The Foreigners (18 page)

The city was constructed on the edge of a river, but it wasn't a companionable river on whose shores inhabitants could walk, that linked up between welcoming piers, under bridges with memorable names, one of those rivers that it was enough to mention to situate immediately the city which is its near-synonym: the Seine, the Tiber, the Thames, the Guadalquivir, the Moscow. It was a river independent from the city like a watery slice attached to it, a river that men didn't need to cross to go from one end of the city to another, that did not impose itself on their vision and about which they hardly ever thought, since weeks and even months could pass without seeing it. They only went to it in the summer, but for this it was necessary to go a good distance from the city.

It was a South American city and maybe for this reason the river was different from those of European cities. Everything about South America is different from Europe, something that saddens and humiliates the inhabitants of this continent, even leading them to deny this reality. Its landscapes, its people, its elements, its political events, its rivers are different. It was difficult to reach this particular river.

A foreigner, attracted one day by the copper color of its waters, scenes on a postcard, wanted to find it and throw in a coin, an indispensable ritual when you arrive at any city where there's a river. He was a determined and meticulous man, since Nordic blood ran in his veins and no one can deny that Nordic people know how to plan their days and accomplish their plans. He went down to the big avenues that run along the river and then turned on a transversal street. It was closed. He repeated his attempts tirelessly over the course of the day. At one point he encountered a wall that was hundreds of meters long. When he arrived at the end of it, he thought he saw the river, but it was only a barrier; he went to the other end of the street entrance and saw a sign that said “Closed to traffic.” His patience and perseverance did not flag, he had been a boy scout from the age of seven and a mountain climber since he was eleven; he had waited an entire year in the Siegfried Line and two and a half in a concentration camp, so he could definitely dedicate a day to looking for the river. But night fell and he still hadn't found the way.

The following morning, he repeated his search, he ran into other walls, other barriers, other streets closed to traffic, long rows of warehouses, coast guards who prevented his passing, rusted rails with out-of-use wagons put there like barricades and always, at the end, as if making fun of him, the tall masts that proclaimed the existence of the river. I don't know how this apparently fruitless persecution ended, and it isn't especially related to this story in any case apart from the definite fact that people had forgotten that they had a river and they neither feared nor enjoyed it. Maybe the foreigner managed to make it out from the top of a modern building or possibly he had to travel several kilometers away in order finally to catch a glimpse of the river on whose shores the city had been constructed.