Fate. Jorge Consiglio

been up since 7 a.m. She’d prepared breakfast for Simón and immersed herself in an Excel graph, plotting humidity metrics of a forest in the northern province of Chaco, near the Pilcomayo river. On the graph, the curve – a green line connecting twelve points – was ascending. Kezelman verified that all the data was correct. Sorted! she exclaimed out loud.

      She was researching the link between humidity and the growth of a particular herb – a variety of wild chamomile – that exhibited a direct relationship with the reproduction rate of rabbits in the area. The survey was done using satellite imagery, but on occasion she went out into the field. Closing her laptop, she checked on her son and went to put some coffee on. From the kitchen window, she could see people standing at the bus stop. She brought her fingers to her lips as if she were holding a cigarette and shifted her gaze. By chance, she noticed two ants on a tile, to the left of the cupboard. She swept them away with a single stroke of her hand. At once she went to examine the side of the fridge. The nest was swarming. Marina Kezelman instantly asked herself a thousand questions, yet all of them, in one way or another, were focused on resolving the same enigma: what were those damn bugs feeding on in a kitchen like hers?

      She acted as she’d been advised. She moved the fridge to improve the angle of attack, sprinkled the poison and placed the bait at strategic points. As she washed her hands, she decided to order an Uber to the airport in the morning. A trip to the northern province of Formosa had come up overnight. She had to go with Zárate, a biologist from the Institute of Experimental Medicine she’d never met, who was joining the rabbit project.

      Leaving the city was always bittersweet. She relished getting a bit of distance from her surroundings: it helped her re-evaluate the day-to-day. On the other hand, giving up the coherence of her habits made her feel somewhat uncomfortable. With her hands still wet, she stood motionless. Silent in thought. That’s how her six-year-old son found her. One of its ears is falling off, he said, holding up a toy dog made from coarse fabric. It had an oval-shaped head – disproportionally oval – and its eyes, two translucent balls, were set far too high, where the forehead should have been. Marina Kezelman hunted for the sewing basket. She chose a strong thread and a slender needle and painstakingly began to sew. Just as she faced everything else in her life. Resolute. Relentless.

      He woke up late, ten minutes after eleven, very unusual. He had toast spread with honey for breakfast. In his throat and at the top of his lungs – right in the hollows of the alveoli – he felt the need for a cigarette. He imagined – and for a moment he saw the scene in sharp detail – the bronchial tubes like a disputed territory, a war zone. The Gaza Strip in the middle of his chest.

      He took a shower, hoping that the water might restore his sense of well-being. It was the right decision. He stepped out of the bathroom smelling of coconut soap and filled with a powerful rush of urgency: he had to crack on with the day, act fast, make decisions. Time was of the essence. Any delay would mean a critical waste.He had to get on with something, although he wasn’t sure what. The anxiety was backfiring. His performance dropped to zero.

      At 2 p.m. he opened his laptop. He pressed the ON button and waited for the operating system to initiate. The living room curtains rippled before him. It was Tuesday and the sun was barely grazing the edge of the planet. A certain splendour, almost a shimmer, emanated from earthly matter. That afternoon, the world was translucent, barely flickering. On his desk – it’d been exactly a week since he’d polished it – were three objects: a miniature horse, a postcard with a Chinese engraving and an adjustable lamp. Amer checked his emails. He deleted some spam and audited the personal messages. He paused on one from the National History Museum of La Plata. When he opened it, the rhythm of his breathing shifted. Work, the mere mention of the word, foisted a new dynamic upon him. Now, suddenly, without rising from his chair, he was climbing a mountain. They were offering him the chance to head up a team of taxidermists. An elephant was on its way from Africa, loaded in the hold of a ship, inside an extremely high-tech cold chamber. There wasn’t much time to organise everything and they were relying on him wholeheartedly, on his anatomic knowledge, on his aptitude with polyurethane. Two months earlier he had worked miracles on an antelope. Everyone knew about it.

      Amer stroked his chin and considered smoking. For fifteen seconds, he was lost in thought. The cigarette was a powerful, indispensable link in the chain. Without tobacco, he was half a man. He stood up abruptly and went towards the bathroom. Determined, he opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out a box of Xanax. He swallowed a pill, coaxing it down his throat with the water he drank straight from the tap, bent over the sink. He returned to the computer in a different mood, but now his mind was elsewhere. He googled brown bears. He browsed until he came across an article in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. In 2015, a 180-kilo bear had killed three farmers in a small village in Asturias. We are not animals, said Amer, staring at the screen. The article included an image of a bear – apparently the culprit – standing upright on two legs. Its head was like a planet: huge, round and tilted slightly to the side, with two small ears towards the back, pricked up in alertness.

      Blood does not have a price, read the German. He was waiting for his turn at a haemotherapy clinic. A friend of Marina Kezelman’s was seriously ill and needed blood donors. Karl was certainly fit, but it was his height that had made everyone – within his universe of acquaintances, within his herd – deem him the man for the job. The German has to donate blood, they all agreed. They mistook size for health. Now Karl was biting the nail of his middle finger in a room lined with tiles. The process went like this: nurse, bed, needle, vein. Enduring the commotion of the drainage, the plasma on the cannula, speed and stillness at the same time. A circuit in which the German played an essential role without feeling responsible for it. There was something endless about the fluid streaming out of his body. That emptying-out held a meaning for him. His body understood it. He had become a shifting cartography, a stampede that bore witness, more than anything else, to his status as a foreigner.

      They removed the needle – it made a sucking sound – and, taking his time, he gradually shifted upright. He stayed there sitting on the bed, his legs hanging ten centimetres from the floor. Silent. His face slack with perturbation. He was staring at a fixed point, a crack in the wall, the mark left by a nail or pin. In that instant, this blemish represented stability for Karl. It expressed certitude, permanence. The rest of the world, ceaselessly shifting, with its incessant movement, was not to be trusted; it introduced values of mutability. Despite everything – his own unsteadiness and that of his surroundings – he was determined to make an effort: he tried to stand up. His legs gave way in the attempt and he collapsed, face first. He had fainted. As he went down, he took with him a metal table full of medical supplies. This caused as much noise as it did mess, and attracted the attention of the staff.

      It took several people to lift him. The help was effective and he came round quickly. He was made to sit down in the waiting room. A nurse said to him: You’re not going anywhere. Faced with Karl’s silence, she asked: Do you understand what I’m saying?

      After seven minutes, the German took a deep breath. He stood up and left the clinic without a word to anyone. He walked a few blocks with his mind blank, empty of images. The fresh air filled him with a sudden serenity and he felt clear-headed, free. Soon enough he arrived at a plaza. He headed down a path until he found a bench ringed by bushes. He sat in the same position, half-turned to the left, until a group of children took over the playground. At that moment, he felt certain that the past had expired. He thought about his son, about Marina Kezelman and about everything that the present revealed to him.

      That same day, he organised things so he could return to the plaza with Simón. He sat on the same bench, though by now the sun was barely a gleam. Simón was a bit lost. He picked things off the ground, turning them over for a few seconds and then discarding them. Then he went over to the play equipment. He launched himself down the slide three times, but when another kid his age approached, he moved away and went looking for his father. He was bored, he said; he wanted to go home. The German straightened the collar of his shirt and briefly felt disheartened. He had brought a bag of sweets and a Frisbee. They played with the disc in the open space, a bit of rough grass next to the bandstand. The Frisbee came and went through the air. Simón threw it hard and upwards, creating a perfect ellipsis. As usual, though, his confidence got the better of him. He threw the disc forwards, straight