Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer Page A

various offices.’ And he went to attend to two guys who had just arrived. I thought seriously about jumping over the counter and bashing his face in, but in the first place that wasn’t going to accomplish anything and in the second place, what did he mean by saying at that moment at least room 132, which was the one I had occupied the day before, didn’t exist?”
    I decided to drink another coffee and I called Marcos but when he came over I asked if he could make me an orange juice and he said yes.
    “Then I went back to room 1247 and inspected my luggage. Everything was in order; it seemed to me that everything was in order. My belly reminded me that it was after midday and I had eaten nothing, so I postponed the problem, went down, went into the restaurant, and ordered the first thing I saw on the menu. And then I remembered the wooden bowl. Once again I felt an urgent physical sensation but I started eating a rather bland stewed fish that they brought me and I thought the best thing would be to go to dra Iratoni’s and ask him about what had happened to me. I finished eating, I didn’t order dessert, I had coffee, and I went out to the street and froze stiff as a statue. It was another city. It looked like New York. And the day before it had resembled Welwyn. Worse: the cars were different and the people dressed differently. Before I started to get scared at the possibility of not finding dra Iratoni, which was about to happen, I called a taxi that was passing, I climbed in and I told the driver, Paseo de las Agujas 225, and I bet you don’t know what I found.”
    “Look, you could have found anything: a crocodile in the bathtub, or that Paseo de las Agujas didn’t exist, or that the driver was Count Dracula, what do I know?”
    “The one who didn’t exist was the driver.”
    Marcos brought me an orange juice the way I like it, not strained, without ice, and with very little sugar.
    “Trafalgar,” I said, “sometimes you depress me. Couldn’t you go to Capilla del Monte or Bariloche like everyone else and afterward come tell me that it rained for three days and you lost in the casino and you ran into five guys from Rosario?”
    “There are trips on which nothing happens, I assure you. Everything goes well, nothing strange happens, and people do and say what one expects. You don’t think I’m going to bring you to the Burgundy to tell you a silly thing like that, I imagine.”
    “It would be very reassuring,” I said. “A while ago, I thought you were a quiet fellow, and you are. But you are not reassuring. At least not when you let fly with things like that. Go on, continue with the phantom taxi driver.”
    “It was an automatic taxi, driven from a distance, or maybe a robot, I don’t know. It didn’t start, instead it informed me over a loudspeaker next to the odometer that the old Paseo de las Agujas was impassable for vehicles. I told it to take me as close as possible to the place. Only then did it start. It crossed the city, which was still a twin of New York and not of Welwyn, and stopped in the middle of the country. I tried to get out but the door was stuck. I paid, which is to say I put the money in a collection box, and then the door opened and I got out. It was a park, not very well tended, that extended to the shore of the lake. No woods. I walked along a little path full of stones and weeds as far as the place where I remembered dra Iratoni’s house was.”
    “Which was no longer there,” I said.
    “No, it wasn’t there and I had already begun to suspect that.”
    “Tell me, hadn’t you slept for a couple of centuries like Rip van Winkle?”
    “I thought that, too. It would have been an uncomfortable solution but, in the end, reassuring, as you say. I returned to the city on foot. When I arrived, it was almost night. In the suburbs, I took another taxi, also automatic, and I had it take me to the port and I looked for the clunker. And would you believe that I don’t know if I