Looking for Nobody

That morning, Gustavo woke up in an inquisitive mood. This characteristic mood of his, prompted him to question almost everything in life. As he looked at himself in the mirror he wondered whether other people looking at him saw him as he did. How real was in truth the image that through the years he had build about himself? Was he just a fiction of his own imagination? Determined to pursue the answers to this questions, he took from the first draw of his dresser a photographic image of himself and set out in a strange quest. It was a quest that would take him from one end of the city to the other, looking for someone that would recognize the man in the picture. He started from his present neighborhood visiting cafes, restaurants, street corners, newspaper stands, and stopping every man or woman that he found accessible to show the picture and ask them a very simple question: ─"Have you seen this man?" Everyone would just look at the picture and shake their heads saying that they have never seen him. The closest comments to recognition were that he looked "familiar" but that they were unable to place him directly. He even sat and shared coffee with people but to no avail. He was so insistent as to knock at doors and stop cars, and when he even went to a police station, they compared the picture with the ones they had, including escaped convicts, and suggested that he file a formal request in the lost person's bureau. Not to waste any time traveling back and forth, he would rent a room every night and get up early the next day, to catch up the morning commuters. After almost a year of walking through the streets of Buenos Aires without any success, heart-broken and tired, he decided to give up the quest and go back home.

A year confronting people with a picture of himself and unable to find a single one that would recognize him, had taught him a bitter lesson. He was all alone on this earth. Almost out of himself with grief, He grabbed the first cab that passed by. As he sat in the back seat of the cab, he realized that he had forgotten the name of the street where he had lived for the last fifteen years. ─"Wait just a moment", he said to the taxi-driver in a state of confusion, "I forgot the street where I was going to"; not mentioning anything about the street being his own. "Drop me in the corner!" He said, embarrassed, after paying the driver. Standing in the street corner for what seemed a very long moment, he desperately sought to convince himself, that it was just a brief lapse and there was not need to panic. To ease his feelings he sat at a sidewalk café and ordered a cup of coffee. In Buenos Aires, every conceivable problem is mysteriously solved with a cup of coffee. He thought, as he had done so many times, that if you do not force it, the name of the street will pop up momentarily.

And as he was trying hard to forget that he was trying to remember, he began to look around, in a purposely distracted manner, to fool his own mind. Actually, they had been fooling each other for so long that they had an innate distrust for each other. While so engaged in this trickery, someone walking by stopped suddenly, and opening his arms walked towards him with a big smile, saying ─"Pedro! What a surprise! I had no idea that you were in Buenos Aires!" Gustavo was in shock. Finally here was someone that claimed to know him but he had the bad lock of not even been Pedro! ─"Sorry sir, he said, but you are confusing me with someone else." The stranger, taking aback by this and visible disappointed said with a scorn ─"Well, if you are not Pedro, then I must not be Carlos." Suddenly Gustavo felt sorry for the man and being that he was totally at lost about his own identity, decided to play along and be Pedro; after all, he at least had someone who recognized him. ─"Just kidding, don't get upset, of course you are Carlos and I am Pedro. How are you?" Relieved, the man smiled and sat at the table with him and ordered another coffee while Gustavo, in his way to being Pedro, began to fine-tune his new role following the stranger's lead. After the first hour together they had all but forgotten the initial awkwardness and no one could have ever suspected that neither one was really the one he said he was.