Luckily Bruno reappeared.
“It’s stifling in here,” he said to Martín. “Shall we go outside?”
“It’s a very stuffy café, but I like it. It’s not going to be here much longer though—just think how many millions this corner is worth. It’s bound to happen any day now: they’ll tear it down and put up a skyscraper, and downstairs there’ll be one of those interplanetary bars complete with all the garish colors and earsplitting noises the Yankees have invented.”
Bruno loosened his tie.
When they arrived at the bridge on the Calle Belgrano, Bruno stopped and leaned over the railing, saying: “At least we can breathe now.” Martín wondered whether Alejandra had gotten that habit of lingering on the bridge from Bruno; but then the thought came to him that it must have been the other way around, because Bruno struck him as a person who was essentially passive, following the wavering compass of his thoughts.
He noted his fine skin, his delicate hands, and compared them in his mind with Alejandra’s hard, greedy hands, with her tense, angular face. Meanwhile Bruno thought: Only impressionism could render these landscapes, and impressionism was a thing of the past now, so that the artist who feels this and only this is plain out of luck. And looking at the overcast sky, the humid and rather heavy haze, the reflections of the boats in the still water, the thought came to him that the sky and air of Buenos Aires were very much like those of Venice, no doubt because of the vapor rising from the stagnant water, as on another level he continued to ponder Méndez’s line of reasoning.
“Literature, for example. Méndez and others of his persuasion have opinions that are terribly cut and dried. Proust in their view is a degenerate artist because he belonged to a decadent class.”
He laughed.
“If that theory were correct Marxism wouldn’t exist, and hence Méndez wouldn’t exist either. Marxism would have to have been invented by a worker, and more particularly by one with a job in heavy industry.”
They strolled along the pedestrian walkway leading over the bridge and then Bruno suggested they sit on the parapet and watch the river.
Martín was amazed at this very young trait in Bruno, a trait that in his eyes was evidence of the cordial camaraderie that Bruno felt toward him; and all the time that the latter was willingly spending with him, his affectionate familiarity seemed like a guarantee of Alejandra’s tender feelings toward him, Martín; for all this would not have been granted him by an important man if he, Martín, an unknown youngster, had not had Alejandra’s esteem and perhaps even her love in his favor. Hence this conversation, this walk, their sitting together there on the parapet served as a sort of confirmation (albeit an indirect one, a tenuous one) of his love, a sort of guarantee (albeit a vague one, an ambiguous one) that she was not as remote and withdrawn as he had supposed.
And as Bruno breathed in the muggy breeze off the river, Martín remembered similar moments on that very same parapet with Alejandra. With his back leaning against the thick wall, with his head in her lap, he was (he had been) truly happy. In the silence of that late afternoon he could hear the quiet murmur of the river down below as he contemplated the endless metamorphoses of the clouds: heads of prophets, caravans in a pure white desert, sailboats, snow-covered bays. Everything was (had been) peace and serenity at that moment. And with tranquil sensual pleasure, as in the drowsy, fuzzy moments that follow waking, he had made his head comfortable on Alejandra’s lap, as he thought how tender, how sweet it was to feel her flesh beneath the nape of his neck; that flesh that according to Bruno was something more than flesh, something more complex, more subtle, more mysterious than mere flesh made up of cells, tissues, nerves; for it was also (in Martín’s eyes at this moment), it was already a memory, and therefore something that would resist death and corruption, something transparent, something tenuous, yet at the same time possessed of a certain eternal and immortal quality; it was Louis Armstrong playing his trumpet in the Mirador, the skies and clouds of Buenos Aires, the modest statues of the Parque Lezama in the late afternoon, a stranger strumming a zither, a night in the Zur Post restaurant, a rainy night when they had taken shelter beneath a marquee (laughing), streets in the southern section of the city, the rooftops of Buenos Aires seen from the bar on the twentieth floor of the Comega. And he had felt all of this by way of her flesh, her soft, palpitating flesh which, though destined to disintegrate amid worms and clods of damp earth (one of Bruno’s typical thoughts), at that moment allowed him to glimpse that sort of eternity; for as Bruno would also one day tell him, we are constituted in such a way that the only means given us to catch a glimmer of eternity is by way of the fragile, perishable flesh. And he had sighed then and she had said: “What is it?” And he had answered “nothing,” that word we answer when we are thinking “everything.” And at that moment Martín said to Bruno, almost despite himself:
“Alejandra and I were here one afternoon.”
And as though he were on a bicycle unable to stop, having lost control, he went on:
“How happy I was that afternoon!”
The moment he uttered these words he was overcome by regret and embarrassment: it was such an intimate, such a pathetic thing to have said. But Bruno neither laughed nor smiled (Martín was looking at him almost in terror), but instead sat there, grave and thoughtful, contemplating the river. And then, after a long silence that led Martín to think that he was not going to make any sort of comment, Bruno said:
“That’s how happiness comes along.”
What did he mean? Martín sat there listening intently, as he always did when it was something having to do with Alejandra.
“It comes in bits and pieces, at different times. When we’re children we hope for great happiness, some enormous, total happiness. And as we wait for this phenomenon to take place we let the little happinesses, the only real ones, pass us by, or fail to appreciate them. It’s as if …”
He fell silent at that point however. Then after a time he went on:
“Imagine a beggar who doesn’t deign to accept alms as he makes his way from place to place, because people have told him about a fabulous treasure. A treasure that doesn’t exist.”
He sat there lost in thought once again.
“They seem to be mere trifles. A quiet conversation with a friend. Those seagulls wheeling about perhaps. This sky. The beer we drank a while ago.”
He changed position.
“My leg’s gone to sleep. It’s as though somebody had squirted soda water into it.”
He climbed down from the parapet and then added:
“Sometimes I think that these little happinesses exist precisely because they’re little ones. Like those mere nobodies passing by that no one ever notices.”
He fell silent, and then for no apparent reason he said:
“Yes, Alejandra is a complicated person. And so different from her mother. But then it’s really absurd to expect children to be like their parents. Maybe the Buddhists are right, and if so how do we have any way of knowing who’s going to be incarnated in the bodies of our children?”
As though he were telling a joke, he recited:
Perhaps at our death the soul migrates:
to an ant
to a tree
to a Bengal tiger
as our body disintegrates
amid worms
and filters into the earth that has no memory
thence to ascend through stem and leaf,
and be transformed into a heliotrope or a blade of grass,
and then into forage for cattle
and thus into nameless animal blood,
into a skeleton,
into excrement.
Perhaps a more hideous fate awaits it
in the body of a child
who will one day write poems or novels,
and in his mysterious fits of anguish
(without knowing it)
will purge his soul’s past sins
as warrior or criminal,
&
nbsp; or relive terrors,
the fear of a gazelle,
the loathsome ugliness of a weasel,
its dark condition as fetus, cyclops, lizard,
its fame as prostitute or pythoness,
its loneliness in remote places,
its forgotten acts of cowardice and betrayal.
Martín heard him out in bewilderment: on the one hand it seemed as though Bruno were reciting the whole thing as a joke, yet on the other hand he felt that in some way that poem was a serious expression of what he thought of life: his hesitations, his doubts. And knowing already how extremely modest and shy he was, he said to himself: It’s one of his own poems.
He rose to his feet and said goodbye; he had to go see D’Arcángelo.
Bruno’s eyes followed him affectionately, as he said to himself: How many things he still has to suffer. And then, stretching out on the parapet with his hands under the nape of his neck, he allowed his thoughts to wander.
The seagulls flew back and forth.
Everything was so fleeting, so transitory. He should write, if for no other reason than that: to immortalize something ephemeral. A love, perhaps. Alejandra, he thought. And also: Georgina. But what, exactly, of all that? How? How terribly difficult everything was, how fragile, like delicate glass.
Moreover, it was not only that, it was not simply a question of immortalizing, but of investigating, digging down into the human heart, examining the most secret recesses of our condition.
Nothing and everything, he almost said, with that habit of his of unexpectedly expressing his thoughts aloud, as he shifted to a more comfortable position on the parapet. He looked up at the stormy sky and heard the rhythmical lapping of the river against the shore, that river that (unlike the other rivers of the world) flows in no direction, stretching out almost motionless over an area a hundred kilometers wide, like a peaceful lake, or like a roaring sea on days when the wind is blowing from the southeast. But at that moment, on that hot summer day, on that humid and sultry afternoon, with the transparent haze of Buenos Aires blurring the silhouette of the skyscrapers standing out against the huge thunderheads in the west, it was only slightly rippled by a distracted breeze, its skin barely trembling, as though with the dim memory of great storms, those great storms that seas surely dream of when they doze, mere ghostly, incorporeal storms, dreams of storms, that can do no more than make the surface of their waters shudder slightly as great sleeping mastiffs dreaming of hunting or fights quiver and growl almost imperceptibly.
Nothing and everything.
He leaned over the parapet toward the city and contemplated the silhouette of the skyscrapers once again.
Six million people, he thought.
Suddenly everything seemed impossible to him. And useless.
Never, he said to himself. Never.
The truth, he said to himself, with an ironic smile. THE truth. Well, let us say A truth then—but wasn’t a truth the truth? Couldn’t “the” truth be reached by penetrating to the depths of a single heart? In the end, weren’t all hearts identical?
A single heart, he said to himself.
A boy was kissing a girl. An eskimo-pie vendor pedaled by on a bicycle and he hailed him. And as he sat on the parapet eating the ice cream bar, he looked at the monster again, millions of men, women, children, workers, office clerks, pensioners. How to speak of all of them? How to represent that reality irreducible to numbers in a hundred pages, a thousand, a million pages? But—he thought—a work of art is an attempt, an absurd one perhaps, to represent an infinite reality within the limits of a single painting or a single book. A choice. But that choice turns out to be infinitely difficult, and in the majority of cases a disaster.
Six million Argentines, Spaniards, Italians, Basques, Germans, Hungarians, Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Syrians, Lebanese, Lithuanians, Greeks, Ukrainians.
O Babylon!
The biggest Galician city in the world. The biggest Italian city in the world. Et cetera. More pizzerias than in Naples and Rome put together. “Typically Argentine.” What in heaven’s name did that mean?
O Babylon!
With the gaze of a little impotent god he contemplated the gigantic, chaotic conglomerate, tender and cruel, hated and loved, standing out like a fearsome leviathan against the great threatening storm clouds in the west.
Nothing and everything.
But it is also true—he reflected—that just one person is enough. Or perhaps two or three or four. If you probed deeply into their hearts.
Day laborers or rich men, day laborers or bankers, handsome devils or hunchbacks.
The sun was setting and the color of the clouds in the west kept changing by the second. Great gray violet tatters stood out against a background of clouds farther in the distance: gray, lilac, blackish. That pink’s an unfortunate touch, he thought, as though he were at a painting exhibition. Then the pink started running more and more, cheapening the whole effect. But then it finally began to fade, and passing through purple and violet, it turned to gray and finally to the black that announces death, which is always solemn and always lends an air of dignity.
And the sun disappeared.
And one more day thus ended in Buenos Aires: something lost forever, something that inexorably took him one step closer to his own death. And so quickly now, so quickly. In the past the years had gone by more slowly and everything had seemed possible; time had stretched out before him like a highroad that was free and clear all the way to the horizon. But now the years were flying by faster and faster toward the west, and again and again he caught himself saying: “Twenty years ago, when I last saw him …,” or some other thing as trivial yet as tragic as that; and then immediately thinking, as though on the brink of an abyss, how little, how miserably little remains of that march toward nothingness. And what was it all for?
And when he reached that point and it seemed that nothing had any meaning any more, he would perhaps come across one of those little mongrels that roam the streets, starving and longing for affection, with his little fate (as little as his body and his little heart that would courageously put up a struggle until the very end, defending that tiny, humble life as from a minuscule fortress), and then, gathering him up in his arms, taking him to an improvised doghouse where at least he wouldn’t be cold, giving him something to eat, gradually becoming the very meaning of the poor creature’s existence, something more enigmatic but more powerful than philosophy seemed to give meaning to his own existence again. Like two helpless waifs who in the midst of their loneliness sleep together to keep each other warm.
5
Perhaps at our death the soul migrates,” Martín repeated to himself as he walked along. Where had Alejandra’s soul come from? It seemed ageless, it seemed to have come from the depths of time. “It’s dark condition as fetus, its fame as prostitute or pythoness, its loneliness in remote places.”
The old man was sitting at the door of the tenement building on his little straw chair. He was holding his knotty wooden cane in his hand, and his worn, greenish bowler looked entirely out of keeping with his coarse wool undershirt.
“Hello, papa,” Tito said.
They made their way inside, clearing a path for themselves amid all the kids, cats, dogs, and chickens. Tito picked up two other little chairs in the room and handed them to Martín.
“Here, take these outside, and I’ll be along with some maté right away,” he said to him.
Martín took the chairs outside, set them down next to the old man, and sat down shyly and waited.
“Sì, sì,” the old coachman murmured, “that’s how it was …”