Blow-Up and Other Stories

by Julio Cortázar

  “I feel like a tango now,” Mauro complained. Finishing his fourth shot, he was a little drunk. I was thinking of Celina, she’d have been so much at home here, exactly where Mauro had never brought her. Anita Lozano was accepting the loud applause of the audience as she waved hello from the bandstand, I’d heard her sing at the Novelty when she’d been at the top of the bill; she was old and skinny now, but still had voice enough to do a tango, even better as a matter of fact, she had a way of singing it dirty, and the hoarse voice helped some, especially if the lyrics really had to be belted out. When she’d been drinking, Celina had a voice like that, and suddenly I realized that the Santa Fe was Celina, the almost insupportable presence of Celina.

  It’d been a mistake for her to go off with Mauro. She put up with it because she loved him and he had dragged her out of Kasidis’ greasy squalor, the promiscuity and the shots of amber-colored sugar-water amid the preliminary stumbling of knees against knees and the heavy breathing of the customers. But if she hadn’t had to work in the dance halls, Celina would have enjoyed staying there. You could tell by her hips and her mouth, she was built for the tango, from top to bottom, born to make that scene. Which was why Mauro had to take her to dances, I’ve seen her transfigured just walking in, just the first lungful of hot air and the sound of accordions. At this moment, stuck and no way out at the Santa Fe, I could measure her magnificence, her courage in repaying Mauro with a few years in the kitchen and sugar with the mate in the patio. She had renounced her dance-hall heaven, her fiery vocation, anise and creole waltzing. As though condemning herself knowingly for Mauro and Mauro’s life, intruding hardly at all on his life, just that he should take her out to a party once in a while.

  Now Mauro was going past with a good grip on a colored girl taller than the others, with a shape nicer than most and good-looking besides. I had to laugh at his instinctive and at the same time deliberate choice, the chick was the one least like the monsters. Then the idea recurred to me, Celina in some way had been a monster like the others, except that elsewhere than here and during the day, it was not as apparent. I wondered if Mauro would have noticed it; I was a little afraid that he would blame me for dragging him to a joint where memories sprouted from everything like the hair on your arms.

  There was no applause this time, and he came over with the girl who, outside of her tango, seemed suddenly to have grown stupid and open-mouthed as a fish.

  “I want you to meet a friend of mine,” he said to her.

  We muttered “Enchanted to meetcha,” coastal style, and without further ado we bought her a drink. I was happy to see Mauro getting into the swing of things, I even exchanged a few words with the woman, whose name was Emma, a name that doesn’t fit skinny girls very well. Mauro seemed pretty well turned on and talked of orchestras with the short sententious phrases I admired him for. Emma rambled on with the names of singers and memories of Villa Crespo and El Talar. At that point, Anita Lozano announced an old tango, and there were cheers and applause from the monsters, the pimps especially stood by her to a man. Mauro was not so clobbered as to forget everything, and when the piece opened with a gut-twisting few bars from the accordions he shot me a look like a punch, he was remembering. I also, I saw myself at the thing for the Giants, Mauro and Celina holding one another tight, this same tango, she hummed it all night long, even in the taxi coming home.

  “Are we gonna dance?” Emma said, sucking noisily on her grenadine.

  Mauro didn’t even look at her. It seems to me that at that moment we overtook one another in the depths. Now (now when I’m writing) I see a single image from my twenty years at the Barracas Sporting Club, I dive into the pool and at the bottom I come face-to-face with another swimmer, we touch bottom simultaneously and see each other imperfectly through the sour green water. Mauro pushed his chair back and braced himself with an elbow on the table. Same as me, he was looking at the dance floor, and between us sat Emma, confused and humiliated, though she tried to cover it up by eating the french fries. Now Anita began to sing breaking the beat, the couples danced nearly without moving from where they were and you could see that they were listening to the lyrics with desire and misery mixed, and all the dulled pleasure of cheap night life. Faces were turned toward the stand and you could see them, even twirling, fixed on Anita bent intimately over the microphone. Some of them moved their lips reciting the words, some of them with stupid smiles that seemed to come from behind themselves, and when she finished with her you were so much, you were so much mine,/and now I look around for you and cannot find/you, and the accordions came up simultaneously and full strength, the reply was a fresh violence in the dancing, lateral swoops and figure-eights interlarded mid-floor. A lot of people were sweating, one chick who would have chewed off the second button on my jacket brushed against the table and I could see the sweat oozing from the roots of her hair and running down the back of her neck where a roll of fat made a tiny whiter rivulet. There was smoke pouring into the room from the next patio where they were scoffing down charcoal-broiled meat and dancing rancheras, the cigarette smoke and the barbecue laid down a low cloud which distorted the faces and the cheap paintings on the wall opposite. I think the four shots I’d drunk helped somewhat from inside, and Mauro was holding up his chin with the back of his hand, staring fixedly in front of him. The focus of our attention was not the tango which went on and on up there, once or twice I saw Mauro throw a glance toward the stand where Anita was going through the motions of wielding a baton, but then he turned back and fastened his eyes on the couples. I don’t know how to say this, it seems to me I was following the direction of his look, and at the same time I was directing his; without looking at one another we realized (it seems to me that Mauro realized) we were both seeing the same spot, we would fall on the identical couple, seeing the same head of hair and trousers. I heard Emma saying something, some excuse, and the section of table between Mauro and myself was left somewhat clearer; still we did not look at one another. A moment of immense happiness seemed to have descended upon the dance floor, I breathed deeply as if to participate in it, and I think I heard Mauro do the same. The smoke was so thick that the faces on the other half of the floor were blurred, so much so that the line of chairs for those who were sitting it out could not be seen, what with the bodies in between and the haze. You were so much mine, weird how Anita’s voice cracked over the speakers, again the dancers (always moving) grew immobile, and Celina who was on the right side of the floor, moving out of the smoke and whirling obedient to the lead of her partner, stopped for a moment in profile toward me, then her back, again, the other profile, then raised her face to listen to the music. I say: Celina; but it was a vision, a knowledge without understanding it, how, at that moment, understand it, sure, Celina there without being there. Suddenly the table shook, I realized that it was Mauro’s arm that was shaking, or mine, but we were not afraid, it was something closer to dread and happiness and stomach-shakes. It was stupid, really, a feeling of something apart which would not allow us to leave, to recover ourselves. Celina was still there, not seeing us, drinking in the tango with all of her face changed and muddied by the yellow light of the smoke. Any one of the dark girls could have looked more like Celina than she did at that moment, happiness transfigured her face in a hideous way; I would not have been able to tolerate Celina as I saw her at that moment, in that tango. I had enough intelligence left to gauge the devastation of her happiness, her face enraptured and stupid in her paradise finally gained; had it not been for the work and the customers, she could have had that at Kasidis’ place. There was nothing to stop her now in her heaven, her own heaven, she gave herself with all of her flesh to that joy and again entered the pattern where Mauro could not follow her. It was her hard-won heaven, her tango played once more for her alone and for her equals, until the glass-smashing applause that followed Anita’s solo, Celina from the back, Celina in profile, other couples and the smoke blocking her out.

  I didn’t want to look at Mauro
; then I recovered myself and my famous cynicism was racking up the defenses at top speed. It all depended on how he would get through the thing, so that I stayed as I was, watching the floor empty little by little.

  “Did you see that?” Mauro asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You saw how much she looked like her?”

  I didn’t answer him, my relief was heavier than any pity I felt. He was on this side, the poor guy was on this side and would never come to believe what we had known together. I watched him get up and stagger across the floor like a drunk, looking for the woman who looked like Celina. I stayed quiet and took my time over a cigarette, watching him going and coming, this way and that, knowing he was wasting his time, that he would come back, tired and thirsty, not having found the gates of heaven among all that smoke and all those people.

  BLOW - UP

  It’ll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing. If one might say: I will see the moon rose, or: we hurt me at the back of my eyes, and especially: you the blond woman was the clouds that race before my your his our yours their faces. What the hell.

  Seated ready to tell it, if one might go to drink a bock over there, and the typewriter continue by itself (because I use the machine), that would be perfection. And that’s not just a manner of speaking. Perfection, yes, because here is the aperture which must be counted also as a machine (of another sort, a Contax 1.1.2) and it is possible that one machine may know more about another machine than I, you, she—the blond—and the clouds. But I have the dumb luck to know that if I go this Remington will sit turned to stone on top of the table with the air of being twice as quiet that mobile things have when they are not moving. So, I have to write. One of us all has to write, if this is going to get told. Better that it be me who am dead, for I’m less compromised than the rest; I who see only the clouds and can think without being distracted, write without being distracted (there goes another, with a grey edge) and remember without being distracted, I who am dead (and I’m alive, I’m not trying to fool anybody, you’ll see when we get to the moment, because I have to begin some way and I’ve begun with this period, the last one back, the one at the beginning, which in the end is the best of the periods when you want to tell something).

  All of a sudden I wonder why I have to tell this, but if one begins to wonder why he does all he does do, if one wonders why he accepts an invitation to lunch (now a pigeon’s flying by and it seems to me a sparrow), or why when someone has told us a good joke immediately there starts up something like a tickling in the stomach and we are not at peace until we’ve gone into the office across the hall and told the joke over again; then it feels good immediately, one is fine, happy, and can get back to work. For I imagine that no one has explained this, that really the best thing is to put aside all decorum and tell it, because, after all’s done, nobody is ashamed of breathing or of putting on his shoes; they’re things that you do, and when something weird happens, when you find a spider in your shoe or if you take a breath and feel like a broken window, then you have to tell what’s happening, tell it to the guys at the office or to the doctor. Oh, doctor, every time I take a breath … Always tell it, always get rid of that tickle in the stomach that bothers you.

  And now that we’re finally going to tell it, let’s put things a little bit in order, we’d be walking down the staircase in this house as far as Sunday, November 7, just a month back. One goes down five floors and stands then in the Sunday in the sun one would not have suspected of Paris in November, with a large appetite to walk around, to see things, to take photos (because we were photographers, I’m a photographer). I know that the most difficult thing is going to be finding a way to tell it, and I’m not afraid of repeating myself. It’s going to be difficult because nobody really knows who it is telling it, if I am I or what actually occurred or what I’m seeing (clouds, and once in a while a pigeon) or if, simply, I’m telling a truth which is only my truth, and then is the truth only for my stomach, for this impulse to go running out and to finish up in some manner with, this, whatever it is.

  We’re going to tell it slowly, what happens in the middle of what I’m writing is coming already. If they replace me, if, so soon, I don’t know what to say, if the clouds stop coming and something else starts (because it’s impossible that this keep coming, clouds passing continually and occasionally a pigeon), if something out of all this … And after the “if” what am I going to put if I’m going to close the sentence structure correctly? But if I begin to ask questions, I’ll never tell anything, maybe to tell would be like an answer, at least for someone who’s reading it.

  Roberto Michel, French-Chilean, translator and in his spare time an amateur photographer, left number 11, rue Monsieur-le-Prince Sunday November 7 of the current year (now there’re two small ones passing, with silver linings). He had spent three weeks working on the French version of a treatise on challenges and appeals by José Norberto Allende, professor at the University of Santiago. It’s rare that there’s wind in Paris, and even less seldom a wind like this that swirled around corners and rose up to whip at old wooden venetian blinds behind which astonished ladies commented variously on how unreliable the weather had been these last few years. But the sun was out also, riding the wind and friend of the cats, so there was nothing that would keep me from taking a walk along the docks of the Seine and taking photos of the Conservatoire and Sainte-Chapelle. It was hardly ten o’clock, and I figured that by eleven the light would be good, the best you can get in the fall; to kill some time I detoured around by the Isle Saint-Louis and started to walk along the quai d’Anjou, I stared for a bit at the hôtel de Lauzun, I recited bits from Apollinaire which always get into my head whenever I pass in front of the hôtel de Lauzun (and at that I ought to be remembering the other poet, but Michel is an obstinate beggar), and when the wind stopped all at once and the sun came out at least twice as hard (I mean warmer, but really it’s the same thing), I sat down on the parapet and felt terribly happy in the Sunday morning.

  One of the many ways of contesting level-zero, and one of the best, is to take photographs, an activity in which one should start becoming an adept very early in life, teach it to children since it requires discipline, aesthetic education, a good eye and steady fingers. I’m not talking about waylaying the lie like any old reporter, snapping the stupid silhouette of the VIP leaving number 10 Downing Street, but in all ways when one is walking about with a camera, one has almost a duty to be attentive, to not lose that abrupt and happy rebound of sun’s rays off an old stone, or the pigtails-flying run of a small girl going home with a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk. Michel knew that the photographer always worked as a permutation of his personal way of seeing the world as other than the camera insidiously imposed upon it (now a large cloud is going by, almost black), but he lacked no confidence in himself, knowing that he had only to go out without the Contax to recover the keynote of distraction, the sight without a frame around it, light without the diaphragm aperture or 1/250 sec. Right now (what a word, now, what a dumb lie) I was able to sit quietly on the railing overlooking the river watching the red and black motorboats passing below without it occurring to me to think photographically of the scenes, nothing more than letting myself go in the letting go of objects, running immobile in the stream of time. And then the wind was not blowing.

  After, I wandered down the quai de Bourbon until getting to the end of the isle where the intimate square was (intimate because it was small, not that it was hidden, it offered its whole breast to the river and the sky), I enjoyed it, a lot. Nothing there but a couple and, of course, pigeons; maybe even some of those which are flying past now so that I’m seeing them. A leap up and I settled on the wall, and let myself turn about and be caught and fixed by the sun, giving it my face and ears and hands (I kept my gloves in my pocket). I had no desire to shoot pictures, and lit a cigarette to be doing somet
hing; I think it was that moment when the match was about to touch the tobacco that I saw the young boy for the first time.

  What I’d thought was a couple seemed much more now a boy with his mother, although at the same time I realized that it was not a kid and his mother, and that it was a couple in the sense that we always allegate to couples when we see them leaning up against the parapets or embracing on the benches in the squares. As I had nothing else to do, I had more than enough time to wonder why the boy was so nervous, like a young colt or a hare, sticking his hands into his pockets, taking them out immediately, one after the other, running his fingers through his hair, changing his stance, and especially why was he afraid, well, you could guess that from every gesture, a fear suffocated by his shyness, an impulse to step backwards which he telegraphed, his body standing as if it were on the edge of flight, holding itself back in a final, pitiful decorum.