(–1)
74
THE nonconformist as seen by Morelli, a note clipped to a laundry bill with a safety pin: “Acceptance of the pebble and of Beta Centauri, from the pure-as-anodyne to the pure-as-excess. This man moves within the lowest and the highest of frequencies, deliberately disdaining those in between, that is to say, the current band of the human spiritual mass. Incapable of liquidating circumstances, he tries to turn his back on them; too inept to join those who struggle for their liquidation, he thinks therefore that this liquidation is probably a mere substitute for something else equally partial and intolerable, he moves off shrugging his shoulders. To his friends, the fact that he finds his happiness in the trivial, in the puerile, in a piece of string or in a Stan Getz solo indicates a lamentable impoverishment; they do not know that he is also at the other extreme, the approach towards a summa that denies itself and goes threading off and hiding, or that the hunt has no end and that it will not even end with the man’s death, because his death will not be a death as in the intermediate band, in frequencies that are picked up by ears that listen to Siegfried’s funeral march.”
Perhaps to correct the exalted tone of the note, a piece of yellow paper scribbled on in pencil: “Pebble and star: absurd images. But the intimate commerce with stones that have been rolled leads one to a passage; between the hand and the stone there vibrates a chord outside of time. Fulgurant…[an unreadable word]…of which Beta Centauri also partakes; names and magnitudes give way, dissolve, stop being what science thinks they are. And then one is into something that purely is (what? what?): a trembling hand that wraps up a transparent stone that also trembles.” (Farther down, in ink: “It is not a question of pantheism, delightful illusion, fall upward into a heaven set afire at the edge of the sea.”)
In another place, this clarification: “To speak of high and low frequencies is to give way again to the idola fori and to scientific language, an illusion of the Western world. For my nonconformist, the happy building of a kite and its raising for the joy of children present is not a lowly occupation (low in respect to high, little in respect to much, etc.), but rather a coming together of pure elements, and out of that a momentary harmony, a satisfaction which helps him raise up the rest. In like manner the moments of estrangement, of happy alienation which hurl him into very brief touches of something that could be his paradise, do not represent for him a higher experience than the making of the kite; it is like an end, but not on top or beyond. Nor is it an end that can be understood in time, an accession in which there culminates a process of enriching despoilment; it can come to him while he is sitting on the toilet, and it especially comes between a woman’s thighs, between clouds of smoke, and in the midst of reading things rarely treasured by the cultured Sunday rotogravure.
“On the level of day-to-day acts, the attitude of my nonconformist is translated into his refusal of everything that smells like an accepted idea, tradition, a gregarious structure based on fear and falsely reciprocal advantages. It would not be hard for him to be Robinson Crusoe. He is not a misanthrope, but merely accepts from men and women that part which has not been plasticized by the social superstructure; he himself is afraid of his body’s getting stuck in the mold and he knows it, but this knowledge is active and not that resignation that keeps time to the rhythm. With his free hand he slaps his own face for most of the day, and in spare moments he slaps the faces of others, and they pay him back in triplicate. He spends his time, therefore, in monstrous rows brought on by lovers, friends, creditors, and officials, and in the few moments he has left he makes use of his freedom in a way that startles everyone else and which always ends up in small ridiculous catastrophes, measured against himself and his attainable ambitions; another more secret and evasive freedom works on him, but only he (and then just barely) is conscious of its movements.”
(–6)
75
IT had been so handsome, in days gone by, to feel himself installed in an imperial style of life that authorized sonnets, dialogues with the stars, meditations on Buenos Aires nights, a Goethean serenity at gatherings in the Colón, or at lectures by foreign professors. He was still surrounded by a world that lived that way, that wanted to be that way, deliberately handsome and spruced up, architectural. To sense the distance that now isolated him from that columbarium, all that Oliveira had to do was put on a wry smile and imitate the exaggerated phrases and the luxurious rhythms of yesterday, the aulic ways of speaking and keeping still. In Buenos Aires, the capital of fear, he felt himself surrounded once again by that discreet smoothing off of edges that likes to go by the name of good sense and, on top of it all, that affirmation of sufficiency which lumps together the voices of young and old, its acceptance of the immediate as the true, of the vicarious as the, as the (in front of the mirror, with the tube of toothpaste in his closing fist, Oliveira again let a laugh escape from his face and instead of putting the brush into his mouth he applied it to his reflection and carefully anointed the false face with pink toothpaste, drew a heart right over its mouth, drew hands, feet, letters, obscenities, he ran up and down the mirror with the brush and with the tube, doubling up with laughter, until desolate Gekrepten came in with a sponge, and so forth).
(–43)
76
THE Pola affair was hands, as usual. There is dusk, there is the fatigue that comes from having wasted time in cafés, reading newspapers that are always the same newspaper, there is something like the top on a beer bottle that softly squeezes you at stomach level. You’re ready for anything, you’re capable of falling into the worst traps of inertia and abandon, and all of a sudden a woman opens her purse to pay for a café-crème, her fingers play for an instant with the always imperfect clasp on the purse. You get the feeling that the clasp is guarding against an entry into a sign of the zodiac, that when that woman’s fingers find a way to slide down the slender golden stem and with an imperceptible half-turn the catch loosens, some outflow will dazzle the customers absorbed in their pernod and Tour de France, or maybe they’ll be swallowed up, a purple velvet funnel will pull the world off its hinges, all of the Luxembourg, the Rue Soufflot, the Rue Gay-Lussac, the Café Capoulade, the Fontaine de Médicis, the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, it will swallow up everything in one last gulp that will leave nothing but an empty table, the open purse, the woman’s hands which take out a hundred-franc note and hand it to Père Ragon, while Horacio Oliveira, naturally, the gaudy survivor of the catastrophe, prepares to say what you say at moments of great catastrophe.
“Oh, you know,” Pola answered. “Fear is not my forte.”
She said: Oh, vous savez, a little like the way the sphinx must have spoken before presenting the enigma, almost excusing herself, refusing a prestige that she knew was grand. She spoke like the women in so many novels where the novelist does not wish to waste time and therefore puts the better part of the description into the dialogue, unifying in that way the useful and the pleasant.
“When I say fear,” Oliveira observed, sitting on the sphinx’s left on the same red plush seat, “I’m thinking especially of reverse sides. You moved that hand as if you were touching a limit, and after that a world against the grain began in which, for example, I could be your purse and you Père Ragon.”
He was waiting for Pola to laugh and for things to deny that they were so sophisticated, but Pola (he found out later on her name was Pola) did not find the possibility too absurd. When she smiled she showed a set of small and regular teeth against which she drew her lips a little, lips painted a vivid orange, but Oliveira was still on her hands, he was always affected by women’s hands, he felt the need to touch them, pass his fingers over each joint, explore with a movement like that of a Japanese kinesiologist the imperceptible route of the veins, discover the condition of the nails, have a Chiromantic suspicion of ominous lines and propitious mounds, hear the din of the moon resting against his ear the palm of a small hand a little damp from love or from a cup of tea.
(–101)
&nbs
p; 77
“YOU probably realize that after all this …”
“Res non verba,” Oliveira said. “It’s one week at about seventy pesos a day, let’s call it five hundred and fifty and you can buy the patients a coke with the other ten.”
“Please remove your personal effects at once.”
“Yes, sometime between today and tomorrow, more likely tomorrow than today.”
“Here’s your money. Please sign the receipt.”
“No pleases. I’ll just sign. Ecco.”
“My wife is so upset,” Ferraguto said, turning his back and taking the cigar out from between his teeth.
“It’s feminine sensitivity, menopause, things like that.”
“It’s dignity, sir.”
“Exactly what I was thinking. Speaking of dignity, thanks for the job in the circus. It was fun and there wasn’t much to do.”
“My wife still can’t understand,” Ferraguto said, but Oliveira was already at the door. One of the two opened his eyes or closed them. There was also something about the door that was like an eye opening or closing. Ferraguto relit his cigar and put his hands in his pockets. He was thinking about what he was going to say to that unconscious lunatic as soon as he came around. Oliveira let them put the compress on his forehead (or rather it was he who had closed his eyes) and he thought about what he was going to say to Ferraguto when he was sent for.
(–131)
78
THE intimacy of the Travelers. When I say goodbye to them in the doorway or in the café on the corner, suddenly it’s like a desire to stay near them, watching them live, a voyeur without appetites, friendly, a little sad. Intimacy, what a word, it makes you want to stick the fateful wh in front of it. But what other word could intimate (in its first acceptance) the very skin of acquaintance, the epithelial reason for Talita’s, Manolo’s, and my being friends. People think they’re friends because they coincide for a few hours a week on a sofa, in the movies, sometimes in a bed, or because they happen to do the same work in an office. When we were young, in a café, how many times did the illusion of identity with our companions make us happy. Identity with men and women of whom we scarcely knew one shape of being, a shape of giving in, a profile. I remember with a timeless clarity the cafés in Buenos Aires where for several hours we would succeed in getting away from family and obligations, where we would enter a territory of smoke and confidence in ourselves and in our friends, where we would accede to something that comforted us in our precarious state, which promised us a kind of immortality. And there, twenty years old, we spoke our most lucid words, we knew all about our deepest emotions, we were like gods of pint glasses and dry Cuban rum. The café a little heaven, cielito lindo. Afterwards the street was like an expulsion, always, the angel with the flaming sword directing traffic on Corrientes and San Martín. Homeward bound, it’s late, back to lawsuits, to the marriage bed, to linden tea for the old lady, to the exam day after tomorrow, to the ridiculous fiancée who reads Vicki Baum and whom we will marry, there’s no way out.
(A strange woman, Talita. She gives the impression of going around with a lighted candle in her hand, showing a path. And the thing that is modesty itself, a rare thing in an Argentine woman with a degree, here where all one needs is the title of land surveyor to be taken seriously. To think that she used to work in a pharmacy, it’s cyclopean, it’s positively agglutinating. And she combs her hair in such a pretty way.)
I’ve just now discovered that Manolo is called Manú in moments of intimacy. It seems so natural to Talita, that business of calling Manolo Manú, she doesn’t realize that for his friends it’s a secret scandal, a bleeding wound. But I, what right have I … That of the prodigal son, in any case. Let it be said in passing, the prodigal son will have to look for work, the last digging into the coffers was absolutely speleological. If I accept the advances of poor Gekrepten, who would do anything to go to bed with me, I will have room and shirts assured, and so forth. The idea of going out to sell cuts of cloth is no more idiotic than any other, a question of trying it, but the most fun would be joining the circus with Manolo and Talita. Joining the circus, a beautiful formula. In the beginning was a circus, and that poem of Cummings where it says that at the creation the Old Man drew a circus tent of air into his lungs. You can’t say it in Spanish. Yes you can, but you would have to say: juntó una carpa de circo de aire. We will accept Gekrepten’s offer, a fine girl, and that will allow us to live closer to Manolo and Talita, since topographically we will only be separated by two walls and a thin slice of air. With a brothel close at hand, the store near by, the market just around the corner. To think that Gekrepten has been waiting for me. It’s incredible how things like that occur to other people. All heroic acts ought to stay at least within one’s family, and ere-we-ave that girl at the Travelers’ keeping up to date on all my overseas itineraries, and meanwhile she weaves and unweaves the purple sweater waiting for her Odysseus and working in a store on the Calle Maipú. It would be ignoble not to accept Gekrepten’s proposals, deny her her full cup of unhappiness. And from one cynicism to another / you’re looking like yourself and not your brother. Whodious Whodysseus.
No, but thinking about it frankly, the most absurd thing about these lives we pretend to lead are the false contacts in them. Isolated orbits, from time to time two hands will shake, a fiveminute chat, a day at the races, a night at the opera, a wake where everybody feels a little more united (and it’s true, but then it’s all over just when it’s time for linking up). And all the same one lives convinced his friends are there, that contact does exist, that agreements or disagreements are profound and lasting. How we all hate each other, without being aware that endearment is the current form of that hatred, and how the reason behind profound hatred is this excentration, the unbridgeable space between me and you, between this and that. All endearment is an ontological clawing, yes, an attempt to seize the unseizable, and I would like to enter into the intimacy of the Travelers under the pretext of knowing them better, of really getting to be the friend, although what I really want is to seize Manú’s manna, Talita’s elf, their ways of seeing things, their presents and their futures, different from mine. And why this mania for spiritual possession, Horacio? Why this nostalgia for annexations, you, who have just broken your moorings, just sown confusion and despair (perhaps I should have spent a little more time in Montevideo and done a better job of searching) in the illustrious capital of the Latin spirit? The fact is that on one side you’ve deliberately disconnected yourself from a gaudy chapter in your life, and that you won’t even allow yourself the right to speak in the soft language that you liked to babble in so much a few months ago; and at the same time, oh contradictory whidiot, you’re literally breaking yourself up in order to enter into the whintimacy of the Travelers, be the Travelers, whinstall yourself in the Travelers, circus whincluded (but the Manager won’t give me any work, so I’ll have to think seriously about dressing up as a seaman and selling gabardine samples to ladies). You fuckup. Let’s see if you can sow confusion in the ranks once more, if you’ve put in an appearance just to ruin the lives of peaceful people. That time they told me about the guy who thought he was Judas, and how because of that led a dog’s life among the best social circles of Buenos Aires. Let’s not be vain. At most a loving inquisitor, as I was told one night. Look, madam, what a fine piece. Sixty-five pesos a yard, just because it’s for you. Your ma … your husband, I beg your pardon, will be very happy when he comes back from wor … from business, I beg your pardon. He’ll climb up the walls, believe me, on my word as a sailor off the Río Belén. Sure, a little smuggling to make something on the side, my kid has got rickets, my wo … my wife does sewing in a dress shop, I have to help out a little, you know what I mean.