One of these ideas, among the first I assimilated so thoroughly as to make it my own, was the idealization, initially during the Romantic Era, then the Modern, of the long walk. There must have been something wrong with me, because at the point at which I should have chosen a way of life for my future, I found nothing persuasive. From early on I’ve felt unequal to any kind of enthusiasm: incapable of believing in almost anything, or frankly, in anything at all; disappointed beforehand by politics; skeptical of youth culture despite being, at the time, young; an idle spectator at the collective race for money and so-called material success; suspicious of the benevolence of charity and of self-improvement; oblivious of the benefits of procreation and the possibilities of biological continuity; oblivious as well of the idea of following sports or any variety of spectacle; unable to work up enthusiasm for any impracticable profession or scientific vocation; inept at arts or at crafts, at physical or manual labor, also intellectual; to sum up, useless for work in general; unfit for dreaming; with no belief in any religious alternative while longing to be initiated into that realm; too shy or incompetent for an enthusiastic sex life; in short, given such failings, I had no other choice but to walk, which most resembled the vacant and available mind.

To walk and nothing but. Not to walk without a destination, as modern characters have been pleased to do, attentive to the novelties of chance and the terrain, but instead to distant destinations, nearly unreachable or inaccessible ones, putting maps to the test. I laughed when someone would tell me a city was too large. And laughed as well if they told me it was too small. A city has one size, a fact known only to the person who walks it aimlessly, for all the world like a curious dog when it’s strayed and lost its bearings, but isn’t hungry or lonely yet. Here lies the blurry distinction between the cities’ homeless and walkers such as me. One peers into a world where few, but definitive, rules divide people according to their street conduct and how long they remain there. I would often think. . What do I want to find? A glimpse of the tramp’s life, made up of nothing but fear and instant opportunism; or some old Modernist ideal that posited the long walk as the basis for a new urban religion. It’s too confused and I’m not sure. . That’s why I’ve kept on walking, out of insecurity and a lack of convictions, as if walking were the ultimate experience I could offer to the ruined landscape I move through, with strength neither to overcome it nor destroy it.

As I said, the other walkers in the park — colleagues, as it were, in these adventures and private sorrows — had scattered themselves out across the greenswards and the vast, gleaming concrete esplanades, near-white with reflections from the bright sky, that dominated the alameda. The visitors, randomly grouped this way, seemed to accentuate the geometrical order of the area, rather than disrupt it. Despite the differences in their ages — they ranged from breastfeeding infants to the elderly infirm — each of them exuded that air I referred to earlier, at once absent and absorbed, self-abandoned, the sign, according to my criterion, of genuine familiarity with a park, and with all places generally. The young people were the most sociable, and a few solitary individuals carried their own maté kits, from which every so often, pensively, they’d take a long pull, at least that’s how it seemed to me, or perhaps they were merely keeping the straw between their lips and forgetting to take a sip.

As everyone knows, Brazilian maté gourds are large; they’d be difficult to conceal if anyone was inclined to do so. Most difficult to hide, though, is the thermos — essential to all those who use a maté gourd, large or small. I headed for a bench that stood next to the fountain. Let’s say that from the opposite side no one was able to see me through the jets of water and the cloud of mist mentioned earlier. Before taking a seat on the bench, I stood contemplating the panorama around me and all the while a fairly lengthy silence prevailed, unusual for that setting — even I noticed that — and I wondered if I were participating in a sort of collective trance, which included all the people and activity in the vicinity, or whether, on the contrary, I was suffering from a mental lapse, or was simply dreaming it. Whatever the case, I sat down, and a moment later took a deep breath; when I let it out, for an instant, and without knowing why, perhaps as a result of the cloud a very short distance away from where I sat, I briefly imagined I was invisible, or in hiding, and that an unaccustomed gift, or power, was allowing me to look without being seen. I put the map in my backpack, took out the book I had with me (it was a novel I’d been carrying around only a short while; I’d started reading it on the trip just before I arrived and hadn’t had either the chance or the desire to go on with it since then), and became so engrossed in contemplating the water and the spaces around it that I felt omnipotent, as if a random but well-intended force had bestowed a gift upon me: I myself was dissolved in the mist that surrounded the fountain and could verify that my sight adjusted, in this way, to any situation: it could discern the indiscernible, catalog the invisible, uncover the hidden. .

An old man was coming slowly toward where I sat, and only when he paused a short distance off did I realize he was going to sit down beside me without saying a word. No empty benches seemed to be left in the shade; and he was leaving the vast sun-scorched area as if emerging from a danger zone, with halting step, but content to have reached safety. His approach displeased me, as did his very materialization, which I took for a sign of hostility or, at the very least, an interruption. I realized immediately, however, that the intruder was most probably myself, and that this man in all likelihood walked every afternoon to a spot he now saw occupied by me. It wouldn’t be the first time, I thought. I remembered other situations, of course, minor reversals of fortune lying dormant in the recesses of my memory. For instance, I was once, briefly, in a European city known for its splendid lake and venerable canals. I happened to be, quite literally, admiring the lake and strolling along the adjacent park. One of those German cities bombed in the Second World War, destroyed and then, with obsessive attention to detail, rebuilt to be just as they once had been.

A while back I met a woman who, alongside her mother, took part in that rebuilding as a child; she told me about the women’s brigades, made up of women of all ages, who’d worked on it. In particular, she remembered her work assignment: she had to move the remains of bricks from one corner — or what was left of it — to another, so as to sort the bricks that were still useful, and set aside the pieces too small to be usable. The few men who were present gave directions to the older women in accordance with some oversized specs and blueprints they were incessantly opening their arms wide to consult. Anyhow, this city now seemed far too impeccable to me, as on the whole German cities do; it proclaimed that there had never been a war, much less such widespread devastation. I recalled the stories of that long-ago little girl as I walked through the park. It was just past noon, and from where I stood I could observe the busy avenue and the orderly flow of cars. Some swans from the colony that had settled on the lake — the only visible fauna, as far as I know, besides the underwater variety — swam up to anyone who approached the water’s edge, doubtless hoping for something to eat. And when they received nothing they would bury their heads and the full length of their long necks in the water, to hide their failure, I suppose, or to look for something in its depths.