Martín Rejtman reaches forward, bends over, loses his focus for a second, misses his toes by an inch. He stumbles and steps off the yoga mat. The accident tells him that he needs a change of life. That same afternoon he buys a canary from a pet shop in Villa Ortúzar. He names it Ornitol, after the birdseed the veterinary gives him.
In the evening he smokes a joint and orders chicken from a local takeaway. He spends a lot of time hacking the chicken with a butcher’s knife, stoned. When he finishes with the chopping the chicken is an amorphous mass. He bins it and goes to sleep without eating. Ornitol doesn’t sing and Martín Rejtman sleeps very well.
The next morning he decides to become a vegetarian. In the afternoon he starts a new film script. In the evening it rains.
Several years later Martín Rejtman finds out about me. He finds out when someone wanting to call me looks for my name in the phonebook and ends up calling him instead —we share the same name and surname.
This is the moment when I find out about him too. Martín Rejtman, himself, calls me, explains that he would like to meet me, that he once shot a film about a woman called Silvia Prieto who meets another woman called Silvia Prieto, that this is a major coincidence, something that plugs into the universal trope of the doppelgänger, and that he thinks it would be interesting for us to get together, and perhaps shoot the meeting on video. I say that I need time to think, that the whole thing has taken me by surprise because I thought I was the only Martín Rejtman, that it all sounds rather strange. He says he can’t believe I’ve never heard of him, that I never looked for my own name in the phonebook, that I never googled my own name and found references to his books, his films. I say that I never had any reasons for googling my name, that it sounds like a strange thing to do, and I insist that I need time to think about his invitation. I also tell him that nobody uses the phonebook any more and I don’t know what that doppelgänger thing is. He agrees about the phonebook and then says he’ll call me in the evening, after jogging around the lakes of Palermo Park.
I say I’ll need more time than that. He says he’ll call later in the week, also after jogging around the lakes of Palermo Park. He says that he jogs every night around the lakes of Palermo Park.
I find the reference to jogging around the lakes of Palermo Park, its repetition, strange. I stay silent.
‘I’ll call you back,’ he says and hangs up.
*
I borrow Martín Rejtman’s books and films from the Biblioteca Nacional. I read a couple of interviews and articles that make very little sense to me but at least I can verify that he exists. But the films and books hook my attention, not because they interest me, but because my name is on them. His name. The same name. That’s more or less what the doppelgänger thing is about, according to Wikipedia, I think. I spend the next couple of days reading and watching Martín Rejtman’s work, which could very well be my work.
The first film I watch is about a boy called Lucio who lives a rather uneventful life, but then has his motorbike, wallet, and shoes stolen. I find the characters bereft of will and energy, the acting weird, the locations familiar but uncanny and I stop watching a few minutes into it. But I recognise the name of the film from the title of one of his books, which is also the name of one of his stories.
In the story Lucio gets his bike stolen, then gets a crew cut. And then nothing happens at home with his dysfunctional family. And then nothing happens when he steals a motorbike. Or when he runs away to Mar del Plata on the bike. And then nothing happens when the bike breaks down and he leaves it lying in the middle of the highway. And then nothing happens by the sea, because the sea is nowhere to be found in this coastal town. Then nothing happens at another hairdresser’s where Lucio gets his second haircut of the story. Nothing happens when Lucio tries to do a runner and the hairdresser threatens him with a razor blade, and then with calling the cops. And then nothing happens because the story ends abruptly.
I really don’t know what to make of it. I put the book down and go back to the film and watch it to the end. At first I struggle, trying to read something into what’s going on: the robotic delivery of the lines, the long stretches of film without dialogue, a guy called Damián walking around with an empty Coca Cola bottle, the price of the tokens in the video games arcade going up from scene to scene. But soon I surrender: nothing happens, there’s nothing to be read, just like in the story, only that here the ending is different, involving skaters and breakfast at someone’s house. When the screen turns black I feel I need a change of life.
I heat up two slices of pizza in the oven and then get my hair clipper from the bottom of a drawer. After eating the pizza slices I shave my head.
*
While I’m watching his films and reading his books, the other Martín Rejtman is busy putting the final touches to another manuscript.
Unbeknownst to me, nothing really happens in this new collection of short stories, nothing beyond another series of seemingly fortuitous events, encounters and trajectories that lead to more fortuitous events, elisions, encounters and trajectories. A story that starts following a certain character takes an unexpected turn, that character recedes into the background, and new characters appear, only to disappear later. Everything is pure escape. There are no narrators, no psychological depth to the characters, no moral, nothing to explain, no major statement, no existential weight, no learning curve, just a circulation and exchange of things and moods— an economy of exchange and pure surface. And then abrupt endings: each story ending wherever it ends for no discernible reason. Martín Rejtman is aware that this is what he wants to achieve. He doesn’t know why he wants to achieve this, mainly because there’s nothing outside the stories, nothing to tell beyond the story itself. When it comes to putting these ideas on paper, he doesn’t exist. It’s almost as if the stories wrote themselves. Or as if the stories were writing Martín Rejtman.
He replaces the cap in his red pen and puts the manuscript away. He goes to the fridge and opens a can of Coke Zero, perhaps to confirm he’s alive and not a product of his own imagination. He eats carrots from a Tupperware. The carrots taste acidic. He throws them in the bin.
He goes back to the lounge and stares at the yoga mat, walks towards it. He lays down on the yoga mat and stays there in shavasana until he falls asleep. He wakes up several hours later. His back is cold and his neck hurts.
§
It’s a grainy film, probably transferred from a VHS tape. Silvia Prieto wakes up one morning and decides to turn her life around. She buys a canary that doesn’t sing, gets a job in a bar, spends a lot of time in the toilet to dodge work, and when she’s at home she chops chicken manically, several chickens. Silvia Prieto is visited by an ex who was living in the USA, and who brings her a statuette that reminds him of her. She quits her bar job and gets one handing samples of soap to supermarket customers. She eats Chinese food. The statuette changes hands several times. At some point Silvia Prieto goes to Mar del Plata and steals an Armani jacket from a man she refers to as Armani. Armani calls her on the phone a week or so later to reclaim his jacket—he found her number in the phone book. Armani tells Silvia Prieto that there’s another Silvia Prieto he called by mistake. The first Silvia Prieto calls the second Silvia Prieto, fantasises about killing her, then ends up meeting her, taking two bottles of shampoo as a present. At some point she posts the canary to her mother. The statuette ends up lying by the side of the road. Someone goes to a rock concert. Other characters do other things that seem disconnected from Silvia Prieto’s story. Her ex ends up in prison. Someone who’s not her ex gets out of prison and moves in with Silvia almost accidentally. They watch the video from Silvia’s wedding with her ex-husband, while the ex-convict eats chicken. The film ends abruptly. And then the film returns, and a group of women, all called Silvia Prieto, are having a friendly conversation over tea and coffee, telling one another about how each is a different Silvia Preto. And then it’s the real end.
I’m left stunned and experience some form of depression, very likely of a psychological type, not organic. I make my mind up that I’ll meet Martín Rejtman and that I’ll kill him before he tries to kill me.
*
A dream. I’m a filmmaker and I’m in London to talk about my films, invited by some obscure academic department. I’m in a hotel lobby waiting for someone to pick me up to take me to a restaurant where the conference attendees will meet for dinner.
A guy who looks a bit like me, perhaps taller, with a moustache, a bit older, walks into the lobby.
‘Martín Rejtman?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Very pleased to meet you,’ he says and stretches my hand.
‘My name is Martín Rejtman.’
‘Nice to meet you, Martín Rejtman,’ I say.
‘Right, shall we go, Martín Rejtman?’
‘Sure, Martín Rejtman.’
‘Martín Rejtman is waiting at the restaurant,’ he says.
I wake up sweating and hyperventilating. I get dressed to go for a jog but when I get to the hall of the building I realise it’s snowing. It’s the first time it has snowed in Buenos Aires since 2007. I have a fever. And I remember I don’t actually jog. I go back to bed wearing my sports clothes but I don’t fall asleep again until the sun comes up.
*
The woman in the supermarket scans the shampoo, the scanner beeps, she puts the shampoo in the shopping bag. Then she does the same with the other bottle of shampoo: she scans it, the scanner beeps, she puts it in the shopping bag.
‘Do you have a Carrefour card?’ she asks.
‘No,’ says Martín Rejtman, presenting his AmEx.
Martín Rejtman pays and walks out of the supermarket, with the shopping bag in his right hand, with the sound of the beeping scanners in the background. He reaches a little square and sits on a bench, gets his phone out and touches the screen a few times. Then he moves the phone to his right ear. He remains quiet for a while. Then he puts his phone back in his pocket and stays there, watching the people walk past in their winter clothes. There’s a guy walking around with an empty plastic bottle of Coca Cola and Martín Rejtman has déjà vu. A car alarm goes off. Martín Rejtman gets up and walks away.
*
I wake up around ten thirty. I feel hungover but I haven’t had anything to drink in weeks. Maybe I need a drink.
I go to the bar in Chile and Bolívar, a little place called La Poesía, just round the corner from my house. I grab a table by the window and order a bottle of beer and a double whisky. The waiter asks me twice if I really want a beer and a double whisky. I say yes, twice. He looks at his watch, then walks back behind the bar and speaks to the the manager. They stare at me for a while. Then the manager nods in approval and the waiter gets a bottle from the fridge. He pours a double whisky from a bottle of Grant’s.
Just as he places the whisky glass and the beer on my table, a group of tourists walks in. They are all dressed in beige shorts and white t-shirts and big white trainers and white socks. One of them is taking photos. They sit on the table next to mine and look around, all smiles, saying, ‘awesome, awesome.’ At some point I forget about them and start reading a story from another one of Martín Rejtman’s books.
Analía is a cashier in a supermarket. She’s alienated. She keeps hearing the sound of the barcode scanner. She hears it everywhere. Her brother is unemployed and moves in with her. He gets obsessed with the gym, dedicates his life to doing pull-ups. He makes friends in the gym and they all come to his sister’s house to drink chocolate milk and eat cookies. They perform pull-ups on a bar they install on a wall. Everybody is into pull-ups. Everybody seems to be unemployed or in some precarious occupation except for an accountant who comes to the house every now and then. And then there’s a party and everybody is doing pull ups on the bar. They start doing pull- ups in groups until the bar is ripped from the wall. And then the story ends abruptly and I’m quite drunk.
‘Excuse me. Excuse me,’ says one of the tourists, a woman, rather tall. She’s not wearing any makeup. Her hair is big and very blonde. ‘Could you take a picture of us?’
*
Martín Rejtman sits in his garden drinking a cup of decaffeinated black coffee, checking his emails, wrapped in a red and black poncho. One of his dogs —Alplax— is digging in the back garden. The dog has been digging in the same place for the past few days and now his whole body fits in the hole. The other dog, a Great Dane called Royal Canin like the brand of dog food, is watching. Every now and then Royal Canin moves to a side to avoid being hit by a piece of mud or rock coming in his direction. When this happens he barks. Royal Canin’s barks are hoarse, almost inaudible, ever since, a long time ago, he fainted after spending a full day barking at a cat in a tree, and his voice never went back to normal.
Hearing the two dogs’ muted barks Martín Rejtman finishes checking his emails. He remembers me and googles my name. Twenty-six pages of results turn up. All of the results are about him. He types ‘Martín Rejtman, el otro.’ But the results are still about him and a band called El Otro Yo, which appears in one of his films.
Suddenly the barks stop. Martín Rejtman gets up and walks towards the hole, next to which Royal Canin now lies fainted. Martín Rejtman peers inside the canine crater but it’s so deep that Alplax can’t be seen.
He calls Alplax a few times but the only thing he can hear is the echo of his own shouts. He calls a few more times but the dog doesn’t answer. Martín Rejtman walks inside the house. Royal Canin wakes up and follows him.
*
The next morning I wake up in a hotel room. It’s sunny and the bedsheets are tough and very white. Brenda, the blonde American tourist, is sleeping next to me. I’m naked but she’s still dressed in her white shirt and beige shorts. She’s wearing her white socks and her white trainers are on top of the TV set.
I leave the bed and start to get dressed. I can’t find my underwear anywhere but I find a pair of Boca Juniors football shorts, still in a plastic bag—they must be a souvenir. I take the shorts and the rest of my clothes and get dressed in the toilet. The shorts are a too small for me but they’ll have to do. When I come out Brenda is still sleeping. I leave.
I stop in reception and write a note for her on my notepad, leaving my phone number and saying I took the shorts and I want to pay for them. I pass the note to the receptionist, who reads it before putting it in a little envelope.
‘Have a good day, Mr Rejtman,’ he says.
‘Same,’ I reply.
As I exit I turn around to look at the name of the place: Palermo Now Boutique Hotel—I’m far from home. I take a taxi. Brenda will never call. When she gets back to New York she’ll tell everyone she slept with an Argentine filmmaker called Martín Rejtman and that he stole her football shorts.
*
In the evening Alplax finally digs himself out next to a big hydrangea that has been dry for a couple of months. He’s covered in mud, wet, and when he walks into the house dirties the parquet floor. Martín Rejtman is both happy to see him and furious about the mess he’s made. Royal Canin barks with his hoarse voice. It isn’t possible to tell whether he’s happy or upset.
Martín Rejtman gives Alplax a bath and then goes jogging around the lakes of Palermo Park. It’s a cold night and there aren’t many people around except some prostitutes, old men cruising in cars, and the group of walkers all dressed in white, that has been walking around the lakes of Palermo Park for several years now, and that Martín Rejtman used as inspiration for the group of people walking around the lakes of Palermo Park in his third film. The film isn’t about the walkers, but about a minicab driver with a girlfriend, who sells his Renault 12 to put money into a business deal to import magic gloves from China. The deal goes wrong and he ends up without a car, girlfriend, or money. In the meantime someone shoots a porn film, many people walk dogs and discuss their different kinds of depression: organic or psychological. People change partners, move house, smoke weed and get hooked on pills of one kind or another. The minicab driver goes dancing several times. And then he walks the streets opening the doors of other Renault 12s with his old key fob. And then he ends up working as a long distance bus driver. And then he’s dancing in a nightclub where they start playing New Order’s ‘Vanishing Point.’ And then the film ends abruptly.
*
Martín Rejtman stretches against a tree for some time. Then he starts running. He does three laps around the lake and crosses paths with the walkers twice. When he’s done jogging he stretches against a tree once more. There are steamed-up cars parked with their engines on and faint moans can be heard all around.
He walks quickly home, has a quick shower, and then calls me.
*
First there’s a girl called Ana who takes a lot of Alplax, a drug used to treat panic attacks and mood disorders. Then Ana meets Laura and smokes dark tobacco with her. Laura’s dog is pregnant. Later both meet with Gabriela and go to the cinema and accidentally end up watching a French film. Ana and Laura later go to a nightclub with Laura’s boyfriend, Federico, and Ana falls asleep because of the Alplax. Then six puppies are born and the girls go to visit Daniel, Gabriela’s boyfriend, who works in a farm in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Federico and Daniel quarrel and Federico returns to Buenos Aires. Ana, Laura and Gabriela return too. And then it’s Gabriela’s birthday and Daniel gives her a hamster and she doesn’t like it and doesn’t know what to do with it and fantasises about shoving it in with the puppies, hoping Laura and the dog mother won’t notice. Daniel and Gabriela break up. Gabriela returns the hamster to a pet shop saying her boyfriend bought it there for her. The pet shop attendant gives her several bags of Royal Canin in exchange. Ana prepares milkshakes and spikes them with several Alplax. Gabriela and Laura end up knocked out by the spiked milkshakes. Ana takes a bus ride and wakes up at the end of the bus route. She buys cigarettes and smokes one leaning against a car. And the story ends abruptly and my telephone rings.
‘Hello,’ I say.
‘Hello,’ says the voice. ‘Can I speak to Martín Rejtman?’
‘Speaking,’ I say.
‘Hi! It’s Martín Rejtman.’
We arrange to meet the next day in the bar in the corner of Estados Unidos and Defensa.
*
On my way to meeting Martín Rejtman I stop at a pharmacy. The pharmacist tells me they don’t sell hemlock or any poison any more. I buy two bottles of shampoo instead.
I walk into the bar. By one of the windows sits a thin man with a moustache; he’s looking at his phone, occasionally glancing towards the street, sometimes around the bar, sometimes at the two bottles of shampoo on the table before him. I recognise his face from my dream: Martín Rejtman, the other one. I sit at another table and pretend to play with my phone. There are plenty of people in the bar and it would be impossible for him to kill me here. Before the waiter comes to my table I get up and walk towards Martín Rejtman. He follows me with his eyes, with a tense smile in his face. When he spots the two bottles of shampoo under my right arm he stands up.
‘Martín Rejtman?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Martín Rejtman,’ he says.
‘Nice to meet you,’ I say.
‘Please sit down,’ he points to a chair. I sit. ‘I bought you
two bottles of shampoo,’ he says.
‘I bought you two bottles of shampoo too. If you don’t like them feel free to change them for something else,’ I say, recalling a line from his film. We’ve bought the same brand, the same type of shampoo: Sedal for fortified growth.
‘Thanks a lot,’ says Martín Rejtman. ‘We’ve bought the same brand,’ he says. ‘And the same type of shampoo!’
‘I was just noticing that,’ I reply
‘What can I get you?’ asks the waiter.
‘Nothing,’ we say in synch and we both feel a sudden change of life.
*
Later, in the evening, Martín Rejtman and I walk across the dance floor and all the way to the bar in a nightclub near Puerto Madero. Everybody is aged forty and above and is dancing in small groups to 80s music. The dance moves belong to the 80s too. So do the clothes. We arrive at the bar quickly and wait for our turn. The waiter, a curly-haired, moustached guy wearing a white shirt and a black bowtie, is serving a couple: a woman with a dark bob and a blond guy who looks like a footballer and who also has a big moustache.
When the barman approaches our end of the bar Martín Rejtman orders four double whiskies on ice. He never asked me what I wanted to drink. But I do want to drink two double whiskies so I don’t say anything. I get one glass in each hand and so does he after paying for the drinks. New Order’s ‘Vanishing Point’ is playing. We start dancing.
We dance alone together, holding and drinking our whiskies, oblivious to anyone but ourselves. Nothing else matters. There’s nothing but our dance, nothing but this moment. No reason to be here. Nothing we want to tell by our dance, no goal, no moral of the story, no pedagogy. No future, no past. Nothing but the dance. And it feels good. Somehow it feels good. And even feeling good means absolutely nothing.
‘This is like one of our films,’ I say.
‘This is one of our films,’ Martín Rejtman says. And then everything ends abruptly1.
Originally published (in a slightly different version) in Under the Influence, edited by Joanna Walsh (Gorse, 2021).