Panic Signs

Panic Signs Cristina Peri Rossi Mercedes Rowinsky-Geurts and Angelo A. Borrás, translators

Panic Signs

Panic Signs

Cristina Peri Rossi

Translated by

Mercedes Rowinsky-Geurts and

Angelo A. Borrás

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Peri Rossi, Cristina, 1941Panic signs Translation of: Indicios pánicos. ISBN 0-88920-393-8 1. Uruguay—Social conditions—Fiction. I. Rowinsky-Geurts, Mercedes, 1951II. Borrás, Angelo A., 1935III. Title.

PQ8520.26.E741513 2002

863

C2002-900015-7

Spanish Edition © 1970 Cristina Peri Rossi. Reprint, Barcelona: Editorial Bruguera, 1981. English Translation © 2002 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5 www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Cover design by Leslie Macredie using a Karel Appel painting, Angry Landscape, courtesy of the Reflex Modern Art Gallery, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Printed in Canada All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or reproducing in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3S6.

Gentlemen: It is time to say that the police force should not only be respected but also honoured. Gentlemen: It is time to say that man, before receiving the benefits of culture, should receive the benefits of order. In a certain sense, it can be said that, historically, the policeman has taken precendence over the teacher. —Benito Mussolini*

* After Mussolini, many Latin American thinkers have not only supported the same thesis, but have put it into practice, with perhaps even greater pains. Among those thinkers are found several presidents, many ministers, chiefs of state, and secretaries. The theory has been especially well received by the generals.

There are probably very few who are unaware that Artigas behaves like a criminal, and that his mob is an army of thieves, murderers, and detestable delinquents who have committed and commit the most dreadful horrors in places that have had the misfortune of suffering them. —Montevideo Gazette, 10 March 1812

Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 I am very interested in botany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2 I live in a country of old people . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3 I have never been in Vermont . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 4 We have not gone to the moon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 5 For more than twenty-five years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 6 Sometimes my mother consoles me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 7 I spent many years caressing statues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 8 I always imagine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 9 She brought me passionate presents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 10 She hands me the scarf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 11 I contribute to the general racket . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 12 She had been brought from Peru . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 13 I have a tiny apartment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 14 She has given me happiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 15 Dialogue with the Writer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 16 For many years I lived . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 17 When I was mature enough . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 18 Hell is bloody birds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 —— ix ——

19 “You are very beautiful” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 20 I will till no more . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 21 In the ghetto of my womb 22 I dreamt that I was

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

23 Desertion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 24 What is happening? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 25 As I was walking along . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 26 The Acrobats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 27 Besieged

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

28 The minister called me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 29 “What are you doing?” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 30 Disobedience and the Bear Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 31 The Statue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 32 I possessed her when I was eight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 33 Mamá’s Farewell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 34 I started to feel your absence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 35 At the corner bar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 36 When the bishops rebelled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 37 A Great Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 38 Such apparent senselessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 39 I was enjoying an ice cream cone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 40 Selene I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 41 Selene II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 42 I have come by train . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 43 Urgent Messages for Navigators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 44 The Social Contract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 45 The Stampede . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 46 The Hero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Other books by Cristina Peri Rossi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

—— x ——

Preface Indicios Pánicos/Panic Signs by Cristina Peri Rossi was first published in 1970 by Editorial Nuestra América in Uruguay. This collection of short texts powerfully presages what would become the cruel reality of Uruguay after the military coup of 1972. It speaks of the despair that people feel when their houses are destroyed by police searching for clues to implicate innocent people of trumped-up crimes against the state. It represents some of the silence used as a defence against a military regime—the silence of a friend protecting another friend; the silence of a parent protecting their children; the silence of an unknown person protecting many more, also unknown. But the texts also show the dangers of being silent. The country that was once known for its stability and democracy became, in the early 1970s, what the writer Mario Benedetti called, “the region of terror.” Censorship, repression, disappearances, and torture took over one of the smallest countries in Latin America. With only three and a half-million inhabitants, Uruguay had more citizens imprisoned per capita than any other country in Latin America. Thousands of people were detained without charges. Thousands more were tortured and killed. There were no legal appeals or due process. Bodies appeared floating in the rivers—bodies whose fingers and teeth had been removed so that identification was impossible. Dismembered bodies were delivered in sealed coffins to families’ front doors with threats that more members of the family could be taken for questioning. Thousands were never seen again after being taken from their beds in the middle of the night; among them hundreds of children. That’s the impending catastrophe Peri Rossi was reading portents of. With its genre-defying allegory, free verse, and innovative prose style, Panic Signs is an elegy for freedom, an elegy so evocative that immediately —— xi ——

after the coup of 1972, Peri Rossi’s work was banned in Uruguay. Seeing her life in danger and refusing to be silent, Peri Rossi left the country and continued to write from Europe. (She currently lives in Barcelona.) Winner of multiple national and international literary awards, she is one of the most salient, prolific, and prestigious voices of Hispanic letters. By translating this collection, we wanted to bring Peri Rossi’s early work to English readers who still haven’t had much opportunity to engage with her writing. Panic Signs brings the reader into a nightmarish world of violent injustice, but it also insists on the redemptive power of the erotic and the artist’s voice speaking out against oppression. By bringing Peri Rossi’s work to more readers, we are also remembering the unnamed graves, the desaparecidos, the tortured, whether in Latin America or elsewhere. And closer to home, the book seems eerily appropriate now that issues of personal freedom and safety—even of terror and siege—have become more relevant to so many North Americans. —M.R. & A.B.

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Prologue POETIC SYSTEM OF THE BOOK

According to the dictionary (the only book which has been constantly rewritten) signs are actions or signals which reveal what is hidden. The dictionary adds a delightful detail: strong signs are those that prompt one to believe or surmise something, in such a way that they themselves are proof or semi-proof. Man is a hunter of signs which are the clues, the keys, to interpret life and reality, since it’s impossible to imagine existence without interpretation. We all act as private investigators following signs that point us closer to the hidden meaning of things, since only banality is transparent. Our duty is to put some order into these scattered and disparate clues, and such ordering is the specific duty of the writer. We live surrounded by signs: dreams, simple quotidian acts, anecdotes, presences, absences, fantasies; it is true that dialogues reflect individual circumstances but they are also a key to something more profound. No catastrophe, no feeling, no idea is surprising or unforeseeable in itself; there were signs which we didn’t see or failed to consider. Reality is a palimpsest which, perhaps out of laziness, cowardice, self-comfort, or obtuseness, we read superficially, our senses accepting the most obvious signs or misinformation, which, for some reason or other, is not always misinformation. To read those signs (and we will never know if our reading has been correct, considering all the possible readings), to make them out, to unravel them, means to possess a vision of the world, without which the kaleidoscope is disconcerting, often contradictory, always risky. So there is no single reading, and the signs are multiple, infinite, endless. This allows for a plurality of books, paintings, poems. A world governed by one read—— 1 ——

ing would be unbearable, and that’s what the politicians sometimes do not understand, nor even visionaries and mystics. At a certain moment in my life (I was older than twenty-five and younger than thirty), I felt that I had the ability to detect signs (whether material or immaterial signs, clues or traces of something) in the world around me, in my country, Uruguay. It’s something that often happens to young people, and I was one of them. This ability, so I thought, did not stem from my circumstantial surroundings, even though they indeed could have fostered it, considering the special conditions of the moment. (There were still five years to go before the military coup, but the civic atmosphere was rarefied, ominous). If those signs were of any value, it was because they revealed something more than the deterioration of reality: to me, they seemed the symbol, the allegory, the metaphor of life itself. I would have thought the same thing if I had lived in New York or in Barcelona, the city where I was fortuitously going to be living—without knowing it then—four years after publishing this book. Signs beckon us. They warn us. They require us to be alert. This need for vigilance is what generates tension in these texts. In most cases, these are not conventional stories because I tried to maintain the hallucinatory and fantastic element along with the dramatic and the ironic, which I discovered in my midst, and which—everything being said—I continued to find in reality. It’s true that the exterior circumstances accentuated some of the paranoid aspects of these signs, but the terror that we feel when we get locked in a public washroom in a foreign country, the fear a man feels when he hears the police knocking on his door, or that a woman feels when she’s being pursued by a stranger in the dark of night, all belong, in my mind, to a similar type of terror. My own fear experienced at university, when we were reading a verse from the Iliad and sirens were piercing the air close to our building, has something to do with the feelings of insecurity I get in some elevators, especially when I have to share the tight space with someone whom I don’t know, and may have something to do with the ancient, unknown fascination that orangutans at the zoo spark in us. It seems to me that panic—which we have learned to control, most of the time—evokes ancient fears: the ones that our remote ancestors must have felt in the face of floods, the tropical sun, sickness, lightning, fire, ashes. There are moments in our lives—and they’re not necessarily the most dramatic ones—which cause us to darkly relive those sensations. Sometimes, the best way for me to translate certain signs into words was through verse, and I respected that tendency, which was so inoffensive. I don’t believe this bothers the reader; in general, it is the critics who feel uncomfortable with the difficulty to classify texts; the reader either accepts them or rejects them for other reasons. —— 2 ——

With a certain amount of presumption on my part, I had written in the prologue of the first edition of this book that I was sure the state, the army, the ministers, the institutions, and organized forms of oppression in general, were going to provide me with a sufficiently long list of panic signs to allow me to keep writing about them. But I neglected to mention, in that first prologue, something else that the book itself would discover: the private, personal, individual sources of hallucination and terror, the miraculous and the absurd. Often, when I cannot sleep, I try to count sheep; the attempt is useless: the first sheep in the flock refuses to jump. The sheep doesn’t walk, doesn’t move, doesn’t follow my orders. It remains indifferent to any effort to impose my will on it. I don’t know what the psychoanalysts would think, but it seems to me that even in the most inoffensive of fantasies, power relations are apparent. In a very clear sense, I don’t own the sheep that I summon in my imagination, and this discovery has appeared to me to be a sign, a clue. To Have and Have Not was the title of one of Hemingway’s novels. False, subtle opposition; nobody has, but some believe themselves to have. —C.P.R. Barcelona, 1980

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1 I am very interested in botany. It could be said that I’m self-taught: I have my room filled with leaves of different shapes, colours, denticulation, and palmation. The leaves are so plentiful that they’ve started to climb up the walls, soaking up the lime from them. Beautiful spear-shaped leaves that point down toward the floor, others with deep, even scallops; acicular ones, like crystal needles. If I walk, the floor creaks, because the fallen ones are dry. Every day I break some, but this doesn’t create a problem: in the streets you can find millions of them, that is, before cars pulverize them or students use them as projectiles against the soldiers. The other day I witnessed a struggle between students and soldiers. Afterwards, a policeman pulled me aside to give a statement. He wanted me to testify how it happened that a banana leaf thrown by a young lad hit a corporal in the face, and when it grazed his eye, it caused the eye to tear a bit. The young fellow was violently repressed by the other soldiers, who threw him on the ground and sprayed him with gasoline. After he was soaked, each soldier, in turn, would go up to him and throw a match at him. He burned for a few minutes. Then he became ashes. After all, the corporal had a red eye, and on this account the judge was very worried. “Somebody must be punished for this,” he said. “This cannot remain unpunished. What will His Worship, the President, say if we don’t punish anybody?” I refused to testify on the pretext that I had a cold: I know many witnesses who’ve been jailed after testifying, because nobody could be found guilty. Nobody dares let an offence to an authority go unpunished. The only thing I regret is that one of these days I will have to give up my leaf collection. That was the advice given to me by a lawyer friend of mine, knowledgeable about the subject. Since students have acquired the very dangerous habit of confronting soldiers with fallen leaves, the government has come to consider the leaves as offensive weapons against the security of the state. Even though my behaviour is —— 4 ——

irreproachable, it’s better if I get rid of them: every day there are house invasions and I wouldn’t want to imagine my fate if they found them in my room. It’s not possible to be safe anywhere, anymore.

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2 I live in a country of old people. Our birthrate is the lowest in the world and it’s not reasonable to expect that it will increase in the near future, given that young couples who are still at the reproductive age emigrate to more prosperous countries. This should come as no surprise, because we don’t cultivate the land, nor do we set up factories, or build homes. Tourism, which was the nation’s hope, has been a resounding failure; no one wants to get to know a country where the only thing you see in the streets is soldiers, a country where peace has disappeared in hotels. The constant house invasions worry foreigners, who are immediately treated as suspects merely for having beards. As for female tourists, they can’t bear to be searched every time they go into an office or a store. The state has apologized to its residents repeatedly, promising to resolve the situation in a few months, but as with so many other projects, like eliminating gangs in the country, the solution is delayed, and in the end, never reached. The only guaranteed thing is policemen and soldiers to maintain order. And besides, we will no longer have national elections because of our turmoil, so it’s necessary to find a new source of employment to occupy the mother country’s children, who will not be able to make a living negotiating retirement or delivering recommendations. (I have already said that, due to the chaos, we will not have elections.) Children are not seen playing in the streets like in other countries; in the places where we used to relax before—I mean plazas and markets, parks, backyards, grassy meadows—one finds only shrivelled-up elderly people, wrinkled like old crumpled papers, and soldiers aiming their rifles at the church dome or an apartment balcony, policemen forcing drivers to get out of their cars to search them. And many civilians also, civilians who are policemen in disguise, from what can be determined. Old people come out to sunbathe, frequenting places where, in former days, mothers used to walk their children; they are like dwellers of a dark region of hell, pale —— 6 ——

and without light, turning to the past, babbling their memories in a half forgotten litany, sung only by a choir of blind shepherds. In the streets we no longer see mothers holding children in their arms, or street vendors selling toys and children’s clothing, and the circuses no longer stop as they pass through our small region on the map: we are inhabitants of an ignored country, finished. The fire of procreation has been extinguished, a victim of infinite disillusion without consolation. The circuses don’t stop anymore to set up their bulging green tents, their painted cages, their strings of lights, and the zoos, sad and abandoned, have become decrepit; only the zoo keeper walks around, portioning out the meagre food to the emaciated, sad-eyed elephants and lions. Some schools have closed their doors; others have been converted into homes for the aged. There are families that can’t take care of their elders so they put them there, where amongst the plants and wooden benches, they spend their days, sallow and slow, emptied of thoughts and memory. Because more than half of the population is elderly, the young people can’t provide for them. In fact, the state doesn’t take care of its senior sons and daughters, nor has it taken any measures to safeguard their welfare; pensions take more than twenty-five years to be granted and hospitals have closed their doors because the state doesn’t have money available for medicines, and so the young people are left to take care of the old who, though they don’t produce, still indeed consume. But the young are very tired. In order to support the old, they have to work all day, and that’s very hard for them to do in a country where there are no jobs. The only way to find a job is to be the protegé of a rich or powerful older person. In fact, all important positions in the hierarchy are monopolized by older men who, afraid of the future, the revolution, death, change, cling to the past which becomes increasingly onerous, as if it were their only salvation, and they resist any novelty, suspicious of the young people, whom they neither understand nor love, and they become more hostile towards them. Old people are a lot of work. Not only do they make it hard to walk in the streets, but they also they spend all day looking around, prying, snooping, here and there, eager to obtain the million promised by the state as a reward for information about unconstitutional activities. They, who have never seen a million in their lives, don’t give up on the possibility of getting it before they die, like with the lottery or betting on horse races, only this new sport promoted by the state turns people into enemies, one against the other. Every day, old people fight in the street, trying to squeeze information from one another, charging like bulls at one another in pursuit of intelligence, making attempts at bribery and trekking to churches, all this to get the million. This pastime has an additional advantage for the state: since old people are so busy all day trying to denounce —— 7 ——

young people devoted to unconstitutional activities, they die sooner, which represents a huge relief for the country; no old man can bear standing in the rain for the hours necessary to prove exactly when his young neighbour leaves the house of his supposed female friend, and after a month of hunting down the suspect, he dies of a heart attack. This being the situation of our beloved country, one can easily understand the young couples’ decision to not have children. They are reluctant to create more victims and they prefer to save up for an abortion rather than a baby. The state, on the other hand, is not concerned with the situation: North American advisors have assured the President that the fewer children born, the greater possibilities he has of staying in power indefinitely, and therefore, instead of favouring the birth of more children, the Executive Power has created a heavy tax on those couples that take advantage of their fertility, so that now a new baby costs as much as a car. That’s why children are no longer born nor are new cars seen. I don’t know if this also accounts for the high rate of homosexuality indicated by statistics. Disillusioned with love, the young people caress one another.

—— 8 ——

3 I have never been in Vermont, New York or Nebraska. I have spent thirty years in this room that I don’t know well and sometimes when I bend over to set my shoes down I make some discovery. For example, I discover that yesterday we wallpapered the walls, that you have hung the handkerchiefs from the back of the bed or that the cigarette butts have dried up on the floor. Then, I think about the infinite abyss of space.

—— 9 ——

4 We have not gone to the moon; we stayed inside the closet because it held so many things from the past from grandmothers and grandfathers who left their traces behind, like hats, traces like dried violets, doll hair, and other things that sometimes amuse us. Next to those dreams, space is a hungry fly.

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5 For more than twenty-five years, my brother Luis has been looking at the sole of his shoe. It’s a nice new sole, because before those twenty-five years, he had only walked one block. What he picked up on that journey— I mean the residue that remained stuck on the shoe—has been enough to meditate on during that interval. I have not reached the floor yet: since I was born I’ve been ready to descend, but the action of leaving the womb for the floor has taken a long time for me.

—— 11 ——

6 Sometimes my mother consoles me over my slow birth. “Don’t be ashamed or complain,” she says, “and don’t believe that what exists outside is very different. There are other reasons for pain, the same darkness, the same wailing. Besides, outside nobody protects you. On the other hand, the way you are now, your support and shelter are assured.” With this, I console myself a bit, but after a while I make new efforts to come out; I move, I move around, I turn around, I steady myself on the sides. I can’t say that my mother denies me her collaboration: once in a while she sighs and pushes to expel me from her fiery entrails. So much work has us red and a little tired. I don’t know what exists outside, but nevertheless, I feel that the correct thing is to come out. Or whatever is expected.

—— 12 ——

7 I spent many years caressing statues. When I got tired, they were destroyed. From dreaming so much, someone had pulverized them. The last one I touched disintegrated in my fingers. I thought it was a sacrificed female astronaut. Things like that have been seen all through the ages. I had missed the age of prophecy and response. I had entered the era of machines. I left the museum and ran away forever from falsification. Art is grandiloquent.

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8 I always imagine that my mother is only twenty-five years old (the age she was when I was born), and that’s why I get angry if I hear her dragging her feet, clucking, coughing, or thinking like an old woman. I don’t understand why at twenty-five years of age she has wrinkles, and I can’t figure out why she goes to bed so early when she’s so young. If in a moment of dreadful lucidity I realize that she is old, I’m horrified, and I try immediately to expel this knowledge from the light of my conscience, so that she can go back to being twenty-five right away. She constantly treats me as if I were a little girl, that’s why we understand each other perfectly. I don’t insist on growing up, because I know it’s useless: for the two of us, time has stopped and nothing in the world can make it run. I will die at five, and she at twenty-five; our funerals will be attended by a crowd of elderly children and children who never got to grow up.

—— 14 ——

9 She brought me passionate presents which I took the trouble to arrange and classify in a box. There was one of her mother’s teeth retrieved after death, a bit yellowish, it smelled of dried herb. One day she brought me a dead fern inside a small case with burnt ends. We cried a whole afternoon over the delirious separation of its filaments. She also gave me an old lens that belonged to her grandmother; the bridge had an enormous bulge which revealed the deformity of her grandmother, who had become spectral after a dreadful accident tore skin from her face, twisting and distorting it. In spite of all this, she continued knitting. There was a thread of that wool: thick, wide, open, loose, a blood colour, more like rope than wool. She would play, pretending to hang her fingers with the wool. And inside a small fish tank, the present that she valued the most: the vile fetus of her brother, detached from her mother’s uterus while she was climbing a ladder and that she quicky scooped up before it dripped on the carpet, and preserved in chloroform so it wouldn’t rot. As time went on, having him opposite the bed, floating in his blue water, I got to see his extremely small eyes, his fin-like shoulders, and the outline of his two legs that never got to split up. My cat also looked at him with curiosity.

—— 15 ——

10 She hands me the scarf and smiles at me lovingly: she hopes that when I reach the corner a gust of wind will hang me in my scarf, or that I will decide to commit suicide with the needle with which she has sewn my shirt. I take the scarf and leave the smile: maybe it’s true that it’s cold outside.

—— 16 ——

11 I contribute to the general racket with a small noise. It’s the noise of my ribs and organs that are growing disproportionately, possessed by the fever of growth, willing to take over the superficial epidermic tissue that encases me. I have consulted the doctor about this strange malady, but I’ve had no luck; he told me to wait. I don’t know what to wait for, while everything inside me continues to grow inordinately, and some of my organs are poking their heads through lesions that they have opened in my skin. The bottom of my lung, for example, has begun to show through just above my waist, announcing its brown edge just at my midriff, and I’m not able to tighten my belt for fear of hurting it. One of my kidneys is also showing its head, round like a child’s, rhythmically striking against my back, like a pendulum placed there by a builder. The muscles break their tensors and I feel them rush along my skin as if sliding into a slippery valley, or onto a frozen runway, or sea landing, or moon landing. And all these selenauts are threatening to distort my movements, because I have not learned to control my new proportions. While my organs grow feverishly, they make music that joins the already existing noises, which together produce an unbearable gabble. What are they celebrating? What are these noises celebrating? What is being celebrated? I’ve seen as many beggars as ever, as many children dying of hunger, as many unemployed, persecuted people; I have learned of a young fellow’s suicide in the Cathedral, which was a form of protest against the inhuman tortures he suffered, and according to what the doctor told me, many deaths by way of starvation have been recorded. Hospitals don’t have sheets or medicine for the ill. The schools are closed and the prisons are full. What then is the general noise celebrating? My crazy entrails are growing at full speed, like young people running away from war, from the hell of the city, so fast my skin doesn’t have time to stretch sufficiently. So it breaks, and my organs come rumbling through the apertures like patios and windows, gushing and smelling of rubber. —— 17 ——

The noise seems to descend from hell. My small noise, on the other hand, rises itself to the sky. I will die from growing, when the size of my body and skin will no longer contain my organs and the weight and length of my developed entrails.

—— 18 ——

12 She had been brought from Peru on the train, a four-day trip. During the journey she saw grass, red sand, dust, dust, dust that trailed along the roads and stayed suspended in the air. Many Indians at the stations, quiet and gloomy. Then again, the sun and the land. Dry light, hunger, Indian, dust. Once in the city, they put her in the middle of a bench in the plaza. When two old men sat down on it, she quietly moved to one end. She was delighted with what she saw from the plaza’s bench: the fountain with its green rusted angels and hissing dragon heads, and between their legs, gluttonous pigeons that purred like machines, children at play and night illumination which sharpened the profile of the hero mounted atop the horse, holiday celebrations. She stayed in the plaza, very quiet. She started to turn blue, the way the streets and the fog do as night falls, but he would put her back on the plaza bench anyway, each morning, while he smoked and waited, motionless in the corner. Her Peruvian socks turned violet-purple from the cold and her blue pleated dress had become a little long, a little loose, if you really looked at it, but she kept her expression of a young woman moved by the discovery of the city, with her two loose, straight braids that fell to each side with naive simplicity. Nobody ever picked her up from the bench, but he kept putting her there with insistence. She was content to watch while he, patient as the Indian he was, waited as he smoked at the round, dull corner of the plaza. He had been told that it was good business, that it was enough to bring her to the city and seat her there, like a dove in the middle of the bench, and he believed it and he kept on believing it, although for some strange reason it wasn’t happening. When she got tired, a long time had passed. Her socks were completely violet-coloured, and her hands purple. Like a tornado, winter had fallen on the city, knocking down cupolas and signs; papers were flying through the plaza like starlings on the wing, and very early, —— 19 ——

the blue misty air took the night sky, imbuing it with the sky’s colour that toned down everything, and turned it into ice. They went back to Peru by train; he smoked, she dreamt.

—— 20 ——

13 I have a tiny apartment from which I can hear all my neighbours. When I turn the key in the lock, I can hardly get in, because the space between the wall and the door is so small it doesn’t allow me inside with the door open at the same time. If I’m standing up I can touch the ceiling with my hands, and sometimes I amuse myself doing that, brushing the ceiling with my hands as if it were a woman’s hips that have to be stroked with an open hand. This is an added advantage this apartment has. If I get tired, I go to bed and my feet reach just to the edge of the window, where a bit of cold comes in, even though it’s closed because the glass is frozen. The tree, on the other hand, is very tall. The one in the middle of the building, because the owner didn’t want to cut it; he loves nature a lot and he thought it was a crime to sacrifice it to build a block of apartments he was going to rent anyway, so it didn’t matter if it didn’t leave us enough space. When we tenants come in or out of our dens, we bump into the tree. A professor of natural history who is a friend of mine, who begs every morning at the Cathedral door (he has obtained the appropriate permit from the municipality), has told me that it’s a giant cypress. When I come into my apartment late at night, I often find the cypress’s filaments on the floor, on the ceiling, or in the air, and they start to bother me because of the irritation they cause in my eyes. However, this is not the worst situation: the tenant in apartment five has to leave the window open all day because the cypress has grown one of its branches toward that side, entering the house through the window, and he doesn’t dare cut it because the owner will evict him, and we all know how difficult it is to find another dwelling. If it’s windy, the cypress branch interferes with everybody’s movements in the tiny house, getting in the way of the feeding bottle that has to be given to the baby, getting into the pot of soup on the stove, or messing up guests’ hair, if there are any guests. To talk it’s necessary to move the branches to one side or another, but they insist on returning to their spot, gently lashing whoever is inside. —— 21 ——

“It is a cypress from India,” says the professor who begs. He begs so he can buy the material needed to teach classes he has the right to teach. He’s not paid for his classes because the state believes that giving classes is a privilege, and whoever aspires to do so has to be registered on a list at the Ministry of the Interior. There, the candidates are analyzed rigorously, their thoughts are pried into, they are examined politically, and even their ancestors’ ideologies are dug up: the state can’t allow itself the luxury of leaving education in the hands of dangerous elements for reasons of security. Only when the candidate has been freed of guilt—if indeed, he has never participated in a demonstration, if he has been deaf and mute, if he has a friend or relative who is a soldier or policeman, if he has never signed any declaration, if he deserves the confidence of the ruling class—he will be able to speak in front of an attentive student audience desirous of acquiring the knowledge that will qualify them to fit into society. Even though many professors have died of hunger, they have died with dignity, confident that it’s a noble death, the one the state reserves for them, as essential pieces of an organization so vast, so complex, so perfect. In some cases, when it’s a matter of professors with recognized ability in their subject matter, they are allowed to beg in the plazas, so that they can provide for their needs, but they die of hunger anyway because the public is indifferent to their pleas: everybody considers it just and appropriate that a worthy and honest professor die of hunger. Sometimes I help him out by throwing him crusts from the window, ever since the day I saw him in the plaza fighting with the pigeons for bread, for which he was severely reprimanded. He opens his mouth under my window and I throw him wheat grains, bread crumbs, leftover biscuits and some raisins, depending on what I might have got that day at the office. He thanks me by giving me botany classes during the evening. No one knows that I’m the one who feeds him.

—— 22 ——

14 She has given me happiness inside a tightly closed box, given it to me saying, “Be careful, don’t lose it, don’t get distracted, it’s taken me a lot of effort to get it: the markets were closed, the stores didn’t have any, and the few street vendors that used to exist have retired because their feet got tired. This is the only one I could find in the plaza, but it’s one of the authentic ones. It has a little less shine than the one we used to consume when we were young, and it’s a bit wrinkled, but if you walk properly, you won’t notice the difference. If you set it down somewhere, please pick it up before you leave, and if you decide to take the bus, hold it tightly in your hands: the city is full of thieves and they could easily snatch it from you.” After all these recommendations, she let go of the box and put it in my hands. While I was walking, I noticed it didn’t weigh a lot, but it was a bit uncomfortable to use: while I was holding it, I couldn’t touch anything else, nor did I dare leave it somewhere in order to do the shopping. So I couldn’t amuse myself, or even less, window-shop, as is my habit. In the middle of the afternoon I was cold. I wanted to open it to see if it was one of the authentic ones, but she told me that it would evaporate. When I loosened the paper, I noticed that the label had an inscription: “Keep, but do not use.” Since that moment I have kept happiness in a box. Sunday mornings I take it for a walk around the plaza so that others will envy me and feel sorry for themselves; at night time I keep it in the back of my closet. But summer is coming and I’m afraid: how can I keep it away from the clothes moths?

—— 23 ——

15 DIALOGUE WITH THE WRITER

“I read your book.” “What do you think of it?” “It’s a bit confusing.” (On the other hand, your soul is clear, señora.) “I’m very sorry.” “Maybe you could explain to me what you meant in it.” “I can’t answer you. If I knew, I wouldn’t have written it.” “Then the words, they are all darkness?” “I don’t know what to tell you. At that very time, a lot of people were dying in the streets. You can still see the large number of wounded and crippled that roam the street, or beg for alms, or hope for a bit of compassion and public charity.” “But meanwhile, you were writing it.” “No, señora: I was dreaming it.” “Dreams are not always easy to understand.” “I write the way I dream, señora.” “Don’t you think you could respect the reader a bit more?” “I respect the reader so much, señora, that I would never want to touch the dream, nor touch the book, nor betray the magnificent alienation of the metaphor.” “I no longer understand.” “It’s understandable.” “If you don’t know what you meant when you were writing, and you’ve created this uneasiness in me, come at least and make love to me.” “I can’t, señora, forgive me; since the last rally suppressed by the police, I have generated a strange impotence: I was at a café reading my poetry and by chance I saw a grenade explode right next to the legs of a young woman and the façade of the National Library. The noise inter—— 24 ——

rupted my reading, and even though it didn’t bother me, the event left me with a bad impression which I still haven’t been able to banish, like an intruder in my garden.” “If you don’t know what you’re writing and you’re not capable of making love to an unsatisfied woman, how can you still live?” “Because of a state decree: I will be preserved as a living image of a world in decline. I will be on display in the museum, preserved by refrigeration.” “That’s very sad. I feel a profound pity for you. I’m sorry if I have been rude.” “Don’t worry about it. I forgive you. To remember me, take a ticket: you’ll be able to go to the museum everyday for free.”

—— 25 ——

16 For many years I lived inside a bottle. As soon as I forced the doors of my mother’s womb with some difficulty, she put me there to preserve me better. Every other day she would freshen the water in the jar so that I lived in perfectly hygienic conditions. I got used to seeing the world from the bottle, through glass. The appearance of things became inoffensive, presences became blurry, colours acquired more importance, but I was also indifferent to the heat and cold of objects. Even so, I was in danger of dying many times because of the cat. He used to appear unexpectedly on the left side or on the right, and through the jar’s thick glass, his legs, crouched down in ambush, looked like enormous marble columns. He sniffed me from behind the glass, and sometimes he scratched its surface, wanting to catch me. “Strange animal this one,” he would think, while looking at me. As soon as I saw him up close, I became agitated inside the bottle, full of anguish and fear. The cat’s bright eyes were stalking me, vigilant of all my movements. My mother almost always appeared at the right moment, frightening and shooing him away from me; then she would turn toward my water and comfort me sweetly. She used to take the glass between her hands (I was like a fish then) and she would walk me through the house, to make me forget the fear, moving me from the table to the credenza, from the living room to the bedroom, from the library to the armchair. I didn’t like to be by the flowers, because their perfume contaminated the water. The white lilies were especially overwhelming. And the jasmines. Sometimes she would let one tear drop inside the jar, disturbing the surface of the water in which I moved about, carried away by I don’t know what sadness. The tear slid, took different orbits, and finally mixed with the water in the jar. That moment was especially emotive for me, when, trembling, she would let one of her extremely pure tears fall from her sky-blue and —— 26 ——

slightly evasive eyes, and it would pass through the surface, the lake of glass water, and it would reach me, and I would take hours to drink it, full of unction and devotion. I don’t know why my mother would cry. Perhaps it was because of my father, explorer of far away planets, gone on cosmic voyages, leaving her in the greatest poverty, or because of my older dead brother (the cat devoured him while he was in the cradle), because of some sick neighbour, or because of the light, or because of the broken mirror that reflected only one side of her face. She would cry for this or for that, and while I swam I liked to pursue her scar, that small proof of her crying, the tear cutting through the bottle’s water. When I managed to catch it, I felt very proud and went around with it under my arm, through the bottled sea, happy, like a diver with his pearl; afterwards I would slowly drink from this gourd-like vessel of pleasure. I would drink it from the outermost part inwards, consuming it with delight. It was an intense and very heavy tear. After drinking it I was satiated and satisfied. Now that I have come out of the jar and my mother has gotten into it, nobody cries anymore. For years I haven’t had a tear from my mother. (Put an advertisement in the newspaper).

—— 27 ——

17 When I was mature enough to abandon the glass jar, my mother got into it. She had been tired of living for some time and envied me a little every time she saw me carefree, swimming around the glass. I was already grown up enough and she was old. “Son,” I read in her eyes many times, “I’m so tired. It’s time to retire from this world; I’d like something more tranquil, my eyes are tired of looking and looking, and my ears are tired of hearing of penury and punishment. If I could find a resting place...” and I know that she looked at my bottle with envy. You probably can’t believe that a mother could feel envy for her children. In your world, frightfully small, everything is arranged in such a manner that sons are good sons, parents are good parents, chores are fundamental and money is the biggest aspiration. A world for a few, for sure. You will disappear along with it without a trace. Instead, my mother belongs to another world. In it, because of misery, hunger, and poverty, children can envy their parents and vice versa. My mother envied my jar, which was all I had, because it was something more than the nothingness she had. Then I withdrew like a crustacean clinging to the jar’s walls and I warned her with desperate gestures not to attempt it: she had grown a lot and if she decided to get into the glass jar, we would both die, asphyxiated: the jar was too small for her. I imagined with terror what would happen if she submerged herself, displacing toward the outside, toward the emptiness, a quantity of water directly proportional to the volume of her body. At the bottom now, without water, where she would flatten herself out like a worm, we would be in repugnant carnal contact. I saw her sometimes, going around me like a dog; like a bird on watchful alert, she circled my glass jar. I often wondered if she could wait long enough for me to grow up and only then, when I abandoned the jar, she would occupy my place. I would get old and she would get smaller, until our proportions would be exactly inverse to the ones at my birth (when I —— 28 ——

would be big like a mother and she small like a newborn son) and at last she could take my place. Each time she got closer to me in her threatening espionage, I trembled and drew back, uneasy in the water. I thought she was going to throw herself on top of me or that she would get inside the jar, anxious, though her legs or her arms might remain outside. Nevertheless, I hid my fear and she calmed her impulses, endured her tiredness, and she used up a bit more of her patience waiting for me to be old enough and for her to be small enough. When I turned forty-five, I leaned on the green glass, I firmly grasped the rim of the bottle with my nails, and I jumped on the table. She, small like a raisin, was waiting on a chair. So small she could barely be seen. As soon as she saw me outside, without saying a word, she sprang up on the jar’s lip and made it to the water. Since then she has been swimming there. She doesn’t wave to me anymore, when I come into the house or when I leave, and each day that goes by I notice her smaller, but at last she’s resting. Floating in the bottle’s water, she looks like a fallen animal, a tiny roving insect. But I know that she’s happy now. I went to the market today and bought a red fish. I’ll put it in the jar so it can keep her company. She won’t be alone then, although it’s possible the fish might eat her.

—— 29 ——

18 Hell is bloody birds, their guts shattered, and still wailing.

—— 30 ——

19 “You are very beautiful,” the man said to the young woman who had undressed for him, “but I am tired of ploughing.”

—— 31 ——

20 I will till no more nor will I cultivate new growth or children. I will not climb again Nor will I set your womb becoming sombre. I won’t work the hoe through your field, your soil, your legs open in exaltation. I will not harvest tatters out of season. All this, to escape taxes.

—— 32 ——

21 In the ghetto of my womb I was keeping a seed still. A seed, a seed. And the seed started to shout because it was helpless. Helpless, like half the world, half of humanity. The seed wanted to emerge, terrible is the seed’s instinct Unremitting, like the instinct of each thing. I let it dry out. I’ll let it slip through so it won’t sprout any more The seed will dry out.

—— 33 ——

22 I dreamt that I was at the edge of a plate, barely holding on with my hands (or was it with my teeth?) and it was so difficult to get up on the plate, on to the smooth, white surface of the china.

—— 34 ——

23 DESERTION

At dawn, there was a woman hanging from the roof. From a distance it looked like a statue, but up close you could see that it was a desperate woman. He called to her from the ground. “Come down from there,” he told her. He tried to sound authoritative, because he was scared and he had a horrific fear of what was about to happen. From a distance it looked like a statue, but up close you could see that it was a desperate woman. She was looking down from the cornice, and swaying in the air above, like the shadow of a palm tree, leaning a little against the side of the terrace roof, she seemed to be stuck to the wall and a bit twisted, like those adornments that old builders placed on friezes, as decorations. “Think about it. Nothing is going to be achieved with your death,” the man shouted without conviction. She stayed there, quiet, hanging on with her two arms to the edge of the terrace roof, her whole body in the air, about to fall. She wasn’t shouting, she wasn’t crying, nor was she saying anything; she was just waiting for her arms to get tired and then she would fall. “This is horrible,” the man said, in a softer voice. Horrible was what both were waiting for: she holding onto a piece of wall, and he imagining how she would fall, how her body would go through the air till it shattered on the ground, like a bag of flesh splattering the tiles and then he would run, run or pick up whatever, perhaps a shoe or one of her eyes that had popped out or some other part of her body that had come loose, and was wandering down the street. “You can’t make me do this,” shouted the man. She continued, unperturbed, still hanging from the cornice of the wall which ended at the terrace roof. Her two arms surrounded the small mass of mortar and brick, but surely they wouldn’t be doing that for long. —— 35 ——

“Think it over some more. You can’t subject me to this,” the man still went on. The woman said nothing. Maybe she couldn’t hear either. At any rate, he considered it best not to insist. He moved nervously along the edge of the street darkened by the stain of the woman’s shadow projected on the ground. He walked two metres, coming and going, looking up once in a while, but most of the time, murmuring as he walked to and fro in desperation. “Consider the opportunity of doing it,” shouted the man. “You’re not going to achieve anything better than this,” he insisted. The woman let go of one hand, and kept hanging on with the other one. The man trembled, broke out in sweat, shouted, ran in one direction, came back, ran in the other, started to make a quick move and then stayed in suspense the woman slowly began to use her arm to hang on again, the arm she’d had to let go to take a hair from her forehead. “For sure you’re going to regret this,” proclaimed the man, now red and trembling, shouting at her, shouting at the air, at the space, at a lone tree, at the one cloud that lingered above the Cathedral. He would bring a ladder and rapidly climb the ten floors, until he grabbed her by the waist and he would force her to come down, even though she might try to slip away and her eyes might become blurry because of the white dress with purple dots she was wearing. After forcing her to come down, he could take her to the hospital where the doctor would surely tend to her, and give her the necessary care for a mentally ill patient, a psychopath, or a paranoiac, like she was for sure. Afterwards, the doctor would dispense the appropriate treatment, electroshock, or whatever, with which she would shortly improve, and she would find herself again in the company of her husband and children, and she would return to work, and she would thank him for dissuading her from that foolish attempt. A strong gust of wind blew up and he got frightened by its force, by its pressure that could lift the woman’s dress, making it catch things in its way, and cause her to be thrown forcefully to the ground. But the wind didn’t succeed in dislodging her. “I am sure that we’ll find the solution. Life isn’t so terrible,” he uttered, feeling immediate embarrassment because of what he’d said. He was indeed sorry for lacking a sense of decency, for having done something ridiculous without meaning to, something not befitting his age, and he wanted to apologize to that woman and to other men and women. If he could be sure she wasn’t going to throw herself from there at any moment, he’d run a couple of blocks to the police kiosk to ask for help in —— 36 ——

order to dissuade this crazy woman. They should know what to do in cases like this. Or even better, if she could wait just a little, for just a second, he would go across to any house and phone the fire department. They’d arrive with their long hoses and their nets and they’d rescue her against her will. For sure, the woman would be frightened by the sight of the nets; in these situations people are over-sensitive and any little thing bothers them. Wouldn’t she likely think that they were treating her like an animal, putting a net underneath her? It was possible the net would bother her. Well, a ladder could still be used as the last resort. An escalator, enormous, impressive. Like the ones used to connect electric poles? And touch her with calm, delicately, not going directly up to her, but going around to get close to her, like you would to a wild animal, and try to persuade her with soft words, like you would talk to wild animals when you are trying to trick them, carefully getting closer, lying to her, talking about something else, the weather, the family. “Get up to her slowly, pretending,” the officer would tell me. And they would grab her with gloves, they would touch her dress with rubber gloves, as if she were a loose cable, a cable detached from a gigantic electric installation, a rebel cable, a cable sticking out, a cable that has slipped, a deserter, an inefficient one, one that has not fulfilled its function, the expected one, the assigned one, the one that was given to her in the big distribution, she a rebel was she a deserter? At any rate, she had to be dissuaded. If only he could bring himself to move from down there, while she, without hearing him, with an absurd tranquility and stony fixation, merely leaning there, waiting for her arms to tire so she would fall, in order to desert definitively, leave, disappear. “Wait a minute; please, wait a minute,” the man shouted. and giddy, he started to climb the steps of the building to get to the elevator. He would use the elevator to get there quicker. He opened the iron door and saw the red walls, with the small mirror in the middle. “I’m sure I can get there in time,” he said to himself in the comfort of the metallic elevator. she started to come down she came down softly, noiselessly, disengaged from the cornice and touched down on the ground, big, open, sprawled out like an avenue.

—— 37 ——

24 WHAT IS HAPPENING?

“I’m coming,” the older man said, moving to the unoccupied side of the bench so the doves on that side, despite being old plaza doves who were accustomed, thought it would be appropriate to alight a little farther down the bench. They were a bit insecure, with age these old people who don’t see anything could cause an accident, such as having a wing stepped on by an old man or suffering a bad blow so in the end they skittered off, even though the old man didn’t get up. “No, it’s better for me to come,” said the other old man, who was a little younger, but not by much. People knew he was a little less old because the wrinkles on his face were less pronounced than those of the older man’s—his wrinkles looked like little slashes that penetrated the bone—and because he could breathe more easily and regularly, but even so, they were both so old the existing difference in their ages didn’t matter to anybody, except themselves. All old people are the same, anyway, like the newborn: all of them drool, tremble, have bad eyesight, hear from one ear only (some from the right, some from the left); they all lose their memory, they all drag their feet, they are all clumsy, they moan; they all say they want to die while all along they hold on shamelessly to life. Some use a cane, others don’t. “Today is my turn to go,” insisted the first one. The doves were eating. They had been eating for years. If these weren’t the ones who had been eating for years, they were other ones, but whichever they were, they always ate. They did so with great concentration and purpose, with true dedication, pecking almost uninterrupted, until not a single breadcrumb was left, ‘til they completely finished the biscuit that the boy had thrown from a package. The point of eating so much never occurs to them. —— 38 ——

“I’ve read in the newspapers that they’re thinking about exporting white doves,” one dove said to another, still eating. As she spoke she continued to alternately raise and lower her head quickly and voraciously. “Where are they going?” asked the other one, also continuing to eat: she was a blue dove. She was not concerned about the topic since they were exporting white ones. If she had been told that they’d be exporting blue ones, she would have caused a great commotion. “To India,” said the first one, who was better informed. “But anyway, even though it’s your turn, I’ll go,” said the younger old man, without getting up from his seat. It was very convenient, because the doves could continue eating without wasting their time skittering off, prompted by the old people’s movements. “It’s a very underdeveloped country. I was there last spring,” the blue dove commented. “According to the newspapers, white doves will be sent as fresh meat in nylon packages. It seems that in India dove meat is very popular.” “Will foreign currency come in because of this?” “I suppose so,” answered the first dove. “In exchange for white dove meat packaged in nylon bags sent to India, Hindus will send some petroleum to fill some tubes and light up fifty lamps. In this way the economy progresses.” “It will be a safe operation?” “That, I can’t affirm. For the tenth or one-hundredth time, cereals and products have been sent in bad condition from the United States; since no one eats them there—they’re very careful—they give them away to the more needy countries. I have tried some of these grains. They tasted awful.” “Is there any hope that the Hindus will show more gentility?” “I am not well-informed. Is India an empire?” “I don’t think so. The only thing I know about India is the hunger. I was there last spring. I’ll never go back. I thought I was going to die on the way back. Not a bit of grain.” “Did they taste good?” “No, they were bitter: they love peace and die thin. Thin dead people have a bad taste.” “Today is Tuesday, isn’t it?” said the first old man. The other agreed. “Then, it’s my turn,” insisted the first one. However, he didn’t move. He looked wearily at the bench across from him. There was a young man sitting, observing the comings and goings of the doves. “I am telling you that it’s better if I go. You must be tired,” the other old man grumbled, without moving. Children were running around the fountain. In it, there was a rusty angel urinating since time immemorial. —— 39 ——

A newspaper page came flying by. A little English movie star was visible, the one to blame for bringing down a minister, and a picture of a luxurious yacht where some princes, European nobility, were getting some air leaning on the railing. “Aren’t you cold?” the woman taking a stroll asked the young man sitting down. She did not have any stockings; her wool skirt was warn through and very short, and her lips were purple. “It’s useless,” confessed the young man, “I don’t have a single cent.” She looked at him, disillusioned and resigned. “What’s going on?” asked the young woman without waiting for an answer. “I don’t have anything either, otherwise, you’d come for free,” she added before walking off. “Don’t insist: I’ll go,” said the first old man, and he stayed sitting down.

—— 40 ——

25 As I was walking along, a mistake from my youth began to crowd my path. I said to her, “Let me get by, I’m in a hurry,” and the mistake answered me with sheets of paper and books in hand. The sheets I had forgotten. They were papers full of signs, papers from bars and movie theatres; I had doodled on them, scribbling engagements and memories, little encasements for words which were meant to capture each frivolous, fleeting, and chilling moment. I recognized these signs as I would a dusty, half-forgotten fable whose scent stirs up in us its secret symbolism. The books, those “enemy soldiers,” on the other hand, I had completely forgotten, since censorship (the minister’s steady lover) had banished their practical use in the republic. Disconcerted by my hurry, the mistake dropped the papers the books. “You had promised me one day a greater, more honourable happiness, a solemn militancy. What’s become of your fighting spirit?” I recoiled, full of sadness. I got a move on. I didn’t want to stop. I wouldn’t have ever wanted to stop to meditate. “You must know through the newspapers,” I mumbled ashamed, “about preventive prisons, destitution, police tortures, punishments, sanctions, exiles... Censorship has a fever and allows us only to forget and run.” She let the books go tumbling on the sidewalk. “At the very least, you’ve been weak,” she told me with melancholy, and then I lost sight of her as she walked under the trees along the avenue. I stepped back a bit, to get some distance. I was ready to start running again, as usual, except I had forgotten where I was running to.

—— 41 ——

26 THE ACROBATS

And now, Maria Teresa, until another day. No more flowers in my room, Maria Teresa, awaiting your visit. In the photograph album, Maria Teresa is a flowing shadow, a liquid blot now dried, that has left behind a yellow flower, from the fixative, testimony forever, Maria Teresa, that your gaze is the warmest I can remember, the warmest I can ever evoke, and your smile, delicate and ethereal, because you are noble, and the features of your face are revealed there, forever, so that tomorrow your grandchildren can take them in, with laughter, and they’ll say, “Look at those times, those dresses are a laugh, what ridiculous styles, and the poses are so contrived!” Or perhaps, the Investigative Officer who may come to search and seize, among the piles of paper that have accumulated in my room, Traces Of That Young Woman You Knew, and discover among my clippings, now yellowed and meaningless, among unpaid bills, theatre rehearsals, movie programs, medicine bottles, traces of you, the distinguishing marks of your face, Maria Teresa, the subject of files. And they may ask what you’ve done, what we’ve done, what we did that day, the day that, the day that, the day that I no longer remember, that we saw a movie, I don’t remember what day it was we went into a horrible café where we had a cup of I don’t know what, and I won’t say, I won’t say, I won’t tell them what I don’t know: where you are, what you did, what we did, because of the wind, the weather and Maria Teresa, even if by chance I knew where you are. Better I tell them nothing. And I took your picture without you realizing it, I pretended that the camera wasn’t loaded because sadly, I was intuiting the present because I knew that each moment was a fleeting one, so I brandished the camera as in a game, that game we regrettably schemed up, and I pressed the shutter release which wasn’t supposed to be focusing on anything and in the intimate conspiratorial silence of the film—she and I, brother and sister—Maria Teresa you —— 42 ——

were a flower, Maria Teresa, sister and friend, fraternal and lover, and right then you were a Polaroid print, a piece of film exposed with the light of your eyes, your silhouette, and had it been an audio tape, I wouldn’t only be seeing your smile now, but I’d be hearing your voice, your voice telling me in fun, “Please don’t tease,” and then you would say, “This evening and this evening and this evening,” Maria Teresa telling me, “Crazy, crazy, crazy guy” and “You are, you are, you are infinite.” What have you done what have we done what did we do, you alone and on your own, leaving me at any time? Because The days passed each other like enemy armies and the nights were venereal Nights of balsam and wakefulness of joy and sentinels of vertigo from ardour we had discovered a new romanticism, we were early prophets of the modern feeling. the great hemorrhage of Ego suddenly supplanted by the ever-open vein of you us they. The lesser god of the self now sunk, we erected the great temple of [you; vertigo follows another vertigo, and one martyr is followed by five all a matter of space and volume; substituting the circus and the lion with the Christian inside on any street the army, and one of us in the centre, dancing. Or, instead of the cross the nails and martyrdom, prison torture and death Slave-dungeon ghetto scourge jungle wire-fence electric prod a nameless death, “disappeared” “whereabouts unknown” “accidental” “casualty” “negligent” “involuntary”; the same for Maria Teresa, but clothed differently. The world, yesterday and today, armed with great complicity, with the blessed help of everyone, some of them more or less innocent, the Holy Papal Offices and the Opus Dei, the New Yorker, McNamara, the Falange, the Movement for Peace and Family, the International Committee for Property Rights, Richard Nixon and the great newspapers; James Bond, Briggitte Bardot, Liz Taylor’s jewellery, all in the same arena, but keep in mind, always set up so that nothing is disturbed and yesterday’s Christians, under another name and with a new look, appear at the circus —— 43 ——

arena, as lions so solemn, so voracious, and such good functionaries and family men. The list, Maria Teresa, was already extensive without your name, and maybe that’s why I didn’t resign myself to adding yours, to courteously hand over your gaze to them, your smile, your warm skin, the intimacy of your body, the rhythmical communication of your womb, your long white arms, the soft hills of your breasts nestling a lake in between them, your legs like two oars rowing gently to the sides. Maria Teresa, I didn’t want to give them that gift, I had the absurd and impossible desire to dig a hole, I had the absurd and impossible desire to open a trench in the middle [of history, a hollow, a gully, to make an underground tunnel where we could withdraw, where I could hide you, where I could keep you and promise you, where I could keep you forgotten taken care of and treated lavishly Maria Teresa in an island of history, Maria Teresa, an escapee from the book that teaches the unin[terrupted struggle Maria Teresa, a fugitive from the Bible, the circus, the lions, the [torture trap, the war, the plague, the siege, Maria Teresa, I got the notion to dig a safe margin to [remove you to, times aren’t good, death is everywhere and I feared for you, and I feared this mortal determinism from [others; this adherence to rules followed since time immemorial rules that are the wings of an implacable bird. It flew flew flew the bird flew one more time, Maria Teresa, leaving our house dazed and lifted our house upside down and checked, undressed girl our house unhurriedly inspected, it collapsed, fell like a frightening children’s catastrophe like the collapse of a palace with no support without foundations —— 44 ——

our house, dazed and delirious from the dogs that sniffed its walls like sex being pawed out of a deflowered girl like a ploughed vagina. Our treaded house. It’s not that I am crying over its ashes as I cry; it’s that this hard time, like a piece of crusty bread that I refuse to chew, envelopes me with its smoke in its grey sleeping place in its scorn This time and its destiny are what’s making me sick I am afraid, Maria Teresa, I’m telling you, wherever you are, and I’m beginning to sob and become tender and melancholic like a [young man who has not yet known woman I’m afraid to wake up a neurotic hypochondriac soon to be convinced by the anaesthetist that life is still not so bad that there is always something left bishop or woman I don’t know what soccer or the chance to write in verse and then your photograph, Maria Teresa, would be the final testimony of the closure of history. Your photograph its blurred message would find its resting place in my heart your picture the smile atop the hills of your departure your picture and the Commissary checking my house the papers the books the memories the album the herbarium the terrace roof the inside of the furniture the refrigerator the —— 45 ——

movie and photography magazines the address book the telephone book with names underlined the airline maps the record covers the back of the television set the medicine boxes the bellies of your stuffed dogs and the elastic on the bed. Fear of the circus Maria Teresa.

—— 46 ——

27 BESIEGED

When I returned home I found four enormous blue birds looking directly at me. Four enormous blue birds. It was nighttime, so the blue uniform of the bird closest to me got lost in the street’s air which was also blue. I tried to hurry to move away from there as fast as I could, so they wouldn’t see me. So I tipped my head down towards the ground, I sunk my hands in the pockets, and I tried to look the other way. “Such bad luck. It had to be now,” I was thinking, because I knew that in spite of my efforts, the birds had seen me, they had consulted each other, looking at each other’s eyes, and one of them was walking towards me, in no rush, very sure of himself. “Schttttttt achttt acrr acrrrrrrr acr.” I stopped, already giving up. “Are you talking to me?” I said, turning around towards the bird that was approaching me. Immediately, I knew the die had been cast: the animal was coming toward me, ready with the severity of his look, and the giddy turn of his wings, to describe a labyrinth of roads and fences around my body. It was a shame that, among the many acrobats who moved around at night, he had to choose me for his turns. But even before I came in front of them, I knew it was my turn, not because of me especially, but for the simple reason that the birds had been perched on the building’s pergola for some time, looking over from the vantage point, under the arcade, on the porch with metal edges. For sure they had been on the cornice for hours, feeling useless, bored, lazy; they had been looking many times to the south, toward the dirty street full of papers, the desolate street (the last cars were silently withdrawing and there were no acrobats left; if by chance someone appeared who was known to them, he was of course invulnerable to the birds: acrobats who waved from the sidewalk, with a familiar and tough air, an air of a commander-in-chief—towards which the venerated —— 47 ——

birds inclined their heads, a little bothered because they had to respect them—or some of the female acrobats, who used to throw grains to the birds, from the harvest of the night’s seductions, deceptive burlesque whores). They had looked toward the south, and then toward the west, with nothing able to shake them out of their drowsiness, out of the vice of fruitless vigilance, out of their inactivity. Tired of being custodians of the old building (the offices of a night newspaper nobody had threatened), and wasting their time, the birds decided to become active with the first defenceless acrobat who walked by. I saw that resolution in their eyes before I was in front of them, and even though I wanted to avoid the clear decisiveness of their necks, the tumultuous vibrations of their wings, nothing could have saved me: they were tired of guarding to no avail, and they would throw themselves in a formation on the first passerby in order to justify their function, to show their usefulness. I felt agitated and annoyed: at least, if the birds’ action had been directed especially against me after knowing and examining the files of each acrobat, their attack, as the result of a selection, would have meant something to me. Instead, it was my turn to be detained by the birds for insignificant and casual reasons, such as: the fact that I had taken that street and not another; the hour of the night; the desire to squawk on the part of one of the birds who had spent hours on guard, without being able to croak with pleasure in the line of duty; a second bird, fed up with standing motionless, yearning to change position; the lust for power of the third bird, a blue sparrow hawk very proud of his plumage, his powerful shanks, the sharpness of his claws and the strength of his bright yellow beak; the arrogance of the fourth bird, the youngest, anxious to exhibit his abduction abilities in order to obtain a promotion. Simply because it was I who happened to pass by just at the moment when they had decided they were bored, and when they saw me, they conceived the possibility of amusing themselves for awhile, like if any other acrobat had passed by, simply because I passed by exactly at the moment they decided they’d have some fun, show off their wings, show all that they’d acquired since the day the circus owner had chosen them to maintain order, that was why when passing by the façade of the old building, the birds started flying towards me. When one of them was near me, I resigned myself to being searched. “Your documents,” the first bird ordered. It was an ordinary bird: barely a bearded eagle with lapis lazuli plumage; when he leaned towards me, certain that I didn’t have any documents, for which he had enough excuse to take me in a rapid flight to the big central cage, I observed his complexion: his dull skin, greenish, olive, covered with enormous black pores, open like cesspools; inside those pores you could see the swamp of his flesh, stinking and coarse, like the undertow at the bottom of a dirty —— 48 ——

lake; his eyes were black, very close together, with malignant brightness but without depth; his beak hard and corneous, stony and eaglish; the disgusting smell of his feathers nauseated me; they smelled like old rancid oil kept in a barrel, like old grease used for tools, like the tar that coats the waters around the ship’s bow. His smell and flapping revolted me. His stilts were hard and shiny like boots; some short feathers were scraping the tops of his legs which terminated in terrible claws, but those were dull feathers, blackened, and weakly joined to the quill. When I handed him the documents the bird made a gesture showing his annoyance and irritation, he flapped his black wings like flags of war and piracy and he examined the papers at length under the street lamp. He turned them around repeatedly inside and out; he was looking for some fault, something that would make his work easier, an indication of forgery, and when he got tired, he stopped, and grudgingly returned them to me. “What were you doing at this hour in the street?” he asked with an imperial inflection. I looked at my watch before answering him. It was quarter to twelve. “I went to accompany a friend to the bus stop,” I declared, which was completely true. If the birds had been paying attention, they would have seen me pass by previously with a beautiful, dark-haired acrobat, walking along that same street, in front of the newspaper building that no one had threatened, by the empty gas station, by the closed store, by the magazine kiosk without clients, by the shut-down theatre. Anyhow, it was a relief that the birds had not seen my acrobat pass by; it’s certain that, bored as they were, tired of invigilating without any results for possible deserters or rebel acrobats, they would have thrown themselves on top of her without any modesty, happy to sink their beaks and claws into her flesh which was much more tender, sweet, light, fresh, and fine than any they had encountered since being assigned to guard the circus. Stories like that circulated around the city everyday, in spite of censorship. How the birds had raped this or that acrobat, how they had subjected some other to infamous treatment, keeping a pregnant dancer standing up for forty-eight hours with her arms up, without any food or drink, while they played cards around her, pecking her every time they scored a point. I understood that having my documents in order, instead of having to protect myself in front of the birds, had made them more irritated, as if they were forced to imagine something else now. And they weren’t prepared to use an imagination they didn’t have, and it’s well-known how much it takes to make a bird think, even the most elemental thoughts or ideas. They are capable only of obeying, and in some cases—according to the corruption of their nature—of torturing in the most vulgar and least subtle way. —— 49 ——

“It’s forbidden to walk around here at this hour,” squawked the second bird. He had come flying down across the air, his big black wings opening in a sinister fan that covered the round light cast by the neon sign emblazoned with the newspaper’s name. That prohibition was a presumptuous invention of the second bird. But since they had become the guardians of institutions, laws, and decrees, what possibility was there to argue with them? The dialogue would have been a mockery before the sombre strength of power. In spite of that, I showed him the time on my watch. “It’s still early, Officer,” I said. I noticed his eyes on my watch. I understood immediately: that bird had never enjoyed the possession of such a small machine on his wrist. That bird didn’t have a watch to note the time of day, the time of his children, his mother, his death. “It doesn’t matter,” he answered with indignation. “I’ve told you that you can’t walk in this area at this time.” “I am not familiar with that order,” I argued, knowing that any attempt to defend my right to walk within the circus limits was in vain, if the birds didn’t want it. “It’s very, very dangerous to walk on the street at this time of day,” squealed one of the birds, as he underlined the second “very” with a highpitched screech. “Something serious could happen to you,” said the third one. “Irreparable,” added the fourth one. I looked to both sides. They had come through the air to surround me, so I didn’t have much chance to save myself. “What is your occupation?” asked the first bird. He was undoubtedly the highest ranking one: his shiny feathers gave off a fetid smell. “The more important, the worse it smells,” was the popular saying. He had started to go around me, flapping his wings like oars hitting very close to where I stood. Opening them and closing them, he was stirring up the air while the smell of his armpits swamped my nose. My nose like a courtyard invaded by dry leaves that carry with them the water and the storm. “I am a professor,” I declared in a low voice. The bird’s dance was clumsy and ridiculous, but it was making me dizzy. Some stinking blue feathers were falling from his long neck full of buttons that were part of his dirty, wrinkled uniform. “You’re a professor and you take a walk at this hour of the night to breath the air, isn’t that right?” I didn’t want to answer, to avoid conflicts. From the way this bird looked, you could tell he was trying to provoke me in order to increase my —— 50 ——

punishment. Meanwhile, the other birds, subordinates, for sure, were quiet, perched very close to me, on a telephone post. I wanted to take a cigarette out of my pocket. “Don’t move,” shouted the first bird, sinking his beak into my side. I felt the fabric of my coat being ripped, my shirt torn, my flesh bristled and twitching. A blow to my arm, unexpected and treacherous from the second bird, made me drop the folder I was carrying with the originals of a book I was writing about the metaphor of zero and the Buddhist aesthetic. The handwritten papers, now dispersed and crumpled, flew onto the street, scattering in various directions. I felt a violent annoyance. I wanted to bend over to pick up the pages, but a peck from bird number two prevented me. Some of them had fallen in a puddle of stagnant water and they were getting wet, getting dirty with the mud and the residues that had accumulated there; since all the birds are assigned to control duties and vigilance, nobody worries about cleaning the streets. At that moment, I recognized the pink page I’d used to write down the information gathered from a rare book, whose only copy I’d been able to read in a archive burned down afterwards, swimming in the manure-clogged gutters along the curb. Nothing in the world—or perhaps only the death of my mother—could hurt me as much as seeing that page soaking in fine threads of sky-blue water, the detailed information that I could no longer obtain. And there was nothing I could do: while I looked desperately towards the curb, the stagnant water was gently, relentlessly, dissolving the group of symbols, signs, and ciphers that were so important to me. At the same time, another three or four birds of the same species appeared in the avenue, triumphantly dragging along a small group of people who, like me, had been detained at that time of night, in different circumstances, and placed at the disposal of the sparrow-hawk boss. I looked for the last time, in agony, at the pages of my book that I’d never see again, disappearing down the drain, and, like everyone else, I got into the police vehicle that was waiting for us, the dangerous trapeze artists. Inside the car there were no windows to look through and there was nothing to do except observe each other. We were five men, and two depressed women, who had the tired air of two old prostitutes. The men were silent, like me, and resigned. One of them was bleeding profusely from his nose and had a violent blue bruise around his eye. I caught on fast. When we arrived, they shoved us out the vehicle. The women complained a bit, and the blow made me lose a button from my shirt collar. “This one is a nobody,” one of the birds that had detained me shouted to the guardian eagle who had a rifle in his wing. Inside, I stood up against the oily green wall. There were people shouting, protesting, mentioning hypothetical rights lost one afternoon, —— 51 ——

who knows where. They were demanding lawyers, laws, constitutions, they were naming well-known people, they were proclaiming their innocence. I kept quiet all the time, immersed in their activities. I felt pity for a man, visibly agitated, nervous, who seemed on the verge of a heart attack; he was sweating in silence, like me; I imagined for him something important was being lost at that moment, there or in another part of the city; perhaps, like me, he was losing a book that he’d written, perhaps his mother was very sick, and he, in a hurry to go to see her, he’d forgotten his documents, and for that reason he couldn’t arrive on time to see her, he would not arrive on time to kiss her before she died; if he ever came out (when they felt like letting him out) she would be buried, and nothing in the world could allow him to see her, nothing would allow him to look at her again, to keep the last vision of her in a jewellery box, mother dying in the darkened room beside the night table with all the medicine bottles and a glass of water in case she was thirsty, mother with her grey transparent eyes looking at the last dust of the room, looking at the Virgin on the wall with a little olive branch and telling her that life was like this, that life was just that, to walk, to arrive and to abandon what was yours, the beloved, mother dying under the starched bedspread and everything so inevitable, it was all right to die if one was old or even if one was young, but who could resist the despair of not arriving on time, of being delayed, of having forgotten the documents? Perhaps that man was on his way at that exact moment to another city, because someone was waiting for him, a son or a lover, she would have been waiting for two or three hours at the airport, looking at how the enormous airplanes were landing on the runway, incredulous at first, nervous afterwards, and he would not come down from the first one nor the second one nor from the fifth plane, and in the end, disappointed, she would leave somewhere, somewhere he couldn’t imagine because it had never occurred to him to ask her where she would go if she felt desperate and when he would be allowed to leave he could no longer take the plane he should have taken, and the young woman thinking that he had abandoned her, that love was a lie that the weekend together and the promises and the telegram. Or it was his mother who was waiting for him, about to die but asking for him, to see him once more. All night we were waiting standing up against the wall, leaning against it like beetles, allowing our shoulders to scratch the green seams of paint and lax legs to open like the tips of a compass on the worn wooden floor. I was not talking much to save my energy; I knew the hardest part would come with the questioning, that long wait was the price to pay, the taming, the debt for the distraction, for having gone down that street, for having arrived late to mom’s funeral wake. I even almost fell asleep sil—— 52 ——

houetted against the wall, stiff and hard, trying to forget the harassed present, taking refuge in the calm lagoons of memories of my mom, in the smoothness of her company, the silence and the meditation, the metaphor of zero, Zen’s aesthetic, all that I had lost in the pages scattered on the ground, all that was now insignificant for the simple reason that it no longer existed, nobody would account for it, lost, lost. I would not have twenty years of life anymore to recuperate the seized data, and if I had them, who would make the effort to let them go to waste in a pothole of water, in a sparrow hawk’s peck? I was alone and stripped, like when I was born. Beyond that, there was the inconvenience that after being detained, I would lose my job. But who would care about teaching classes of Latin art, something that we had taught badly if the birds were flying over our heads, scattering the pages, pecking at our sides, not allowing us to get to mamá’s funeral wake, keeping us for an undetermined period of time against the wall, and on top of that, laughing at us. Something that we learned and taught wrongly. I was going to dedicate the rest of the night to examine which of my teachings had been confusing, what had escaped me in reading books or in the explanation of ceramics, for the birds to be flying on top of my head. That night, they did not allow anybody to go to the bathroom or to use the phone, and our complaints were falling in a sarcastic void of official omnipotence, because if we were the birds of a night ensnared in the trap, fallen in the mantrap, they, on the other hand, were the habitual hunters, the usual ones, the guerrilla fighters, the beaters, the snarers, the unsociable snoopers who, supplied by the masters, would drag the crossbows, the dogs, the nets, the lassoes, the arrows, the horns, and the hunting horns rushing to pursue the deer that, wounded, would then be exhibited in the palace, like trophies, fragile pieces, cockade, rewards of power. When my turn arrived, I was wet and sweaty. My watch had been snatched away by one of the birds that didn’t have one, and that seemed fine with me: nothing in the world could confirm my right to possess a watch and for him not to have one; on the other hand, I was very upset by the situation with the folder. Precisely, the folder was the exact centre of the interrogation. “These papers are not clear at all,” the inquisitor bird had unfolded on top of his desk some of the pages that had survived the disaster. They were just a few pages, full of numbers and symbols obtained by a computer after analyzing many Oriental metaphors. “It is data obtained by a computer,” I explained, without hope. “Where is your permission to do research?” asked the vulture, turning over the papers. —— 53 ——

“Señor,” I said humbly, “For this exercise of aesthetics you don’t need any authorization; it has to do with a series of metaphors where zero and its possible relationship with Zen’s metaphysics appears.” “I don’t know of anything that can be investigated without the proper permit,” shouted the bird. “And, I can’t believe in the harmlessness of zero. Nothing that’s been invented by man is harmless in itself. I am sure that, used in the proper manner, the zero can be turned into a subversive instrument; it can also become a weapon in combat against the prestige and the solidity of our institutions. Besides”—and here the inquisitor bird made a gesture that I interpreted as his surest capacity for mistrust—”why zero?” Why zero? That was a good question, and the bird would never know how much he touched me. Why zero? Why, among all the other possible topics, and while the birds were destroying the circus with their rushed flights, why I, while so many acrobats were falling from their ropes, savagely destroyed, breaking their necks, beaten, terribly flagellated, had I chosen the metaphor of zero? I couldn’t explain it, and if I could, the answer wouldn’t be suitable for him. “Why zero?” insisted the inquisitor bird. He was happy: he had the sensation of having found my weakness, my vulnerability, the question with no answer that would condemn me, and everything had been so easy in spite of the appearance, in spite of not understanding even one of the signs written in those pages, blurred now by the stagnant water of the curb, however, without the need to have the computer or specialized studies, he had found the key question, without torturing me, without subjecting me to punishments, he alone, he all by himself, had found the definitive argument, the question that I could not answer. This would gain him a promotion for sure. A promotion, or something more. “You can’t answer satisfactorily?” Because I stayed silent, the inquisitor made a small mark on my educator’s licence. That was it; luckily he was exempting me from explaining the presence of zero in the Buddhist aesthetic, with one strike of the pen about my knowledge, on that licence that was the witness of my capability. I was being freed to explain the theory of zero, the binary system, and the representation of the numerical values. The blue bird made a sign and handed over my professor’s licence to a minor thrush, a very dirty one, that was flying over the desk. “Take it to the superiors,” ordered the boss. “From this time on, you are disqualified to give classes of any kind, public or private, to teach for free or for pay, to distribute information, to receive visits in your house. You will be strictly watched. I am reminding you that any transgression of this sentence will be punished with jail and exile.” —— 54 ——

I accepted the resolution in silence. I looked, with a little melancholy, at one of the pages of my book that was still on the table of the inquisitor bird. I could read almost a full sentence: “First stage: the stupidness of the pure state, of the pure bleat.” “Can I take my folder?” I asked, before leaving. “By no means, señor. These beautiful pages are going to be analyzed by our technicians and specialists in order to uncover what is behind this theory of zero. We’re going to structure models of codes, and we’ll investigate if there is any message hidden in the ciphers and in the numbers. How can we know you’re not an agent from the enemy side? Meanwhile, you have to understand, there will be an official permanently by your side, all day, and you’re not going to be able to go in or out of your house, to move in any direction, to visit anybody, without communicating it in writing to the official. This one will approve your strolls, your appointments, your dates, your comings and goings. Only when we’ve investigated all your papers completely, will you be subjected to a definitive judgment.” By chance, the official that was assigned to watch over me ended up being an ex-student of mine. He happened to be a slow thrush, somewhat clumsy, not too ambitious or bright, and very respectful of order. I knew immediately he’d never understood a single word of my lessons, but he had sided with the winners of the moment. He accompanied me from the time I left the precinct, and even though his treatment was courteous and correct, his watchfulness was not less strict. Only our previous acquaintance—I had been his professor—allowed me to sometimes interrogate him. For example, “How long do you think they’ll take to return me the folder?” I asked him. Very slowly, with his clumsy toes, he calculated. “About fifty-two years,” he concluded calmly. He knew his trade, and he was completely comfortable in it. As I showed some kind of astonishment by the amount of years, he cordially explained to me: “There are more than eighty rooms full of paper to be revised. Books, documents, things like that. They were obtained in raids. The bosses said that nothing could be overlooked in a true democracy. And the people in the labs can’t work faster than they are working. Everyday, they receive a stack of reports. For each case they have to make a file, they can’t keep up. That’s it.” The explanation was completely satisfactory. I understood that destiny would keep a thrush by my side for the rest of my days. I have almost become accustomed to him. He eats from my hand, sometimes he helps me to clean the house, and he’s easy to trick; he would never discover that in the list I send daily to my philatelist friends looking for the stamps I don’t have, I transmit a secret formula for a bomb that, once made, will end once and for all this terrible continental plague of birds. And to tell you the truth, it’s more fun than the theory of zero. —— 55 ——

28 The minister called me and I rushed through the corridors. I had bought a pair of slightly used wings at a bazaar to use each time the minister rang me with two long buzzes followed by a short one. I couldn’t buy new ones because my salary was barely enough to eat on, but at any rate, they were two very useful wings. It seems that the bird who had them before either didn’t wear them much, or he died young, I don’t know. Life expectancy is going down each day due to hunger, illnesses, and the lack of hygiene. There are a lot of dirty people. I was managing fairly well with those wings, even though they didn’t go with the rest of my attire: an old uniform of some employee who was more than thirty years old. I should have exchanged it for another one, but for centuries, the budget has not had enough for uniforms, so an old one like this has to be used, no matter what condition it’s in. If I can’t retire the old uniform, I, myself, can retire even less: the paperwork takes twenty-five years, and since I’m sixty years old, I would be dead before I could cash my first cheque. When I opened the door the minister stood waiting, already looking at his watch. “You have taken one minute and five seconds. Three seconds more than the last call,” he announced coldly. “Señor,” I murmured, ashamed, “the corridors are very dark and I don’t see well. Twice I ran into the curtains, looking for the exit, and in the patio, a guard shot at me, thinking I was a Tupamaro.” The minister got very angry. It’s always that way: no matter how careful you are, when you least expect it, you’ve said something to irritate him. “I do not permit any criticism from policemen in my service!” the raging beast bellowed. “You will be severely penalized for your complaint.” “I didn’t want to report him,” I quickly answered. ‘’I would never say anything against those self-sacrificing employees: serving their country —— 56 ——

and jeopardizing their lives all day long. Nobody knows how much we owe them.” “That’s more like it. Now, I will sit down.” He sat down beside the bayonets, as usual. Even on the desk there were bayonets, like bouquets of flowers. I remained standing, waiting. The minister can’t stand anybody sitting after he sits down. Right away he started to look through some papers. They were some of the bills sent by the military. Bakery services, orchestras, and the rent for halls, larger each time, because since the Minister has taken over the country’s government to free us from the incompetence of the Chambers, the police force has grown a lot; there are so many things to protect and to take care of, which is why everyday hundreds of police officers are appointed. I stood there waiting for two hours. I had drawn up my wings which I no longer needed to fly, but my right underarm was itchy, and that was uncomfortable. I am old and my legs hurt when I stand for a long time, but surely something had bitten my underarm and it was not acceptable to scratch in front of the Minister of National Defence. The salesperson had warned me about that when I bought them: because they weren’t new wings (new wings were much more expensive), sometimes, when they’re stored for a long time, insects get right into the inside feathers, especially the feathers closest to the body, and so I get a scratchy sensation. The minister kept on reading papers without paying attention to me. I was in front of him, standing, looking at the floor, because he can’t stand anyone looking at him in the eyes. He has fired many employees for that reason. When he’d finished checking the military expenses, he raised his head and saw me there. “What are you doing standing there?” he shouted. His forcefulness caused a lot of air to escape from his mouth. This air slightly moved the feathers on my right wing. As the black feathers shook, they made me feel cold. I did not answer him right away: he’d get furious when his questions were answered. I let some time to go by without raising my head, and slowly I started to step back towards the door: it was necessary to disappear gradually, without his noticing, to avoid his fury. The last invoice he had in front of him must have been for a large amount, because it ended in many zeros. It was the bill for the armourplating for his car: he had sent it to be armour-plated in North America, like the President, so it could be resistant to bullets, insults, spit, stones, and the public’s gaze. This measure had been suggested to him by the Office of Latin American Issues, after his trip. My furtive attempt to get to the door and leave was thwarted abruptly by the minister’s screaming. —— 57 ——

“Wait a minute!” he ordered me. “Explain this to me!” he said, tossing a note through the air. The paper glided past me so I had to fly after it, as the minister watched with amusement. I am old; I don’t fly like before. The paper was light and made turns; finally when it fell on the floor, I was able to pick it up. It was a bill for a funeral; last month, one of the minister’s old employees had died. So that he would appear in the newspapers, the minister attended the funeral, surrounded by countless policemen. Protected by his personal guard and that of the ministry, he had been in attendance for ten minutes. The journalists took advantage of the opportunity to do a television interview in which the minister praised the services of the dead employee and announced that his government, in order to modestly reward the undertakings and efficiency of the deceased, would pay for his coffin. That was the bill. I had chosen the coffin myself, according to the minister’s instructions. “Choose a cheap one. We can’t spend too much,” he’d said to me, coming back from the wake. The dead officer and his family were very poor, and they wouldn’t think about these things. The wood was obviously of poor quality and the nails were so loose they could come out right away, but for what purpose would the poor man want to be safely kept? Death is death, and nails aren’t important. “It’s the funeral home’s bill from last month, Mr. Minister,” I humbly explained. “Well, send it to the family immediately. Let them pay. What do they think? That the minister doesn’t have any expenses? I don’t want to see that bill around here.” I picked up the bill immediately. I took flight, put it in an envelope and sent it airmail to the deceased officer’s family. They are poor and so resigned that this will do nothing to add to their usual pain. Regarding the television and the newspapers, there is nothing to worry about: they haven’t paid any attention to the complaints of the poor for some time.

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29 “What are you doing?” I said to her —she was cultivating a child lovingly in her virginal womb. “What are you doing?” I said to her —with determination she was tamping down some blood droplets and a little semen in a pumpkin, stirring it well. “What are you doing?” I said to her —when I saw her crushing the mix, she was taking it in her hands, and sinking two fingers in the dough, combining and separating it, combining and separating, watering it now and then with her tears. It emitted a violent odour of vine, vineyard, macerated grapes, wine and orgasm. “What are you doing?” I said to her —she took great pains kneading, adding to the preparation a white spurt that streamed from one of her breasts and the red blood of her vessels, wide-open like floodgates. Only then she deigned to look at me. “I am preparing Him,” she said, “THE SURVIVOR, if He arrives on time.” In the distance could be heard the din of combat.

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30 DISOBEDIENCE AND THE BEAR HUNT

I hesitated a long time before giving a title to this text. As the reader will understand when reading it, disobedience and bear hunting are two different things (which makes it impossible to use the conjunction “or”), but they are closely related, to the degree that one term alone could not be used in the title, without causing detriment to the other. I decided to maintain their connection through the use of the conjunction “and.” That way, the latter becomes curiously revealing. The narrator. The first disobedient act happened when we decided to invade the lawn around the flower beds in front of the Cathedral and the Movie Club. At that moment, about a hundred people were leaving the small hall that had daily showings of old movies, some of them censored. That day, they were showing one of Bergman’s old films, The Seventh Seal. The film speaks clearly about our present-day situation: feudalism as a social and economic structure in our countries, the rich, the masses of poor people, and the bears dancing in the centre, on a wooden table, abundant and well-served. Bears are ancient animals, with legendary vigour and energy, who can be caught by hunters using various tricks. They can do this because they (the hunters) are more numerous than the bears. They are well-armed, they are equipped for winter, summer, and seasons in between. They can detect them from afar with their helicopters that buzz like blowflies, with their —— 60 ——

binoculars that scan the prairies, hills, and mountains, and as if that weren’t enough, they have a great variety of traps, especially prepared to hunt bears. There are specialists who have spent their lives, years, stuck in laboratories making snares to catch bears. Then, the feudal lords (and some who aren’t, but secretly wish they were, collaborate with them as if they really belonged to the same class) leave their houses, their winter homes, their summer homes, their party halls, their drawing rooms, their museums, their family vaults and together form a large hunting party, whose purpose is to get a bear. Once they’ve singled one out (and almost all the other animals of creation collaborate in the hunt and persecution, sometimes due to hunger and sometimes due to envy), they hurl the greatest and most varied quantity of arms at their disposal against him. After using dynamite, gunpowder, turpentine, a poisoned dart, an axe, a pike, a lance, a halberd, a club, a crossbow, and if they finally get to corner one, they carry it triumphantly as a trophy to the palace, to the country house, to the summer house, where they exhibit it to astound the ladies of the court. The ladies, at first step back, terrified. An animal so fierce and so strange, how could God, The Supreme Creator, have made it? This animal amongst us? Then, feeling more confident because of the strict watch over the animal, they get up the courage to examine it better. In fact, some attentive soldier, one of those indulgent ones who guess the wishes of their masters by merely looking into their eyes, is capable of separating the tussock of hair that covers the bears’ tail, to show the monster’s magnificent sexual organs to the astonished lady. The lady, admiring, fakes modesty, but doesn’t allow the bear’s hair to go back in place, to cover its private parts, but begs the soldier to keep it that way, while she goes and invites her friends to take a look at what she has seen, which is so incredible. This is the theme of The Seventh Seal: the bear hunt. That’s also why we see signs everywhere, guaranteeing a nice reward to whoever locates a bear and provides information to the closest master. I have seen a large number of ants assigned to that task by their queen. If they manage to find one, it’s possible that their work will be over forever. Apart from the pleasure that inferior beings feel from informing—it’s a unique circumstance, the yearnedfor moment to participate in something, they, who are always in the middle: they are not hunters (they don’t share their nobility, or oligarchy) nor are they bears. Basically, they prefer to be swallowed up by the feudal lord than protect a bear. And besides that, there’s the advertising. I said that the first disobedient act happened when we decided to invade the lawn around the flower beds that surround the public square, in front of the Cathedral. It was a spontaneous decision which arose unforeseeably in our minds, as if we had been planning it for a long time. Suddenly about a hundred of us were, just by chance, walking across the —— 61 ——

public square, old people who’d gone to sunbathe on the wooden benches, the women who knitted endless wool sweaters, the office workers who were going across to the bank, the messengers who were carrying large bags containing messages, the magazine vendors who were going from one stand to the next, singers, soloists, a soccer referee, some crippled people (we have to keep in mind the severe police repression lately), we all decided, in one single impulse, to go up on the lawn around the flower beds. It was a small transgression of the municipal regulations that prohibits it, but once we put our soles (there were some very worn-out, rubber soles, vegetable-fibre soles, yarn soles, and there were simply the soles of feet, just the way they had come into the world, and it’s very curious that we call them “plantas,” when we are dealing with swimming fish) on the beautiful grass evenly cut with a lawnmower (since our state is very careful to protect the grass, which is what’s visible, because the dead don’t talk, they don’t recite verses or harangue the travellers, the tourists who come to fill our coffers), nothing moved us to come down from it, nothing in the world could convince us to come down, to walk on the earth again, on the ground, on the old patterned street tiles. Our attitude caused great outrage. As a matter of fact, there were about a hundred or a hundred and two people (the first time I counted them, I came up with one hundred; to be sure, I counted again the gentle, discrete rows of heads raised around me against the grass, but this time my addition came to one hundred and two; one of the times I made a mistake, but it’s possible that I had counted someone more than once, or, failing that, I’d missed someone in my calculation), properly settled on the grass, speechless, quiet, with a look of calmness and tranquility in their faces, and it seemed that they’d forgotten their chores for an instant: the search for the sun, every afternoon, while time gently elapses; forgotten were the knitting-needles, which were inoffensively pointing downwards, allowing the green and red stitches to slip through the gap; forgotten were the urgent telegrams (“Mom very ill. We need you. What coffin should I choose?” “Happy nuptials to the triangle.” “News from Russia. We have found a communist.” “Dad is fine. The dog drowned in the well chasing a bird. Do I buy wool?” “Close the operation. The thread must be gold.” “Accept the exchange. Many bears for one maggot.” “Mom: I am sending you the pictures of Yolanda and Marisa. I don’t know which one to choose. Yolanda has a familiar appearance, she looks a bit like you, her general features. That small deformation in Marisa’s lip, on the other hand, makes me nostalgic for our daughter Ines. Answer me soon. I am recovering well”), vendors were not advertising their magazines, which, loosely bundled, were coming apart and falling to the ground, like the dropped knitting stitches; the singers were silent, the soloists lonely, the soccer referee was captivated by —— 62 ——

Aphrodite’s statue in the corner of the public square, and the cripple remained quiet, resting one leg, the good one, after the assault on the university where policemen shot in every direction. At the beginning, nothing seemed to be happening to us, but right away, a municipal guard with his grey, worn-out uniform, full of holes, ordered us to come down off the grass, waving a sign that said in thick black characters (in small capitals): “Keep off the grass.” We had all seen that sign, and even if we hadn’t seen it at that moment, we were used to the regulation since childhood, since some feudal lord invented it, he created the churches and with them, the public squares in front, where doves, old people, children, and women gathered, as if to receive communion. From that same moment when a feudal lord, to give thanks for any favour (the restoration of damaged arm tissue after a singular combat, the acquisition of three black slaves in a country of blonds, the profitable marketing of his batch of butter, his slaves, serfs, or oil, the completion of paperwork to get a passport, the extermination of the mildew plague from his fields, as Vassilis Vassilikos recommends), had commissioned the construction, decoration, and inauguration of a church, and naturally, a public square in front of it, we could say that a new chapter in the book of municipal regulations had been opened where there appeared Decree Number 14,578, that prohibited any citizen, of any age, whether a baby (for whom it would be very difficult to get up on the grass on his own, but he could do it easily with the help of his mother or some other relative, and even if no one did it, he could crawl up on the grass), a child, a professor or an old person, of any sex (man, or woman, hermaphrodite or other), of any religious belief (republican or the opponent) or political party (here the decree didn’t discriminate, because in any state, in any of our fortunate civilized countries, on either side of the hemisphere, only one existed: that of the feudal lord class, which holds the power, a class that, curiously, is the same everywhere, although it dresses according to styles and local customs, and is always dedicated to the bear hunt), it prohibited in all cases, setting foot on the grass in the square and public walks. Number 14,578 is the decree which belongs to the old code, because, as we all know, due to the shortage of available numbers, because infinity is a dove, they had to renumber the municipal decrees, adding a letter from the alphabet to them to distinguish them. For example, there must be a Decree Number 14,578A, and another one, Number 14,578B, etc., prohibiting the common citizen from doing different things, so they can use the same number many times, one for each letter of the alphabet. When the possibilities of combining numbers and letters are exhausted, the government has already decided to use pairs of signs. There will be, for example, a decree that prohibits something that will —— 63 ——

have this code: 14,578A/B. And another one that will have the following code number: 14,578A-B-C. This will keep the accountants and lawyers busy and, at the same time, will solve the problem of having too many of them in the country. The fact that the guard waved the sign that said to keep off the grass didn’t bother us at all. On the contrary, we stayed on it, serene, mute, as if a spell had come over us. It didn’t disturb us either that the poor guard, used to going after children and doves that dirty everything, especially the daisy, pansy, and geranium beds, blew his whistle noisily and with full force, as if it were a ship’s siren summoning help or signalling the afternoon’s retreat. He blew it so loud that a palace soldier, thinking he’d heard the sentinel’s signal, lowered the flag. When the whistle was blown by the first guard, some others who were in the area, though not many, drew near. One must keep in mind that they’re all close to a hundred years old and they are interested only in providing information about the bears (which would assure them a proper funeral), or in chasing away children from their neighbourhood squares. The police couldn’t come: they were too busy chasing four or so bears that had entered the jungle. It’s not that they were very important bears, not even very dangerous ones, but one of the richest feudal lords on the continent had offered a great reward in dollars for one of their skins, a job to which all the active armed forces of the country were directing their efforts. To give this event a certain official prestige, government backing, and security of the law, the palace feudal lords (especially those holding the portfolio of Education and Culture, of Order and Progress, and of Advertising and Public Relations), had circulated many slogans on radio and television. It was common, for example, to see a close-up view of a beautiful announcer making a face and murmuring: “Make sure your children’s lives are safe. The bears are ambushing your home. Collaborate by giving clues.” Or they showed frightening drawings of a catastrophe involving children, with the following caption: “This is the work of bears. Would you allow them to devastate your country, your home?” They also exhibited a large number of pictures of bears dressed up on this or that occasion and they gave them each physical characteristics by which they could be identified, and they also indicated the most sensitive parts of their bodies where it was possible to shoot and kill them for sure. The second transgression consisted of sitting in the street, peacefully, interrupting traffic. It’s not that we were tired of the grass, but it just happened, spontaneously. When the municipal guards, upset by our resolve, by the persistence of our feet on the grass, disappeared from the public square and gave up on us, we peacefully came down off the flower beds and went in orderly fashion towards the middle of the street, amongst the buses, where —— 64 ——

we positioned ourselves, sitting down without fear of soiling our clothes. It was all so simple and cordial, like a visit from relatives or friends. There was even some young man who helped an old lady to sit down, since she had difficulties because her aging bones made it hard for her to bend down. We all sat down without sensational gestures. Those coming down last from the grass passively occupied their place in the street, with a certain unhurried calm, with tranquility, as if they had their reserved seats at the movie or the theatre. As if an usher had guided them there with his flashlight and his program. Seated, we filled the street to the edges, to where it becomes the sidewalk. There was a sweet young woman putting on some lipstick, taking out a mirror from her purse to see herself, a girl sucking a big round sucker that looked like a coloured Host, a fat lady, as big as an elephant, two cyclists who had abandoned their bicycles by a tree, and a hot dog vendor who was not serving anyone, but was sitting like us, motionless. This transgression was more violent, if we consider the scandal it caused the many drivers who had to stop their vehicles or else run us over, the pedestrians who were furious (because they couldn’t join us), cursed our presence and kept on walking really irritated: soon, the bus and car horns caused a tremendous noise, like a storm’s thunder, like when the army runs over a crowd, and the line of stopped cars, waiting for us to move, was enormous. A woman sitting beside me, very agitated, confessed to me ecstatically: “I have never done anything like this before. Never did any of my acts get a similar reaction. I’m very excited. I’ll write it down in my diary.” A driver got out and started to insult us. He accused us of disturbing the peace, of being insurgents, of maintaining secret relations with the enemies of the country, of possessing links with foreign powers. He got out of his vehicle wielding an iron bar, like the municipal guard waving the sign that said to keep off the grass. He waved it for a while in the air, threatening; we all looked the other way, out of compassion; the truth is that he hit two or three people in our group, and broke their skulls, but that didn’t make them stand up and walk away, like he wanted them to, but on the contrary, they were left sprawled, permanently, on the ground. After that, he was disappointed, and sat down with us. He couldn’t start the bus because it had broken down, but if it weren’t for that, he assured us, he would have run us over; he was tired, he had a wife and a son, which was an added tragedy we all understood, and there was no guarantee that the company would not fire him due to the delay, and no one knew when it would be that we’d pick up and go, and so, he decided to sit down and wait with us. He said, philosophically, that he had not done anything else in his life, since birth, even though in reality he had moved a lot, and we all knew that this was the first opportunity he’d had to sit down. But that was life. —— 65 ——

The third stage started when a young woman started to undress, taking her clothes off slowly. This went against municipal Decree Number 1 in all the codes (in the old nomenclature as well as the modern), chapter 1, “Against political and moral vices,” since we have given much attention to social ethics. We allow neither the advertising nor screening of immoral or revolutionary movies; we don’t allow the sale of books or magazines that incite rebellion; we censor, a priori, any expression, be it oral or written, in order to prevent the dangerous germs of communism or immorality from infiltrating our lines, our batteries. There are a large number of decrees that legislate all this. They stipulate what must not be done or said in any situation, to the degree that we’ve reduced our language to a few words that allow us to name the realities we can talk about without undermining public morality: the prestige of the armed forces, or the democratic structure of our state. Aware that the only reality is language, we have prohibited the use of many terms that are harmful to the health and well being of the citizens: “naked,” “revolution,” “homosexuality,” “clandestine,” “lechery,” “sedition,” “rebelliousness,” “sensuality,” “socialism”: these are all words that we have eliminated from our language, and thus we’re certain to have eliminated, finally, the phenomena. For example, when a couple made up of two splendid women is seen, nobody says “lesbians” or “homosexuals”: we say a “couple of young women,” we say “sisters,” and thus we prevent the fact of their being together from being seen as reprehensible or immoral, given that—is there anything particularly offensive about a simple pair of young women? Or is it sinful for two beautiful sisters to go for a stroll? There is a careful imposition of language on this issue: no longer pronouncing an aggressive word, and naming the action it refers to with an inoffensive expression, a different one, we change, in reality, its ethical value, so verbal substitution corresponds to a real moral transformation of the action discussed. Insofar as we forget the old sign, the old designation charged with ethical and despicable connotations, and we substitute another one for it, one with different value and content, we bring pressure to bear that it lose its old obscene or dangerous meaning, by which process, that meaning ceases to exist. I’ve been able to prove that the same happens in the political sphere; so many terms have been eliminated, that, in the end, there is only the possibility of not talking about it, ignoring it, disregarding it, pretending that it doesn’t exist. In the end, no term could be pronounced without one’s being accused of transgressing this or that decree, so we avoid touching on topics related to it. In this way, something very subtle has been achieved: since nobody can talk about politics without becoming the victim of some sanction for pronouncing prohibited words, the only thing left is to suffer it; a long suffering becomes an unconscious habit, a cus—— 66 ——

tom, a need. In this way, by not mentioning it ever, we paralyze it, we stagnate it, we make it eternal, lasting, under the current appearance it has assumed. Since it is neither mentioned nor pronounced, it can’t be modified. It is the realization of the feudal lords’ permanence. I always admitted they were very intelligent. As I said, our third transgression started with a young woman, one of the ones who’d stayed sitting with us, who stood up in the middle of the street, and absorbed in thought, slowly, sluggishly, studiously, started to undress. Nobody expected it, and this wasn’t an organized event. We were the first to be surprised when she started to take off her sweater, then her skirt, later her shoes, and when her marvellous breasts were uncovered, we had dispersed and each of us started to undress in different places of the public square, but not too far away from each other. There were some who were very enthusiastic, so in order to exhibit themselves better, they chose spectacular places, visible from various angles, like the one who climbed a column and unbuttoned his shirt, his pants, and threw them down to the street, or another young woman, the blonde one with large red breasts, who got undressed on a bench. We showed some leniency: an old woman asked to be exempt from taking off her underwear because she hadn’t washed it, and she was afraid of the criticism regarding her hygiene; a Salesian priest kept his shirt because he had made a promise not to take it off for the whole summer, and finally, a woman whose breast had been surgically amputated didn’t want to create a sad spectacle, so she kept her bra. Some spectators applauded; others ran away frightened; most of them contemplated us, ambivalent, surprised, incapable of reacting. It was a sad illness that started in childhood: progressively, and due to the dreadful degradation of our inherited chromosomes, parents’ passivity was incarnated in the children, and in the children’s children, and so on, until we became a country of meek people. The more concerned ones warned us, when they made out the police vans from a distance. At this point, we were all naked, rejoicing in our skin, seeing ourselves with the happiness that Adam and Eve must have felt at the beginning. For me, for example, it was the first opportunity I had to observe a woman completely naked. My wife, complying with state orders, refuses to get naked in our intimacy, maintaining that it’s a sinful and condemnable act, justifiable only in the case of procreation, and we have to keep in mind that our government has adopted the plan of birth control by which, of every ten couples, only one is allowed to procreate, and so many conditions must be met, that in practice, only one out of twenty will be able to reproduce. It’s not necessary to say that I’ve not been blessed with this permit; my wife’s uterus, rather, has been decorated with a ring that prevents any possible contamination from my fertile sperm. That was the first time I saw a —— 67 ——

woman really naked, so I felt very happy to be contemplating each other in full daylight. Not only that, I also noticed that she felt very pleased to be able to look at me. We would have tried dancing, as it occurred to us right there, in spite of all the decrees that prohibit it, if it weren’t for the police, who burst into the crowd at that moment, carrying out strict orders given them by the feudal lords, and they started, from very favourable positions, to shoot their rifles and guns at our naked bodies. It was a violent explosion of white flesh, a tremendous din of body parts that went flying, separated from their trunks, breasts floating, utterly terrified, truncated legs. The last image I kept in my eyes was of that young woman whom I saw completely naked, a sight so pleasant for me. P.S. A final transgression has been verified. After being irrefutably killed by the police, all the protesters refused to attend their own funerals, so that, in each case, the wake was held with empty caskets. Some relatives, afraid of causing indignation and retaliation amongst the judges, the police, the government men, the feudal lords, the bankers, the industrialists, the executives, the military, the Falangists, the young democrats, and the sovereign state, replaced the mutilated corpses with cloth dolls. Without success: those dead people can’t deceive anybody.

—— 68 ——

31 THE STATUE

Your husband came to question me and I stuttered out some disconnected explanations in reply. He asked me what your favourite colour was and I told him red; if indeed you liked music and I replied that you used to sing an aria at night (“There once was an old king, King Thulé, and follow him to the grave, I will; to his memory and sorrow, faithful I will be; full of kindness was he, and him forever will I love”) and you knew almost by heart (I mean at the piano) a short piece by Satie, all of which didn’t confirm your love of music but for certain vibrations that moved your soul. “That’s a devalued term” answered your demanding husband, who had no idea, however, of how my soul had been hurting for several days. “It’s a low pain”—I explained—“like a low do on the organ. Deep, low down and might be located at the bottom of the pharynx.” “What may have caused this?” I remembered the love affair with my sister, but maybe it wasn’t that, nor the memory of my sister coming out of the bathroom shower, nor his wife, nor my sister looking at me at dinner time while the cat crawled up on the chairs and they were as black as her dress, perhaps its wasn’t the memory of our games around the chimney, nor the surreptitious way of reaching for an open book which sat waiting beside the bed, but it was something else. Something else, which I couldn’t ascertain or investigate. “I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m sleepy,” I told your husband who was poking around the ashtrays, looking for traces of cigarettes that would accuse you. In half an hour he had turned over all the ashtrays and sunk his hands in all the wide-mouthed vases, which, curiously, did not blink. “Her favourite actor,” he continued interrogating me, while he searched the house like an inspector. —— 69 ——

“Peter O’ Toole,” I repeated, from memory, I, who had studied you, and had learned as a much-loved lesson which teaches us to speak, to sleep, to walk, to recite, to walk around the house, to sit down at the table, to take a breath of fresh air, so that when one yearned to dream, so that when one went out to walk through the parks, to feel the wind in one’s face, so that when one wanted to sit down at the table, one was to carry you on their lips, you the prayer, you the password, you the verb, you the alphabet, you my steps, you the window of the house that I left open, to see if you come. He was looking for proof. He interrogated me with the precision of an investigator. “The sun?” “Red. She likes to take it like a magnificent lizard sprawled out on the beach. All her pores tremble, they open up to its caress, and they breathe, they flood, they bathe. The sun takes over, penetrating all those little mouths, those orifices from which magnificent cities could be built, in the foundations of her bones.” “In the foundations of her bones,” your husband replied mechanically. “She is my wife,” he declared, in an act of singular courage, affirming what you had denied every day. I thought about you and your hair, the Saturday nights that you’re not with me, daybreaks, being at the movies, while miraculous entanglements unfold on the screen, and I, out of pure nostalgia, (a brother’s nostalgia for a sister) caress the hand of the unknown woman who is occupying your place, her hand, her leg, her thigh, and little messages result, small movements in seats; the unknown woman is you, when we hid in the pantry and mamá was singing in the garden and papá was only a portrait. Afterwards, tired of poking around in the ashtrays, he went on to examine my sculptures. Small figures and screens. Large steel constructions. They all looked like you, they had something of you in them, something of your hair, your smile, especially your gestures. If you’d come there of an afternoon snatched from the deceiving passage of time, for a fleeting moment, everything there was of you, because of me. Metal sculptures, wood carvings, stone sculptures, forged ironwork, all, all, crying out for you. “You always write the same book and construct the same statue,” he said, coldly examining some of my work. “There are some variations,” I defended myself, exhausted. “This massive block, for example”—I pointed out an enormous mobile in the middle of the room—“Here there is no feminine form. It represents the massacre of people during a demonstration. You must remember. One hundred and two dead and thousands wounded. The exact numbers were never found out.” —— 70 ——

He skeptically contemplated the block. “It has no importance. The power, the dates, the excavation.” I saw how she was looking at you the last night,” he continued. The last night you were wearing a sky-blue shirt and I thought about all the blue things in the world that it reminded me of, and nothing was as blue as your shirt, like my memory of you, not even the blue I’d imagined we had on when we got to the moon; we had left the atmosphere, on our way to the calm of quiet lakes, weightless seas without gravity, where the air is a perpetual silence and hands touch and open like steps I was taking over your body. The moon a sky-blue blouse, a step that can’t be taken, the quiet lakes. That last night you looked at me and I dropped a glass and water spilled on the table and I imagined all the fish we were drowning and we had just sunk our watches were palpitating like the temples of fevered children and I had a unique fear of dying that way, and even more fear of surviving. The last night you looked at me and I confused the times, I mean I hurried the days, months, and years, and I took something not lived for something lived, and took something that was lived for something not lived. The last night there were two candles lit for mamá’s anniversary, and the small piece of bronze in the hand. You touched it and I touched it and touching it, we touched each other, the bronze piece, the hand, mamá, you and me. The last night was the memory of mamá’s funeral, and we lightly touched each other when closing the coffin and we brushed each other again unintentionally when emptying the flowers, the many flowers that had arrived, expressions of friends’ respect; the last night you were wearing a black dress and statue number 100 wasn’t finished because we couldn’t finish the conversation the day before. The last night mamá left the house and we stayed alone, alone without visitors, so we went to the pantry and there you grew up, even though I asked you not to, because it was risky. “I remember how she looked at you that last night. She has never looked at me that way,” your husband insisted. The last night you arrived with him and both of you sat down at the table, to eat up memory, mamá’s cold corpse. We were celebrating the anniversary of her death, I suppose, and you, for solemnity, wore your black dress. I would have preferred the red one, as I’ve told you many times. It seems you’ve forgotten about your red dress and it’s somewhere in the house but I can’t find it. Sculpture 100 wasn’t finished. You looked on ninety-nine with interest and no pity. You knew for once I had escaped from my usual model. I mean I invited a girl home, I undressed her and worked on her for days on end. That’s why you looked at it with contempt. “It’s the ninety-ninth,” I explained, with humility. You passed your hand over it before it was dry and you damaged it with a brush. —— 71 ——

Afterwards, we ate the grilled meat. You didn’t know anything. I mean, you didn’t know what was happening outside, I mean, beyond the backyard, outside the workshop where I bend, chisel, scratch your flesh, your waist, where I eat you, like a fruit, I crush you, I cause you cramps, I build you, I model you, I turn you around and then I stand you up. “Ninety-nine is retrograde,” you said, while having dessert. Your favourite dessert, which he detests. While having coffee, you were taken with a carving, a very small, green one, and you wanted to take it home. I gave it to you and you touched me unintentionally when I served the coffee. “A look like that is never casual.” In the park we’d get together and everything would happen in silence, a ceremonial of greens and greys, while you played with the apparent children that walked amongst us, strange simulators. I needed you in order to finish number 100. We went to the workshop. There, among hollow blocks of incredible appearance, you threw yourself on top of it. It was bent iron, perforated, showing an imposing belly, uncovered, where a bird had placed its wings. The bird’s sex had softly penetrated the feminine cavity. He looked at it with fascination. “What’s this one called?” he asked me. I replied immediately: “The Sister.”

—— 72 ——

32 I possessed her when I was eight years old, while playing children’s games. Since then, I haven’t stopped doing it, regularly. If it rains, I possess her slowly, to blend the noise she makes with her legs drawn up against the sheets with the noise of the falling rain. If it’s a mild day, I possess her wildly, so she’s left complete and finished, as in a painting. When I was eight years old, I had her, though I didn’t mean to, when I was squeezing her in a game. My hand was like an insect, boring its way through a labyrinth. And what a surprise for the courtyards and lofts. The prize was the fresh water that ran between her legs and moistened the creepers, the wallflowers, and the Canterbury bells with an unexpected, healthy rain. I have never stopped drinking from that fountain: she has offered me her juice every day. At the age of eight, I gave her a firefly, and she gave me a flower. She kept the firefly in a box, next to a pine branch; I kept the flower inside the pages of a book, where it etched a circle of fragrance. Since I possessed her the first time at age eight, I haven’t stopped doing it. Frequently she says to me, “I wish you’d possessed me when I was eight years old, in the middle of our games. And since then to have not stopped, putting your soft hand on my belly, right there where it ends in the hollow part. And for you to have given me little animals put in boxes, as a testimony of your love, and for you to cover my naked body with spearhead-shaped leaves from the garden, that would leave their smell and dampness on my skin. You would pass your tongue over them, licking them off me when they’d stick to my body.” Then, I possess her again, as if we were eight years old.

—— 73 ——

33 MAMÁ’S FAREWELL

And now, at the hour of your death, mamá, tell me stories of incestuous love affairs, loves of that kind; at the hour of your death, mamá, remember me, with a small bouquet of flowers, a dead person is a dead person and nothing else; a body that dissolves little by little. Incestuous and sublime love affairs, they told me, for example, the story about D.H. Lawrence, who they say was in love with his mother, and that she was a rural schoolteacher, and he was born in Eastwood—he was—but he occupied his father’s bed—since the father, her husband, was so removed in spirit and sensitivity from his mother, that it fell to him to be her lover, but not just any lover, any occasional lover, but her LOVER, par excellence, the one who dedicated to her verses, poems, letters, hours, flowers, irises, sighs, memories, nostalgia, the names of plants and rivers. “Has a mother in love ever explained the meaning of rivers’ names to you?” You don’t know what that’s like, you don’t know what it’s like to hear those names pronounced by a mother in love who coddles you as a child and a lover, so you benefit twice over: love-love-lover-son; they say that Lawrence’s was a refined love, appropriate for one who was born in 1885 in Eastwood, England, and died in Vence, France in 1930. Lawrence found in her a stimulus for love and art and this made him fall in love with her, and remember this is not a combination that’s easy to find; either you’re lacking the mother and you have the spiritual stimulus, or you have the lover and you’re lacking the mother, or you have the model but you are lacking the gift of creativity. In a word, she had the greatest of opportunities—having her son fall in love with her, and the son having his mother fall in love with him. Essentially, it was the same thing. Motherson-lover-beloved, both loved nature and they would go for strolls at the river’s edge, and would get so much joy mamá, looking at the water, and they would capture their silhouettes reflected in the water, and imagine —— 74 ——

the tenderness of those walks, both of them well-dressed, their baskets filled with food and the love they shared, and a few leaves falling and everybody giving them admiring looks because mother and son got along so well, imagine the boat trips, him taking care of her, fearful that the rocking of the boat might dizzy her, causing her to fall and it to capsize, and she making sure he didn’t tire from rowing, looking into his eyes, contemplating their landscape, both feeling so close and affectionate, they could be a real couple. And what could be said about the woods, full of unpredictable murmuring and rustling, dry pieces of tree bark entangled beneath their feet; they both thought love and the woods were the best thing in the world, and they forgot about forms of government, monogamy, economic systems, and all that. And when it rains both take refuge under the trees and they play at touching each other. And when they are fed up with the society in which they live, a society that still had companies and insurance companies and tax collectors and calculators and constitutions and statutes, they decide to abandon this world, to wander the earth, criss-crossing territories and generations, insanely happy, and sometimes Frieda tags along, Frieda, whom they picked up along the way when the inspector told them that they couldn’t register at the hotel as lovers if they were mother and son, so they picked up Frieda, a provincial woman without scruples, I mean a universal woman, and while the two of them—Lawrence and his mother—slept together and made love, Frieda accompanied them, and at all times, showed a great consideration and respect for all their fervent, beautiful, elegant performances. Afterwards, psychoanalysts wove terrible hypotheses which Lawrence didn’t pay the slightest attention to, because he continued living very happily with his mother. They said that he was an insatiable man, and the truth was that she needed both, the son and the lover, and she knit a scarf and clothing for the two of them, and sometimes for Frieda, who had joined the couple in perfect agreement, without causing money problems, content with any remains of pleasure left over from the pleasure which Lawrence and his mother had felt or which Lawrence and his lover had felt, whichever you prefer. Frieda was satisfied with the arrangement because anywhere the three of them stayed, there was a beautiful familial atmosphere. There was always the mother, the son, and her, the guest of honour, and there was always a cat sitting close to the fire, a book to read about carnal love, and these things, in a mechanistic and dehumanized society such as this, were a true relief. Lawrence was a man who fell in love at first sight. That’s how he fell in love with his mother. He didn’t have to compare her with other women, or subject her to any analysis. She had a perfect body—despite having delivered him—she reasoned wisely, and as for her character, she possessed natural tenderness that mothers feel for —— 75 ——

their children, when we are talking about upper-class women. Ever since meeting her, Lawrence was in love and decided that his mother would be his and nobody else’s. The father figure never meant anything, nor did anyone else, so there were no enemies in sight. She, of course, the mother or lover, whichever you wish, had to leave behind very little in order to follow him. She was tired of mediocrity and life with Lawrence promised to be a continual adventure. He was not the average man. Even the simplest thing, like preparing a meal, would turn out magnificent, new, and transcendental if he was at her side. Another important thing was to remember the past. She had related to him, in copious detail, each and every one of the critical moments of his gestation, and then Lawrence would repeat the wonders of his birth: the first and last pains, the depression, the walk she took in the garden the night she felt him kick, she promised herself that he would be handsome and daring, and she told him how she delicately put her hand on her belly to stroke him—which Lawrence concluded was the source of his sensitivity—and she promised herself she would love him with this same intensity. After his birth, they met each other, with no hesitations. They understood each other with a dark sanguineness, as if no one had dared cut that delicate thread of flesh that had joined them before his birth. It was forever impossible to separate them. Even to do the smallest shopping, they went together, mother and son, lover and beloved. The first coupling was slow and difficult, as all of them are. Lawrence was excited and lacked the smoothness to allow him to perform with the touch and charm that were expected of him. She, on the other hand, consumed by expectation, abstinence, and lengthy contemplation, longed for their contact as she would a blessing, the way rain has been yearned for since ancient times. They made love the first time underneath the portrait of John Middleton Murray, and as a memento, they never parted with that picture. The couplings that followed, on the other hand, were of marvellous ductility and versatility. Frieda helped to set aside the anxieties of the household by not leaving food for the cats, who shook her off with no problems, and in that very sensual silence, mother and son came to know pleasures so singular they deemed them immortal. The only pain that Lawrence felt was not being able to be born again. He wasn’t sure if the child that might result from himself and his mother would be himself again, so he gave up on the project. One day, the three of them went to Mexico: Frieda, Lawrence, and his mother. He’d heard that Mexico’s nights were ideal to love freely, and she was sure the trip would rejuvenate her skin, and Frieda couldn’t get the last cat out of her mind. She had developed an incestuous love for it.

—— 76 ——

34 I started to feel your absence on a dreadful afternoon in June and since then. You had gone somewhere and there was no point looking for you in theatres and libraries no point going out on the street, no point visiting friends, covertly asking things about you, who you were, how many children you had, in which night club you used to get drunk, sing for friends, becoming tender and sensual, public and violent, there was no point no point, and like an agent of the CIA, concealed among the trees with documents so faithful, with arms so secret, with collaborators so efficient and discreet, to try to piece together your biography —a manner of speaking— to hunt down your vices and marks, to learn your character in a crossword puzzle. Piazzolla used to compose tangos that spoke of you, it’s true, and about the year 3001 and other things, I, too, had ten thousand records that started to send messages, messages that came from the sierra telling me things about you and I decided to see a psychiatrist the day that all the books, —and I assure you absolutely all of them—also had pictures of women [like you so that I would no longer say you were the woman in all the books. —— 77 ——

Someone who knew you far better than I spoke to me about a pair of legs, about almost floating breasts, about some disease of the skin and the lips, about the need to see things as they are about the proven existence of three hundred thousand more women who walked in the street, who got undressed at least once a day and they were easy to find standing by a store window, at theatres, in shops and supermarkets, but I didn’t hear him, I was too busy sending roses every day to an assumed address that someone had given me. Some other woman received them with great emotion, I found out later on, because several months before you had moved, and nobody knew where, or if someone knew, I didn’t. I don’t know what the woman must have thought about the roses, the poor woman filled every corner of her house with them, and she would greet the messenger in the street, sure she was part of a [confusing complicated error. To cleanse herself of possible sins (the forbidden and the incestuous) she ended up placing the flowers on the Castilian Virgin’s altar, but I don’t know, it seems that when I corrected the mistake (I stopped sending bouquets of roses to your now forgotten address, to the house where you were for awhile, to your old address) she missed something, she became strange, she wanted flowers all day long. When I returned to the laboratory after taking a short holiday, I went to the Registrar: perhaps they might have your new address, but an old friend of yours (one of those you have forgotten without sorrow who at the same time slip by you almost unnoticed) told me you were a bit careless, not even thinking of informing the Registrar, and then frantically, I started scouring the night spots, the places where between wine and song intimate and secret links are established. —— 78 ——

There was a young woman who would do a striptease, while keeping a white butterfly poised on one of her breasts, and after she finished she would go home to put her baby to sleep, and another one who would give herself only against the wall, and if you were fast, tearing apart her dress, and those who went there only to drink and play, and smoke and talk to friends as drunk as they, and they would leave just as day was breaking, strange thing that, to go in at night and come out at dawn to sleep in the room and a certain fraternity of the condemned, ghetto solidarity, ferociously repelling the foreigner. I found out that those had been your friends of the night, of smoke [and dance and drug-addict sleep and days spent in the dark cave. A swimmer told me that you used to go to the beach on winter days, to walk I don’t know how many sands in order to keep your figure; the coast was very long, the waters washed up to shore an infernal caravan of dead fish, and among their corpses, I imagined you, dressed for winter, passing your foot over the blue contour of the open scales with a funereal lust of sensual cemeteries; passing your bare foot over the blue scale, and the open mouth; in between the long rows of dead fish I tried to find your footprints intertwined with the delicate imprints the [birds leave in the sand; on my walk, I’m sure, I must have gone on a pilgrimage after one of [those sea birds that alight on the beach only when it’s empty and the smell and the man’s muttering have drifted away; follower of fish and birds, I found neither your shadow nor any other woman’s, only a half-sunken piece of wood its dog-like face pointing towards the first buildings and an old boat—abandoned—full of lichens and water where a little fish genty floated. I stopped looking for you at the beach and in the brothels. Sometimes, asleep, I believed I could hear the sound of your steps on the stairs —— 79 ——

or I hoped to see you getting out of the car that would be parked in [front of the window and I never—as a precaution—stayed too far away from the phone, frantically answering after the first ring, who knows, maybe you were inconstant and didn’t insist. Distressed, I became a member of the Philatelists’ Club and I got bored after many hours of studying a rare piece, a defective issue or a sheet with errors. I bought a lot of stamps with the illusion of showing them to you [some day, side by side, like children musing over an animal album. The most difficult piece, I bought from a scrupulous collector who frequented the club every afternoon. He was a man with some sorrows, a bit heavy, balding, a kindly and discreet person. To break away from his norms, we got drunk in a lounge at the corner. For three hours, he showed me the rarest stamps I’d ever seen, all the while shedding tears because of the alcohol, because of the conflicts with his union, and his sentimental problems. Finally, he took out your picture from his pocket, the one where you’re in the backyard of his house, between two children with no charm, a bit rough like the father. He told me he was married and that he recognized your talents as a cook, how kindly you treated the children, how organized you were in managing the affairs of the house, but he assured me that you were quick to argue and that you had a bad [temper. He’d gotten himself a mistress, a well-mannered and tender woman, but he suffered over the fate of his children. I accompanied him to your house and you welcomed me with a cold [tea. You didn’t remember me, sure you’d never seen me before, I spoke to you [about the Mélancolique nightclub I think you said you didn’t know of it, your husband had fallen asleep on the couch, I asked you if it was still your habit to get undressed when you listened [to Makeba: you told me that you didn’t know who that Black woman was, the children came in wanting to eat, I said to you, “I’ll wait all night for you at El Pastor” you said, “This man is crazy.” and the unbelievable thing is, you didn’t go.

—— 80 ——

35 At the corner bar, I met Elizabeth Taylor having a whisky and smoking. She was leaning on the bar, not looking very happy. “Do you know how many people could eat with just one of your bracelets?” I asked her. “Gad, another preacher,” she said. “I’ve been a convert to several religions, already. What are you suggesting to me now?” she asked as she watched out of the corner of her eye Richard Burton, who, with an obscene, senile gaze, was chasing a little four-year old blonde girl as she ran around the tables like a fox terrier being stalked by a bulldog. “Richard, leave her alone,” she warned him mildly. “He’s hopeless,” she commented to me, “and after buying him so many dolls. You were saying?” “Listen, I’m saying that just one of your gems would satisfy the hunger of many families,” I repeated. “I can’t figure out what religion you are. Muslim? Mormon? Zoroastrian? Idolatrous?” Right then, Richard Burton came up to fill his glass. For a moment, in an identical gesture, she and I simultaneously, nervously scanned the room looking for the little girl. Where was she? With a certain relief, we spotted her under the stairway, sucking her finger with an air of surprise. “She has a flat nose, I’m not interested,” Richard Burton commented as he served himself another whisky. “I could give you a piece of jewellery that I no longer wear,” Elizabeth Taylor proffered. “I’m tired of it and you’ll know how it could be used. But I insist, I will not convert to any new sect.” “Who might the female officiants of this religion be?” Richard Burton asked, now getting interested in the topic. She threw an lemon peel at him, hitting him in his eye, the eye that’s insured for a hundred thousand dollars, and hence a very important eye. —— 81 ——

“This is not religion. It’s the most serious problem that exists in the world,” I said solemnly. “Do you work for some television program?” Richard Burton asked. “We don’t grant interviews that have not been requested a year in advance.” The girl started to cry over in the corner. We all looked her way. “Do you want to adopt her?” Elizabeth Taylor asked, as if giving in. “I already told you her nose is a bit flat,” he replied. Then he turned to me right away and said: “As for you, I envision you as a talented cinematographic writer. Bring me any script, something where the two of us and some young girl, of course, would fit in. I promise that I’ll do something for you.”

—— 82 ——

36 When the bishops rebelled, the field was left sown with fainted pawns: the rooks ran to take refuge in the tamarinds and a knight, utterly terrified, wandered along the road, blinded in both eyes and bleeding from the ears. The remaining pawns prepared an ambush in vain: they died next to the stream and only the other knight seemed to resist. The last enemy attack felled the king as he turned tail and fled—as all kings usually do. When the queen, majestic and tragic, was left standing alone on the road, one of the bishops climbed up on her back and the other one, with a touch of his lance, knocked her down. They enjoyed her all morning, until they got bored, and abandoned her beside square number five.

—— 83 ——

37 A GREAT FAMILY

When the reinforcements arrived, we surrounded the block and installed the spotlights and the machine guns. Even though there were only two men inside the house, we called the armed forces for help: it’s time they started moving. They collect their pay every month and do nothing. Between us and them, there were more than eight hundred. The huge deployment had caught the attention of the neighbours who, silent and alarmed, went behind the trucks, moving like shadows made silly by the cold. That was why the commander gave the order to detain some of them: thus tension mounted, and the other curious ones felt less inclined to make comments when the journalists and the judges would question them after the operation had ended. We put them in the blue cars, in the ones that the government just bought; the commander asked us not to ill-treat them, all in all, they would be detained for a day or two, for questioning, that’s all. The procedure produced immediate effects: as soon as they’d taken away five or six of the neighbours who were snooping, the rest of the people moved away a bit, so they could look from a distance: nobody wanted to risk their job, their family, for one or two days of questioning. The other two remained inside the house, and they couldn’t be seen. The commander could have given the order to arrest them immediately, but he wasn’t in a hurry and he wanted to wait: while we waited and time passed, hope grew, more reinforcements were arriving and it looked like this was a very important operation, with all the television channels filming and the radio stations interviewing us. Not us, the high-ranking people. But it’s the same, because we are a great big family. The commanders, the army, the president and us, all of us a large family, because we defend the same thing and our enemies are the same. Even though we couldn’t speak among ourselves (the orders are very strict), I realized that the big demonstration we were putting on around the besieged house con—— 84 ——

fused even us; excited by the arms, the movement of the commanders, the loudspeakers and the lights, we’d forgotten that we were dealing with two conspirators of little importance, almost unknown, and that we were acting and waiting with an ardour and tension as if, hiding inside the house, were the longed-for leaders of the movement who had never been seen. Inside the house, among the dusty furniture, the earthenware vases, and the beds, because they sleep like us, they eat, they nourish themselves, they feel the cold and they sit at the table, which is very curious. With the preparations, the army’s arrival, the cars with sirens, we had all become rather excited and we were going crazy feeling the urge to let some bullets fly. Even I, as a result of the spectacle, seemed to have forgotten who the ones inside the house were, as if I didn’t know. Finally, someone spoke over the loudspeakers. Some commander, I couldn’t find out who he was, surely one from the army, because for some time now we have been handing over the important things to them. That’s how things are. We do the job, they give the speeches. It had to be one of the army officers who spoke, otherwise I would have recognized the voice. All the spotlights were facing the front of the house, but they were illuminating much more than the house itself, they were illuminating other houses, those of the frightened neighbours behind the locked doors and shut windows. The house we all had our sight fixed on had a window, and nothing was moving there, as if all of them were dead, or as if they had gone to a party or for a stroll, like people do on their days off. We don’t because we don’t have days off. The president called us and told us all that, for the good of the country, we wouldn’t have days off or leaves. That service to our country was not only a sacrifice, but also an honour. They must not have days off either. In that regard we are alike; who can imagine one of them walking through the park with his son on a Sunday, buying him peanuts and taking him for a boat ride? They have children, like everyone else, but they can’t take them for a stroll. All the spotlights were lighting up the front of the building, a grey house like all the houses in the area, with humidity stains, even though it wasn’t nighttime yet, but it wasn’t a matter of doing the operation in the dark. The night falls like an apartment building collapses on the sidewalk, flattening the trees and the people. The voice warned those present not to get close to the surrounded area, and cautioned the neighbours of the house occupied by the delinquents not to stick their heads out at all and to stay away from doors and windows. To those inside the house, he said nothing. We were all aiming our weapons in the direction of the wooden door that remained closed. Mine is an M-1 recently brought from North America; the government got them by selling meat that we weren’t eating, because they banned the internal supply for six months; with the meat, the gov—— 85 ——

ernment bought the arms they gave us in order to fight better, and to satisfy the daily complaints of the commanders; the weapon has an inscription on the bottom that I don’t know how to read, because I don’t understand English, but I don’t need to read it, anyway, because the weapon is so good that it fires by itself. We didn’t all get an M-1, because it’s said that from the three hundred boxes the Unites States’ government sent, only two hundred arrived; the other hundred were kept by the commanders, in order to sell them at a higher price in foreign countries, not bad considering that they got them at no cost. So, just as many didn’t eat meat, neither were there enough arms for everybody. When the voice was no longer heard there was something like a tremor; we were all waiting orders, but they didn’t come right away. That’s a psychological blow, as the commanders say. They really like those kinds of blows; they go specifically to the United States to learn about them because, they say, they are much better than the M-1s. I don’t think there’s anything better than the M-1s, but it’s true there are people who go to the moon, and they’re North Americans, and if the North Americans go to the moon, why not believe them about the business of psychological arms? Of course these types of weapons aren’t just for anyone’s use; even children could learn to shoot with an M-1, but neither a child nor we could deal with psychological arms; you have to be very sharp for that, you have to be a commander. At the same time I realized that the problem was the neighbours; if we all shot toward the besieged house, we could destroy the neighbouring houses, and maybe there’d be some casualties. More than once when shooting at the enemy, we’ve shot spectators, curious neighbours, or passersby; afterwards it’s very tough to fix things, because although the victims can be attributed to them, there’s always a judge who starts questioning the circumstances. But there are fewer and fewer judges, and they’ve told us that there’ll be none left, because the government is going to retire them all; when you’re at war you can’t think or contemplate about judges or neighbours or anything. I was a bit scared this time, because some of my uncles and aunts lived in that neighbourhood and even though I didn’t remember their house number, I imagined that with the shots, it was maybe their turn, and afterwards, if I shot my uncle or my aunt, how would I stand with the family? I couldn’t say anything to my boss, because if he doesn’t listen when nothing is happening, he’d hear me out even less in this case. So, the only one I spoke to was the one beside me. I said: “My uncle and my aunt live around here. You have to shoot carefully. Let’s not shoot them,” and he smiled and said, “if I don’t shoot them someone else will” and he grabbed his M-1, because he also had one, not because of his merits, but because his nephew has a political club. So I turned to the one on my other side who’s a bit clumsy, and I said, “Be —— 86 ——

careful what you fire at. I have an uncle and aunt who live close by,” and he smiled, because since he’s a bit clumsy, he’s always missing the mark. But since I couldn’t tell all of them, one by one, to be careful with my uncle and aunt, I stayed quiet. I realized that if we hadn’t received the order to shoot yet, it was because of the spectacle and also because of the confusion with the neighbouring houses, and the flower beds. The others must’ve been thinking the same thing, the two who were inside the besieged house, because suddenly, we saw them putting their heads out the window, looking at us, the whole block surrounded, the military trucks, the mobile transmitters, the machine guns poised on their tripods, a throng of soldiers, the loudspeakers, and after looking at all of us, they quickly hid again and the house sank into silence, like a grave, and with its silence, the neighbours’ terror—mute, stunned. Then they decided to come out; they appeared through the door that opened to allow them out, the two of them, together, both with their hands and weapons raised and a white handkerchief hanging from the end of the rifle, they were two young men, they’d be around my age, and when we saw them appear, dark pants and white shirt, hands up in the air, the gun with the hanging handkerchief, the commander gave the order and then in unison, like one man, we shot a violent burst that knocked them to the ground, both of them, the flowers, the neighbours, my uncle and my aunt.

—— 87 ——

38 Such apparent senselessness did not at all impress them: dying for those who didn’t know they were dying for them.

—— 88 ——

39 I was enjoying an ice cream cone in the Plaza Matriz when Juan Carlos Onetti sat down on the edge of the sidewalk and greeted me: “Good afternoon, m’hija.” Limping past at that moment was a crippled passerby, maimed by the army during a demonstration: he was missing an entire leg and a few toes on his foot. He smiled at me timidly and greeted me saying: “I know that art is immortal.” Juan Carlos Onetti had a little dandruff and I a little cough, but just the same, in unison, we studied the marks the glasses had left on the table cloth and the three marks, in the shape of a duck, of the irregular steps of the cripple. “Art is immortal, indeed,” Juan Carlos Onetti spluttered. A dove had soiled his hat.

—— 89 ——

40 SELENE I

Sometimes I think she does not exist, that I invented her during a night of boredom, while thinking about tenuous, sad things, that I will never see her traverse the courtyards again nor will she be there looking at me, giving me her hand nor will slip past the balconies, languid, white, watching me live and that doubt—that suspicion she may not exist— is sufficient to drive me mad. Sometimes I think she does not exist; that I invented her during a sleepless night, just for something to do, to believe in something. Then, even though I may see her appear at the feet of my favourite verses, her doubt, —this malicious disbelief in her— makes us miserable. Me, a skeptic thinking about her, unwilling to challenge her; she—saddened by my infidelity—moves away from the room, and opens the door of the last trees. And I see her leave in the magic spell and I want to stop her, but I must wait until tomorrow when, perhaps, she will come back to me, familiar and forgiving.

—— 90 ——

41 SELENE II

Adjacent and distant, light giver, duenna of a sea of permanent calm, of a cold and grey sadness, of an inconsistent dust and doesn’t drift away, everything in peaceful repose, neighbouring seas, fleeting promontories light-molten, sky-blue and selene, close, adjacent.

—— 91 ——

42 I have come by train I have enjoyed the landscape at the foot of your city I tell you: there is a grey air of cataclysm atmosphere of disaster full moon of catastrophe There is around your city a twentieth child begging and moss oil paintings hang from old buildings there is uncertainty tragedy germinating there is a smell of rancour and death that asphyxiates me or it could be the ten o’clock silence through the [night street the city without cars the city with fear and a thousand and one refugees hiding in the woods of your outlying seaside resorts and fifteen thousand political prisoners moan in their stalls There is an underground struggle opaque fear —— 92 ——

dried grass a sense of resentment and a prophetic silence black bird of death that announces everywhere the coming of other times.

—— 93 ——

43 URGENT MESSAGES FOR NAVIGATORS

163R River Plate, latitude 34º, 5 m Urgent: 167 mermaids moving in an easterly direction. Cape Columbus, South Groove, longitude 26 km approximately. I see a phantom ship coming. What should I do? 193R Rosario Channel, latitude 53º, 22 minutes. Lost. A blue damsel, phosphorescent skin, 1.59 m tall, large masts and spars, she has a mole on her right arm. Please find her soon. I’m very lonely. Argonauts’ Channel, River of the Trees, 43º latitude east: Disappeared. The Argonaut Cape, at two o’clock in the morning, rowing in underwear, enveloped in dreams. Wanted with green buoy and a promise to return. Moaning audible with the oars. His absence keenly felt. 24R Uruguay River: The light of poetry extinguished by a cloud laden with ministers. They all get burned in the same reflective glare, the age of innocence is over, only slow, solitary fish are left, a pilot’s tooth and three literary chroniclers. They write on the wind. 35º latitude east. Exhortation Channel. 18 km to the south of Bay of Dreams. The light of intelligence in men has been turned off, from the river they can be seen dispersing, fighting over leftover food and waste, being buried in stone niches and crematoria. When they’ve finished their self-destruction, we will fumigate the area they were in to cleanse it of microbes and insects.

—— 94 ——

23R River Plate. Cape General. The barge of dreams sunk, with only its calculators left. Should we destroy them all? November 23: Today I saw a bird. Situation latitude 36º. 3 minutes longitude 25 km approximately. Hull wrecked carrying the ministers. General rejoicing. 44R River of the Restless Birds. Longitude 64 km. The President for Life has disappeared among the bushes. We’ll cut down the whole forest until we find him and then lock him up in a cage. Since we bear him no grudge, we’ll look for a monkey to keep him company.

—— 95 ——

44 THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

I came accompanied —protected— by my lawyer and analyst. A crude and vulgar procession clad in black iron, lined up in rows, blocked our way, once we arrived. No sound of music or any sense of emotion on the long green field. It was a venue where some of my statues and geometric designs could [suitably be placed, but it’s true that I’d promised my analyst I wouldn’t insist on that. And to forget my occupation, so strange, unique and incredible as it was—of sculpting. And to stop thinking about them—my sculptures— the white marble, the sweet alabaster, to shape knees, the belly’s soft mounds, and breasts linked to each other like two neighbouring mountains, scented. To not talk about my profession, or even mention it. Attending the service—besides my analyst and lawyer— was an obscure 4th Officer, in charge of stamping documents and the businessman, one of those mediocre apes empowered by the triumph of Conspiracy. The air was dry, black, funereal. Where was the crowd? That motley, vulgar crowd, whose thought was about as stable as a [hummingbird’s wings, no longer than the length of a pin, no more coherent than a hatful of slogans from which to draw, with a gesture of surprise, a particular interest loosely [connected to an idea. There was a hollow in the world where the crowd was not found, —— 96 ——

and for sure would not be for many centuries. I had to take an oath, inevitable ceremony that it was, since I had refused suicide after troublesome failures, weak failures, and there was the General Manager (I’m referring to this particular business, [the State), the Fourth Officer, the lawyer and my analyst, acting as witnesses. In the first place, I had to have my fingerprints taken, and my distinguishing [marks recorded on a perforated sheet. It was odd, because I’d never noticed those marks by which they were [trying to distinguish me. I was used to considering myself different by virtue of other things, but there, what was absolutely important was my finger, this ordinary thumb, ordinary since it stopped digging into the matter, giving it form, making it intense, expressive, other. Aside from my thumb, my signature seemed to interest them. I had assured the analyst that I could sign my name a thousand different ways and all of them would be reckoned as mine, and that I could write in both [directions, towards the left or right, joining one letter to the next, by links of imperceptible ink, or, if I wanted, I could keep all the letters separate, as if oceans and seas of writing were truly separating an “o” from its “l”. But these talents didn’t interest my analyst, who, quite the contrary, recommended that I not mention these conditions these possibilities and that I limit myself to signing in just one of the ways I could, recom[mending that I insisted that this way was the only one possible for me. It has always bothered me to lie, but since the analyst, at the request of my family and a representative of the State, has taken me in his charge, with the task of assimilating me into the society in which we live, this lie has become an unavoidable recourse for the purpose of carrying out [this painful process of assimilation. I have come to understand that lying, the army, television, and the church, are the pillars of society. It would’ve been very simple to explain to me from the beginning. But, it was I who had misunderstood. At school, I remember well, I was taught very clearly that I should never lie. Given that this was a lie, since neither the army, the church, television, —— 97 ——

nor society tell the truth, I should have made the appropriate appraisal, and I would have reached the proper conclusion: to make us understand that we should lie like them, they should have told us it was not good to lie. It could be inferred from [this that lying was our principal form of education. Failing to arrive at the right conclusion from the teachings offered me, certainly created this painful imbalance in me which makes it necessary that an analyst be almost continually by my side, like a second mother, but without her breasts and lips, naturally. He assures me that I’ll be well soon, that is, I will be assimilated, I will no longer suffer these maladjustments everything will seem normal and correct to me, everything fair and proper. Like wearing glasses. The type of glasses that will adjust my sight, that will change the world, make me deaf to the supplications I hear now, insensitive to the sorrow and affliction that consume me, glasses so I will neither see nor jump, glasses so I won’t cry or grow, glasses so I can be someone else. After I had signed, the General Manager made a sign to the Fourth Officer, who then began to bring documents. At the beginning it didn’t worry me very much: I’m used to seeing large quantities of paper in all the State offices. We paper ourselves like we do walls. Such a big inferno of papers is made that nobody can find anything later, and so the main purpose of the State has been achieved, which is to make us disappear. By a strange paradox, they are the papers designed to record our names and surnames, place of birth, current address, they are the papers apparently intended to mark us forever, they are the ones that reduce us to oblivion, ignorance, nonexistence. I remember a short gentleman whom I once met in a park. He was very worried. I didn’t know what was wrong. I thought that his mother had died, or that she didn’t love him anymore, that she was deceiving him with some dog or cat, but it wasn’t a matter of such tragic things. The man was going around half-crazy, because he had misplaced a paper. He was a non-existent man. In fact, since someone at the State offices had misplaced all his documentation concerning his person, the poor fellow didn’t appear in the lists necessary to live: the list of citizens of the country, —— 98 ——

of reserve soldiers, of members of society, of alumni of the Salesian priests of members of the White Party of members of the Yellow Party of decorated informers of eyes and watchmen for the palace of candidates for the sovereign’s personal guard the white list (where the names of all those respectable citizens who are still not on the black list appear) the list designating those who have the right to live, and since he didn’t appear on any of these lists, it was absolutely impossible to obtain anything he needed to continue living, and so, what his absence of papers signified fatefully came true: he was no longer living, he did not exist, he had died, without realizing it. I said at the beginning that I wasn’t worried by the quantity of papers the official was collecting. However, after a period of never-ending coming and going, our space became so reduced that soon we were drawn in close together, as if we were going to look at something really small, in the centre of the room. The papers started to climb up our shoes, and they crept past our feet up our legs, we had papers over our heads, in our pockets, and in our hands as tense as tables, until finally, to avoid problems, we climbed on top of the filing cabinets and the desks. When that official stopped bringing papers, I breathed a sigh of relief. The General Manager gave me a pen again and said to me as he handed me a receipt: “Sign here, and be informed of all your obligations to which you are bound from this moment on, whose written form appears in these papers. Ah,” he continued, “and I am informing you that ignorance of the law is no excuse.” I looked at my analyst, and he smiled back at me, blissfully happy that everything had gone so well, so orderly, so easily, and that the path they wanted me to take was so well-known, so well-worn. “I will never have time to find out all the things that I’m prohibited from doing,” I murmured, feeling discouraged as I looked around. My lawyer was a compassionate person. “You’ll come to my office every day, between 3:00 and 4:00, and read a portion of any of these provisions. Moreover, there will be a large number of functionaries around you, from this time on, who though not requiring anything, will inform you little by little of your new obligations. —— 99 ——

They are very experienced in cases of this kind and nothing will happen to you. You’ll see how efficiently everything works,” he informed me. I picked out one of the contracts at random. One, for example, which forced me to spend a third of each day doing a job of no importance to me, one that troubled me and let me be free only on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. I tossed it away, violently. I couldn’t think of anything more malevolent. And how would I be compensated for so much time I’d be sacrificing? My lawyer informed me right away: in exchange for the third of my life I had to make available to carry out the work which was so distasteful to me, I would receive a yellow card and a green one. The yellow one would allow me to buy a little meat weekly, as well as flour and a few apples. I had no need for these things. I sustained myself on dreams. With the green card, on the other hand, I had access to all the Statesponsored functions, that is, I could see any of the movies the State allowed to be seen, since they were harmless, and I could likewise attend any ballet function, ice-skating, or buy any of the permitted books. These things were also unnecessary; movies bored me, the ballet I found antiquated, and the books that weren’t censored were of no interest to anyone. Besides, I realized that this third of my time which I graciously had to make available to the State, didn’t include time spent waiting for transportation to get food, etc., nor was there any provision for clothing. None of that appeared on the card. Obviously, I’d made a bad deal. Another paper, that I randomly chose to look at, spelled out the sanctions I would be subject to if I were to arrive for work late; they went from being docked one movie to being sent to jail for contempt. In no case was dismissal considered, a punishment I would have eagerly wished for. Feeling sick from so many obligations, I left the hall so I could get some fresh air. The analyst had just signed my release, which meant I was now subject to all these provisions and rules. It was the end of my freedom. There was no getting away from it: I was caught, cornered, a prisoner. My relatives would be waiting for me at home, ready to celebrate my assimilation into the world we live in. This saddened me even more. I imagined desserts made on the strength of yellow cards, and a movie on the green card; I imagined my aunt and uncle dancing a tango and I suddenly remembered my mother, who was getting cold in the cemetery. Luckily, when I was saying goodbye to my analyst, whom I never wished to see again, I made out in the distance the short man from the park. Resolute, I went up to him. He was going round and round the trees, his head bowed down, —— 100 ——

as if looking for his lost identity on the ground now carpeted with leaves. His eyes were grey and I thought about those little birds in the public squares and the female marble statues that we would encounter on the walk. He was pecking on the ground with his eyes, looking for the lost papers, that would assure his survival for a while. I slowly approached him and showed him my brand-new assimilation card. He didn’t understand at first. I had to give him a brief explanation. I spoke to him of my mother, of the statues in the park, in any way I could, of a stone, to have a woman born. He didn’t understand any of it, but he was very enthused with the business of the card. Finally I gave it to him, and I left for the cemetery. Of all my suicide attempts, there was one only one that I hadn’t tried: to shut myself up in the crypt with mamá. This time I was sure of not failing.

—— 101 ——

45 THE STAMPEDE

He never got up again, not since the day the shots were heard and there was a run, not of the bulls, but of soldiers and civilians; the soldiers were armed to the teeth, for war, with arms brought from the United States, requested by the President for Life of the Ambassador who then attentively transferred the request to the Department of Foreign Affairs and he, in turn, consulted with the Pentagon and the Pentagon decided to collaborate with the agency so that so they wouldn’t speak badly about them, because they weren’t willing to help friendly and subordinate governments; the civilians were unarmed because they didn’t have the help of the Pentagon, nor the Quadrilateral, in fact they didn’t have anyone’s help, but they ran just the same. The noise of the running was tremendous and the resounding echo reminded him of a stampede of buffalo he’d seen in a western movie in panavision and cinemascope, with buffalo legs in a close-up passing right over the top of one’s head, and the stereophonic sound of the movie theatre, which was specially equipped for this type of screening. He was most impressed by the running and the stampede, and he wondered how the movie had been filmed, but now we had it at home, except that the buffalo were men and women running down the street, utterly terrified, and the thundering noise was of horses, thrown into pursuit, the noise of shots and exploding grenades, grenades that came with a warning written in English, that they were not to be used in demonstrations, crowds or disturbances, but who was going to pay any attention to that; the noise was so incredible—the shooting and terrified people looking like a buffalo herd—that it echoed thunderously along the beach and the streets, as it actually would in a hunt. Out of the blue, his thoughts turned to huge black sea basses that moaned before they died and their wailing could be heard the whole width and length of the shore, but this noise —— 102 ——

was much louder. The ung ung ung of sea basses, the belly rumbling, the zing zing zing of bullets, rattling sea basses, ricocheting bullets, sea basses rumbling, bullets rattling, sea basses zing, zing, zing bullets ung ung ung sea basses rumbling, bull’s-eye shots. He didn’t come running, but walking, and anyway, the noise was so intense that he couldn’t block it out, shut his ears like closing the doors of his house to take refuge inside. And from this stampede many were left crippled forever, broken arms and legs, lost eyes, mutilated hands; everything lost in the street in a frightful flight to cathedrals that opened their doors like large welcoming, tender mothers, but the fury extended even to the altar itself, where Christ agonized once more, and the Hosts jumped like fish only to land on the floor, the pulpit, and the kneeler. The newspapers didn’t cover this event because it was prohibited to do so, and silence spread a shroud over the public squares, cathedrals, hospitals, cemeteries, streets, and over the jails and the ambulances; silence fell over the mourning families, mutilated limbs, over the rarified air. Walking on the streets at that time was like walking on the greyish, opaque surface of the moon: a silence of dead or not yet born things, of lifeless things, a calm sea, dust that’s stirred up and then slowly settles, and ghost-like furniture, abandoned the day before, a heavy air, a sinister absence of sounds. Where were all the people? First they went to walk in the streets, which suddenly became empty, as if everyone had left the squares, the avenues, their houses. Even the walls gave off no shadows. The loneliness of the city moved him deeply, as if he were the only survivor. Where would he find the crowd? Only soldiers patrolled the avenue, watchful that no one attempted to assault fortifications. The green of the uniforms against the grey of the sidewalks filled him with sadness, as would a tombstone or granite of the pampas. There was a young wounded girl somewhere, and he would have liked to visit her; he’d seen how a soldier coldly aimed his rifle at her and how she fell, to one side, next to the sidewalk, like one more autumn leaf, fallen. It was impossible to figure out where she went. What hospital would they have quietly taken her to, in what cemetery would they have secretly buried her, would anyone have picked her up like a lost book or coin off the sidewalk, would anyone have taken her by the hand, taken her pulse, helped her? He felt compassion for those truncated anecdotes, all those biographies prematurely cut off, stripped away, interrupted by the ridiculous hyperbole of a bullet; he felt compassion for the love affairs abruptly ended, for the empty houses, the abandoned furniture, the orphaned children, for everything that from this day onward had become forbidden, unstable, dangerous. Someone recommended that he get in the house, since it was risky to be walking in the street with that detached look, that look of hopeless—— 103 ——

ness, the look of surprise that gave the impression he was maladjusted, a potential rebel. It was then that he went to bed. The room was filled with photos of ancient wars, former wars, survived wars. Wars out of books which had now come alive with macabre vividness. Charlemagne on the red walls of Paris and sweaty, thirsty paladins on sweaty, thirsty horses. Had he started with that picture? A long caravan was advancing. Titled photographs of the Second World War. Nagasaki full of smoke and a marine lighting up his cigar with his foot resting on the arm of a partially burnt corpse. The photograph had won a prize from Life magazine or something. They must certainly have given him a medal. Spectres of other days, spectres of these days. He straightened up a few books and clothing that he had in his room and dusted off the only chair. A soldier should be neat, even if he deserts. His friends would come to visit him. To ask him why he wasn’t going to the office anymore, what was keeping him away from the stadium. He would simply be quiet, stay quiet while they contemplated the titled photographs and legends, indifferently, the photographs of the wars that everyone had surely forgotten, except him. Napoleon and Charlemagne, since childhood, he had a wretched memory for everything, and how was he going to forget the soldier coldly pointing the gun at the girl—almost a child—falling in slow motion, slowly, leaning on a wall, and knowing, or not knowing ever again, understand: never know again, what became of her, if someone picked her up, if she was locked up in prison with so many others, if they left her to die, if she was carried in the arms of comrades, if a brother was looking after her, or a friend or a mother. And as for him—like what happened to Job—friends would come to give him false consolation, to dissuade him, to insinuate that all these wars—remember the Romans—had maybe gotten to him. They would tell him that always, always, it had been this way. They recommended patience and entertainment. Go for a walk, go on foot, spend more time with women, travel to some adventurous country where peace existed superficially. They would come to propose remedies and sonnets: resignation, hope, and charity. Theological virtues that he had lost in some battle field. Or maybe he had just lost them in the stampede. It was good that sometimes it was his turn to lose something in a war. He had painfully crossed the fields of Castile and had survived Auschwitz, he had fallen in Hué, and gotten up only to fall again; he had witnessed the slaughter of Blacks in Palmares and the extermination of the Indians in Potosí; he had fought in the south against the north and in the north against the south; he had been a blue soldier, a green soldier, and a red soldier. What more could be asked of him? He was no longer of an age to fight. So he went to bed and left some written —— 104 ——

orders: for the paperboy, not to bother anymore to leave a newspaper under his door: he didn’t have to know what was going on in the east or the west anymore, nor did he have to read local news which was censored by the minister; for the milkman, not to leave milk in the hallway, next to his door, milk which would likely have become tainted, contaminated by the impurity of his lapsed memory, obliviousness, of the whole affair, of the derision. For the mailman, he left a note saying to return the letters addressed to him: he wasn’t interested in any contact with men there, or in the Hereafter. For the maid who came to clean his small hideout three times a week, he left a disturbing note, in which he relieved her of her domestic duties, and ordered her to withdraw from the other one, forever, which was to increase the number of human beings on the planet. He was convinced the woman wouldn’t understand a single word he’d written, and that’s why he enclosed a little money: with this advice, he felt he had carried out his last duty dictated by conscience, and with the money, the woman would stay quiet and not alarm anyone, nor notify the police. As for his boss at the office, he sent him a letter thanking him for his persistence in always correcting the small details that distinguished him from others, convinced that any peculiarity—it could be the way he knotted his tie—was subversive, in a mass society; he thanked him also for his rigorous control of his work schedule, even on days when there was nothing to do, because the world cannot function (so he said) without discipline, for women’s telephone numbers that he provided though he never asked for them, and in a gesture of ambiguous camaraderie some data for the horse races which he didn’t use, and for the proposal to rent an apartment together for weekend parties, all of these being signs of warmth that he never believed he earned. After which, he lay down. He is still lying down. Long lines are forming in front of his door. The people want to find out why he refuses to get up. Days go by and some think he’s sleeping, and others think he is dead. An old girlfriend came from somewhere, and surely he no longer remembers her. She says that she’s the first woman he kissed in his life. He’s not there to confirm or deny that. The government has taken over the situation. First, they sent a Police Inspector. The man couldn’t open the door, so he left in search of instructions from the High Command. Then a psychiatrist arrived, and tried to communicate through the walls. The man refused to answer all his questions. The psychiatrist made several important affirmations. He said that the patient was going through the process of resisting the system, due to a deep emotional shock he suffered, who knows when. A friend in attendance asked if it could be the result of having seen a western film some time ago, one —— 105 ——

in which a buffalo stampede had impressed him very deeply. The psychiatrist said that hypothesis was within the realm of possibility. Then an older woman arrived, sobbing, claiming to be his mother, asking if she would be eligible for his pension if he died, but she hadn’t brought any document proving her maternal relationship with him. She said those documents had been lost in a plane accident, probably the same accident in which the famous singer, Carlos Gardel, had died. A family doctor came, whose assessment was that the patient had a full-blown case of arteriosclerosis. In his dreams, he’d been heard talking about a boy. The psychiatrist admitted the possibility that he could be a sex maniac, who, after committing some devious act, was punishing himself by voluntary seclusion. A search was made in the police files, but the only dead or wounded young girls from that period had been those who were victims of some police negligence, when accidentally an errant bullet was fired by an officer’s regulation gun, or someone had stumbled, something that often happened during demonstrations and strikes. One fact alarmed the psychiatrist: could the man be blaming himself for a crime he didn’t commit? This was common in patients who were delusional. The boss looked furious. He didn’t have a problem with his absenteeism, though he had no intention of justifying it, even if the man were to present him with all the doctors’ certificates in the world, but what bothered him was that he’d lost his list of telephone numbers and he wanted his subordinate to remember the number of a phenomenal blonde he wanted to see on the weekend. His employee always had an extraordinary memory. Was there no damn way of making him come out of his hiding place? After days on end of waiting, the situation became particularly delicate. The journalists surrounded the house, as if they were dealing with a residence of someone important, a famous soccer player, for example, whose things are all touched, photographed, taped, and filmed, details like the way he yawns when he wakes up in the morning, how he takes his marmalade spoon to his mouth, the kiss he gives his mother on her birthday and the brand of toothpaste he prefers. The police had cordoned off the area, in preparation for any disorder. An army helicopter circled above, keeping a watch on any movement. Doctors and inspectors of everything were coming and going. The woman, who claimed to have been the first girlfriend the patient ever had, received various propositions, of diverse sorts: to promote a beauty product for the skin, to sponsor the National Movement of Democratic Women, and to make a small television commercial, whose slogan was: Be patriotic, denounce a rebel. The solution was made possible by the Prime Minister, who had always shown great concern for national issues. He declared that it was necessary to evict the rebel, since he was a dreadful example for society, —— 106 ——

for the young and future generations, a destructive element, propagator of ugly customs, like missing work, not tending to his guests, and not replying to the questions of various authorities; not fulfilling his civic duties, especially those of honouring, respecting, and hailing the army, pointed to the fact that amidst us we had an extremely dangerous agitator, a man without morals, scruples, willing to stop at nothing to reach his sinister goals, which were to bring down the State, destroy the family, assault institutions, and undermine public health. Furthermore, the crowds gathering around his house were a constant danger for national security: at any moment, an incident could take place with unforeseeable consequences. As a result, he ordered the citizen immediately to abandon his bed, get dressed, open the door, and leave the house, with his hands up and a white handkerchief tied to his arm. To do this, he was given five minutes. The citizen did not answer. Nothing moved inside the house, nothing seemed to change after the minister’s calm, firm order. Five minutes passed and the occupant did not leave the house. Then the army squad threw a fistful of grenades at the building, which exploded like a small balloon; the rebellion had been snuffed out.

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46 THE HERO

It was an enormous horse, mounted by a national hero. It was customary for visitors and many tourists to stop and contemplate both horse and hero. The stateliness of the horse, his colossal size, the perfection of his muscles, his stance, his crest, everything about that magnificent beast gave cause for admiration. They were the work of a professional sculptor who specialized in monuments commemorating special anniversaries of historical events, and had been commissioned many times by the government for that reason. The horse was enormous and seemed to be almost breathing. His magnificent haunches always elicited praise. The guides would draw the public’s attention to the tension in his muscles, the space behind his knees, his neck and formidable jaws. The hero, meanwhile, was dwarfed. “I’m fed up being here,” he shouted one morning, at last. He looked down towards the horse’s back that supported him and he realized how minute, how diminished, how insignificant he’d been. On top of this splendid green animal, he looked like a grape. The horse gave no indication that he heard him: he maintained his pretentious stance, his forefoot in the raised position, as if ready to march. The sculptor had modelled him from a picture in an illustrated book which told of Julius Caesar’s great deeds, and ever since the horse found this out, he tried staying in this marching position most of the time. “Schttttttttttttt,” the hero called out. The horse looked upwards, arching his eyebrows and raising his eyes; a small black dot very high up, way above him, seemed to move. He could get it off him with just one of those rippling skin tremors that horses use to chase away flies and other insects. He was busy, however, keeping his forefoot in the starting position, because at nine o’clock in the morning a Japanese delegation would be coming to place a floral wreath and take pictures. This made him very proud. He had already seen blown-up pictures —— 108 ——

of himself in the foreground, broad and handsome, the monument’s platform sitting upon a very green lawn, its base surrounded with flowers, natural flowers, artificial flowers, given by officials, sailors, ministers, French actresses, North American boxers, Czechoslovakian dancers, the Pakistani ambassador, Russian pianists, people from the Peace and Friendship of Nations Mission, the Red Cross, the Young Neo-Fascists, the Major General of Air and Sea, and a core of Surviving Red Skins. This interruption just as he was about to lift his leg really bothered him. “Schtttt,” the hero insisted. Finally the horse realized he was being spoken to. “What do you want?” the chief asked in an imperious and somewhat rude tone. “I’d like to come down for a while and walk around, if it’s possible,” the hero humbly replied. “Do whatever you want. But I warn you,” the horse cautioned, “that at nine o’clock in the morning a Japanese delegation is coming.” “I know. I saw it in the newspapers,” the chief said, “but I’m fed up with so many ceremonies.” The horse refused to discuss such an unconventional reply. “It’s because of my bones, you know?” the hero said, excusing himself. “I feel a little stiff. And as for the pictures, I don’t know anymore what expression I should have,” he continued. “Glory is glory,” said the horse, offering his cheap philosophy. These wise phrases he had learned from the official speeches. Year after year, different politicians, presidents, ministers, secretaries, stood in front of the monument to give speeches. With time, the horse learned them by heart, and besides, they were nearly all the same, so they were easy to learn, even for a horse. “Do you think that if I came down for a while anyone would notice?” the hero asked. The question satisfied the horse’s vanity. “Not at all. I can stand in for both of us. Besides, in this country, nobody looks up. Everybody walks around with their head down. Nobody will notice the absence of a national hero; in any case, there are probably lots of people aspiring to take your place.” Encouraged, the hero furtively descended and left the horse alone. Once on the ground, the first thing he did was look up—something that nobody in the country would do—to observe the place he’d been relegated for years. He saw that the horse was enormous, like the Trojan horse, but he wasn’t sure if there were warriors inside it or not. At any rate, he was sure of one thing: the horse was surrounded by soldiers. Armed to the teeth, they formed two or three rows around the monument, and he wondered what they could be protecting. The poor? The law? Wisdom? Spending so many years sitting —— 109 ——

up high on the horse had made him a bit muddled, to the point of thinking that he’d been put that height from the ground so that he wouldn’t realize what was going on below. He wanted to get closer to ask one of the soldiers a question (“What is your function?” “Whom do you serve?” he would ask) but no sooner would he step a few metres in that direction than the men in the first row would all aim at him and he knew that they would riddle him with bullets if he took one more step. He gave up on the idea. Certainly with time, maybe before nightfall, he would find out why the soldiers were in the public square, what interests they were protecting and whom they served. For an instant, he felt nostalgia for his regiment of voluntary civilians who shared his ideas, and pushed forward with him, fighting even with their nails. He bought a newspaper at the corner, but reading it made him disgusted. He thought the police were there to help old people cross the street, but he could see very clearly, in a picture in the newspaper, a policeman beating up a student. The student was waving a sign with one of those slogans that he’d pronounced once, but something had happened with the slogan that he didn’t like now; for years he’d heard it monotonously chanted in all the official ceremonies that took place in front of the monument, but it had obviously become obsolete, or suspect, or something. Perhaps it was because they thought he hadn’t really said these words, and that they were false, or invented by someone else, not him. “It was me, it was me, I said them, I’ll repeat them!” he felt like shouting, but considering who was going to hear him, he thought it would be better not to shout, because for sure, if he started shouting in the middle of the street, he would land in jail, like the poor young man in the picture. And what was his portrait doing, his own portrait, stuck on that ministry’s door? He was not willing to allow that. A ministry accused of so many things having his portrait, the only real one, the only one that did him justice, on its door . . . This time the politicians had gone too far. He was willing to have his portrait on the cover of books, notebooks, or even better, on the houses of the poor, the humble, but certainly not at that ministry. Who could he complain to? There was the difficulty. He would have to present his formal complaint in a document with seals and treasury stamps from the library in one of those enormous, crowded offices. After a few years, maybe somebody in the hierarchy would look at the case, if he were promised a promotion, but it was a well-known fact he was in no position to offer anything to anybody, nor had he ever been in his life. He started to walk around a bit in the street and sat down on the cordon sectioning off the pavement. He was inconsolable. From above, he’d never seen so many poor people and beggars as he was seeing there now. What had happened during these years? How had it all come to this? Something awful was going on, but from above it was hard to see just what. That’s why they had put him up there. So he wouldn’t notice anything, so he wouldn’t find —— 110 ——

out what things were like, and so they could keep on uttering his name, pointlessly, in the speeches given for the refined enjoyment of foreign hypocrites who happened by at the moment. He walked a few blocks and along the way he met up with several tanks and army vehicles patrolling the city. This alarmed him very much. Could it be that his country—his own country—the one he had helped shape, was about to be invaded? The idea excited him. Nevertheless, he realized his mistake: he had read the morning newspaper very carefully and nothing had been said about that anywhere. Every country—at least those that people knew something about—had good relations with his country; of course one of them exploited all the rest, but this was considered natural and accepted by other governments, those of exploited countries. Disconcerted, he went to another public square and sat down on a bench. He didn’t like the tanks, he didn’t like walking through the city— now that he had dared to come down off the monument—and find it like this, constantly watched over, always shackled, oppressed. Where were the people, his people? Did he have no descendants? Later, a young man sat down beside him. He decided to ask him some questions, because he liked young people, and he was sure they would be able to answer all the questions he wanted to ask since he’d come down from that monstrous horse. “Why are all those tanks out there, young man?” he asked. The young man was very pleasant and looked clean-shaven. “They are maintaining order,” he answered. “What order?” the hero asked. “The official order,” he quickly replied. “I don’t quite understand, excuse me,” the hero said, feeling a bit ashamed of his ignorance. “Why does order have to be maintained with tanks? “ he asked. “Any other way would be difficult to accept,” the youth answered with utmost gentility. “And why wouldn’t it be accepted?” the hero asked, now feeling like he was taking part in Ionesco’s theatre of the absurd. Over the holidays he’d had time to read that author. It was summertime, when the government transferred its offices and ministers to the east, and when luckily, nobody thought of giving speeches in front of the monument. He’d taken advantage of the opportunity to read a little. Books that hadn’t been confiscated yet, which were very few. Most of them had been or were about to be censored. “Because it’s an unjust order,” the young fellow replied. The hero was confused. “And if it’s unjust, wouldn’t it be better to change it? I mean, revise it a little, so it wouldn’t be?” —— 111 ——

“Ha, ha!” the young man laughed for the first time. “You must be crazy or live on some happy island.” “Some time ago I left the country and I’ve just recently come back. You’ll have to excuse me,” the hero answered, disturbed. “Injustice always favours some, that’s the way it is,” the young fellow explained. The hero now understood why the tanks were there. He decided to change the subject. “What do you do? “Nothing,” the young man replied sharply. “What do you mean by ‘nothing’?” the hero asked, still surprised. “I was a student before, but now the government has decided to close the colleges, high schools, and universities. It suspects that education opposes order and so it’s being withheld from us. On the other hand, in order to get into administration, the only thing you need to do is pass an entrance exam proving you fit into the regime. In this way, public positions will be secured; as for private positions, there’s no problem: no one is ever employed who hasn’t proven solidarity with the system.” “What will the others do?” the hero asked, alarmed. “They’ll flee the country or they’ll be overtaken by hunger. Up until now, this last measure has been very useful, as powerful and efficient as real tanks.” The leader wanted to help the guy; he thought about writing a letter of recommendation for him, for the purpose of his getting a job, but he didn’t do it, because at this stage, he wasn’t sure if a card with his name on it would send the guy straight to jail. “I’ve been there,” the young man said, having read the word “jail” in the thoughts of the older man who’d returned to his country. “That’s why they cut my hair,” he added. “I don’t understand. What does having short hair have to do with jail?” “Long hair means you oppose the regime, or at least that’s what the government thinks.” “All my life I’ve had long hair,” the hero protested. “Those must have been different times,” the young fellow serenely concluded. There was a long silence. “And now what will you do?” the old man asked sadly. “I can’t tell anyone that,” he answered; he stood up, shook hands, and went across the square. Although the dialogue had filled him with sadness, the young man’s last sentence cheered him sufficiently. Now he was sure he had descendants there. —— 112 ——

Other books by Cristina Peri Rossi Las musas inquietantes. Barcelona: Lumen, 1999. El amor es una droga dura. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999. Poemas de amor y desamor. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1998. Inmovilidad de los barcos. Vitoria: Bassarai, 1997. Desastres íntimos. Barcelona: Lumen, 1997. Aquella noche. Barcelona: Lumen, 1996. Otra vez Eros. Barcelona: Lumen, 1994. La ciudad de Luzbel y otros relatos. Compañía Europea de Comunicaciones e Información, 1992. La última noche de Dostoievski. Mondadori: Madrid, 1992. Babel bárbara. Barcelona: Lumen, 1991. Fantasías eróticas. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1989. El libro de mis primos. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1989. La nave de los locos. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1989. Solitario de amor. Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1988. Cosmoagonías. Barcelona: Laia, 1988. La rebelión de los niños. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1988. Europa después de la lluvia. Madrid: Banco Exterior de España, 1987. Una pasión prohibida. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986. La nave de los locos. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984. El museo de los esfuerzos inútiles. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983. Indicios pánicos. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Editorial Bruguera, 1981. La rebelión de los niños. Caracas: Monte Avila, 1980. Linguística general. Valencia: Prometeo, 1979. Diáspora. Barcelona: Lumen, 1976. La tarde del dinosaurio. Barcelona: Planeta, 1976. Descripción de un naufragio. Barcelona: Lumen, 1974.

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Evohé. Montevideo: Girón, 1971. Indicios pánicos. Montevideo: Nuestra América, 1970. El libro de mis primos. Montevideo: Biblioteca Marcha, 1969. Los museos abandonados. Montevideo: Arca, 1968. Viviendo. Montevideo: Alfa, 1963. English Translations Museum of Useless Efforts. Trans. Tobias Hecht. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Evohé: Erotic Poems. Trans. Diana P. Decker. Washington: Azul Editions, 2000. Solitaire of Love. Trans. Robert S. Rudder and Gloria Chacón de Arjona. Durham: Duke Univeristy Press, 2000. Dostoevsky’s Last Night. Trans. Laura C. Dail: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. A Forbidden Passion. Trans. Mary J. Tracy. Cleis Press, 1993. The Ship of Fools. Trans. Psiche Hughes. Columbia: Readers International, 1990.

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