“Whatever you say, old man. That’s the way things turn out, the best thing is to keep cool. It’s not so bad for me either.”
“This sounds like a dialogue between two idiots,” Traveler said.
“Pure-bred mongoloids,” said Oliveira.
“You think you’re going to explain something, and it gets worse every time.”
“Explanation is a well-dressed mistake,” Oliveira said. “Make a note of that.”
“Yes, it’s much better to talk about other things then, about what’s going on in the Radical party. It’s just that you … But it’s like a merry-go-round, it always comes back to the same thing, the white horse, then the red one, the white one again. We’re poets, dad.”
“Terrific troubadours,” Oliveira said, filling up the glasses. “People who don’t sleep well and go over to the window to get a breath of fresh air, things like that.”
“So you did see me last night.”
“Let me think. First Gekrepten got to be a drag and I had to temporize. Just a little, but still … Then I slept like a log, trying to forget. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” Traveler said, and slapped his hand across the strings. Jingling her winnings, Señora Gutusso brought a chair over and asked Traveler to sing.
“A man named Enobarbus said in here that night dampness is poisonous,” Don Crespo informed them. “They’re all crazy in this book, in the middle of a battle they start talking about things that have nothing to do with what’s going on.”
“Well, then,” Traveler said, “let’s do the lady’s pleasure, if Don Crespo doesn’t mind. Malevaje, a bona fide tango by Juan de Dios Filiberto. Say, old buddy, remind me to read you Ivonne Guitry’s confession, it’s something great. Talita, go get the Gardel anthology. It’s on the night-table, where something like that should be.”
“And give it back to me while you’re at it,” Señora Gutusso said. “I don’t need it, but I like to have the books I like close to me. My husband is just the same, I might add.”
(–47)
47
I AM I, I am he. We are, but I am I, first I am I, I will defend being I until I am unable to fight any longer. I am I, Atalía. Ego. Yo. A professional degree, an Argentine, a scarlet fingernail, pretty sometimes, big dark eyes, I. Atalía Donosi, I. Yo. Yo-yo, windlass and hawser. Funny.
What a nut, Manú, going to the Casa América and renting this thing just to have some fun. REWIND. What a voice, that’s not my voice. False and forced: “I am I, I am he. We are, but I am I, first I am I, I will defend …” STOP. Wonderful machine, but it’s no good thinking out loud, or maybe you have to get used to it. Manú talks about recording his famous radio script about fine ladies; he won’t do anything. The magic eye is really magical, green slits that oscillate, contract, a one-eyed cat staring at me. Maybe I should cover it with a piece of cardboard. REWIND. The tape runs so smoothly, so regularly, VOLUME. Put it on 5 or 5½: “The magic eye is really magical, green slits that osci …” But what would really be magic would be for my voice to have said: “The magic eye plays secretly, red slits …” Too much echo. I have to put the microphone closer and lower the volume. I am I, I am he. What I really am is a bad parody of Faulkner. Cheap effects. Does he dictate to a magnetic recorder or does he use whiskey for tape? Do you say magnetic recorder or tape recorder? Horacio says magnetic recorder, he was surprised when he saw the machine, he said: “What a fine magnetic recorder, old man!” The manual calls it a tape recorder, they ought to know in the Casa América. Mystery: Why does Manú buy everything, even his shoes, in the Casa América? A fixation, a touch of idiocy, REWIND. This will be funny: “… Faulkner. Cheap effects.” STOP. It isn’t very funny listening to myself again. All this should take time, time, time. All this should take time, REWIND. Let’s see if the tone is more natural: “… ime, time, time. All this should …” The same thing, the voice of a midget with a cold. One thing, though, I do a good job of running it, Manú will be surprised, he doesn’t trust me with machines at all. Me, a pharmacist, Horacio doesn’t even notice, he looks at a person like mashed potatoes going through a strainer, mush that comes oozing out on the other side, something to sit down to and eat. Rewind? No, let’s keep on, let’s turn out the lights. Let’s try to speak in the third person … Then Talita Donosi turns out the lights and there isn’t anything except the little magic eye with its red slits (maybe it’ll come out green, maybe it’ll come out purple) and the glow of her cigarette. Hot, and Manú hasn’t come back from San Isidro, eleven-thirty. There’s Gekrepten at the window, I don’t see her but she’s there just the same, she’s at the window, in her nightgown, and Horacio at his tiny table, with a candle, reading and smoking. Horacio and Gekrepten’s room, I don’t know why, seems less like a hotel than this one. Stupid, it’s enough of a hotel so that even the cockroaches must have the room number written on their backs, and they have to put up with Don Bunche next door and his tubercular patients at twenty pesos a visit, the cripples and the epileptics. And below them the brothel, and the tangos that the errand-girl sings out of tune. REWIND. A good stretch, I should go back a half a minute at least. It goes against time, Manú would like to talk about that. Volume 5: “… the room number written on their backs …” Farther back. REWIND. NOW: “… Horacio at his tiny table, with a green candle …” STOP. Tiny, tiny. There’s no reason to say tiny when you’re a pharmacist. Pure corn. Tiny table! Misapplied tenderness. O.K., Talita. Enough of inanities, REWIND. All of it, until the tape is ready to snap off, the trouble with this machine is that you have to judge carefully, if the tape snaps off you lose a half a minute putting it back on again. STOP. Just right by an inch. I wonder what I said at the beginning? I can’t remember any more but my voice sounded like a frightened little rat, the well-known mike fright. Let’s see, volume 5½ so it’ll be easier to hear. “I am I, I am he. We are, but I am I, fir …” And why, why did I say that? I am I, I am he, and then talking about the tiny table, and then getting annoyed. “I am I, I am he. I am I, I am he.”
Talita turned off the recorder, shut the cover, looked at it with deep disgust, and poured herself a glass of lemonade. She didn’t want to think about the business of the clinic (the Manager called it “the mental clinic,” which was idiotic) but if she refused to think about the clinic (besides the fact that this matter of refusing to think was more of a hope than a reality) she immediately got into another equally bothersome sphere. She thought about Manú and Horacio at the same time, in the scale simile that she and Horacio had manipulated in such an ostentatious way in the circus box-office. Then the feeling of being inhabited became stronger, at least the clinic was an idea of fear, of the unknown, a hair-raising vision of raving maniacs in nightshirts chasing her with razors and grabbing stools and bed-legs, vomiting on their temperature charts and masturbating ritually. It was going to be very amusing seeing Manú and Horacio in white lab coats, taking care of the lunatics. “I’ll have a certain importance,” Talita thought modestly. “The Manager will certainly put me in charge of the clinic’s pharmacy. It’s probably a little first-aid station. Manú is going to tease me about it as usual.” She would have to review certain things, so much gets forgotten, time with its fine sandpaper, the indescribable daily battle that summer, the waterfront and the heat, Horacio coming down the gangplank with a friendless face, the rudeness of sending her off with the cat, you take the streetcar back because we’ve got to talk. And then a period began that was like a vacant lot full of twisted cans, hooks that could hurt your feet, dirty puddles, pieces of rag caught on the thistles, the circus at night with Horacio and Manú looking at her or looking at each other, the cat getting stupider every day or really more brilliant, solving problems to the delighted shrieks of the audience, the walks home with stopoffs in bars so Manú and Horacio could drink some beer, talking, talking about nothing, listening to herself talking in this heat and this smoke and the fatigue. I am I, I am he, she had said it without thinking, that is, it was beyond being thought, it ca
me from a region where words were like the lunatics in the clinic, menacing or absurd entities living an isolated life of their own, jumping up suddenly without anybody’s being able to tie them down: I am I, I am he, and he wasn’t Manú, he was Horacio, the inhabitant, the treacherous attacker, the shadow within the shadow of his room at night, the glow of his cigarette slowly sketching out the shapes of his insomnia.
When Talita was afraid, she would get up and make herself some tea that was half linden, half mint. She did it hoping with great longing that Manú’s key would scratch on the door. Manú had said with soaring words: “Horacio doesn’t care a damn about you.” It was insulting but tranquilizing. Manú had said that even if Horacio had made a pass (and he hadn’t, he’d never even hinted)
one of linden
one of mint
the water good and hot, first sign, of boiling, stop
not even then would she have meant anything to him. But then. But if it didn’t make any difference to him, why always be there in the corner of the room smoking or reading, be (I am I, I am he) there as if he were needing her in some way, yes, just that exactly, needing her, hanging on to her from a distance to reach something, the better to see something, the better to be something. Then it wasn’t: I am I, I am he. Then it was the opposite: I am he because I am I. Talita sighed, satisfied a little with her good powers of reason and the good taste of the tea.
But that wasn’t all there was to it, because then it would have been too easy. It couldn’t be (there’s a reason for logic) that Horacio was interested and at the same time was not interested. The combination of the two things should have produced a third, something that had nothing to do with love, for example (it was so stupid to think about love when love was only Manú, only Manú until the end of time), something that was close to being a hunt, a search, or rather a terrible expectation, like the cat looking at the canary it cannot reach, a kind of congealing of time and day, a kind of crouching. A lump and a half, the soft smell of the country. A crouching without explanations, the-way-things-look-from-here, or until one day when Horacio would deign to speak, go away, shoot himself, any explanation or material on which one could imagine an explanation. Not that business of being there drinking mate and looking at them, making Manú drink mate and look at him, making the three of them dance a slow, interminable pattern. “I should be a novelist,” Talita thought, “marvelous ideas come to me.” She was so depressed that she turned on the tape recorder again and sang songs until Traveler came home. They both agreed that Talita’s voice did not come out too well, and Traveler showed her how a baguala should be sung. They brought the recorder over to the window so Gekrepten could be the impartial judge, and even Horacio if he was in the room, but he wasn’t. Gekrepten found everything perfect and they decided to have dinner together at the Travelers’, combining a cold roast that Talita had with a tossed salad that Gekrepten would make before coming over. This all seemed perfect to Talita and at the same time there was something like a bedcover about it, or a teapot cover, or some kind of cover, just like the recorder or Traveler’s satisfied air, things done or decided, to be put on top, but on top of what, that was the problem and the reason that everything underneath it all was still the way it had been before the half-linden, half-mint tea.
(–110)
48
NEXT to El Cerro—although you never really do get next to El Cerro, you arrive all at once and never know actually whether you’re already there or not, near El Cerro would be better—in a section with low buildings and arguing children, his questions got him nowhere, they would all shatter against pleasant smiles, women who wanted to be helpful but didn’t really know anything, people move away, sir, there’ve been a lot of changes here, maybe if you go to the police they’ll be able to tell you. And he didn’t stay too long because the ship was going to sail, and though he kept it deep inside himself, everything had been hopeless from the start, his investigations had had their source in his doubts, like playing the numbers or working out a horoscope. Another streetcar back to the pier to flop down on his bunk until it was time to eat.
That same night, around two o’clock in the morning, was the first time he saw her again. It was hot, and in the steerage where a hundred-odd immigrants were snoring and sweating it was worse than sitting on the coils of a hawser underneath the dull river sky, as all the dampness of the harbor stuck to his skin. Oliveira sat down against a bulkhead to smoke, studying the few stars that were sneaking in and out of the clouds. La Maga came from behind a ventilator funnel, holding something in her hand that was dragging along the deck, and almost immediately she turned her back on him and went towards one of the hatchways. Oliveira made no attempt to follow her; he knew only too well that he was looking at something that would not let itself be followed. He thought that she was probably one of those snobs from first class who like to descend even to the filth of the forecastle, thirsting for something they would call experience or life, things like that. She did look a lot like La Maga, that was certain, but he had supplied the main part of the resemblance, so that once his heart stopped heaving like a mad dog he lit another cigarette and called himself a hopeless idiot.
To have thought that he had seen La Maga was less bitter than the certainty that some uncontrollable desire had brought her up out of the depths of that place defined as the subconscious and had been able to project her onto the silhouette of any one of the women on board. Until that moment he had believed that he could allow himself the luxury of the melancholy memory of certain things, evoke determined stories in a proper time and atmosphere, then put an end to them with the same tranquillity with which he would crush a butt in an ashtray. When Traveler introduced him to Talita on the dock, so ridiculous with that cat in a basket and an air somewhere between pleasant and Alida Valli, he again felt certain remote likenesses condensing quickly into a total false resemblance, as if from out of his apparently so well compartmentalized memory a piece of ectoplasm had suddenly emerged, capable of inhabiting and complementing another body and another face, of looking at him from outside in a way that he had thought forever restricted to memories.
In the weeks following that were dragged along by Gekrepten’s irresistible abnegation and his apprenticeship in the difficult art of selling cashmere cuts from door to door, he had more than enough glasses of beer and time spent on park benches in which to dissect episodes. His explorations in El Cerro had seemed on the outside like a discharge of conscience: find, try to explain, say goodbye forever. That tendency of man to finish cleanly what he does, without leaving any threads hanging. Now he was beginning to realize (a shadow from behind a ventilator, a woman with a cat) that this was not why he had gone to El Cerro. Analytical psychology irritated him, but it was true: this was not why he had gone to El Cerro. Suddenly he was a pit falling infinitely into himself. He scolded himself ironically, right in the middle of the Plaza del Congreso: “And you called that a search? Did you think you were free? What was that business about Heraclitus? Let’s see, repeat the steps of liberation, so I can have a little laugh. But you’re at the bottom of the funnel, bud.” He would have liked to be sure that he had been irreparably debased by his discovery, but he was bothered by a vague satisfaction in the region of his stomach, that feline answer of contentment which the body gives when it laughs at the restless schpells of the schpirit and hunches comfortably into its ribs, its belly, and the flat soles of its feet. The worst of it was that deep down inside he was rather content to feel that way, to feel that he hadn’t come back, that he was still going away even though he didn’t know where. On top of the contentment he was being burned by a kind of desperation for simple understanding, a cry for something that he would have liked to make into flesh and blood, and which this vegetative contentment was sluggishly rejecting, keeping it at a distance. There were moments when Oliveira would be present like a spectator at this discord, not caring to participate, cynically impartial. That’s what happened with the circus, the mate sessions in Don Cres
po’s patio, Traveler’s tangos—Oliveira would look at himself out of the corner of his eye in all of those mirrors. He even wrote down some odd thoughts in a notebook that Gekrepten lovingly kept in the dresser drawer, not daring to read it. He was slowly realizing that his visit to El Cerro had been good, precisely because it had been based on other reasons than those he had imagined. To know that he was in love with La Maga was neither a defeat nor any sort of fixation in any outdated order of things; a love that could do without its object, that could find its nourishment in nothingness, that could be totaled up and come out as other strengths, defining them and bringing them together into an impulse that one day would destroy that visceral contentment of a body stuffed with beer and fried potatoes. All the words he used to fill the notebook along with great flourishes in the air and shrill whistles made him laugh like a madman. Traveler would finally come to the window and ask him to quiet down a little. But other times Oliveira would find a certain peace in manual chores, like straightening out nails or unweaving sisal threads, using the fibers to construct a delicate labyrinth which would cling to the lampshade and which Gekrepten would describe as elegant. Maybe love was the highest enrichment, a giver of being; but only by bungling it could one avoid its boomerang effect, let it run off into nothingness, and sustain one’s self alone again on this new step of open and porous reality. Killing the beloved object, that ancient fear of man, was the price paid for not stopping on the stairs, just as Faust’s plea to the passing moment would not have made sense if he had not abandoned it at the same time, just as one puts down an empty glass on the table. And things like that, and bitter mate.
It would have been so easy to organize a coherent scheme, an order of thought and life, a harmony. All that was needed was the usual hypocrisy, elevate the past to the value of experience, derive profit from the wrinkles on one’s face, from the knowing look one sees in smiles and silences after forty years. Then one would put on a blue suit, comb one’s graying hair, and go to art galleries, to the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores and the Richmond bar, reconciled with the world. A discreet skepticism, an air of having returned, a measured entrance into maturity, into matrimony, into the paternal sermon at carving time or on receipt of an unsatisfactory report card. I am telling you this because I have lived longer than you. I’ve been around. When I was a boy. They’re all alike, te lo digo yo. I’m telling you this from my own experience, son. You don’t know what life is yet.