The Study of Fear
If fondness moves you
To call yourself ingenious
For having found death for men where death was not,
To the study of fear we owe in turn
The design by which you lent a mere respite
To icy death from all its many blows.
—FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO,
“TO THE INVENTOR OF THE ARTILLERY GUN”
. . . nothing. I see nothing. I hear nothing. I feel nothing. I advance through a thick fog, earth-colored, like dirty water. But I’m not even sure that this fog is real. If I raise a hand (that is, if I believe myself to be raising a hand), I cannot actually see it. If I try to touch my face with my fingers, there is nothing to let me know that I’ve achieved this aim. I can’t feel my fingers, I can’t feel my face. At the moment, for example, I believe myself to be speaking aloud, but I can’t make out any sound. I pull my hair, I bite my tongue, I scratch my forehead: no pain, no discomfort. I walk, I lie down, I sleep, I talk to myself, all the while sensing nothing. Nothing.
I thought someone asked me something.
Impossible. There are no voices here. There never were.
There are, and were. I don’t even know what is happening to me. And what happened before.
Before what?
Before this nothingness. I thought that voice spoke again, the one I can’t hear.
I carry on.
Backward, sideways, in circles. It’s all the same.
And always through this fog, the color of dried blood.
Now I remember.
Something like this happened to me when, as a boy, I suddenly found myself in a sandstorm. Everything disappeared in a great cloud that stung my eyes, face, and hands, choking the mouth and nose. One could not see, speak, or hear. The world had become sand, and one feared becoming sand, too. Then my father came out to look for me, pushing and shoving me back into the house. Even the bitches know not to go outside when the wind gets up, he said. I was always disappointing him.
Once, lost in a storm, I stumbled on some animal bones, gradually being polished by the sand. I am going to end up like that, I thought. Whitening bones, ever more transparent. And then, nothing.
I have a measured, smooth voice. I’ve been told that it’s a lovely voice. My father, on the other hand, had a voice evoking something between thunder and barking.
My father’s voice resounds, now, in my head. I don’t hear it, in the silence that surrounds me, I don’t hear anything, but I still have the impression of someone talking to me. It’s a hoarse voice, malicious, sarcastic, accustomed to being obeyed. His military training lent him a certainty absent from other voices in my village, even the priest’s. Our prestige depended on that voice.
I touch (but my fingers don’t feel it) something metallic, something cold and embossed. His saber’s sheath. My skin remembers it.
The other boys showed off their lead toy soldiers, their bicycles. We showed my father’s saber, which we took down secretly in the dark sitting room among the furniture covered in dust sheets. Compared to his saber, the security guard’s machete was a mere penknife. This (my unfeeling hand slides over the surface, divested of weight and consistency) was our town’s most precious emblem. Colonel Gorostiza’s saber, say the voices I cannot hear. Has he ever cut a man’s throat? asks one. He must have done, of course, answers another. They say that, under a special light, you can see the bloodstains on the blade. At night, we children told each other, the blood on the saber cries out in a very sharp, high-pitched shriek that only the bitches can hear.
My leg brushes against the shaggy coat of one of my father’s bitches—all of them are a mix of German shepherd and Russian wolfhound and of something else indefinable, like those great prehistoric wolves that I found once in a magazine. With the right hand that I can’t see, I try to stroke one of them, but it is like stroking the wind. I call them: Annunciation! Visitation! Nativity! Presentation! Discovery! None of them replies.
My father was a mason and an ardent anticleric. He used to say that the notion of a god demanding constant praise filled him with contempt. Your god needs more pampering than a French whore, he lambasted the poor priest. What sort of an Almighty can he be, if he needs people to tell him day and night: You’re mighty! You’re strong! You’re awesome! What crap!
My mother had tearfully begged him not to name his puppies after the Five Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. He didn’t deign to reply. My mother never dared to call them by these sacred names. Fearful of blaspheming, she would say, here, here, when she wanted them to come. Now I feel that it is her voice echoing mine.
Come along with us! bark the bitches through this cotton-wool air. They must be running the way they used to run then, in a long-haired pack, raising red dust. Only my father’s voice restrained them.
My father liked to put on his uniform in the morning, the boots shining like ebony bowls, the belt pulled tight under his stomach, and then to go and sit at the door onto the street, drinking maté, the dogs sprawled at his feet. A smell of corn chowder filled the house (I am smelling it now), and my siblings and I, in starched smocks, took our leave of him with a brief reverence as we set off for school. The red dust clung to every part of us, even when there was no wind. But not to him, as though out of respect. Not even one grain dared to touch him.
As a young man, he had worked for an Irish landowner, who had wanted him to rid her land of Indians. A black plait, a memento of this work, hung in the dining room next to the saber and a flag. Apparently, before I was born, a pair of Indian ears hung there, too, but my mother refused to enter the house until he took them down. She had shown such uncharacteristic resolve in this matter that my father shrugged his shoulders and threw the ears out of the window. The plait’s staying, was all he said.
The bitches keep howling. They want me to go with them; they demand it with their shrill yapping. Within this dream (which isn’t mine), I sense them run toward something that they are going to tear to shreds. When they were lying at my father’s feet (he would stroke their bellies with one hand while the other held on to the maté), I used to look at their terrible teeth, exposed by the black lips, and imagine them sinking into flesh, grinding bones. The bitches’ soft, brown eyes gazed at my father. How can they belong to the same face, those eyes and those teeth? I wondered. Then my father smiled, his brow softened, and a gold tooth showed between his lips, beneath the mustache.
The owner of my nightmare shivers.
Now I know that the bitches have reached their prize. They’re not my bitches anymore, or rather they are, but they are also different, wilder, with enormous alabaster fangs. I can see them now, on the other side of a vast dump, pouncing on a boy who falls facedown in the filth. Someone shouts at them to stop, but it’s too late. The boy tries to stand up, his shirt is torn to shreds, part of his left cheek is missing. For fuck’s sake! says the colonel (another one, not my father—this happens years later, I’m a man now). Let’s see if next time someone can control these animals! A group of soldiers scares the hounds away. Next time, an echo repeats in my head, across the unfathomable depths of time. That experience at the dump ought to have taught me something. Perhaps I would have been able to endure all this better.
I advance.
There are things one doesn’t learn from, only remembers.
Who’s asking me something? What does she want?
What, stuck in the house again? You’re going to make yourself ill, Titito, with so much reading. Let me bring you a better light. My mother comes and goes, anxious. I read everything: the poems of Capdevila. Billiken. The Sopena dictionary. An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians. My mother always looks worried. She has my brothers and sisters to look after. There are seven of us. No, eight. Santiago was born so much later than the rest of us that we forget to count him. My father never mentions him.
My father was clear about hierarchies. Friends first, then country, and family last of all, he would say. And to us: pissing and making you lot—it all came out of the same hole.
My mother’s voice is joined by my father’s. Tell that poofter son of yours that I don’t want to see him indoors until the afternoon. He can go where he likes so long as it’s out in the sun. The sun only shines for a few hours during these winter months. I take the opportunity to practice the poems I’ve written, but find myself reciting others, the ones I know by heart, thanks to the books that Señorita Amalia, my teacher, lends me. Joaquín V. González, Rubén Darío, Espronceda. “Sail on, sailing boat, without fear.” That “without fear” implies that he is, in fact, afraid, I write in my notebook. I’m learning to read poetry.
But writing’s shit. My father always knew that, and I didn’t believe him.
A brief bio-bibliographic interlude. I studied literature in Río Gallegos, I enrolled in a course on European literature, but it was useless—one boring class after another. I tried to make friends with other students. Yes, me, too! Of course—where do I sign? United we stand, unto victory or death. We’d protest against any old thing, demanding our right to be heard. Never a step backward. (But to what end? I asked myself, though I did not dare say so aloud). And at night I wrote. Let me sing of my land, things I imagined I loved. But now I was composing jingles. Exalting armed combat, against enemy tigers. Songs, hymns, marches. Before leaving for Buenos Aires, I published a little book at the local press. I paid for the printing myself. A thousand copies. Red March. My childhood as I wanted it to be, and a eulogy to the revolution that I had never seen and which mattered little to me. The owner of the press, an anarchist from Asturias, gave me a hug and a discount. Poetry is also politics, he told me, of the best and strongest kind. I took away my books wrapped up in brown paper and secured with twine. In Buenos Aires I left little piles of them in bookshops, when no one was looking. Thieving, in reverse. Then I started working at an insurance company.
I confess that I never had a single reader, let alone a review. The world failed to register the presence, the existence, of my verses. One day I saw, at the entrance to a bookshop, beside the discarded cardboard and packaging, half a dozen copies of my book waiting for the rubbish collectors. I gave them a wide berth as I passed, denying them, like a traitor. Never again, I told myself, never again. I made a mistake. I dared to do something improper. How could I have been so presumptuous as to think I might be read? I kept a few copies at the back of my closet, like someone hoarding the pornographic magazines of his adolescence.
I stop.
In this fog, names keep coming at me. Of the places where I’ve worked. Of the places where I’ve lived. Of friends who have died. Of half-read books. Of anonymous faces. Of cities that I do not remember having visited. Of train stations. Of publicity posters. Like a great invisible parade of names, a mob of fanatics brandishing flags. Colonia Mariana. Gerstein Insurance Company. Elsa. Villa Plácida. Songs of Life and Hope. School friends. Juan Ignacio Santander. Ovidio Goldenberg. Boedo. Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered. Cela Mondacelli. El Sordo. El Cronista Comercial. Los Gatos restaurant in Madrid. Blanca. Goytisolo’s Campos de Níjar. Bilbao.
The letters dance around, dissolve, coalesce. I am overwhelmed by a cacophony of words I don’t understand. More barking.
Who’s calling me?
I wish I could tear off this unfeeling skin in order to feel again.
I move forward.
Anyone who has ever set words down on a page never loses the habit of writing, even when not writing. The calligraphy persists, like an army of ants that can’t be stopped. Behind closed eyelids, the words gather, call one another, pair off. An anthill of letters bursts forth and pursues me, black and red battalions which attack one another, get mixed up in the sand, climb up the bitches’ legs, burrowing into their fur. They bite, advance, devour. The bitches howl. A dictionary has launched itself into this inconceivable space in which I am walking.
Visitation. Presentation. La Perla. Don Felipe Pereira. Colonel Aníbal Chartier. Carrasco. Consider the lilies of the field. Liliana Fresno. La Resistente. Señorita Amalia. Cáceres. Hendaya. Belem and Sons. Angélica Feierstein. Quilmes Beer.
That’s enough.
After I started working at the insurance company, I never wrote again, or scarcely.
Only once, years later, reading that long-forgotten writer Manuel J. Castilla in an anthology that was prohibited at the time, did I once more feel the urge to make something out of words. Castilla had written:
He who goes through the dead house,
and who along the corridor at night
remembers the afternoon of leaden rain
as he pushes open the heavy door.
But no, it was impossible now.
Before, as an adolescent, everything moved me. The flat landscapes of my village. The red hills on the horizon. Winter and the feeling of cold in poor people’s houses. The misery of those who worked on the large plantations. The suffering of others, which I tried to imagine as my own. To sing of the mason’s hands, of the widow’s eyes, of Tolstoy’s and Ciro Alegría’s redeemed heroes. To be their poet.
But no, you fool. You should never have tried it. I still feel ashamed of it.
I told myself never to try again, although, at night, in half-waking moments, I would still string words together to the rhythm of certain melodies. What would the colonel have thought, I wonder, of that double treachery, writing instead of doing, talking instead of writing? It disgusted him that any son of his should be a poet rather than a soldier, but also that I should not have continued in the career that I myself had chosen. It would surely have disgusted him even more to know of my Judas vocation for, although he did not believe in Christ, he still regarded him as a good lad, albeit a bit off the rails. Doubtless it was the father who convinced him that he was a god; in my view a stint in the Roman army would have done him a world of good.
I advance like an intruder in someone else’s garden, at night, in the dark, feeling my way. I imagine the owner of this garden, in the distance, at the mercy of this troubling nightmare, my suffering dreamer. It’s me, I want to tell him, don’t be scared, whoever you are. It’s only me, whoever I am. Keep sleeping, I won’t hurt you, I won’t do anything, good or bad. I only want to talk to you, just talk.
Somniloquist: one who talks in his sleep (Sopena’s New Illustrated Spanish Dictionary).
Even after I stopped writing, I continued to read the dictionary feverishly. A present from my mother. Parallelepiped. Paremiology (which means the study of proverbs). Prosaic. Prostate. Prostitution. The words flit past, daring me to catch one. Presbytery. Presidence. Prodigious. Profound. Progeny.
I don’t want to do this. That linguistic cosmography has no longer anything to do with me. I wish I could lock all those philological abortions up in a great library and set fire to it. Reduce the universe to illiterate ashes. Find something else to occupy me.
Over the white skeletons of the slaughtered dogs run words which I no longer try to follow with my eyes. Let’s allow them to keep running, with their thousand feet, their fibrous wings, their antennae probing the air: there is nothing left to eat. Once, on that dump, I picked up the skull of a boy who had been thrown into a lime pit. Don’t ask how. The colonel doesn’t like to be asked questions. An adolescent’s skull is the same size as an old man’s. Like an imbecile, I said to myself: And what about experience, accumulated memories? How do they fit into a little box like that? Mark this, master of my nightmare: I once had feelings.
Now I understand more. Now that I have no flesh or bones, I believe that none of that is contained: it comes in and goes out through pores in the rock, like a stream, like air, like this constant cloud of sand, no beginning or end.
First recollection or last memory. Who knows. It’s impossible to be sure.
Let’s count them. One, two, three, twenty-five, six hundred thousand memories.
The army of letters is joined now by figures. An alphabet of numbers.
Everything is in code.
I feel exhausted.
I know that the true invasion has yet to begin.
Perhaps it will never begin.
The nights before are always the most frightening.
I carry on. I continue.
A writer denounces reality as he sees it.
Imagination filters it.
Inspiration feeds it.
But he has to know when to stop.
To know when what is written is shameful, as I knew my writing to be.
Not this.
Throw it out.
Scratch it out, tear it up.
Then, what remains?
I don’t mean this as an excuse, let me make that clear. To give another use to the words. To tell what others do. Because every chronicle is also a file.
My father used to say that the army’s strength is in its secrets. Yes, Colonel, sir. I’ll tell you about it. This is what I saw. This is what I heard. Tom said this to Dick. Harry’s lying: I heard him saying this thing and that thing. The difference between gossip and betrayal is the seriousness with which one operates. A gossipmonger writes novels; I drafted reports. Which is the more honorable craft?
Onward.
Buenos Aires devours everything. For a poor boy from the south, it was like a giant chessboard, with massive, granite pieces, full of sinister nooks, obscene crannies. I went there. I took a room on the third floor of a house on Calle Alsina, friendly landlady, doling out maté and cake. In the neighboring rooms, young couples from the north, El Chaco and Córdoba, bank employees, two single sisters. In the morning, at lunchtime, and in the evening, the barrio filled with youngsters on their way to and from school. At thirtysomething, I’m old now and working for Belem Importers. Now and then, I jot down some verse I’ve composed, to rid myself of it, to get it off my chest.
I was solitary. Anyone who’s had too many brothers and sisters quickly gets used to having none. It was easy, at that time, to put on masks. Nothing had any substance, nothing seemed real. Not even our merchandise, not even the bread or the wine. In the shops no one bothered putting price tags on anything anymore. This morning it cost ten thousand pesos, this afternoon fifteen thousand. You had to spend your monthly salary in the first week, or lose half its worth.
I receive a letter from my father. Things are hard. If you need work, go and see my friend Colonel Chartier, my brother- in-arms. I’ll let him know you’ll be going to see him. Look your best, get a haircut.
It’s true that I didn’t know how much longer I would last in that job. What job? Keep putting on zeros—nothing really has a price anymore. It was impossible to import anything, or to export anything either. It’s not even worth sending them a bill: translate it into dollars and you’ll see that we’re the debtors here. Señor Belem’s children moved to São Paulo. I’ll close the shop the day I die, said the old Belem, as wrinkled as a prune. You’ve got a job here until then. My mother, meanwhile, a prisoner of her own misery, wrote to tell me that nothing at home had changed.
Now I’m struggling to breathe. The invisible sand enters my mouth and nose, filling my lungs, transforming itself. Sand into air, air into blood, blood into mud. Everything is dragging me back. I’m at the beginning again. In fog again, and darkness. Once more, I advance.
That’s how it was.
One afternoon, coming out of the Lorraine Cinema, I bumped into a girl with straight, black hair, a smooth brow, very white. We started talking about something or other and she invited me to go for a drink. I’ve never found it easy dealing with women. I can still hear my father’s advice: The world is divided like this: first, dogs; second, comrades; third, friends; fourth, personal stuff; fifth, women.
I saw out my adolescence as a virgin. My first encounter was at twenty, with the older sister of a classmate, in Río Gallegos. Liliana Fresno. One night, waiting for my friend on the sofa of their house, Liliana started playing around with me. She sat down beside me, unbuttoned my shirt, then took me to her room. I thought: There it is, that’s it, that’s enough.
At the insurance company there was a girl, Mirta, who used to smile at me. I wrote her a poem. One afternoon, I saw that she and her friends were laughing and looking at me. I realized that I had been foolish, that my verses had amused her. I didn’t speak to her anymore after that. I saw her, years later, in Buenos Aires. I pretended not to recognize her.
The girl at the Lorraine laughed a lot, but she didn’t mock me. She would have seen me, I suppose, as an older man, given that she was twenty-eight and I was thirty-five. In those days, thirty-five was a considerable age. Now I could be twice as old and still be younger than I was then.
The girl asked me what I was reading. I was carrying the banned anthology in my pocket. I showed it to her. She laughed again. Go on, read me something. I don’t remember what I read her, but I was pleased to let her hear my voice, watching her furtively as my eyes followed the verses on the page. I’d like you to read to me in bed. I looked at her as if I had not understood. I’d like to go to sleep with you reading to me. I paid for the coffees and we left.
Now, in the red mist, I bump into great sheets of paper which are hanging in the wind, as though from a washing line. Dry, rough paper, of the type used in books published by Austral, which absorbed the ink so badly. They don’t tear as I advance; they are impervious to my weight: only light and time age them. It’s not that I feel them (I feel nothing), but I know that they are hanging here, as though to obstruct my path. Something is printed on them, but I don’t know what. I see nothing, hear nothing.
I don’t like reading, her voice says to me, but I like being read to. Any old thing. Even the phone book, if you want. I like watching your lips move, I like the color of your tongue.
More names. More words. More verses by Castilla.
I am growing from you
I am a new leaf, barely touched by the breeze,
I am that summer . . .
I can make out letters on the sheets as though on a blurred letter chart at the optician’s. I recite with the book open on the bed, the girl beside me, caressing her own breasts to the rhythm of my voice.
I am that summer that feels its breast
heavy with fruits
and which falls upon you, making you fertile.
Somehow I kept on reading, and later I asked if I could see her again. I’m with someone, she said. But we’ll probably run into each other again. And she handed over my clothes.
I don’t know if it’s different for someone who’s used to surprises. But for me, whose life had until then been a predictable series of more or less sensible events, to fall in love was an intrusion of the impossible. Until then, I could explain everything. Every fact had its cause, every decision its consequence. My world was logical and coherent, as formal as a sonnet, or at least my sonnets, in which the final verse contrived to be surprising, and therefore never was. “Here it comes,” my quartets announced. “Any minute now,” predicted the first tercet. And so it was. Laws of gravity and dynamics ruled my world, inside and out. She was my first encounter with the inexplicable.
During those months, I repeatedly went to the Lorraine, hoping to find her. One day I saw her, on the arm of a very thin, smiling man. I don’t know if she saw me. I realize that with the exception of those few hours we spent together, I was invisible to her. I, on the other hand, never lost sight of her. I remembered her every night; I knew every corner of her body and imagined expeditions across her increasingly familiar geography. That was then. Now I wouldn’t even be able to say what color her eyes were.
After work, I liked to explore the bookshops on Calle Corrientes. I looked for old poetry books in battered editions, by long-dead authors. I bought them for myself, to make me feel less alone, but also in order to read them to her.
One day, while I was riffling through the tables in one of those bookshops, two men ran in and carried off a young man who, minutes before, had been reading at my side. As they bundled him into the car, I heard someone call me: Hey, you with the long hair, aren’t you Colonel Gorostiza’s son? A man in a double-breasted suit and dark glasses placed his hand on my shoulder. Your father wrote to me saying you’d be calling. How about it? He smiled, handed me a card, and walked off up the street. I went back to the books.
Seeing her and hearing her mattered to me less than touching her. Skin is a space that stands in for the world. When we touch it, brush against it, it encompasses everything. Now I move forward through the fog, but then my fingers moved over her valleys and hills like determined pilgrims, barely resting, retracing their steps sometimes to try another route, exploring unknown pathways. Now that all touching is forbidden me, that landscape of skin sinks under my weight, envelops and stifles me. I tumble into a sack that closes over me, damp and spongy, made of my own flesh. My fingers want to climb the slopes of that body, but the slopes keep getting steeper. It’s impossible to get a grip. The skin, warm and sticky now, encloses me and my cloud of claylike dust. The air turns to mud, filling my eyes, mouth, and nostrils. The mud turns to water. I’m drowning. My throat burns. The water turns to air. Then the panic abates. I breathe.
Again.
Every memory, this whole suffocating multitude of memories, leads to nightmares. Here there is nothing more than that, things that I believe once happened. Forgive me, my dreamer, for infecting you with so much horrible stuff. It isn’t willful—I can’t try to do anything. Every time I attempt to retrieve an instant of joy, a moment in which I was happy to live, a black stain spreads over it, obliterating everything. Her in the damp sheets, her panting on the pillow, her digging furrows in my back with her nails, her, too, turning into that fathomless mud in which I am forever sinking. And I rise up again. And I sink in again.
I cannot even salvage that first moment of memory. Nothing clean, nothing happy, nothing that does not grow dark.
Darkness is also Buenos Aires. I’ve never known such a murky city, with those streets which branch off from an illuminated avenue to lose themselves among secret trees and unsuspected sturdy walls, abrasive to the touch. Here, at least at the start of those years, darkness is not frightening. I follow the instructions in her note, which is unsigned, but written in the tidy handwriting of a model pupil. Come to see me tomorrow at eleven. Ring twice and I’ll open the door. I obey. I arrive, I ring the bell, the barred gate opens, I go up some steps, I push open the door. She hasn’t put the light on, but I can see my way. There’s a smell of summer, of apricots, of rain. A hand takes mine and pulls me onto a mattress. I fall, I sink, but I’m not drowning. I breathe deeply. We say nothing to each other.
I like talking to you alone, mouth to mouth.
Telling you all the things you don’t want to say.
In love, there is one condition that is more terrible than the others. Overwhelming, exclusive, jealous, blind to all reason. Its language is coarse, brutal, abusive. Its gestures are sometimes gentle, at other times of a terrifying violence. It never speaks the truth, because it fears itself. And it lies to keep people from believing all the things that it is. It consists almost entirely in an imagined body: enormous hands, enormous eyes, enormous tongue, gigantic sex. Its limbs have atrophied, grown so small as almost to disappear. The lover has no legs or chin. The nose appears and disappears, as do the ears. A breath, a moan conjure them, and then they vanish again. In that amorous reality there are more bloodthirsty armies than the ones commanded by my father, packs of hounds more rabid than the five bitches in my worst nightmares. You may complain now, dreamer, of the nightmares I foist onto you. Thank your stars that you have been spared this other one.
I recognize this sense of suffocation that I’m feeling now, this sinking into mud. I was here before, but it was worse then, when my flesh still existed and my brain was working. Worse was the fear of hearing (and of not hearing anymore) the desired answer to the question. When will I see you again? She looks at me with those amused eyes and says that she doesn’t know, and I’m not to worry—enjoy the moment.
To live in the present: the definition of hell.
I leave, with her perfume clinging to my clothes. I don’t shower. In the office, on the bus, beneath the blanket, at night, I imagine that she is there. I can think of nothing else. I walk aimlessly. I eat, in no particular restaurant, boiled food, on starched tablecloths. I flick through books which I have no intention of reading. I go to the Lorraine, but don’t watch the film. On the contrary, I can’t wait for it to end so that I can go and stand at the entrance and look for her among the women who come out chatting with their boyfriends, or alone, or in gaggles of shrieking friends. She isn’t there, of course. I return to the darkness of my street and fumble for the lock. I grow experienced in unlocking doors in the dark.
My mind repeats: she, she, she, she. Ella, ella, ella, ella. I try to hush it, but it’s impossible. Two graceful volutes culminating in infinitely drawn-out lines. The city is full of inverted Ionic columns, like the extended facade of a Greek temple upside down. Everything is ella.
Don Belem dies. One of the sons returns from Brazil to close the business down. He offers me a job in São Paulo, but how can I go so far away from her? The man doesn’t understand, and thinks I’m ungrateful. When saying good-bye to the other employees, he leaves me out. Returning home, I walk past the Military Circle, and remember that this is where Colonel Chartier has his office. I go in and ask for him. A corporal takes my documents and leads me to an office dominated by a gigantic desk and a gold-framed mirror. The ceiling is adorned with cherubs.
Inside the placenta bag in which I am sinking, something (a knife, a saber, a claw) has torn at the walls and is dragging me out, on a viscous and foul-smelling wave. One Roman torture consisted in making a prisoner drink wine, then thrusting a knife into his stomach. Like the wine in that Roman’s stomach, I’m dragged along by a river I can’t see. I spin around several times. I hear nothing, feel nothing. I hit the bottom.
In the watery gloom, I make out three tall military figures, their chests covered in phosphorescent medals. The first has no face, only an immense arc of sharpened teeth, through which protrudes a fat, purple tongue. The second is a tangle of hair, as rough as steel wool, as sharp as barbed wire. The third has the features of Colonel Chartier, well-shaven cheeks, a neat black mustache, dark glasses, a military peaked cap. In front of them are dozens of little naked people, raising their arms before this terrible triumvirate. Then the teeth begin to chew on the tongue, the tangle of hair bursts into flames, and Colonel Chartier’s face breaks up, handfuls of worms pushing their way through the cracks. In unison, the triumvirate utters a howl and vanishes. In the darkness, some whitish, rough-edged residue remains, like phlegm.
Colonel Chartier steps out from behind the desk and takes my hand. My father has spoken of me to him. How is my old friend? Lumbago troubles all of us. But what do you youngsters know of that! Life seems eternal to you. How old are you? Forty-one already? I don’t believe it! Can you manage a coffee? Now then, Corporal, bring us two coffees. Well, well. Where were we? And he offered me a job.
I never inquired as to the official name of the department led by Chartier. We called it COMMUNICATION, and the folders were marked with a capital C and a serial number. A secretary, practically a teenager, had the job of filing them. I never knew who used them, nor when, nor why.
Colonel Chartier declares: As for you, all you have to do is pay attention. Your father told me that you have a special talent for that. “He has a bloodhound’s sense of smell,” my friend Gorostiza said. And that’s what we need here. People who know how to sniff the air, to catch things most people miss. These are treacherous times, my young friend. Anything could be a trap. The enemy looks just like you or me, and no sooner we’re distracted than we’ll have a knife at our throats. Civilization and Barbarism. I don’t need to ask which side you’re on.
My job entailed presenting myself in his office at eight o’clock in the morning to receive my instructions. After coffee with a dash of milk (it was never served black in Colonel Chartier’s office), my six or seven colleagues and I, all men, would be handed a folder (C27658, C89711) with an address, a time, sometimes a name. I spent innumerable days sitting in a particular bar close to Congress or standing on the platform of the Pacífico station, waiting for something to happen, for someone to arrive.
In one pocket I carried a little book of poems, to while away the time; in the other, the identification badge they had given me, with the naval crest in embossed tin, which felt like my father’s saber. Sitting in the bar, or standing at the station, I held the book from which I read in one hand while the other rubbed the crest, warming it with my fingers. At the end of the day, I would return to the office for a debriefing. Occasionally, I had to go out at night.
Whenever I saw what I had been sent to see, I gave a signal with my hand, and the agents got on with their work. I learned not to recognize them; it was they who looked out for me. Nor did I want to know anything about the people I was spying on. Their variety surprised me. It was impossible to generalize. There were all sorts. Gentlemen in overcoats. Workers. Pensioners with the newspaper tucked under their arms. Mulattos. Old ladies with blue rinses. Teenagers with acne. Young men who must have been university students or who worked, as I had done, in some anonymous insurance company. Ditto young women. The odd priest. The odd nurse. The occasional secondary-school teacher.
Once I was sent to spy on an ex-colleague, a woman of about forty who had worked in accounts at Belem Exporters—Chela something-or-other. I had scarcely noticed her when we were working in the firm. Reserved, well turned out, invariably in very high heels, she was, someone told me, a widow with two children. Now she appeared very agitated, her hair disheveled. She was carrying a briefcase which she kept opening and closing. As she got off the train, I immediately recognized her, and motioned with my hand. I think that she saw me and thought that I was waving to her. When the agents closed in on her, she shouted and started to run, but then one of her heels broke, and she almost fell onto the tracks. She looked up at me, or at least in my direction, as she sprawled on the ground. I left before they took her away.
Thick and sticky filaments of phlegm cling to my body, hindering my movements. Its tentacles almost seem to have a life of their own, the way they roam over my arms and legs, my neck and face. It’s like being clasped to the bosom of a jellyfish, like growing another layer, slimy and warm, over my own skin. It’s as though I’ve been turned inside out, my organs exposed, my guts intertwined with this fibrous filth. They tighten my throat, strangling me with gelatinous fingers, finding new methods of suffocation. The filaments probe my nose and mouth, filling my lungs to the point of bursting. And once more, all around me, the dust cloud. The phlegm has disappeared. I move forward in a space I cannot see.
If I could stop thinking, even for a moment, I could rest, regain strength. If I could cease, for a moment, vomiting this string of images, of words, of things past.
I try to focus on a dark point, on a pinprick of nothingness. Impossible. The point expands, fills with twinkling lights, each light something lived, something remembered. And I go back to the beginning. My parents’ house. The bitches. My siblings. The poems. The city at night. My elusive lover. Blood and broken bones. My reports. Her. Ella.
Sometimes I inform on boys and girls who are really very young. It’s a way of protecting them, Colonel Chartier tells me. It’s our duty as fathers of the nation.
I see them gathering outside the school gates (I still live in the little room on Calle Alsina), and I stand close to the newsstand, pretending to be choosing sweets, watching them. It occurs to me that I am rather like a satyr, hidden in the undergrowth, spying on nymphs. Or like the elders devouring Susanna with their eyes, nostalgic for their erections. Or like some depraved pornographer, flashing open his dirty raincoat in the playground.
I watch and make notes. Sometimes I can hear them. They tell each other nonsense, lark about, inventing a rhetorical world and a new golden age. Demonstrations, petitions, declarations, a whole vocabulary of banner waving and end-of-year speeches. I was fifteen once, too.
I make my lists. I question the doorman, perhaps a waiter, the uniformed police officer who barely understands what I am asking him. And then I hand in my homework on time—I’m never late. You and punctuality are like twin brothers, says the Colonel.
And we go back to the start.
Every so often, at unpredictable and overlengthy intervals, I would see her. We met almost by chance; I would receive a note proposing a date, or I would be bold enough to call her at work, in some faculty office. One day, I left my book for her, beside the bed. I never knew if she had read it. I didn’t dare ask her. It was enough to know that it was there, at her side. It meant that I was there, too, my words on her lips, my tongue in her mouth.
I can see that my story is exciting you, my dreamer. It’s making your blood flow faster, prompting you to delve into your own memory in search of amorous memories. I warn you: don’t follow me. My hunting grounds are dangerous. All of them begin as tended gardens which sprout suddenly into jungles, into minefields, into quicksand. You won’t reach the other side.
Two simultaneous events changed everything.
There is a first moment (we don’t realize it’s the first) when we cross the threshold of a forbidden room, somewhere we ought never to enter. We do it without thinking. A key accidentally placed in the wrong lock, the door unintentionally opened, the splashes of blood on the floor that we ought not to have seen—just like in fairy tales.
Two events: her telling me, as we woke up, I can’t see you again. Not anymore. And then that morning, on the letter of instructions, her name heading a new list of quarries.
She doesn’t want to see me anymore, because she wants to see the other man. I say “other” because I am not unique. I am one of two, one among many. I want to know who my rival is. Who has privileges over her. Who is this person causing my dismissal from her presence. You don’t know him. What does it matter to you? And she smiles. I grab her hair. I yell at her to answer me. She refuses. I shout louder. I shake her, I yank her hair harder, as though to tear it from the fearful, distant face looking back at me. I slap her. She utters a name. What? She repeats it. Say it again. She says it again, crying. My open hand is still hitting her. And now, for sure, I’ve crossed to the other side and the door is closing behind me.
There is a condition of love more terrible than the others: I repeat this like a litany. It is almost the sum of my learning. I can’t help it. Sometimes it remains latent, like a snake, sleeping beneath the sheets. More often it bursts into flames, like a salamander, consumed by its own heat. I know this monster down to the last detail. It has three heads and a triple, avenging shadow. I could not stop it even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. I want everything to burn. Her, especially, silently screaming.
I like talking to you alone, mouth to mouth.
Telling you all the things you don’t want to say.
The name she mentioned is not on the list. I pick up my pen and add it, clearly writing it beside hers. I go home, shower, dress, set off for work. At midday, I position myself at the door to Casa Gold, where the rings in the shop window announce engagements and anniversaries, silver and gold weddings. I am no longer a disinterested professional, spying for other people. What I’m doing now is personal—private business. How is it possible to be betrayed like this? I ask as people come and go, rarely bumping into each other, borne along on sinuous currents that hardly touch each other. The vision of the multitude dissolves. Images of her are superimposed onto others, this time of butchery, of dismembered bodies, Bluebeard’s brides with bloodied stumps and stomachs cut open. Let everything end so that she will end, I say to myself. And I am still waiting.
Various people begin to assemble. I don’t know why they are demonstrating. Nor do I want to know. I don’t read the banners, I don’t listen to the chants. I don’t see her in the growing crowd either, but I know she’s there—I can smell her. And doubtless him, too. A common cause. Both of them guilty. Both of them condemned. The surge of people hides them, but does not protect them. If I stretch out a hand, I can touch them.
The crowd begins to walk along Diagonal toward the Plaza de Mayo. On the pavements, spectators. At the end, the mounted police, their sabers still sheathed. I walk along among the onlookers, with an absent expression. Outside the Boston Bank, I spot Chartier’s agents, unmistakable now. I make a slight gesture, and they join the procession.
When the marchers reach the Plaza de Mayo, the mounted police charge, as planned. Then I see her, shining in the dark crowd. I look for the agents, but they have disappeared in a tangle of legs, sabers, people’s heads, and horses’ heads. The clamor is deafening. Clouds of tear gas explode on the pavement opposite. The crowd is herded toward Calle Florida. Then I suddenly see her, leading the thin man by the arm. He’s covering his face with his hand, and his face is covered in blood. And she is tending to him.
Dust, fog, mud, water, dense, indeterminate moods, fathomless, formless seas, a world suspended between solid and liquid, viscosities, globules of spit, blood. Myself, trapped forever; her, forever cleaning his wound, diluting his blood in water, an obscene and economical Eucharist. My state condemns me to this vision, it’s a professional obligation, an occupational hazard. But I don’t resign myself to it. This is also torture.
I see the agents, and point out the couple to them, sitting in a café window emblazoned with the words CERVEZA QUILMES. Take away the noise, gunfire, screaming, the smoke, the people running, the water, the blood, the agitated waiter—and what’s left? Two lovers at a café, hand in hand, one head bowed toward the other, a man and his sweetheart.
How dare she exclude me? That paradise is mine. I see her stand up to go; he stays behind. I signal to the agents to follow her. We’ll see about him later. She (I run through the practical exercises that Chartier insists are essential) will suffer all the interrogations, all the punishments, all the deaths. One alone is not enough for me.
I don’t know where they took her. I never wanted to know it, because I preferred to imagine the whole lot. I never tried to find anything out, even though everything is recorded in the folders (C56908, C99812), every raid, every prisoner, every building, every procedure, every conclusion. This has to be run like a bank, says Colonel Chartier. We should be able to account for every last centavo.
Weeks went by, months. I moved, within the same department, from informing to gathering information. The first job entailed observing. The second required questions. A friend of my father, an amateur botanist, used to claim that all he did was to classify, in great ledgers, whatever he happened to find in nature; he left the whys and wherefores to academic luminaries. I, on the other hand, did not regard the move from lookout to inquisitor as a step up. It was simply another aspect of the same job—using the tongue instead of the eyes. Now you can give your eyes a rest, joked the colonel.
One can get used to anything (except for this, except for what comes after, except for nothingness). One gets used to the sight of a person deprived of all hope, to tears, to screams, to deliberately inflicted wounds, to vomiting and blood, to picturing another’s pain as though it were being drawn for you with colored chalks. The hours go by, and afterward one forgets, or pretends to forget. One has to make an effort not to forget.
I remember.
There he was, calmly walking down the street, he who had hijacked her affections, robbed me of her skin, trespassed on my territory. There he was, poor bastard, oblivious to my existence. For the sake of my own honor, I had to convince myself and convince the others that he was not merely a fool, a nonentity in the enemy army, but on the contrary, a glorious captain, a paladin, someone we must use all our cunning and might to overthrow. After his hell, his purgatory, I was generous enough to allow him a new life in Europe, a way to prolong my pleasure in dreaming of his end. No one ever extended such consideration to me.
I would venture to say that I worked well. Without the distraction of feelings or literature, I threw myself entirely into my duty. Noblesse oblige.
I’m invited to an official ceremony at the Military Circle—I no longer recall in whose honor—a party with medals and sabers beneath crystal chandeliers and the inevitable gilded moldings. Colonel Chartier makes a speech; others follow. Applause. In the room sit various rows of decorated military men and their wives. An enormous, mountain-shaped woman occupies one or more seats in the front row, her blue silk dress spread over her stomach like a giant sail, at the stern of a swell of uniforms. After the ceremony, the colonel introduces me to a little man with a mustache and bushy eyebrows. General, this is the boy I told you about. Colonel Gorostiza’s son. The little man looks me up and down and says nothing.
Somebody must have appreciated my efforts, because the colonel calls me to his office one Sunday, soon after the party. Do you go to Mass? No? Quite right; church is for sissies. I’m going to give you some good news, you deserve it. And he announces that the General (the most recent one) wants to send me to Spain. A new broom, says the colonel. But I think the changes are good. All that scum we’ve been trying to clean up here is getting away from us—to the Yanks, the Frogs, the Italians. But especially to the Spanish, would you believe? Our General over here doesn’t want their generals over there to get annoyed about the deluge, so we’re going to go over and keep an eye on what our riffraff is getting up to in the mother country. You’re going to carry out the same little job you’ve been doing for me here, but in Madrid. Pay attention, learn to recognize the signs, be discreet, raise the alarm. You’ll have to listen hard, because I don’t know what they speak over there, but it isn’t Spanish. And he roars with laughter.
Madrid was the ideal place for me, being both hard and welcoming at the same time, like a sort of boarding school. The prevailing atmosphere of suspicion suited me. Somehow the work was easier. My boss, in the company where I was supposedly working (and where I passed myself off as an impecunious exile, like the others), was an absentminded old man who spent his nights watching Sarita Montiel films. The true authority was a spare and silent Murcian, from the Ministry of the Interior, who had been with the Generalíssimo in Africa. I saw him only half a dozen times, and on each occasion he made the same observation. Everything’s going well, very well. Keep it up.
That banal belief in time healing all wounds is wrongheaded: we grow accustomed to our wounds, which is not the same thing. So it was that at an earthy fortysomething, I felt able to accept the advances of the refined Quita, without fearing that she would usurp that other person, both absent and irreplaceable. Quita found me amusing, intriguing, I was her gentleman, she would say, when we were together. My Dark Blanca, I would reply. I would never have made the first move. It was she who approached me, her glasses shining, her mouth always on the point of a smile, a tremulous down on her lips. She was generous, more than she ought to have been to me, the false victim, the lying lover, impostor in everything.
Now there is a sort of phosphoresence in the fog, a vaguely luminous darkness, a dirty light. I move forward. I hear the voice of Quita, cajoling, begging me to stay with her, not to leave her. There is something obscene, grotesque, in hearing loving words from someone we do not love. We suddenly notice the spittle in the corners of their mouth, a broken vein on their nose, sleep on the lashes they are so coquettishly seeking to flutter. Quita’s voice goes on and on, and I move farther and farther.
I want it to disappear: her, her voice, her face, her hands. But she continues to whine in this mist, her whining becomes mingled with the yelping of the bitches, her teeth with their fangs, her red fingernails with their claws. I would like to set them on him, this pack of animals and women. On him I would like to set loose all these piebald creatures with their flaming eyes. On him I unleash my furies, but to no avail. All I can do is advance, without feeling that I am moving. As though I were walking in a circle which is growing ever tighter, a spiral in the center of which I am doomed not to find the other, but myself, the man I once was, patiently waiting for the person I am now.
Forward.
Few of the refugees passing through the Martín Fierro center really interested us. Most of them were poor bastards who had grudgingly taken flight, in the manner of a cat shooed from its home with a broom. Others, who had once been fighters, now appeared dull and sterile, incapable of the slightest protest. A few had been transformed, or were in the process of transforming themselves into obedient members of the bourgeoisie, regretting their youthful ethos, willing to put all that behind them. These got transferred to the credit column. But there were also some in debit. The ones who were still raging. The ones who demanded reparation, public vengeance, future justice. The ones who gathered testimonials, confessions, private statistics. The ones who probed memories. Those who ascribed to themselves the role of recording angels. They were the ones who had to be watched, whose names were kept on file.
Like any official job, there is a bureaucracy involved in denunciation. At the top of the tree are the anonymous men who make the initial and final decisions, who have no private lives, the initiators of public action, the masters of history. Their subordinates are the ones who communicate orders, who appear to be important, who have personalities, names, ranks. Beneath them are the ones who execute the orders, who mete out the blows, who pull the trigger. Finally come the underlings, the ones who use their ears, open their eyes, make notes, who live on surveillance and indiscretion. I am one of these last. I watch, listen, and tell. Perhaps that is the reason why I no longer have ears, eyes, a voice. Nothing exists outside my mind. While yours is occupied with dreams of me.
One day, at Blanca’s office, I see him. I recognize him. It’s his face, his frighteningly fine-featured face. He has the looks of a soap star, of an actor in a commercial, a face at once dreamy and astute, a face that looms over the piles of books at the Martín Fierro like an enormous harvest moon. There it is, implacable, stuck in my eyes like a shard of glass, that face which is also a thousand faces, all the same, all calm and smiling, all the faces the face over which she bent, solicitously, bathing his bloodied ear. There he is, that day when Blanca asked me to drop into her office and pointed to the man standing beside the bookcase, like one of those scabby old statues of Chinese clay. There he was, waiting for me, as I had waited for him since that afternoon. We shook hands. While he introduced himself I was thinking: How can I make him suffer?
During the months that followed, our paths inevitably crossed many times. Images of him keep repeating themselves: in the café, in the street, at the Martín Fierro, at the exit of a theater, at a gathering of literary friends. We saw each other at meetings, soirees, in the street on summer evenings, in cafés during the winter, a word here, a greeting there, never anything that would give away the secret intimacy we shared, our past history. We are undisclosed rivals—he doesn’t know it, and I can’t forget it. And while the image of her disappears, his reaffirms itself, multiplying itself, as though in a corridor of crystal-clear mirrors.
Let’s get technical. The needle on a lie detector traces onto sheets of rolling paper a zigzag line that seems never to commit itself either way: only in the moment of an absolute truth will the line become firmer, clearer. That unbroken, straight line is also the one made by an encephalogram when a patient dies. You have to keep an eye on both of them during an interrogation: they never both show the same state. To get to the truth without ending the life is our aim—that was my job. My first encounters with him were all about following the line of the lie-detector needle; now I’m after the other kind, the straight line, the inevitable one.
Every scene is acted out with protagonists and minor figures who flit on- and off-stage. The ridiculous Berens, the clown, the rhymester. A certain disgusting Cuban, either a thief or an intellectual, I don’t know which is worse. The Cuban’s wife—I threatened her once, to get him to talk. The midwife, Camilo Urquieta, who brings inky abortions into the world. Anonymous friends. Indispensable enemies. One or other passionate lady. Little acolytes. Choirboys. Maenads.
Women have always felt sorry for me. That isn’t a good basis for passionate love, which is what I, the frustrated poet, have always sought after. The literature I once tried to write betrayed me pitilessly; it’s better that way—less embarrassing. Women consoled me when I wanted them to die for me, an asp to the breast. It’s cold comfort, like a sick man who knows that the lover sitting at his bedside, she who tenderly moistens his parched lips, will go out at the end of visiting time and throw herself into another man’s arms.
He, on the other hand, elicited their love without even trying to win it. Why? I ask. Only little Andrea managed to keep him at her side. You should have seen her boasting about it. He’s at my place, we eat lunch together, we share a bathroom, we wake up together. Andrea, for whom he was like an extremely rare edition of an important and famous book.
I bided my time.
Waiting is an art. You can study it, practice it. I observed, made notes, preparing reports and forecasts. I heard the Murcian say one day: Gorostiza has an African patience. I understood what he meant. Like the Sphinx. Like the pyramids. Made of sand.
Then we come to In Praise of Lying. It’s a pathetic piece of work. I read it, of course. Incredulous at so much idiotic adulation, furious at literature’s great priests, and with the futile satisfaction of knowing that my enemy had failed. As a book, In Praise of Lying is pompous, colorless, and spent. How can people have said, many times over, that this is a masterpiece? I listened to their ravings without advancing an opinion. Because, who would have paid any attention to me, who would have listened to my criticism, in the midst of that choir of fulsome, stupid angels?
The rest is trivial: the author’s adventures, the story of the publication, the public adoration. My protests would have counted for nothing. The book exists now, as a planet or a river exists, indifferent to those who travel over one or drown in the other. In Praise of Lying has a place outside our meager life span. They’ve dubbed it an “immortal work.” It is to be an immortal work, to my great chagrin. The earth is flat, and the sun revolves around it.
But not the man himself. He had to be crushed, like a stinking pile of waste, dissolved in a sewer. And I had the means. I had compiled quite a promising dossier on him. It would be enough to attack him. A mere formality. Once apprised of the man’s past enormities, albeit fabricated, the Murcian would give his approval. What better moment than the very day of his artistic coronation! My invitation to the launch arrived, with some unctuous drivel in Urquieta’s hand. I went along early.
The file we held on the Antonio Machado was dense. Prohibited books. Censored magazines. Obscene authors. Readers who have no decency either in politics or pornography. Information withheld from customs, the police, the Church. Objectionable comings and goings. Unacceptable conversations and even readings. All that arrogant intelligentsia which likes to call itself “enlightened.” All their hangers-on, too. Something had to be done.
One day the Murcian tells me to go and see the results for myself. I arrive early in the morning. The bookshop’s front is burned out, the window smashed. Black pages flutter in the air and a handful of curious passersby are trying to make out any words that remain. Inside the premises, there isn’t much damage. There are still piles of books on the tables or stacked on the shelves, all of it covered with a dusting of ash. It’s not that bad, I think, seeing a woman standing in the doorway, crying. Who are the animals that did this? asks a man in a white shirt. They are the Warriors of Christ the King, I think of telling him. They’re a bunch of pretentious bastards anyway, God’s booksellers. I would have liked to tell those idiots that you achieve nothing with a paltry gesture like this. As if anyone cares about a few kids getting excited over slim volumes of poetry. I spot one singed cover and try to remember some verses I thought I had forgotten. A fruitless endeavor. I go over to the woman and ask if I can help her. She says nothing, so I start picking up some of the books that were sent flying by the explosion. I take one away in my pocket. As a memento.
I’m having lunch with Quita one afternoon when she tells me that tomorrow we’re going to a launch. I guess which one it is. She mentions the book. She names the author. I watch as her mouth grinds the meat, the down on her lip glistening with grease. I can’t stand seeing her eat. She breaks the bread with her hands, puts a piece in her mouth, mentions his name again, and it’s as if she were swallowing phlegm. Then she picks up an apple and takes a bite out of it, and a mixture of foam and spit forms at the corners of her mouth. She crunches up the fruit vigorously while talking about the next day’s event, and when she opens her mouth, I can see a great, white bubble floating over her pink-brown tongue. She talks and eats, eats and talks. Quita, who had a horror of silence, disappears now into the mist.
Two figures rise up like columns, winding around each other, her and him, the ones that matter. They appear, growing larger in front of my eyes, in front of what would have been my eyes if I could see. He, with his spurned retinue of women, he who wanted to be with her, he who was chosen by her. They remain there, erect, united, two in one. Because, even when she is no longer there, she is still with him. I can’t manage to detach them.
Onward.
The presentation, a ceremony to honor his book. The book he wrote. The idiots talk to him, men admire him, women desire and protect him. He is silent, like a king. Why speak, when the world rushes to celebrate you? Almost without surprise, among the crowd I spot my Cuban and his wife—she of the ubiquitous hat, she who ought to be dead. If I can manage to corner the three of them, what a ceremony I’d prepare, what a presentation, what a bonfire for the Devil and Christ the King.
Him, at the front. Him, still not saying a word. Him, suddenly frightened. Him, running toward the street. Everyone perplexed, astonished, embarrassed. I decide to follow him. He comes to a door. He goes in. I see a light go on. I wait. The Cuban and the hat woman arrive. Quita arrives, a flustered busybody. Quita comes out again, crying, poor cow. Then I decide to go in. I ring the bell. He answers the door. I step into the hall. We argue. I try to open the door behind him and he tries to stop me opening it. I see the repugnant Cuban. Hello, Chancho, I say, and I place my bag on a chair, as if this were a homecoming, a long-awaited return to a familiar place. And hello, señora, I say to the resurrected one, his scrawny girlfriend.
The Cuban looks at me. I can’t read his expression. The woman makes a face, somewhere between disparaging and flirtatious. We were about to leave, she says.
Sit down, I answer. Or I order her—it’s all the same. And I tell them that I was about to ask the other one how they were planning to share out the money hidden in Switzerland. To make them aware of it, I suppose. To frighten them. To make him, my prey, quake.
But he pretends not to understand, he says he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I suggest he ask his fat friend for some explanations. In fact, it doesn’t really matter to me whether he knows or not. That is not the guilt that interests me.
Then I feel as if I’m suffocating. I need air. I go to the balcony doors and fling them wide open. He tries to close them. I stop him. He struggles. Meanwhile the Cuban and his flamingo make their getaway, petrified, no doubt. Before leaving, they tell him that his book is very good. Even in these last words, they lie. Who cares? He doesn’t even look at them. He’s looking at me.
From the foggy depths, a pair of thin, hairy arms reach upward. The arms encircle me and grow longer, wrapping around me. The arms become embedded in my body. Little roots burst out of the hands and grip my skin, sinking tiny tentacles, boring through the flesh to the bone’s marrow. The arms envelop me and I have the impression of disappearing beneath their ramifications.
I want to open the balcony doors. He wants to close them. We struggle. A light goes on in one of the houses opposite. Then I gather all my strength and shake off his arm and I feel him swing himself over the balcony’s low railing. A vacuum in the air, a fall that seems like a jump, and the horrible thud of a body dashed against the pavement. For a long moment I don’t know whether it’s him or me who has fallen.
I close the doors, pick up my bag, go out to the staircase, and run. Up the dark street I run, almost without drawing a breath. At the top, in front of a lit-up theater, I pause, euphoric. This is it, I tell myself, this is the end. He’s not here anymore, she’s not here, only I am here, still standing, finally liberated, ready to begin again, the old skin shrugged off, scrubbed clean, back in the starting blocks, turning over a new leaf. Because I won’t ever run into him again, I told myself, because he’s gone forever. He’s out of reach now, in a place beyond the horizon that I can’t make out, and which keeps retreating as I advance.
In Madrid, everything is cloaked in damp, as though the bricks themselves exhale it. At night, in the lamplight, the air turns rusty. I walked through the damp mist to my house, unable to distinguish the trees from the men. I reached my door, went upstairs, and sat down at the table. I needed to get some sleep before the morning came, and everything changed.
I poured myself a large glass of Urquieta’s sherry. And then another. And one more. I finished the bottle and started on the other. Urquieta had been kind enough to open them before the event began so that the public could help themselves. But there had been no event. The star had fled. What shame she would have felt to witness the flight of her pusillanimous paladin. What remorse, what anguish. Now I was the artist, the victorious hero, the flame, the beau. I felt what great actors must feel when the curtain falls after a stellar performance. A rejuvenating exhaustion, an overwhelming euphoria. A lump in the throat.
A burning. A drowning. Something claws at the back of my throat, ripping the veins, tearing into the flesh. Everything is fire, everything is smoke. I need water, air. Now my guts are bursting into flames. Beneath the nails, my fingers are glowing red, black. My lungs struggle like two great headless birds, their scaly wings thrashing to survive. Nothing can fill them, nothing but blood that is warm as lava. I want to stop the invasion, the burning; it has to stop, such a pain cannot continue, it’s an animal devouring me from the inside, drowning me in sand, mud, blood.
It’s impossible to shout, impossible to give a voice to this extreme agony. So much pain doesn’t fit into this crumbling flesh, this shattering head, these limbs which are falling to pieces and turning into embers. I feel my face falling off in chunks, my skin peeled off alive, my organs hurled at my feet. I am coming apart, but the pain remains. I am disappearing in a storm of burning ashes.
Then, suddenly, there is no pain. There is no body. There is nothing, except the contents of my memory.
I want my dreamer to wake up. For this to be over.
I see nothing.
I hear nothing.
I feel . . .