I left the library as evening fell and walked back along Nassau Street toward the house. I often got a table to eat at Blue Point, a seafood restaurant along the way. There was a beggar who stood in the parking lot there. He had a sign that read “I’m from Orion” and wore a white rain jacket buttoned up to the neck. From a distance he looked like a doctor or a scientist in his lab. Sometimes I would pause to talk with him. He’d written that he came from Orion in case anyone else from Orion appeared. He needed company, but not just any company. “Only people from Orion, Monsieur,” he told me. He thought I was French, and I hadn’t denied it because I never wanted to alter the course of our conversations. After a while he’d go silent and then lean back under the overhang to sleep.
Back at home I organized the notes I’d taken in the library and spent the night working. I made tea, listened to the radio, tried to stop the morning from coming.
Hudson nostalgically recalled the period of his life when he was a soldier in the Guardia Nacional and took part in the military exercises and maneuvers of 1854 near the Colorado River in Patagonia. “During my military service I learned a great deal with the troop about the life of the gaucho soldier, with no women or respite, and I learned from the Indians to sleep stretched out on the back of my horse.”
A Crystal Age, Hudson’s novel, recreated that harsh and ascetic dream in a world located in a distant future. “The sexual passion is the central thought in my novel,” Hudson said in a letter, “the idea that there is no millennium, no rest, no perpetual peace till that fury has burnt itself. We may maintain that we are improving, morally and spiritually, but I find that there is no change, no sign of a change, no decline in the violence of the sexual rage that afflicts us. It burns as fiercely now as it did ten thousand years ago. We may look forward to the time when it will no more be said that the poor are always with us—but we see no end to prostitution.”
4
I too lived in a transparent world and, drawn on by a certain monastic cathexis, tried to follow a set routine even though I was growing more and more agitated. Minor disruptions produced strange effects in me. I couldn’t sleep, and on nights of insomnia I’d go out walking. The town would appear deserted, and I’d advance into the dark neighborhoods like a specter. I’d see the houses in the blackness of night, the open gardens; I’d hear the rustling of the wind among the trees and sometimes listen to voices and uncertain sounds. I even came to think that those sleepless nights spent walking the empty streets were actually dreams, and indeed I would wake in the morning, exhausted, not sure that I hadn’t just spent the night turning in bed without ever leaving the room.
I would emerge from such states half-blinded, as though I’d been staring too long into the light of a lamp. I’d get up feeling unusually lucid, vividly recollecting certain isolated details—a broken chain on the sidewalk, a dead bird. It was the opposite of amnesia: the images were fixed with the clarity of a photograph.
It might have been the effect of a nightmare or it might have been the effect of insomnia, but I kept these symptoms secret. Only my doctor in Buenos Aires knew what was happening, and in fact he’d advised me not to travel, but I objected, convinced that living on an isolated campus was going to cure me. There’s nothing better than a peaceful, wooded town.
“There’s nothing worse,” Doctor Ahrest had cut in, holding out a prescription. He was a great doctor and a good-natured man, always serene. According to Ahrest, I was suffering from a strange ailment that he called arborescent crystallization. It was the result of exhaustion and an excess of alcohol, as though I was suddenly undergoing little attacks of nervous recollection. Maybe this was my illness, or maybe it was the feeling of dislocation made worse in a place where I’d been some years before and could remember vaguely.
Whenever I felt especially constricted, I’d escape to New York and spend a couple of days amid the multitudes of the city, not calling anyone, not showing myself, visiting anonymous places and avoiding Central Park and wide-open areas. I found Renzi’s Café on MacDougal Street and became friends with the owner, but he couldn’t tell me how the café got its name. I stayed at The Leo House, a Catholic guesthouse run by nuns. It had once served as lodgings for family members visiting the sick at a nearby hospital but was now a little hotel open to the public, although priests and seminarians were still given priority. I would see them at breakfast time, celibate and ceremonious, laughing like children at any little thing and reading their religious books with a deliberate air of absorption.
From there I would head out, as I’d done so many times in the Buenos Aires night, in search of an adventure. I’d take walks
