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Avenida de Mayo – Diagonal – Avenida de Mayo
He crossed the avenue during a pause in the traffic and started walking
down Calle Florida. A cold shiver made his shoulders tremble, and his
resolve to be stronger than the adventuring air immediately removed his
hands from the shelter of his pockets, increased the curve of his chest, and
lifted his head – a divine search through the monotonous sky. He could
withstand any temperature; he could live way down south, farther even
than Ushuaia.
His lips were sharpening with the same purpose intent that contracted
his eyes and squared his jaw.
First, he acquired an extravagant vision of the poles, without huts or
penguins; below, white with two patches of yellow; and the sky above, a sky
of fifteen minutes before rain.
Then: Alaska – Jack London – thick furs obliterating the anatomies of
bearded men, high boots transforming them into toy soldiers that could
not be felled in spite of the blue smoke from the long handguns of the chief
of the mounted police; instinctively they crouched down, the steam from
their breath imitating a halo over their fur hats and filthy brown beards;
Tongass bared its teeth along the shores of the Yukon; his gaze like a strong
arm swept out to grab the trunks coursing down the river – foam again:
Tongass is in Sitka – beautiful Sitka, like the name of a courtesan.
On Rivadavia a car tried to stop him, but a spirited maneuver left it
in the dust, along with its accomplice on a bicycle. He carried the car’s
two headlights, like easily won trophies, toward the desolate Alaskan
horizon. In the middle of the block, he effortlessly avoided the warm air
in the poster that was resting on Clark Gable’s powerful shoulders and
Crawford’s hips; though he did have the urge to raise to his brow the roses
that the star with the big eyes held up in the middle of her chest. Three
nights or three months ago he had dreamed about a woman with white
roses instead of eyes. But the memory of the dream was merely a flash of
lightning to his reason; the memory quickly slipped away, with a flutter, like
a sheet of paper just released from a printing press, which settles quietly
under the others images that continue to fall.
He installed the stolen headlights on the car in the sky that was copied
from the Yukon, and the car’s English brand made the dry air of the
Nordic night resound with energetic What’s, not shuttered away in a muffled
room but exploding like gunshots into the cold blue between the giant
pine trees, only to rise like rockets into the starry whiteness of the Great
Craggy Mountains.
When Brughtton knelt down, shielding the enormous bonfire with his
body, and he, V.ctor Suaid, stood up next to the Coroner, ready to fire, a
woman made her eyes shimmer, as well as a cross under the fur of her coat
twinkle, so close that their elbows touched.
On his mysterious back, Suaid’s vest rose and fell like two to the pulse
of the breathing, as he sought to embed in his brain the perfume of the
woman and the woman herself, mixed with the dry cold of the street.
Between the two opposing currents of pedestrians, the woman soon
became a spot that rose and fell, from the shadows into the shop lights
then back into the shadows. But the perfume remained with Suaid, gently
and decisively expelling the landscape and the men; and from the shores
of the Yukon only the snow remained, a strip of snow the width of the
roadway.
“The United States bought Alaska from Russia for seven million
dollars.”
Years before, that fact would have moderated the fountain pen of the
oldest Astin boy in geography class. Now it was nothing but a pretext for
a new reverie.