When Jorge Michel, in María Rosa’s house, once again told the story or incident of Atilio Matías and María Pupo in front of several witnesses, I suspected that the narrator had achieved a level of estimable perfection, undoubtedly threatened with decline and rot in predictable future repetitions.
This is why, without any higher purpose, I will attempt to transcribe the aforementioned version, if only to protect it from time, from future postprandial conversations.
The incident, which is not a tale and doesn’t even brush against the literary, goes, more or less, as follows:
For me, as you know, the bare facts don’t matter at all. What matters is what they contain or carry, and then to discover what lies beyond that, and then beyond that, till we get to the deepest depths, which we will never reach. If a historian were to address the journey of the telegraph operator, it would be enough for him to establish that, during the government of Iriarte Borda, the packet boat Anchorena set sail from the port of Santa María with a shipment of wheat and wool on its way to the countries of Eastern Europe.
He would not be lying; but the best truth lies in what I am telling, even if my account has often been derided for supposed anachronisms.
The journey must have lasted about ninety days, and I might, with some effort, be able to specify the role of the crew; at the beginning I forgot his, the telegraph operator’s, name, swept away as I was by superstitious hatred. I will baptize him Aguilera on this page for my convenience. The name of the woman, whom I never met, I will never forget: María Pupo, from Pujato, Department of Salto.
“What can I do. Her name is María Pupo,” as the telegraph operator, Aguilera, would say.
We must navigate by the light of the stars, someone began to sing one morning while whitewashing a door, and immediately the infection spread, everybody crooning the same line, using the sentence as a greeting, a response, a joke, and a consolation. We must navigate by the light of the stars. Mysteriously, the tune managed to be stupider than the lyrics.
You, someone, when it’s your time, which is always at dawn, clamber onto the landing dock with a necessarily blue bundle banging defiantly on your back, sleep-deprived, hungry but queasy, still a little drunk and keeping an eye on the sloshing of warm beer in your stomach, alert also to the slow disappearance of memories, face, hair, legs, the firm and maternal hand of the whore you ended up with under the corrugated tin roof. These are simply the rituals, a timid, swelling arrogance, a maritime tradition.
And you, someone, already filled with premonitions about the fate of the freighter and its soggy adventures, pull out your papers and humble greetings as you examine, almost without moving your eyes, the new faces, and you begin to evaluate what they can offer you as far as help, hindrance, or misfortune.
Gathered together, hypocritical and prone to patience, we listened as the captain spoke of the fatherland, sacrifice, and trust. A boring and discreet man, he lifted one arm, wished us a good journey, and requested, with a smile, that we do our utmost to let him also have a good journey.
We were so grateful that he hadn’t mucked around for more than three minutes that we gave him a robust military salute on a merchant ship and bleated out a hurrah.
I ran to make sure that I got Vast, the gringo, as a cabin mate. But it was too late, the bunks had been assigned the previous day, and on the door to my vomitorium I found a card with two names on it: Jorge Michel – Atilio Matías.
Washed and refreshed, we inevitably found ourselves face to face at seven thirty, each one sitting on his bunk, each one with the heavy futility of a man’s motionless hands between his knees. So Matías, the telegraph operator – I have to go to my post soon – coughed without phlegm and said:
(He was, and will forever be, ten years older than I; he had a long nose, restless eyes, the thin and twisted mouth of a thief, a trickster, a compulsive liar, skin protected from the sun since adolescence, fairness preserved in the shade of a wide-brimmed hat. But above all this, like a permanent coat, there floated sadness, misery, fierce bad luck. He was small, fragile, with a smooth, downturned mustache.)
“I have to start my shift,” he repeated.
But there was still half an hour to go before his stupid task of receiving meaningless telegrams, and we in the meantime had a bottle of Puerto Rican rum.
My need to be in motion was the only reason for my first embarkation. This third one was different: it was to flee for three months from La Banda, from Multi’s implausible patronage, from the precise genuflections of people I used to respect and, in some cases, love.
In the dim light we had the rum, the glasses, the cigarettes, the blue anchor tattooed on my forearm.
Half an hour. So Aguilera, Matías the telegraph operator, spoke the beginning of the truth that he believed to be certain, without needing to be asked. Cautiously protected by the fantastical ill fortune that was bent on destroying him, he talked a little, confessed.
Twenty minutes before his shift began, the stench of rum was dribbling out as he spoke. It was not, he knew, something that could be categorized as a persecution complex, shoved aside so he could move on to something else. Because, listen, Matías more or less said, or I was seeing in his sad face – with his resolute expression of childish indignation – the words that were stuck in his throat and not being uttered. For example:
“You know Pujato,” somewhere between asserting and asking. “You, you know Pujato, you have to be aware of the difference and the scam, between grey and green, at least. It was the Telecommunications Agency, and I can show you the documents, one after another, in chronological order, which for some reason I decided to save. The National or General Telecommunications Agency. First step: enter the lottery to apply for national job openings for radio-telegraph operators. I won’t deny that I had a friend who knew Morse, who could receive and send as if it were nothing, without paying much attention, the way you breathe or walk or speak. My friend, also from Pujato, was also the telegraph operator at the railroad station for decades. Received commendations from the English at every inspection. Pujato, don’t forget, almost without par, like Santa María itself. And my friend wanted to retire and leave me his job, a legacy of our friendship. So as soon as he heard it first announced, here it is, he told me, the job is yours, and he started training me, and long before the deadline I would hear Morse and my fingers would move in Morse. It wasn’t the piano, it didn’t matter that I’d messed up my fingers working on the farm.
“It was all about a job as a telegraph operator at the railroad station in Pujato. It was all about Pujato, in peace and quiet till the end of my life. Pujato and getting married to María, whom I won’t talk about because such things are sacred to a man. But about Pujato, yes, one word, that says it all. Point to whatever you want: one morning, one afternoon. Sometimes, who knows, even at dawn. Green and yellow Pujato, farmers loading wheat and corn onto trucks, which some dump in bulk into the silos near the station, where they then ask for a date, a shift, and wagons. And me, there, solving their problems with Morse, half bothered, half amused, never really bothered. Me, and you see how I saw myself, telegraph operator and master, married to María, who could live with me at the station itself or be waiting for me at a cottage down the road.
“You see, you can see us, Pujato, my wife, and I. Now look at the other document, the third one, and the fourth, where the scam is. On the third one, among more than two hundred applicants, I place as qualified. And in the fourth document, ten months later, they send me to work the telegraph on a ship, this one, far away from everything I told you about. Germany, Finland, Russia, so many names I’d had to learn, always thinking they had nothing to do with me, not in school or afterwards.
“What do you want from me?” Matías the telegraph operator asked defiantly. “You want me to be happy?”
I let him leave, the rum kept flowing, and I fell asleep fearing diseases. At six in the morning they woke me up with those dead and vulgar words, the ones that are a dime a dozen; stoker or fireman, I descended into my hell without seeing Matías, almost forgotten.
Someone arranged things so that we’d take turns occupying the cabin for the next few days, and we barely saw each other at lunch, the long table intervening. Fate kept careful watch over Matías’s existence and forced me to postpone my Christian and optimistic reply, my Alborada del Gracioso until a few hours before Hamburg, heat, small lapses of discipline, imprecise hatreds, spitballs for words.
I already said or thought that this was a story about seafaring folk, and that only they would be able to truly understand it. I add, unapologetically, that many times in ports or on real dry land I wanted to explain and argue that all of us, citizens, mountain dwellers, and peasants of the lowlands, we are all at sea. Often, and always failing.
This is said so that you will come closer to understanding why, from the moment the ship left Santa María, I began to feel the indifference, the avoidance, the poorly hidden scorn from the crew, from my friends from other journeys.
Maybe I’m exaggerating, because words are always like that, never exact, a little more or a little less. But yes, I’m certain, quick greetings, silences tolerated patiently, smiles without eyes, deflected conversations.
Because I, not guilty of anything more than living in the cabin they assigned to me, was the friend of Matías the telegraph operator, the partner of failure, the shadow of bad luck.
And it didn’t do me any good to mock Matías in front of them and Matías himself. I had been infected by the illness, the hostile fate of the man from Pujato – that’s what they believed or suspected – and they were prudent to subject me to a cordon sanitaire, a quarantine. Hence I had to feel the injustice of being connected to Atilio Matías and sail by his side through a sea of hostility and persecution. He, Matías the telegraph operator, from his beginning to his end; I, for a three-month-long journey.
“Look where they send us,” he said to me at one of our inevitable encounters. “They send us to the cold, a deathly cold, so different from what we have, I suppose, during the winter in Pujato. Think about the little room of the wireless operator at the railroad station, with boiling maté and a stove and some friends with real subjects to talk about, who hopefully will have brought a bottle of grappa, even though I’m not much of a drinker.”
And it was futile to exaggerate the number of times that I’d already taken this same route, through these same ports, during the same month of the year.
“Look, in Finland now, even in Hamburg, in Baku, people walk around in their shirtsleeves, and the women at beach resorts wait for the light of the moon to go skinny-dipping.”
He simply didn’t believe me; it was forbidden for him to accept the kindness of summer, and he shrugged his shoulders to shake off any possibility of optimism. He wouldn’t even answer; I knew what he was thinking about: María Pupo, Pujato, or the other way around.
Up there, above the fire in the boilers, someone was scrupulously keeping track of the day, the hour, the daily entries in the logbook. For me it was different, as always happens in Hamburg.
When we got to port one morning in summer, a little before noon, I walked away energetically to look for a streetcar stop, and I heard the pursuing footsteps, the resolute voice:
“Hey, Michel. Where are you off to?”
“The other direction. I’m itching for St. Pauli. Women and something stronger than beer to forget that I’m shipped out, and that tomorrow night I’m back with the boilers. But you, Matías, are going to the Kaiser Hotel, I heard you say so. You’ve got to cross the street, go in the other direction, take the other streetcar.”
A smile of disagreement was hovering, even though he accepted his bad luck. It must be easy if you get used to it. Then he said, and no streetcar was coming:
“Do me a favor.”
“No,” I said, “I’m going to St. Pauli, I’m dying for St. Pauli, and if you want you can come.”
It was useless, because he didn’t hear me, because he, Matías, had spent years in the practice of unholy despair.
“You can do me a favor and then you can go and get drunk. I didn’t tell you this the whole time on board, but today is María’s birthday. With your help I can send her a telegram.”
“I don’t understand. Why don’t you just send it from the ship? Why don’t you go back and send it?”
He didn’t even look at me. He smiled as he walked and spoke patiently, as if from a father to his son.
“Fourteen. Article fourteen prohibits all personal communication except under dire circumstances and even these must be approved in writing by the captain or station chief.”
“Of course, forgive me,” I translated.
From where we were, you couldn’t see the city; just a few square towers sticking out in the sun. But I could smell it, I could taste it in my dry mouth, and I can swear or promise that St. Pauli was calling to me. But no; his misery, Matías the telegraph operator’s misery, was more powerful than my appetite for smoke and whatever might come to pass around a a great big round table. Pujato and María Pupo were the victors.
“Telegraph?” I started, giving in and covering over the shame. “Yes, right here, there’s one two blocks away.”
“So, if you don’t mind coming with me. It’ll just take a minute. I don’t speak the language, and you can get by.”
So we walked toward the telegraph and post office, each step taking us farther away from St. Pauli.
Consider, if you will, that the fraulein at the telegraph and telephone counter had been born there forty or fifty years before, and that her glasses, her wrinkles, her mouth like a bitter half moon, even her voice, which sounded like the voice of a macho pederast, were, like her soul, the product of her miserable salary, her absurd love for her work and for efficiency, indestructible faith augmented by the mystery promised and denied by the letters T.T.
Hence, at a satisfactory speed, the message went from the Pujatoan dialect, passed through my sailor’s English and into the perfect German of the fraulein, to be translated into something like “María Pupo, Pujato, Santa María. Happy Birthday from Matías.”
She made three carbon copies, charged three or four marks, and gave us a copy and a receipt.
We found ourselves once again on the streets and it was time to be hungry for lunch, and all the streetcars started moving toward St. Pauli and its promises. Now the voice wasn’t coming from Matías the telegraph operator but instead from my hunger, my weakness, my mollified nostalgia. The voice said:
“Hey, Michel. Do you know anything about graphology?”
“At one time I pretended to know something. But I never really did.”
“But, of course you know or at least you are aware of it. Think about that woman’s face.”
“No.”
“Yeah, she disgusts me, too. Three marks forty-one is more than a dollar. And she didn’t even type out the telegram, she wrote it with a ballpoint pen and we have a copy. Take a look, even if you keep claiming you don’t understand.”
At an intersection, afraid that the evening would begin on an empty stomach, I wanted to punch him and I couldn’t, I swore at him and grabbed him by the arm.
Everything, anything; but in Hamburg there would always be, even on the most unlikely corner, a delicatessen in waiting. Beer and Scandinavian dishes. There on the table, held open by Matías’s thumbs, was the copy of the telegram to María Pupo, Pujato.
“Think about it calmly,” Matías said. “First, the woman, a nasty piece of double-crossing work, which we agree on.”
I took a sip of beer, I filled my mouth with seafood of name unknown, and I gave myself over to a sudden, irresistible admiration for Matías’s subtle intelligence, revealed to me in exchange for forty-six days of burning my hands in the bowels of the ship, aware that inside the same hull, over the same wave, just barely separated from me by thin layers of wood and steel, traveled the inconsolable sadness of a radio man.
“For starters, the face,” Matías continued, “and now we have the handwriting, and even if you pretend not to understand, the two things together are indisputable. Conclusion, and forgive me, but the gringa is out to get me. Even more obvious: she already did and has kept the money, which I don’t care about because I have a lot, and she didn’t send my telegram. Based on her face, her handwriting, and because I’m a certified telegraph operator and I understand a little about these things.”
The English of sailors is a universal language, and I always suspected that something similar occurs with whisky, in every latitude and altitude, whether it be joy, misery, tiredness, boredom. Matías was crazy, and I had nobody nearby to share the astonishment and joy of this discovery. So I agreed, nodding, pushed aside the mug of beer, and ordered a whisky. This is how they served it: a bottle, a bucket with ice cubes, soda.
Nor did I have a friend I could whisper to about the glaring madness of Matías, who had decided to remain quiet for a while as he gulped down seafood and beer.
He was still the same as always: ten years older than me, long nose, restless eyes, the thin and twisted mouth of a thief, of a trickster, of an addicted liar, small, fragile, with a smooth and downturned mustache. But now he’d gone crazy and was shamelessly exhibiting an ancient and concealed madness.
It was already the afternoon when I decided to interrupt his repeated utterances about faces, intuitions, and accent marks.
“We must navigate by the light of the stars,” I told him. “And since you, Matías, have so much money, the best, the only thing you can do, if you truly value your fiancée’s birthday, the only thing you can do is walk back to the T.T. monster and request a telephone call to Pujato.”
“From Hamburg?” he asked bitterly, with the graceless sarcasm of the persecuted.
“From Hamburg, and through T.T., I’ve done it thousands of times. You can hear better than when you call from Santa María itself.”
His struggle was between hope and atavistic incredulity. In jest, he patted his roll of bills in his pants pocket and said, “Okay, let’s go,” as if he were daring a child.
We went, I, just a little drunk, and he, determined to prove, once and for all and to himself, that he had been denied all and any guise of happiness from the beginning of time and nothing could attenuate this, his very own curse, from which he derived enough pride and distinction to go on living.
The telephone office was in the same building as the telegraph office, as the old maid who’d cheated Matías out of approximately three marks forty, keeping for herself, out of revenge or avarice, the words of Happy Birthday meant for María Pupo, Pujato.
But the telephones were in a different wing, to the left; we dragged each other to the counter, to the thin young blond with a carefree smile. She was another T.T.
I said, I translated, I explained, and she looked at me sluggishly and without any real faith. I said it again, enunciating each syllable, proving my sincerity and enough patience to last till the end of the world.
She wavered, and finally accepted, her face blanching with her exaggerated and perhaps painful smile. It’s true that she hesitated for yet another moment before believing it and said:
“One moment, please,” then she nodded and yielded the counter to us, disappearing, she as well, young as she was, behind the doors and curtains, way behind the big T.T.
Then there appeared an older T.T. with round, thin, gold spectacles and asked us if what seemed impossible to him was true.
“This coincidence, gentlemen…”
I knew. I can’t know what was going on inside Matías, how he was dealing with these delays to his preferred personal destiny. I was, as I said, a little drunk and brilliant. Tolerating more interrogations, more T.T.s, each one older than the last. And I repeated with candor, with certainty, the correct answers, because we were also finally given the privilege of pushing back curtains and walking through doors until we were face to face with the oldest T.T., the real and definitive one.
He was already standing behind a tiny black wood desk in the shape of a half horseshoe. With the help of the heat, the two-year-old whisky, Matías’s recently arrived madness, I was able to believe for a moment that the man had been waiting for us ever since we left Santa María. He was tall and heavyset, a man who had been a champion in the field at the University of Greifswald and had stopped playing two or three years before.
Blond, ruddy, freckled, friendly, and revolting.
“Gentlemen,” he said. I pretended to believe him. “They have told me that you would like to place a telephone call to South America.”
“Ja,” I said, and he asked us to have a seat.
“To South America,” he repeated, smiling at the ceiling.
“Pujato, sir, in Santa María,” I said, turning to look at Matías and ask him for help.
But nothing was forthcoming from that quarter. The telegraph operator’s madness chose, out of cleverness or definitive rebellion, an absent expression, empty eyes, a silky mustache, droopy and foreign, blown by the breeze of the air conditioner. He, Matías, wasn’t participating, he was merely an alert, waggish witness, certain of defeat, indifferent, remote.
The corpulent man surrounded by the half horseshoe of his table held forth. He was older than us, and the cheerful fraternity of his discourse very soon turned into decency and weariness.
By now he was surrounded by civil servants with happy expressions on their faces, and we were all drinking coffee while he explained that Telefunken T.T., of which he was a simple cog in the gears, had just put in operation a new line of communication between Europe and South America, and that on this occasion, Matías’s quivering longing should be celebrated, because the love call we were requesting was, in fact, the first that would be made, apart from, of course, the numerous tests carried out by the technicians.
When he leaned back and lifted one arm, we saw that the entire wall behind him was an enormous world map on which the rigors of decorative geometry had no respect for the whims of coastlines. And he smiled again as he told us that, because of the celebration, the call like the cups of coffee was gratis, no more than three minutes.
I nodded enthusiastically, spoke words of gratitude and congratulations, as I was thinking that all of this was normal, that inaugurations had always been free, as I looked at the telegraph operator’s furtive face, his adversarial anticipation.
There was a pause, and the big man pushed one of the telephones toward Matías. It was white, it was black, and it was red.
Matías didn’t move; and if a joke can be serious, there was a joke in his drained profile and in his voice.
“María doesn’t have a telephone,” he said. “You call, Michel. Call the store and ask them to find her, though I don’t know what time it is there. Ask them because maybe it’s very late and she’s asleep.”
He meant to say that Pujato is asleep. I spoke to the manager, we checked Greenwich, and we found out that the sun was just beginning to set in Santa María. Calves mooing around Pujato, the station barriers dropping lazily and creaking as they wait for the 18:15 train to the Capital.
Then, slowly, due to premonitions that acted upon me like arthritis, thinking about freedom and St. Pauli, I reached out my arm and pulled the telephone toward me till it touched my chest. Frozen, not looking at anything in the room, Matías spoke to my hands.
“It’s 314 in Pujato. The general store. You’ll ask them to get her.”
After receiving specific instructions from the main German, I spoke to the operator. Through patience and repetition, the difficulties were easily overcome.
I don’t know for how many seconds and how many minutes the woman said to me, “Please remain on the line; your call is being placed,” or similar words. And then even Matías was forced to lift his eyes and appreciate the miracle spread out on the wall that was the world map. We saw the tiny red light go on, right there in Hamburg; we saw another light up in Cologne; we saw, successively, sometimes blinking, other new ones at a confident, unbelievable speed; Paris, Bordeaux, Alicante, Algiers, Canarias, Dakar, Pernambuco, Bahía, Río, Buenos Aires, Santa María. A stutter, a fluctuation, the voice of another woman: “Please remain on the line, calling Pujato, three one four.”
Finally: “Villanueva Hermanos, Pujato.” It was a thick, serene voice, full of indifference and the first glass of vermouth. I asked for María Pupo and the man said he’d get her. I waited, sweating, determined to ignore Matías till the end of the ceremony, looking at the world illuminated with points of fire behind the wide face, the happy smile of the manager surrounded to his right and left by the respectfully less important smiles of the robots of Telefunken T.T.
Until María Pupo was on the line and said, “This is María Pupo. Who is it?”
I am innocent. I spoke politely but not boldly, I explained that her fiancé, Atilio Matías, wished to speak to her from Hamburg, Germany. A pause, and María Pupo’s contralto voice, crossing the world and the flickering noise of its oceans: “Why don’t you go fuck your mother, you shitfaced asshole?”
She hung up the phone, furious, and the little red lights quickly went out, in reverse order, until the world-map wall sank back into the shadows and three continents agreed in silence that Atilio Matías was right.
1970