INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW
TO CLIMB A STAIRCASE
No one will have failed to observe that frequently the floor bends in such a way that one part rises at a right angle to the plane formed by the floor and then the following section arranges itself parallel to the flatness, so as to provide a step to a new perpendicular, a process which is repeated in a spiral or in a broken line to highly variable elevations. Ducking down and placing the left hand on one of the vertical parts and the right hand upon the corresponding horizontal, one is in momentary possession of a step or stair. Each one of these steps, formed as we have seen by two elements, is situated somewhat higher and further than the one prior, a principle which gives the idea of a staircase, while whatever other combination, producing perhaps more beautiful or picturesque shapes, would be incapable of translating one from the ground floor to the first floor.
You tackle a stairway face on, for if you try it backwards or sideways, it ends up being particularly uncomfortable. The natural stance consists of holding oneself upright, arms hanging easily at the sides, head erect but not so much so that the eyes no longer see the steps immediately above, while one tramps up, breathing lightly and with regularity. To climb a staircase one begins by lifting that part of the body located below and to the right, usually encased in leather or deerskin, and which, with a few exceptions, fits exactly on the stair. Said part set down on the first step (to abbreviate we shall call it “the foot”), one draws up the equivalent part on the left side (also called “foot” but not to be confused with “the foot” cited above), and lifting this other part to the level of “the foot,” makes it continue along until it is set in place on the second step, at which point the foot will rest, and “the foot” will rest on the first. (The first steps are always the most difficult, until you acquire the necessary coordination. The coincidence of names between the foot and “the foot” makes the explanation more difficult. Be especially careful not to raise, at the same time, the foot and “the foot.”)
Having arrived by this method at the second step, it’s easy enough to repeat the movements alternately, until one reaches the top of the staircase. One gets off it easily, with a light tap of the heel to fix it in place, to make sure it will not move until one is ready to come down.
PREAMBLE TO THE INSTRUCTIONS
ON HOW TO WIND A WATCH
Think of this: When they present you with a watch they are gifting you with a tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air. They aren’t simply wishing the watch on you, and many more, and we hope it will last you, it’s a good brand, Swiss, seventeen rubies; they aren’t just giving you this minute stonecutter which will bind you by the wrist and walk along with you. They are giving you—they don’t know it, it’s terrible that they don’t know it—they are gifting you with a new, fragile, and precarious piece of yourself, something that’s yours but not a part of your body, that you have to strap to your body like your belt, like a tiny, furious bit of something hanging onto your wrist. They gift you with the job of having to wind it every day, an obligation to wind it, so that it goes on being a watch; they gift you with the obsession of looking into jewelry-shop windows to check the exact time, check the radio announcer, check the telephone service. They give you the gift of fear, someone will steal it from you, it’ll fall on the street and get broken. They give you the gift of your trademark and the assurance that it’s a trademark better than the others, they gift you with the impulse to compare your watch with other watches. They aren’t giving you a watch, you are the gift, they’re giving you yourself for the watch’s birthday.
INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW
TO WIND A WATCH
Death stands there in the background, but don’t be afraid. Hold the watch down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly. Now another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that burgeon the air, the breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell of bread.
What did you expect, what more do you want? Quickly strap it to your wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is about to corrode the watch’s veins, cankering the cold blood and its tiny rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it’s already unimportant.
unusual
occupations
SIMULACRA
We are an uncommon family. In this country where things are done only to boast of them or from a sense of obligation, we like independent occupations, jobs that exist just because, simulacra which are completely useless.
We have one failing: we lack originality. Nearly everything we decide to do is inspired by—let’s speak frankly, is copied from—celebrated examples. If we manage to contribute any innovation whatsoever, it always proves to have been inevitable: anachronisms, or surprises, or scandals. My elder uncle says that we’re like carbon copies, identical with the original except another color, another paper, another end product. My third-youngest sister compares herself to Andersen’s mechanical nightingale. Her romanticizing is disgusting.
There are a lot of us and we live in Humboldt Street.
We do things, but it’s difficult to tell about it because the most important elements are missing: the anxiety and the expectation of doing the things, the surprises so much more important than the results, the calamities and abortive undertakings where the whole family collapses like a card castle and for whole days you don’t hear anything but wailing and peals of laughter. Telling what we do is hardly a way of filling in the inevitable gaps, because sometimes we’re poor or in jail or sick, sometimes somebody dies or (it hurts me to mention it) someone goes straight, finks out, renounces us, or heads in the UNPOSITIVE DIRECTION. But there’s no reason to conclude from this that things are terrible with us or that we’re incurably unhappy. We live in this lower-middle-class neighborhood called the barrio Pacífico, and we do things every chance we get. There are a lot of us who come up with ideas and manage to put them into action. The gallows for instance: up till now, no one’s agreed on how the idea got started; my fifth sister asserts that it was one of my first cousins, who are very much philosophers, but my elder uncle insists that it occurred to him after reading a cloak-and-dagger novel. Basically, it’s not very important to us, the only thing that counts is to do things, and that’s why I tell it, unwillingly almost, only so as not to feel so close the emptiness of this rainy afternoon.
The house has a garden in front of it, an uncommon thing in Humboldt Street. It’s not much bigger than a patio, but it’s three steps higher than the sidewalk, which gives it the fine aspect of a platform, the ideal site for a gallows. As it has a high railing of ironwork and masonry, one can work without the passers-by being, as one might say, installed in the house itself; they can station themselves at the railings and hang around there for hours, which doesn’t bother us. “We shall begin at the full moon,” my father ruled. By day we went to find lengths of wood and iron in the warehouses in the Avenida Juan B. Justo, but my sisters stayed home in the parlor practicing the wolf howl, after my youngest aunt maintained that gallows trees draw wolves and move them to howl at the moon. The responsibility of acquiring a supply of nails and other hardware fell to my cousins; my elder uncle made a sketch of the plans, and discussed with my mother and my other uncle the variety and quality of the various instruments of torture. I remember the end of that discussion: they decided austerely on a reasonably high platform upon which would be constructed the gibbet and a rack and wheel, with an open space which could be used for torture or beheading, depending upon the case. It seemed to my elder uncle a rather poor and meeching construction compared with his original idea, but the size of the front garden and the cost of construction materials are always restricting the family’s ambitions.
We began the construction work on a Sunday afternoon after the raviolis. Alt
hough we had never concerned ourselves with what the neighbors might think, it was clear that the few onlookers thought we were adding one or two floors to enlarge the house. The first to be astonished was Don Cresta, the little old man in the house across from us, and he came over to inquire why we were putting up a platform like that. My sisters were gathered in one corner of the garden and were letting loose with a few wolf howls. A goodly group of people gathered, but we went on working until nightfall and got the platform finished and the two little sets of stairs (for the priest and the condemned man, who ought not to go up together). Monday one part of the family went to its respective employments and occupations, after all, you have to live somehow, and the rest of us began to put up the gibbet while my elder uncle consulted ancient engravings to find a model for the rack and wheel. His idea was to set the wheel as high as possible upon a slightly irregular pole, for example a well-trimmed poplar trunk. To humor him, my second-oldest brother and my first cousins went off with the pickup truck to find a poplar; my elder uncle and my mother, meanwhile, were fitting the spokes of the wheel into the hub and I was getting an iron collar ready. In those moments we amused ourselves enormously because you could hear hammering on all sides, my sisters howling in the parlor, the neighbors crowding against the iron railings exchanging impressions, and the silhouette of the gibbet rose between the rosaniline bed and the evening mallows and you could see my younger uncle astride the crosspiece driving in the hook and fixing the running knot for the noose.
At this stage of things the people in the street could not help realizing what it was we were building, and a chorus of threats and protests was an agreeable encouragement to put the final stroke to the day’s labor by erecting the wheel. Several disorderly types had made an effort to keep my second-oldest brother and my cousins from conveying into the house the magnificent poplar trunk which they’d fetched in the pickup truck. An attempt at harassment in the form of a tug of war was won easily by the family in full force tugging at the trunk in a disciplined way, and we set it down in the garden along with a very young child trapped in the roots. My father personally returned the child to its exasperated parents, putting it genteelly through the railings, and while attention was concentrated on these sentimental alternatives, my elder uncle aided by my first cousins fitted the wheel onto one end of the trunk and proceeded to raise it. The family was congregated on the platform at the moment the police arrived and commented favorably on how well the gallows looked. My third sister had stationed herself alone by the gate, so the dialogue with the deputy commissioner himself was left up to her; it was not difficult for her to persuade him that we were laboring within the precincts of our own property upon a project only the use of which could vest it with an illegal character, and that the complaints of the neighborhood were the products of animosity and the result of envy. Nightfall saved us from losing any more time.
We took supper on the platform by the light of a carbide lamp, spied upon by a crowd of around a hundred spiteful neighbors; never had the roast suckling pig tasted more exquisite, or the chianti been blacker and sweeter. A breeze from the north swung the gallows rope gently back and forth; the wheel of the rack creaked once or twice, as though the crows had already come to rest there and eat. The spectators began to go off, muttering vague threats; some twenty or thirty stayed on, hanging around the iron railing—they seemed to be waiting for something. After coffee we put out the lamp so that we could see the moon, which was rising over the balustrades of the terrace, my sisters howled, and my cousins and uncles loped slowly back and forth across the platform, their steps making the foundation shake underfoot. In the subsequent silence the moonlight came to fall at the height of the noose, and a cloud with silver borders seemed to stretch across the wheel. We looked at it all, so happy it was a pleasure, but the neighbors were murmuring at the railings as if they were disappointed or something. They were lighting cigarettes or were wandering off, some in pajamas and others more slowly. Only the street remained, the sound of the cop’s nightstick on pavement in the distance, and the 108 bus which passed every once in a while; as for us, we had already gone to sleep, and were dreaming of fiestas, elephants, and silk suits.
CEREMONY AND PROTOCOL
It has always seemed to me that the distinctive trait of our family is restraint. We carry modesty to incredible extremes, as much in our manner of dressing and of eating as in our way of expressing ourselves or getting onto trams. Nicknames, for example, which in the barrio Pacífico are so unscrupulously assigned, are for us an occasion for care, reflection, even uneasiness. It seems to us that you can’t simply attach any old nickname to someone who will have to digest it and tolerate it as a permanent adjunct for the rest of his life. The ladies in Humboldt Street call their sons Toto, Coco, or Tiny, and the girls Brownie or Doll, but this plain variety of nickname does not exist in our family, much less the rarer and terrifying ones such as Scarface, Professor, or Sharkey, which abound around Paraguay and Godoy Cruz. To show you the caution we employ in such matters, one has only to cite the case of my younger aunt. Visibly endowed with a backside of impressive dimensions, yet we would never have permitted ourselves the easy temptation of the customary nicknames; thus, instead of giving her the brutish nickname “Etruscan Amphora” we agreed on the more decent and homely one “Rumpy.” We always proceed with the same tact, although it happens that we have fights with the neighbors, who insist upon the traditional devices. Now in the case of my younger second cousin, who carries around a remarkably large head, we always rejected the nickname “Atlas,” which had been given to him at the snack bar on the corner, and preferred the infinitely more delicate one “Pinhead”—etcetera.
I should like to make clear that we don’t do these things to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the neighborhood. It’s only that we should like to modify routines and traditions gradually, and without ruffling anyone’s feelings. Vulgarity in any of its forms displeases us, and if, down at the bar, one of us hears phrases like “It was a game with some rough action,” or “Faggioli’s game was characterized by a good deal of early infiltration down the center line,” that’s enough for us: we immediately drop our firm adherence to form and good breeding and whip out the locutions most advisable under the emergency circumstances, for instance: “He made one of those kicks I owe you,” or “We rapped them around a little, then we really scored.” People look at us with surprise, but no one ever misses the lesson concealed in these delicate phrases. My older uncle, who reads the Argentine writers, says that it would be a good idea to work a similar gig with some of their work, but he’s never explained this to us in detail. A shame.
POSTAL & TELEGRAPH SERVICE
One time a very distant relative of ours managed to get to be a minister and we fixed it so that a large part of the family received appointments in the post office substation in the calle de Serrano. It didn’t last long, that’s for sure. Of the three days we were there, two of them we spent attending to the needs of the public with astounding celerity, which served us well on a surprise visit by an inspector from the Central Post Office and earned us a laudatory squib in the Civil Service Leader. We were certain of our popularity by the third day, for people were already coming in from other sections of the city to send off their correspondence and to make out money orders to Purmamarca and other equally absurd places. Then my elder uncle gave us free rein and the family really began handling things, adapting procedures to their principles and predilections. At the stamp window, my second-youngest sister was giving away a colored balloon to everyone who bought stamps. The first recipient of a balloon was a stout housewife, who stood there as if she’d been nailed to the floor, balloon in one hand, in the other a one-peso stamp, already licked, which was curling up on her finger little by little. A youth with long hair flatly refused to accept his balloon, and my sister admonished him severely, while contrary opinions began to be raised in the line behind him. At the next window, divers provincials stupidly engaged in remittin
g part of their salaries to their distant relatives were somewhat astonished to receive small shots of vodka and every once in a while a breaded veal cutlet; all this my father took charge of, and to top it off he recited the old gaucho Vizcacha’s better maxims at the top of his lungs. My brothers, in the meantime, in charge of the parcel-post counter, had smeared the packages with tar and were dunking them in a bucket filled with feathers. They presented them later to the thunderstruck truck-man, pointing out the happiness with which such improved packages would be received. “No string showing,” they said. “Without all that vulgar sealing wax, and with the name of the addressee that looks like it’s been printed under a swan’s wing, you notice?” Not everyone proved to be enchanted, one has to be truthful about it.
When the bystanders and the police invaded the premises, my mother closed the act with a beautiful gesture, she flew many paper airplanes over the heads of the assembled public, all different colors, made from telegrams, forms for postal money orders and for registered letters. We sang the national anthem and retired in good order; I saw a little girl, third in line at the stamp window, crying, when she realized it was already too late for them to give her a balloon.