The Absolute, page 38
A photograph on the cover showed the dead wife of the deposed president, Juan Domingo Perón, referred to as a “tyrant on the run.” Eva Duarte, “Evita.” The mummy was in her coffin. Her braided hair looked like straw, and her white face was a mortuary mask. On her shoulders and neck one could see the evidence of hammer blows and slashes, dealt to her by the same rebels who had previously toppled her husband, blows and slashes that had torn gashes into her skin and that permitted, or so it seemed to me, the burlap of her stuffing to appear. In addition . . . In addition, there were her small hard breasts, the fragility of her thorax bones, her elegant waist, the algebra of her navel over the mystery of her belly’s curve, her mount of Venus where the stiff hairs of her pubis sprouted.
There isn’t much point in describing the nature of the emotions that flooded through a boy experiencing, for the first time, the complex blend of stimuli produced by a naked body surrendered to the unmoving pleasure of life in the beyond. The source of eroticism itself gushed toward me. Never before had I been struck by an image with such intensity. I gazed at this translucent skin, the taut remains of this flesh that revealed to me its particular way of embodying the secrets of death, and at the same time I tried to find out the material explanation for its charm, focusing on the journalistic account that told of the secret pilgrimages of the corpse and the ancestral techniques used to conserve it. But these words were pure typographical signs, and buzzed about the picture like flies escaped from the casket. There was no way any order and meaning could be pinned down that turned me away from the attraction of that body; I could barely pay attention to the lines about her illness and the methods of taxidermy. But if cancer and its devastations had injections of formaldehyde as a response, if nitrate salts and distilled mercury tried to maintain her appearance of youth, then what was being revealed to me was in essence a secret I hadn’t yet approached: adult love. Because Perón must have loved his wife a lot to keep her free of decay, even as a shell tugged at and abused by the avatars of politics, pushed and pulled every which way, with organs no doubt removed and stored for safe protection somewhere, prepared to be restored to the body when medical advances made her cancer reversible.
Evita was thus (she too) a parcel launched into the future, a dream of survival that hurtled through the space of myth and the possibilities of marriage (since Perón would die before his wife returned from the shadows) to locate her in the sphere of immortality.
Obviously, I wasn’t interested at the time in any link to an archaic cult of resurrection, but the possibility opened by Perón’s generous and visionary way of seeing—can a dictator also be a genius?—which considered the prospect of a long-term cure for his beloved wife to be viable, also pointed to the moment when science would discover the remedy for every illness, and therefore what encompassed each one of them: death itself.
In this respect, along with a multitude of scientists whose names were my true company, I too had to name that deposed president as my precursor. One with limits, because Perón left the solution to the problem in the hands of others and the ingenuity of times to come, while I was resolved to make all times come toward me—and if necessary go toward them. In spite of this, I couldn’t help but consider the splendid way some elements of reality were presented. It was as if chance were putting things together in my favor so I achieved the desired results. No doubt I’d already learned a great deal, but I was still eager to go deeper into other revelations whose imminence made every second of my delay throb. I trembled with doubt, and still wasn’t convinced I had to abandon Evita and move to the next page. Perhaps I was afraid that, searching for the new, involved in a “betrayal” at once sentimental, sexual and scientific, I’d lose everything good that I had gained. But at the same time, how could I discover anything without taking a risk? In any case, I told myself, if the next page didn’t offer anything new, except for the illusion of oblivion, I could go back to the previous one, where the image of Evita’s corpse called out to me. And anyway, flipping through the magazine would help me soothe the violence of the emotions that disturbed me so much when I looked at her . . .
I lick my finger; I turn the page. The next thing I come across is a regular section consisting mostly of agency cables, ones already published in all the country’s newspapers and magazines, whose contents the editor has decided to refresh for the consumer of his product. But there are also fantasies that speak to an editor on deadline looking to fill the page: three-headed-calf births, pig hypnoses, extraterrestrial abductions, genophagic snake attacks, flea trainings, dwarf races, et cetera. The strange thing is that amid all this nonsense, the very information filters through (or materializes) that I need to move forward with the implementation of my design. A scientist in the United States has invented a time machine. And How It Is offers some clues about how to build it.
5
My first impulse was to rush to get hold of the scientific publications with the instructions I needed to put together the machine, then send myself to the time when the formula for immortality had been discovered.
Naturally, a second reading of that text box—titled Believe It or Not—helped me realize that before getting down to business, I’d need more information at every level: as regards the science, design, risks, et cetera, et cetera. Even if by miracle I were to obtain all these responses in some issue of another publication of the time, Popular Mechanics, those preliminary investigations would imply an effort and level of privacy that at the moment I didn’t have. To set up a time machine in some corner of the house isn’t the same as dedicating oneself to building model airplanes. But the difficulties didn’t discourage me. I kept studying.
In 1917, Karl Schwarzschild discovered the stars collapse into points of an infinitesimal diameter, scattered throughout space of an infinite density. He didn’t know what to call these points or how to describe the characteristics of this space, and he didn’t know their specific arrangement. Today they’re called black holes. In the mid-1950s Roy Kerr discovered that some stars don’t totally close: they pass through a formative cycle that doesn’t end, and collapse as they keep turning. During this rotation they generate rings (known as Kerr rings) which possess gravitational forces so intense they can distort space-time, allowing large objects to enter one side and leave another. According to Kerr, these black holes might work as portals to the past or future, and if one has a great desire to carry out the experiment, the only thing necessary is to find one and set off on your journey.
Now then, save for in the unlikely conditions of fantastic literature, in which proliferate magical objects able to condense the totality of the Universe into a small object, it isn’t common for us to have the luck of stumbling across a black hole in the silence of our own room. Kerr offered an alternative: it was enough to create one’s own ring, gathering up material equivalent to the mass of Jupiter, then compressing it to a mass of about five feet in diameter. The force necessary to squeeze such a mass would make the material start to spin, and once the speed of its rotation approached that of light, a black hole would form in the center, so the operator of this accomplishment could then enter the portal, pass through the black hole and be brought to another point in space and time. Unfortunately the domestic Kerr ring worked only in one direction, and it was a journey of no return.
For a brief period I grew enthusiastic about the warp bubble, which explored the possibilities of altered geometry, producing contractions in the space in front of and behind the spaceship, so it could travel faster than the speed of light. It was like rowing through the void, transformed into time. But after some calculations I understood that in order to form these contractions, I’d need more energy than was contained in our entire galaxy. In 1937, Willem Jacob van Stockum calculated that the only way of traveling to the past “would be inside an enormous high-density cylinder, which must turn at a speed near that of light.” While rotating, the cylinder would drag space and time along with it, spinning onto itself and tracing out a “closed timelike curve.” Obviously, for this to occur, the cylinder would have to be of an infinite length. But in 1949 Kurt Gödel discovered that if the entire Universe were in rotation, then there would be closed timelike curves everywhere: the Universe itself would be a great time machine. Since the Universe doesn’t gyrate but rather expands, however, the idea of building a cylinder became, along with impracticable, unnecessary.
Directly picking up from the theories of Einstein, Kip Thorne claimed there were rips within space-time—so-called wormholes—that served as direct access to other space-times, and it was only a matter of—precisely—time before we knew how to manage them so they’d perforate these dimensions according to our will, and could pass through those gates of the sky into both moments and spaces extremely far away, and distances just a few meters or minutes from our homes and places of departure. Thorne not only floated the idea of crafting a journey tailor-made to each user, but also proposed a way to make these trips happen. Four metallic plaques had to be set up, preferably rectangular and with a diameter no less than several kilometers long, arranged in parallel at an incredibly short distance from each other, so the force of attraction between the parallels generated quantum fluctuations in the void of the electromagnetic field. Once this environment had been built, the four metal plates were split into groups of two and connected through a wormhole.
But Thorne faced a practical problem: in order for the process to achieve the parameters of efficiency needed, the plaques could not be separated by a distance greater than the diameter of an atom, and the wormhole had to be of a proportional size in order to be completely included in this distance. Being so small, the result was that a human being would find it impossible to enter or leave its interior, even if the issues related to the radiation emitted, or the destructive effect of its gravity, were solved. With melancholy, Thorne concluded that the first trip through the walls would be undertaken by some nano-robot, equipped with various kinds of sensors able to register the details of its passage.
Although my euphoric starting point was precisely the limit where Thorne had grown discouraged, I wasn’t unaware of the difficulties I faced: just getting hold of the kilometers of metal plaques I needed would be no picnic. It would require the support of the scientific community, of private foundations, of appropriate contacts at different levels of the State . . . all conditions out of my reach. That’s why I decided to reverse the procedure based on the following conjecture: although the immensity of the plaques had forced Thorne to introduce elements at a micro scale, if I built a series of smaller plaques—which could be hidden in my room as if they were the Styrofoam panels of a school model—the wormhole through which my machine and the objects inside it traveled would have a dimension larger than its entrance.
Given that a series of questions in theoretical physics had been resolved in advance by my precursor, even if they’d taken him down a dead end, all I needed was to apply the concept. The understanding of the dimensions this involved made me delay carrying it out, however. Even though for me the machine of the future wasn’t an aim in itself, but a simple means to obtain the formula of immortality—a formula I took for granted would be discovered in one of the futures I’d visit—the fact of knowing myself capable of building it, and therefore becoming the only human until now qualified to accomplish it . . . would form a milestone in the history of our evolution and thus turn me into . . . I didn’t even want to think about it.
Let’s be clear: it’s not (just) about being a genius; there are geniuses galore, in every field. Geniuses trace out furrows in the terrain of the known and carve out passages for the fire of the new; these magmas rise to the surface and soon congeal. What was once lava turns to solid rock, a landscape that new geniuses must bore through in their turn so that then . . . and so forth. What I was going to do, in contrast, was gouge out a path for the new knowledge stolen from the future, in order to radically transform the possibilities for being in what existed in the present. I was on the verge of making the flame of the eternal cauterize the wound of death in our flesh. And here I imagined even further scenarios: lifting the torch of that conquered eternity, I’d go back in time to raise the dead from their tombs, guiding them toward life. Of course, I would start by bringing back my grandma . . .
6
Setting up the machine was easy. After carrying out my tests, I put it on a shelf of the library in my room. It had a “natural” presence, and its moving panels, connected by a tube, gave it a look between abstract and decorative, much in the style of the designer lamps made of aluminum or orange acrylic, shaped like squares or spheres, which in those years were the ornamental summum of the local petit bourgeoisie. And this is why, because it seemed to be one of those pieces of junk that crowded our house, which after being expanded had been arranged to harmonize with the criteria of interior design magazines, no one suspected its true character.
Now that I’m journeying to the center of my account, I want to say the following in a way that doesn’t sound vain: art is a mental affair. Science, even more so. Science and art are the opposite of decoration, which takes pleasure in the random and offers as an ultimate justification of its existence the vacuous argument of freedom. In contrast, every serious activity reduces the margin for options and submits itself to a final objective. Nobody is free, not even me (especially not me), who chose to submit to what was necessary. This was so true that in the course of my work I had to leave behind everything and everyone, even someone who had begun to be important to me . . . my fourth-grade girlfriend, Alba.
Every Saturday that spring, at the hour of the nap, I stopped to pick her up at her house and we set out on an excursion, carrying big pieces of stiff poster board to a deserted suburban plaza, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in whose center there began to rise up, before it was abruptly interrupted (just like the life of the honored president), a sort of elliptical monstrosity of iron and cement. There, in the shade of some eucalyptus trees, we cut up the poster boards and stuck them together with glue and Scotch tape. I’d convinced her we were designing the model of the mansion where we’d live when we grew up.
Clearly, those were my first attempts; I still hadn’t distanced myself from Thorne’s view, so I assumed a gigantic machine was a condition of the passage. At the same time, I was conscious that both the size and the materials within my reach differed from the standards required by the original project. Far from despairing, I considered this to be a stimulus and challenge; if Thorne’s model was hypothetical, then my application could permit itself the luxuries of experimentation and extravagance.
As for Alba . . . as for Alba . . . she accepted my quirky decisions (the progress in my investigations) and enjoyed taking part in them. Maybe, when she was cutting the poster boards or sticking them together, she was dreaming of working as a fashion designer for María Fernanda, host of the program Jean Cartier’s Art of Elegance.
One day I appeared with a few aprons that seemed to her “in poor taste.” She laughed when she put hers on, and was astonished by their weight. I refrained from explaining to her that the cloth was lined inside with lead that would keep out radioactive elements, and instead told her that since “our house” still belonged to the realm of the imagination, whatever we did inside also had to fit the logic of dreams. Starting now, this was the path I was going to take. I encouraged her to follow me, but also said I wouldn’t get angry if she preferred to call it quits. Alba looked at me with that luminous gaze of hers, and hugged me.
