’d been on the brink of closing an erratic cycle, and refrained from doing so. The grid of the city descended over me like a net, and I began to think again about the street names and street numbers, about the interweaving lines of the subway and the exhalations of the buses. One of my brothers had picked me up from the airport and agreed to let me stay at his house, because ours—that is, my father’s, mine and theirs—had been swiftly auctioned to discharge the family’s debts. My brother explained this to me as he tried to placate one of his children, wailing tirelessly for a chocolate or a soda from the back seat of the car. It was nearly impossible to live in that suburban house of his, amid the scattered school supplies and the silence of the cleaning lady. Everyone suspected I was returning from some kind of failure, I could sense it in their condescending glances and the vagueness of their questions. All that seemed to matter to them, the one thing they reminded me about again and again, was that I hadn’t been there for my father’s funeral. One of my sisters-in-law pointed out that at least he hadn’t suffered too much. “Not too much,” she said. “Not excessively.” They spoke about my father as though he were an expensive piece of furniture nobody wanted. I asked them if they’d spoken about him this way while he’d been alive, but they didn’t understand the question well enough to be offended. Why bother fighting, since we were all so good and civil? That Sunday, one week after my return, leafing through the newspaper in the peaceful wake of the daily breakfast chaos, I found an advertisement for berry-picking jobs in the south. It said the harvesting season was about to start. I packed up my things that night, muttered an explanation that nobody seemed to pay any mind to, and made my way to the Retiro bus terminal. There were no buses leaving that night. Are you sure? Not even with a different company? Nada de nada. The last buses only go as far as Santa Rosa. I slept across the road, in a traveler’s hotel on Avenida Libertador. In the hotel I played at being a foreigner; I even pretended I couldn’t understand the reception clerk’s Spanish. Was I a bad actress? To me it felt like the height of authenticity, but my performance didn’t ring true.

  I could smell the night, heard the complaint of a frightened dog. But I wasn’t afraid. The Earth had stopped turning on its axis. “Impossible!” my father would have said.

  The harvest still hadn’t started when I arrived at Las Golondrinas. At the volunteer fire station they assured me it would be more convenient or more affordable to stay in the town of El Bolsón, but ever since that first apartment in Madrid—the one I’d shared with the melancholy musician and the supposed filmmaker—I’d been wary of artists and artisans, and that’s exactly what the name “El Bolsón” suggested to me. I bid farewell to the firefighters (there were three of them) and crossed Route 40, heading toward the lower slope of the mountain. At the first gully, just before the terrain began to rise, I found a little cabin, typically alpine, complete with ugly furniture, in which to spend the night. The owners said they were brothers. They soon confided that this place wasn’t what it used to be, that now they had to turn the radio right up so they wouldn’t hear the trucks on Route 40 rolling toward the Andes. They owned a complex of eight tiny units just like mine, surrounded on all sides by pine forest. I decided from the outset that I wouldn’t share anything of myself with these bearded brothers, nor with any of my neighbors in the other cabins. Who were they? Families spending the first half of summer far from the city, couples enclosing themselves in wooden tents only to discover that they were as incapable of living together as they were of separating. Watching them come and go, I felt reassured; Las Golondrinas was not the kind of place where anything transcendental occurred, it was not the kind of place where ideas happened, or where one promised oneself anything true, or even probable, or even kind. I was wrong. It was a forest solely of pines, perfu
med. In bed I dreamt of bonfires.

  Strawberries were appearing in the nearby fields, but there were already several volunteers enlisted to harvest them. I was told to look for work higher up the mountain. I left that same afternoon. There was a cattle fence, and two tracks imprinted in the grass where I entered. Farther along three houses appeared, two very close to one another, the third set apart a little. There was a walnut tree bent over the patio, and beneath it a sheep with a black muzzle, tethered and bleating. I stopped and applauded. Then he appeared.

  Rest is a form of movement, he insisted. My father liked axioms, he was always contradicting things. Me? I was so irritated by his puzzles. To such an extent that, sometimes, when I was bringing a cup of tea over to the desk where he worked, I would accidentally spill it all over myself. Sitting there at his desk he would talk about movement and I would scurry along, slowly burning my fingers.

  “How can you do this to us?” Julia screamed. It was the first time I ever saw her angry.

  But years later, in Berlin, I’d learned how to keep my pulse steady. At work in the mediocre hotel, with my half-smile, and especially in the café in the city center, where I served the hottest and fullest cups without spilling a single drop. Until then I’d been through several different jobs, known and inhabited seven, eight, nine different bedrooms, and in each one I’d fantasize about overstaying my welcome, because I still didn’t know myself well enough, I still wasn’t convinced about who I was. Rather than fall into introspection and rummage around in my own muddy depths I preferred to pack my bags, to inaugurate something, the next thing. In the Berlin patisserie, on Friedrichstraße, I met Julia. She was on one side of the counter and I was on the other. I began to recognize her on her second or third visit. Sometimes she would come with Kolya and sit him down on one of the high bar stools, causing quite a scandal among the clientele, who murmured their displeasure the way one murmurs one’s displeasure in places like Berlin: with their eyes, without a word. Kolya had a yellow head of hair that always recalled summer, and round Russian eyes that, no matter what the circumstances, always made you want to weep. Julia was interested in me; she would come to the café and sit close to the coffee machine where I produced the espressos and macchiatos. I noticed a certain clinical curiosity mixed with her general affection for me, which often led her to interrogate me, casually, while Kolya sat eating happily, burying his nose in bread and butter. And although it was never easy for us to maintain a conversation due to the constant interruptions of other customers, which meant we had to keep repeating ourselves clumsily to make the most of our brief opportunities, I discovered that she was a trauma therapist, that she had separated from Kolya’s father not long ago, that she believed in the soul, in the psyche, in the afterlife, believed acutely in the humanity of mankind. She spouted grand ideas, and in her mouth the ideas were beautiful. Later on, when I lived with her in the ground floor apartment that gave onto the canal and the old Wall, nestled between Treptow and Kreuzberg, she told me she was proud of her beliefs, and of the patient, earnest naivety with which she approached her clinical cases, mine included. She marveled at the fact that, over there (as she referred to my old life in Buenos Aires) I’d studied biology, then chemistry—first organic, then inorganic. What could possibly be so fascinating about chlorides? For her, believer in dreams and the subconscious, octahedral silicates were insignificant. Who knows, maybe she fell in love with me too. One night, standing in the kitchen of the apartment, picking at our bread and fruit like insects while Kolya slept in the adjoining room, she told me confusedly that yes, she did love me; she invited me to cross the meter-wide divide that separated us and let her hold me. But my tears, or my laughter, did not come from a need for affection or consolation. I found it neither scandalous nor soothing that Julia thought she desired me that night, because we were alone and we loved each other, and Berlin would have been the best possible place for such a love. Did I mistrust her? No, I could never have mistrusted her. But I didn’t cross the kitchen and go to her, nor did I change the subject. Julia remained where she was, leaning against the kitchen counter, and asked me, as always, to repeat my long list of odd jobs and occupations, because she liked to listen to me, because she thought of my misery as something picturesque, something deceptively inoffensive, I suppose.