Hello. I recently finished a short story that I’ve already rewritten several times, yet it still displeases me. I feel the rhythm slips a little in the final part, and it also takes on a tone that is more essayistic than literary. I would therefore appreciate it if you could give it a look and offer some criticism—it would help me a lot. Here is the story:

Malvinas

There was once a man who knew everything. His name was Gerónimo, and we shared a dormitory during our military service back in ’82. He was humbler than anyone I’ve ever known, and I still remember him smiling at me when he would defeat me in chess in just a few moves during the little free time we had.

He was somewhat older than I was, and we would talk at length during the hour of mate. I loved listening to him, for he possessed an immense vocabulary. He could describe each thing with such precision that, on occasion, the general would summon him to draft reports on his behalf.

One day, during one of those conversations, he confessed that he had been writing for some time in a notebook—something he swore to God he would share with me once it was finished. From the little he told me about it, he intended to grasp within a single volume the vastness of the cosmos. He spoke of the universe as though he had wandered through it entirely, as though things were not what we believe them to be. I remember laughing, though I slept poorly that night.

But in May he died. That morning we had been ordered to advance. I knew Gerónimo loathed hand-to-hand combat, yet I asked him to take the front. I do not know whether he hesitated; what I know is that he walked several paces ahead of me when the Englishman emerged from between the rocks and drove a dagger through his throat right before my eyes. I raised my rifle and fired into the bastard’s heart, killing him instantly. I ran to Gerónimo. Blood soaked his uniform and stained my hands. He tried to speak, but the wound silenced him. I held him and shouted in desperation for help, but no one came. And so I watched him perish in my arms.

Since then, whenever I remembered him, the thought of that notebook would intrude upon my mind, unsettling me for the rest of the day. Make no mistake: I searched for it tirelessly after his death. Yet among his belongings I found nothing but a few books, photographs, and some drawings he had made. Still, I knew it had to exist somewhere, for many times I had seen him writing with his head completely bent over that notebook—a dark volume with a gleaming ribbon along the spine—and whenever I tried to sneak a look, he would snap it shut and scold me with a stern expression.
“Not yet,” he would say. “It isn’t time.”

Then, one night, it occurred to me that if the notebook was not in the room, he must have taken it with him that day. I slipped quietly out of the barracks and went to the battlefield. There was no one there at all. Hundreds of corpses lay scattered across the ground, pale as the moon that night. When I found him his eyes were still open, insects swarming about his body, and the notebook lay beside him—as though it had been waiting for me.

Since then, even to this day, I have struggled to understand the facts and data Gerónimo recorded in that notebook. There is an extravagant dialect within it, one that allows only abstract meanings to be conceived. For instance, on the first pages he had written:

Spinoza – proposition – zb.

Beneath it, a sentence I could not comprehend.

I granted that citation many possible meanings, though not without passing through absurdity when no conclusion emerged, for at first I took it for nonsense. The language of the notebook seemed a corruption of our own, in which he used symbols to explain ineffable terms. That is why it took me so long to discern any pattern.

I can say little about why he used letters instead of numbers, but from the first statements in the notebook that I managed to translate with relative success, I deduced that he attributed numbers to universal—or divine—truths, not to humanistic concepts.

From this point onward I filled the margins of the pages with countless annotations, attempts to translate his language and understand his mind; and perhaps, unfortunately, I have managed to decipher more than I should.

Elsewhere in the book he returns to those markings. I reread references that, I suspect, are in the plural—yet an exclusive plural, as though the noun itself knew whom it was meant to name. Beside it there is a diagram, drawn by hand, with folds in the page. As I understand it, it is a plane from which straight lines extend, forming a surface that strives toward infinity. When the sheet is folded along those very lines, a sphere emerges from what had at first been straight lines. In one corner, without interrupting the drawing, there are words in red alluding to an idea of ontological projection, along with other notes I cannot understand.

I cannot mention what Gerónimo wrote on the following pages, more than fifty years ago now. Should anyone ever come to understand it, I fear no one could endure it.

Many times I have thought intensely about the moral weight of the decisions I have made—some of them mediocre, others less so. I admired Gerónimo from the depths of my being, yet he committed the imprudence of seeing too far.

And so I will make certain—this I promise—that no one will ever reach the notebook that I now carry with me. They do not know it, but I have saved them. And let it be known that I still bear the burden of having sent him forward that day…

…"

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