“Poor Karperpianos.”
“They’re not called Karperianos. They’re called Neyiomdav-ianos.”
I thought he was pulling my leg, but he said, “It’s a system of thirteen around a star called Neyiomdav, see? Each one of the thirteen has a different name, they’re not called Neyiomdav I, Neyiomdav II, and so on, but rather like here, each world has its name, but those who live there go by the name of the star.”
“Those of the thirteen worlds?”
“Only two are inhabited. Karperp, where I had an order for violins, lutes, guitars and zithers and violas and all that, and Uunu, which I didn’t know was inhabited.”
“How did you not know?”
“No one had told me anything. But after delivering the instruments and while loading the wood—remind me to give you a box made of estoa wood that will hold cigarettes or buttons or those things you women like to keep in boxes. Very fine, like a spider’s web, but you can’t break it even with an axe. And it doesn’t burn, either.”
“It won’t be wood, then. And thank you, I will certainly remind you.”
“It’s wood. You’re welcome. While loading the wood I spent a few days at the home of a friend who lives on the shores of a river in which one can swim, sail, and fish.”
“You neither swim nor sail nor fish.”
“I don’t dislike swimming. Fishing and sailing don’t interest me. But now and again, I do like to stretch out in the sun and do nothing. He was the one who mentioned Uunu, in passing. And I was intrigued because he didn’t seem to want to offer much explanation. He only told me that they didn’t go there because it was hard to recover afterwards. I asked him if it was insalubrious, and he told me that on the contrary, it was a very pleasant place, with a splendid climate, nice people, landscapes a piacere and comfortable lodging. I didn’t insist because discretion is a virtue everywhere and I assumed Karperp was no different.”
Marcos walked past our table because more people had come in, and he left Trafalgar another full cup. I made no move to order more coffee, though my cup was miserably empty.
“As you’ll imagine,” he continued, “right then I decided to go to Uunu and see what there was to buy. So a week later, with the clunker filled to the top (the Neyiomdavianos are laid-back, they don’t hurry even if someone’s about to slit their throats, and it took them ten days to load everything), I said good-bye and I went. Straight to Uunu.”
“You just like looking for trouble.”
“Yes, but at the beginning I thought I was going to have my desire thwarted and I even thought Rosdolleu didn’t know what he was talking about.”
“Who was that, your friend from Karperp?”
“Uh-huh. He’s president of an institution, a combination ministry and chamber of commerce, and I suspected there might be a question of competition, because I assure you, Uunu was a jewel.”
“Later you discovered it was not.”
“It was still a jewel, in spite of everything. They acted like gentlemen, they facilitated everything, they found me a cool, sheltered spot where I could leave the clunker open so the wood would be ventilated without having to use the air conditioners, marvelous. They recommended a hotel neither very far away nor right downtown, and when they learned I was a merchant they got me an interview with a boss, Dravato dra Iratoni, who from the name seemed Japanese but wasn’t and who called me at the hotel and invited me to dine at his house that same evening. The hotel was gorgeous, comfortable, not very big, with rooms full of light and color and bathrooms with every possible treat.”
“Hey, couldn’t I go summer on Uunu?”
“I don’t advise it.”
He waved to someone who was leaving and smoked for a while without saying anything. Would there be coffee on Uunu?
“Was there coffee on Uunu?”
“Yes, there was. Well, relatively speaking.”
“Relatively, how? There was or there wasn’t.”
“There was and there wasn’t, you’ll see. What was I telling you?”
“That the hotel was splendid and that same night you were going to eat with the Japanese fellow.”
“Oh, yes. He had a house to make you laugh at Frank Lloyd Wright. The living room went into the woods, or rather, the woods came into the living room, and the dining room was suspended over the lake. On entering, I thought I would like to live there. Of course, after a short time I would have gotten bored, but for a few weeks, it wouldn’t be bad. And he had three delicious daughters and a nice son-in-law, also a merchant like him, and a great big, smiling wife, and he wasn’t so big but he was smiling. I had a very good time.”
“With which of the three daughters did you go to bed?”
“With none of them. What do you have in your gourd, anyway?”
“Same thing as everyone. And besides, I know you.”
“This time, you’re way off the mark. Although I confess it was not my virtue but the circumstances that obliged me to chastity. We ate a very tender, very spicy meat, with a kind of sweet potato purée and a flatbread made of different grains, and we drank wine. Afterwards dessert was served and that’s where everything started.”
“In the dessert?”
“With dessert. I have to tell you that the dishes were display-quality. The owner of the house may not have been Japanese but the plates and the glasses and the jars looked like the very finest Japanese porcelain, in a pale yellow color with a brown border. The dessert arrived served in wooden bowls the same color as the border on the plates, with a wooden spoon. I ate it with relish because it was delicious. I don’t know what it was: some fruits like loquats but without pits, a little sour, served in what looked like water but was very sweet, like syrup.”
“Big deal. I make better desserts.”
“I don’t disagree.”
That, from Trafalgar, is high praise.
“But this had a very special flavor, and when I finished the fruit I ate the syrup with the spoon. I passed the spoon over the polished wood and as the level of the liquid dropped I felt something very strange.”
“An evil spell,” I said.
He ignored me.
“I felt, gently at first and then like a kick in the stomach, I felt as if I had made that gesture before, that at some time I had scraped with a wooden spoon the polished bottom of a wooden bowl and that.”
“But listen, that happens to all of us.”
“Don’t I know it,” said Trafalgar, and he let Marcos remove the empty cup and leave another, full one, “with all the places I’ve been to and everything I’ve done. Generally it isn’t true, you never before did what you think you’re remembering. A few, very few times it’s true, and if you don’t remember at the moment, you remember later. But this was much more intense, so much so that I thought I was going to lose my composure. I didn’t hear what people were talking about, I didn’t see the table, or the faces, or the windows that opened onto the lake. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t my memory, it was my whole body that remembered the dish and the gesture and, looking at the wood, I recognized even the grain at the bottom,” he took out a pencil and drew the lines for me on the back of a card he fished out of his pocket. “See? And here they curved toward the bottom and then rising along the edge they became very, very fine and disappeared.”
I stood the card against the water glass. “And then what happened?”
“Nothing. I pulled myself together as best I could and kept talking. We drank liqueurs and coffee, yes, because there was coffee, and we smoked and listened to music and it was after midnight when dra Iratoni’s son-in-law drove me back to the hotel. When I was alone in the room, I remembered the thing with the wooden bowl and started to go over it like crazy because I was sure, I knew, sometime, somewhere I had eaten from that bowl. It was no use. I took off my clothes, I bathed, I lay down and I slept. No,” he said when I opened my mouth, “I did not dream about the bowl or about the daughters of dra Iratoni. I slept like a log until midday. I woke up hungry. But my hunge
r went away as soon as I sat up in bed. Speaking of which, don’t you want to eat a sandwich or something?”
“No. Go on.”
“My hunger and my sleepiness and everything went away, because I was not in the same room in which I had gone to bed. This one was smaller, comfortable but not as cheerful, it was not on the second floor but rather on the tenth or thereabouts, it didn’t overlook a park but rather another tall building, and the sunlight didn’t come in anywhere. Nor was the bathroom as luxurious as the one in the other hotel, which is to say, I thought I was in another hotel, but.”
I wanted to ask him what that meant, but I know when Trafalgar can be interrupted and when he can’t.
“It also had its comforts. I didn’t stop to bathe or shave. I washed, I went back to the room, and when I was going to the door the horrible idea occurred to me that I had been kidnapped and the door would be locked. It was locked, but the key was on the inside. I turned it with some apprehension and opened the door. It was a hotel, no question. There was a corridor and numbered doors on both sides. Mine was 1247. I looked for the elevator, found it, went down. Twelve floors. The lobby was smaller than the other, cheaper, as if they had wanted to take the fullest advantage of the space.”
Here he paused and drank coffee and smoked and I didn’t know whether to say something that had occurred to me or not say it, so I kept quiet.
“There was a hoity-toity concierge who asked me, ‘Sir?’ ‘Listen,’ I said to him, a little angry now, ‘I took a room yesterday in the Hotel Continental; can you tell me where the hell I am now?’ ‘In the Hotel Continental, sir,’ he answered. I was speechless. ‘It can’t be,’ I shouted. ‘The room is different and all this, too.’ The concierge was unruffled. ‘What day did the gentleman arrive?’ he asked. I told him the date, day, month, year, and added the hour. ‘Ah, that explains everything,’ he said. ‘How does it explain everything?’ I wanted to give him a good wallop while he looked over some papers. ‘Room 132 does not exist, sir, at least not at this moment, because the floor has been dedicated to the accounts department and various offices.’ And he went to attend to two guys who had just arrived. I thought seriously about jumping over the counter and bashing his face in, but in the first place that wasn’t going to accomplish anything and in the second place, what did he mean by saying at that moment at least room 132, which was the one I had occupied the day before, didn’t exist?”
I decided to drink another coffee and I called Marcos but when he came over I asked if he could make me an orange juice and he said yes.
“Then I went back to room 1247 and inspected my luggage. Everything was in order; it seemed to me that everything was in order. My belly reminded me that it was after midday and I had eaten nothing, so I postponed the problem, went down, went into the restaurant, and ordered the first thing I saw on the menu. And then I remembered the wooden bowl. Once again I felt an urgent physical sensation but I started eating a rather bland stewed fish that they brought me and I thought the best thing would be to go to dra Iratoni’s and ask him about what had happened to me. I finished eating, I didn’t order dessert, I had coffee, and I went out to the street and froze stiff as a statue. It was another city. It looked like New York. And the day before it had resembled Welwyn. Worse: the cars were different and the people dressed differently. Before I started to get scared at the possibility of not finding dra Iratoni, which was about to happen, I called a taxi that was passing, I climbed in and I told the driver, Paseo de las Agujas 225, and I bet you don’t know what I found.”
“Look, you could have found anything: a crocodile in the bathtub, or that Paseo de las Agujas didn’t exist, or that the driver was Count Dracula, what do I know?”
“The one who didn’t exist was the driver.”
Marcos brought me an orange juice the way I like it, not strained, without ice, and with very little sugar.
“Trafalgar,” I said, “sometimes you depress me. Couldn’t you go to Capilla del Monte or Bariloche like everyone else and afterward come tell me that it rained for three days and you lost in the casino and you ran into five guys from Rosario?”
“There are trips on which nothing happens, I assure you. Everything goes well, nothing strange happens, and people do and say what one expects. You don’t think I’m going to bring you to the Burgundy to tell you a silly thing like that, I imagine.”
“It would be very reassuring,” I said. “A while ago, I thought you were a quiet fellow, and you are. But you are not reassuring. At least not when you let fly with things like that. Go on, continue with the phantom taxi driver.”
“It was an automatic taxi, driven from a distance, or maybe a robot, I don’t know. It didn’t start, instead it informed me over a loudspeaker next to the odometer that the old Paseo de las Agujas was impassable for vehicles. I told it to take me as close as possible to the place. Only then did it start. It crossed the city, which was still a twin of New York and not of Welwyn, and stopped in the middle of the country. I tried to get out but the door was stuck. I paid, which is to say I put the money in a collection box, and then the door opened and I got out. It was a park, not very well tended, that extended to the shore of the lake. No woods. I walked along a little path full of stones and weeds as far as the place where I remembered dra Iratoni’s house was.”
“Which was no longer there,” I said.
“No, it wasn’t there and I had already begun to suspect that.”
“Tell me, hadn’t you slept for a couple of centuries like Rip van Winkle?”
“I thought that, too. It would have been an uncomfortable solution but, in the end, reassuring, as you say. I returned to the city on foot. When I arrived, it was almost night. In the suburbs, I took another taxi, also automatic, and I had it take me to the port and I looked for the clunker. And would you believe that I don’t know if I found it or no? In the place where it should have been there was a mountain of scrap metal,” he made the face Buonarroti would have made, or that I imagine Buonarroti would have made had he seen the Pietá smashed with hammers, “and it could have been in that heap. Sometimes it seemed to me it was, sometimes no. I was so depressed, I didn’t even know what to do. Meaning, I knew what I had to do but I didn’t know how: I had to find someone who would explain to me what had happened, but I also remembered how little importance the concierge had given to the part of my problem that he knew about—and that irritated me, yet at the same time suggested that everything was probably going to work out easily. I went to the bar in the port, I ate a few sandwiches that tasted like cardboard, I drank some very bad coffee and I pumped up my bad mood until it was pretty late at night. When I left the bar, instead of going to the taxi stand, I headed for the road and I started to walk feeling very sorry for myself. Around then it seemed to me the sun was rising, the sky turned an ugly gray and I had a sensation of unreality and even insecurity, as if I were about to lose my balance, but I didn’t pay any attention and I kept walking. It got dark again. I got tired. I sat down on the shoulder, I walked a couple of kilometers or maybe more. I didn’t pass a soul and that began to seem strange to me because I had seen earlier that it was a very busy road. When the sun came out for real, I saw the city far off and I had the hope that it had again become Welwyn. My fatigue passed and I picked up my pace. I saw the remains of a burnt truck on the side of the road that, although it had been smooth and new the day before, was quite damaged, full of cracks and potholes. I approached the city. Which, of course, was not Welwyn. Nor was it New York. It was a bombed-out city.”
“I know what was happening.”
“Not for nothing do you like Philip Dick. I’ll tell you, I do, too. But reading a novel or listening when someone tells you the story is one thing, and being thrust into the situation is quite another. I was in no mood that morning to be satisfied with explanations.”
The Burgundy was very busy. Almost as if I, no, not I, almost as if Philip Dick had made it fashionable, but Marcos didn’t forget about Trafalgar. I stuck to the o
range juice.
“I started to see bunkers, trenches, the remains of more trucks and of tanks, too. And bodies. The country was burnt and not a tree remained and there were pieces of walls or some bit of tamped earth where perhaps there had been houses at some time. Someone called out from beyond the shoulder. I turned around and saw a tall, thin guy who was desperately making signs at me. ‘Careful! Duck!’ he yelled and he threw himself to the ground. I didn’t have time. Two military trucks appeared, braked beside me, and five armed soldiers got down and started to kick me around.”
“I retract that about wanting to spend the summer on Uunu,” I said.
“Many screwy things have happened to me,” said Trafalgar; I agreed silently, “but nothing like being knocked down with rifle butts at the side of a road after a sleepless night by some guys in scarlet uniforms appearing from who knows where and without you knowing why or having time to react and defend yourself.”
“Scarlet uniforms? What an anachronism.”
“The machine guns and bazookas they carried were no anachronism, I can assure you.”
“Then the question of defending yourself was purely rhetorical.”
“Well, yes. First they beat me to a pulp and then they asked who I was. I grabbed my documents but they stopped me short and the one giving the orders called over a soldier who searched me. They looked at everything, passport, identity card, even my driver’s license, and they halfway smiled and the head honcho said from up in the truck that they should execute me right then.”
“It must be the eighteenth time you escape execution.”
“According to my calculations, the third. Once on Veroboar, once on OlogämyiDäa, once on Uunu. I was saved because someone started shooting. And this time I threw myself to the ground and remained, as they say, in critical condition. The tall, thin guy who had yelled to me was coming at the soldiers leading a troop of savages. The soldiers entrenched themselves behind the trucks and started firing, too, and me in the middle. The savages came closer: they were dropping like flies, but they came closer. There were many more of them than of the redcoats and they finally beat them. They killed almost all of them and were left with a lieutenant and two sergeants, wounded but alive. And they lifted me up off the ground and took me with them.”
Trafalgar Page 8