by Alan Pauls
There’s a young man from Tucumán at the factory, the brother of a foreman recently fired for stealing, whom his grandfather kept on partly out of spite, to torment the man he’d fired—from whose betrayal he never recovers, being an immigrants’-son-turned-boss and an incorrigible paternalist—and partly because it’s convenient. The boy is naïve; for a few coins he’ll do things that nobody else would do—errands, preparing mate cocido, acting as a chauffeur or night guard—and he has ambitions that his gratitude to the boss only strengthens. He’s enlisted for some overtime (yet more to add to the great quantity he’s already amassed, which even combined would never add up to a wage): to see what the boss’s son-in-law is up to. Six hundred of the pesos of the day, pesos moneda nacional: exactly the amount his father needs, four nights later, to stay in at a surprisingly, inexplicably adverse poker table, which something tells him it’s still not time to leave even though he’s been completely cleaned out. It’s five past five on a raw winter’s dawn, and his father’s gone out into the street to smoke in his shirtsleeves. A sweater would keep him warm. Gambling is better: it makes him invincible. He stubs his cigarette out on a paving stone, spits a resigned stream of smoke into the frozen air, the last of the night, and when he raises his eyes he catches a glimpse of the boy from Tucumán’s shadow moving across the street, or rather shivering from the cold in the alley he’s been standing guard in for some time. It takes him five seconds to work out that it’s someone, ten to cross the street, twenty to catch up with the boy from Tucumán after he tries to run away, half a minute to recognize him—he remembers him well: he’s the boy who laughed under his breath on one of the two visits his father has paid to the factory in order to please his father-in-law, when he said that his favorite thing about the place was the workers’ clothes—and a minute—prolonged by the bottle truck that drives past, making a racket that obliges him to repeat the arrangement he’s proposing a second time—to take from him the six hundred pesos he’s just earned. It’s only a loan, he tells him, underpinning the idea with subtle nepotistic insinuations. He’ll return it in two hours, without fail, in this same alleyway, only quadrupled. A little while later, she emerges from another strenuous bout of insomnia and finds him in the kitchen, sitting with the back of a chair between his legs, swirling a recently made cup of coffee in his hands. He’s just shaved, he looks younger than ever, and he smiles like an awestruck child. “I was dead. A real beating: I hadn’t won a single hand,” he tells her, his eyes wide. “The guy from Tucumán your father hired to follow me ended up rescuing me.”
Gambling is his thing—just as other men might take drugs, shoplift, cross-dress, or drive at 200 kilometers per hour—and he’s alone in it, and everything that will ever be known of him while he’s in his thing until they both die off will only emerge by error or accident. Because “things” are worlds, and no world can close itself off completely, no matter how perfect it is. That morning, in the kitchen, his mother realizes that there will never be space in him for her. It has nothing to do with her, with what she does or does not do. The proof is his absolute lack of guilt, the almost jovial ease with which he skips over the trouble of a confession and assumes something that for her, until that moment, had been a mystery, and had tortured her unbearably. He’s never mentioned his gambling before for precisely the reason that he’s talking about it now, which is also why he’s talking about it in the way he is, like someone thinking aloud, without any need for interlocutors. His silence has never been a secret. That’s why he never felt the urge to confess. For his mother, this is the first and perhaps the only night of gambling, and it’s charged with surprises and revelations. For his father, it’s one more in a series. That’s why he’s talking about it as though his mother had known all about each of those other ones that led up to it.
And now he knows, too. He’s almost more aware of it than his father himself, given the mimetic impulse awoken in him by certain indeterminately sick people, the undiagnosed or those trapped in the webs of confusing diagnoses (melancholics, perverts, dreamers, idolaters, procrastinators), with whose ills he claims both a rare intimacy, as though he had suffered them in some other life, and a peculiar distance, characterized by compassion and astuteness and more befitting a doctor than a patient. “At the casino, my darling,” his mother tells him after bursting out laughing, and once the first moment of astonishment has passed, he peeps around the door she’s cracked open for him and sees a rapid panorama of it all, the gold and red of the carpets, the flashing lights on the slot machines, the waiters carrying trays of drinks between tables, the employees in bow ties and waistcoats taking piles of chips out of boxes, the tables surrounded by gamblers on their feet, the baize tabletops, the cards coming out of the sabot, and, with his back to him, his jacket off and hanging from the back of his seat, two halos of sweat around his armpits, and his head enveloped in the smoke from his own cigarette, his father, leaning very far forward, his shoulders sunken and his elbows resting on the edge of the table.
Sometimes he can’t help himself, and he lets slip a question about roulette wheels, croupiers, cheats, or the secret, silent rooms where he imagines big winners go to exchange their chips for money. Other times he skips straight to action, thinking he’s much more likely to rouse his father by making himself an example and demonstrating everything he doesn’t know and wants to learn. And so he finds any reason to start shuffling cards, and shuffles badly, exaggerating his clumsiness, trying to stir his father’s pride and convince him to teach him, or deliberately loses card games in an attempt to awaken his pity or his fury and so finally extract the drops of his expertise that will save him from more humiliation. They’re feeble, hopeless efforts. His father responds indifferently, with evasions that he accepts without protest. After a while he stops trying. Lost cause. But how he rejoices in those moments when something unexpected, a random, utterly unintentional spur, dents the shield protecting his father and his world and reopens for a second the door his mother once opened; when a tiny but dazzling flash of that forbidden realm escapes and reaches him, like music escaping a party and reaching some far-off room, and he feels as though a seed is being planted in him. It happens rarely, generally with movies, TV programs, plays, books that at some point touch on the subject of gambling, gamblers, the practice of betting. Everything will be fine, the scenes will be flowing as normal, the film more or less entertaining, the book well or poorly written, the play moving forward—until someone shows up and cuts a deck of cards, or a character tells a story about a night at a casino while sitting at the table after dinner, or a ball takes a few hesitant leaps on the slope of a spinning roulette wheel, and his father, who had been following the developments in silence, entrenched in his indifference, suddenly stiffens, as if struck by an invisible dart, and all of his senses, which until that moment have been floating and dispersed, surface again on his face as though called up for battle, and then fire on what he’s been looking at. In a fraction of a second, he’s transformed into what he’s always been but had been keeping in reserve: the defender of an experience that nobody else knows firsthand, and about which only he possesses the ultimate truth. Being a film fanatic, for example, he readily defends the liberties taken by cinema in the name of art as instances of poetic license that no demand from reality can ever rightfully challenge, and yet he’s feverishly sensitive when it comes to films about gambling. Everything strikes him as sloppy and ludicrous, not because it’s artificial but because it’s wrong. His arguments, when he makes them—when he doesn’t restrict himself to giving a sarcastic little smile instead, a gesture of disdain he aims at the television, the scene, the screen where the outrage is being committed—are unspecific, always general, often sententious. They’re really vetos, laws that can only be formulated negatively. “Nobody who’s ever played baccarat looks at women while he’s playing,” he says. Or: “For a true gambler, cash is never a problem.” Or: “Gamblers don’t have lucky rituals.” Or: “There’s no such thing as a nice
croupier.” Or: “No gambler wins or loses everything in the first hour of play.” Or: “Nobody ever plays everything.” He’s also riled by the overall aesthetic effect, the gleaming, almost glossy image with which cinema beautifies gambling, where the backs of the playing cards twinkle like mirrors and the ice in the glasses like diamonds, the green baize looks like English grass, and the good gamblers are always elegant while the bad ones are monsters covered in scars and given to the vilest tricks, incapable of doing or deciding anything without the help of the entourage of baleful assistants monitoring the table incognito. But the heart of the reproach is something else, something more fundamental, more radical. What sickens his father is that they’re always secondhand versions, hearsay, pale echoes of echoes. They might keep audiences pinned to their seats, smash the box office, and claim to be based on true stories, but to his father—to anyone who’s been submerged in the original experience—it’s obvious that nobody involved in the concoction of these swindles has ever been there. None of them has lived the gambling life. And it’s this lack of life that poisons these representations with an irremediable falseness.
Maybe this is his father’s real life, this hidden one, the one they never see, this strange combination of gated paradise and toxic cellar, of orgiastic oasis and forced-labor camp, of which all they can ever hope to know comes from the leaks his father allows to escape every so often, almost against his will, like a medium opening his mouth and speaking and closing it again only when instructed to by the spirit speaking through him. It’s a slightly distressing idea: it forces him to think of the father he can see, first the everyday one (while he’s still married to his mother), then the weekend one (after the order to leave Ortega y Gasset), as a sort of body double for some invisible other, a replica that mechanically, as though following an instruction manual, carries out everything that should be done by one father, the original one, who is apparently too busy guessing cards, doubling bets, and frightening rivals with hands he doesn’t have to do a father’s work.
Eventually, though, he ends up getting used to it. Gambling is a world, and it works. It has its own rules, schedules, customs, uniforms, backdrops, props. Like every world—no matter what dangers it contains—its founding principle is that it’s habitable. It might be distressing, but he now knows, or can guess, where his father is when he doesn’t find him where he hopes to find him, where he and maybe his mother before him most need him, sitting by his side in the middle of the night when he has one of the nightmares that take hold of him without waking him up and make him sit up very straight in his bed, like Pinocchio, his eyes open and as unseeing as coins, or calling the pediatrician after taking the thermometer out of his armpit, or cleaning the bits between his toes. It’s much worse, really, to imagine him crossing Rio de Janeiro at night in a brightly colored Volkswagen Beetle flying at the speed of light in search of a nameless, faceless debtor who no doubt couldn’t have anything further from his mind than paying the debt he’s about to be reminded of.
Besides, it’s been clear since very early on, since before he could think for himself, as they say, that if there’s anyone who can determine where life is, it’s his father. In fact, he makes himself the authority on its everyday allocation (though his own existence demonstrates, perhaps in spite of itself, that there’s nothing less certain or less obvious than the things we take for granted when we talk about life) and, like a surveyor, traces the frontiers—or rather reveals the invisible ones that were always there—between simulations of life and real life, shams and experiences, disguises and the naked truth. Even when he was a young boy, accompanying his father on his rounds through the business district was like taking a crash course in the art of appraising other people’s lives. (Although “appraising” carries a trace of optimism: his father is a brutal evaluator, for whom nuances are pure affectation or gradations of fear. For him, there are two options: you’re either alive, or you’re dead.) You can start anytime. At the office, for example. He’s come straight from school to see him; they’re about to go out for lunch. The first lesson (like almost all of them) is conducted on the move, subtly imparted while they cross the office diagonally on the way to the elevator, fully exposed—particularly him, with his shyness, his bangs, and his pants’ knee patches torn by the schoolyard’s rough paving: an exotic animal, like all creatures from the outside who end up in the world of work—to the scrutiny of the other employees. While he walks and gives out general greetings, nodding his head and smiling, his father lets him in on the death certificates he’s already signed: “The fat woman with the hairband: dead. The guy typing with two fingers: dead. That one selling coffee: dead. That ugly woman who talks to you like you’re three years old: dead, dead, dead.” The sequence shot follows them into the elevator that jolts them downstairs, taking in the operator, who’s practically asleep (dead), through the lobby, with the doorman who’s shuffling envelopes with greasy fingers (dead), into the street, with the redheaded guy selling candy at a kiosk (dead), the woman selling flowers (dead), and the newsstand owner closing his stand to go eat (dead). All dead. This is essentially the whole lesson. Dead: which is to say—according to the variety of existentialism prevailing in the region at the time, a civil servants’ kind of existentialism, with the expert on accountants’ woes Mario Benedetti in the role of Albert Camus, his novel The Truce in that of The Rebel, and his own father in that of official spokesperson for the dogma—perpetual hostages in the cells of a wretched, obligatory, monochrome life (gray being the color of horror vacui, according to the palette of the era) that offers no surprises nor any prospect of change. As time goes by, he thinks he comes to understand that life—which seems so universal, so evenly distributed—is actually a rare good that shows up where he would not at first have expected to find it: in children, beggars, stray dogs, crazy people—the only ones, according to his father, who meet the sole condition that makes life real: having the nerve to challenge everything. The barefoot boy putting a dirty hand through the window of a car stopped at a light; the beggar howling in an alley, covered in bags of trash; the puppy boldly sniffing the vulva of an arrogant Afghan hound; the madman and his private world of burning souls and organs consuming one another: these are the few happy anomalies his father seems to recognize in this general theater of the dead. There’s more life there, he says, in that human wilderness, in those bodies covered in calluses, scabs, scars, than anywhere else.
He agrees in silence, because at a certain age any more or less self-assured show of authority is met with agreement. Even so, he would like to learn, to know where his father got his skill for tracing the dividing line, which signs to look out for and how to read them in order to decide what is genuine, free, sovereign life, and what is the parody that attempts to usurp it. Even at this age, he likes solid reasoning. He can admire the edge of a decision, or the timely impact of a bombshell, but what captivates him about both is also what frightens him: how sudden they are, and how soon they’re over. Besides, if the taxi driver who spends his whole life cursing the other cars on the road is dead, as dead as the cashier who serves them at the bank, who spends hours counting other people’s money without even lifting her head, and as the waitress in the phony Italian restaurant where they usually have lunch, who’s red with embarrassment at the prostitute’s uniform she’s made to wear, a shirt undone to her belly button and a tight skirt that hardly covers her buttocks—if all these people who for better or worse breathe, peel open their eyelids every morning, and feel the icy thrusting of water at their gums, and are scared, and speak to other people are dead, oh so dead, as his father says of the ugly woman at the office who waves a useless hand in the air to ingratiate herself to him from a distance, and generally of more extreme cases, those that no earthquake or revolution could resuscitate, what about that close family friend of his mother’s husband, who leaves behind a widow and two orphans, also leaving his mother’s husband in a state of shock, dreaming about his body at the bottom of the river for months, un
til he feels as though he can’t breathe and wakes up, his heart having almost stopped beating, pressing his pillow into his face with his own hands.
He’s his first dead person. Like all first dead people, he has the rare quality of being simultaneously implausible and inevitable. The moment he arrives in the overheated room where the wake’s being held, everything—the whispering, the soft light coming from the lamps on the floor and the tables, the furtive sound of every movement, the uniform color of the clothing, the air of monotony enveloping everything—prepares him to come face-to-face with a dead person, forces him to believe in it, to accept without a shadow of a doubt the evidence that he is dead. But when he gets to the coffin and sees the corpse all made up and dressed as if it’s going out for the night, the first thing that crosses his mind is a remark too shameful to say aloud: “Okay, that’s enough. Let’s put an end to this farce. You can get up now.” The truth of a lifeless body lacks nothing. It’s irreducible, as hard as stone. But it’s precisely this kind of impassive superciliousness that demands all the surrounding spectacle, the zealous care and beautification that turn every dead body into a strange mixture of puppet, waxwork, and actor. Even so, for all their artificiality, our first dead bodies are like a note struck by a pianist before he begins to play, which melts away no sooner than it has been heard but lingers throughout the whole piece as a key, guiding and making sense of it; they radically and permanently alter the world as we know it, injecting it with the sole possibility—the possibility of elimination—that was unimaginable to us the second before we came face-to-face with that corpse, because it was the opposite of the world itself.
And in this case, there’s also the matter of the money. Where is life—his father’s old question, which the dead man makes flesh, exposing it to the fragility and menace that color the world after every brush with misfortune—often gets mixed up with the other question, where is the money, which snakes through the wake in an undertone (in the way that vulgar, malicious, or funny conversation sometimes circulates in solemn and serious situations, deliberately disturbing the solemnity in order to make it more bearable, or maybe to remind us what cheap stuff it’s made of) and sparks a few deliberations when a guest appears who should theoretically be able to answer the question, someone high up at the iron-and-steel company, a police official, the two or three army and navy officers who arrive in uniform, preceded by a compact phalanx of guards, and who restrict themselves to squeezing the hands of anyone who approaches them as soon as they see them coming, as though they were the chief mourners—though they never met the dead man in person and they’re quick to leave as soon as they’ve stood at attention next to the coffin—and not the people who have been there for hours, wasting away in the sickly light of that apartment. Where. Where is the money.