Trafalgar

by Angélica Gorodischer

  “I am terrified,” I said. “What did you find the next day?”

  “Cheer up, here comes the best part.”

  What came was more coffee in the hand of Marcos. Trafalgar’s trips don’t interest Marcos. I suspect he doesn’t believe him. And he’s interested in other things: in the Burgundy, his kids, the first grandchild (due in the next three months), his wife, Clarisa, who was beauty queen in 1941 in Casilda, race horses and, something in common with Trafalgar, tango.

  “I woke up in the Hotel Continental,” Trafalgar said with his nose deep in his cup.

  “Which one?”

  “The first. Dirty, with my suit immaculate, well shaven and without the bowl or the shotgun but with my documents and a pack and a half of cigarettes in my jacket pockets. I got up, I looked out the window, and I was in the city that resembled Welwyn and my room was number 132 on the second floor and it overlooked a park. I ran my hand over my face and I felt an immense tenderness toward the fat woman. I bathed, I put on another suit and went down to have breakfast. Liters of coffee.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “And some crunchy fritters and more coffee and cigarettes. Afterward, I grabbed a phone and called dra Iratoni; I was scared, you wouldn’t believe, but I called. Only when I heard his voice did I know for sure that I was back on the Uunu to which I’d arrived. He invited me again to dine at his house and I said no thank you, I wanted to see him that very morning. Then he gave me the address of a club or businessmen’s circle and told me he’d meet me there. I took a taxi—with a driver—I went to the port, inspected the clunker and the wood and found everything was fine, I took another taxi and I went to the club. There I had to endure almost an hour of introductions and conversations with other merchants who were with dra Iratoni, until I managed to drag him to a little room and buttonhole him myself.”

  “Last chapter,” I said, “and thank goodness, because it’s getting late.”

  “Stay and eat downtown,” said Trafalgar.

  “I can’t. Besides, if I stay you’re going to extend the story until we finish our dessert, whereas this way you have no alternative but to tell me everything now. And if they were to serve us dessert in wooden bowls, I’d have an attack. So go on.”

  “I told dra Iratoni everything,” he said, “and he listened to me with great formality, like the concierge, like ser Dividis, but, like them, he wasn’t the least bit worried. He did say, at least, that he was sorry not to have said anything, but that he had assumed I was informed because if I had said on Karperp that I was going to Uunu, they would have already warned me. When I told him no, on Karperp they had insinuated something and had told me it wasn’t a good idea to go and for that very reason I had come, he was enormously surprised. He stood there with his mouth open and his jaw dropping. How? If a guy wants to go somewhere, why not say so? And if they tell him he shouldn’t go, why would he go? Or why not insist and ask for explanations and afterward decide whether to go or not? A Neyiomdaviano does not understand our give and take.”

  “They must be great people.”

  “I assure you, they are. A little unsettling. But I maintain that yes, they’re terrific. They say what they think, or they give you a subtle invitation, which to me sounded like reluctance, for you to say what you think, and they say what they are going to do and they do what they have said they are going to do. It’s not as easy as it seems.”

  “Must not be much room for neurosis there.”

  “You know there’s always room for neurosis, everywhere. But it seems to me we give it more consideration than the Neyiomdavianos. I made dra Iratoni understand some of this and then he explained to me what happens on Uunu and I am going to try to explain it to you but I don’t know if I’ll be able to.”

  He finished his coffee and took a breath as if for a pole vault.

  “Time is not successive,” he said. “It is concrete, constant, simultaneous, and not uniform.”

  Then I was the one who took a breath.

  “God, for instance,” said Trafalgar, “perceives it that way, and every religion allows that. And on Uunu it’s perceptible that way for everyone, although with a lesser immediacy, due to a quirk of its placement in space. Space which, of course, could not exist without its coexistant, time.”

  “We’re not getting anywhere this way,” I said. “Give me the concrete examples because I don’t read Einstein or Langevin or Mulnö.”

  “Imagine time,” said Trafalgar, “as an infinite and eternal—it’s the same thing—bar of a material that has different degrees of consistency both in its duration and in its length. With me?”

  “Got it.”

  “Now, once a day, or rather once a night, Uunu experiences a chrono-synclastic infundibulum.”

  “Oh, no,” I protested. “That’s from Vonnegut.”

  “Yes. And dra Iratoni didn’t say it like that but in another way, much more descriptive but also more complicated, so much so that I don’t remember it well. But you know the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. When it occurs, it covers and envelops all of Uunu and then the parts of that temporal bar that at that moment have greatest consistency, surface—I can’t think of another way to say it—and so if today is today, tomorrow can be a hundred years from now or ten thousand five hundred years ago.”

  “I understand now,” I said. “I think so, at least. But the people of each era, don’t they find themselves thrown from one to another and have to live a different moment of their history every day? Why did you not meet dra Iratoni the next day even though his house didn’t exist, or how come the concierge from the first Hotel Continental wasn’t in the second one?”

  “No, no. Each continues with their life in the era they were born in and in which they live, thanks to their adaptation to the environment. A lousy environment, I’ll agree with you, but not worse than others. Eras don’t mix, one never invades another. They coexist. They are simultaneous. If you’re born on Uunu, you keep living your life day by day, very happy, unaffected and you know that at the same time other things are happening in other eras. With a little effort of the syncretic awareness of time—I don’t know what it is, but dra Iratoni takes it for granted that all of us have it—you can perceive on any given day of your life, the era which on that precise day has the greater consistency since the prior chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Something no one on Uunu bothers to do, or almost no one. They’re prevented by the very fact that all eras are there, as they say, within reach. Historians or philosophers or sociologists do it—or have done it—to demonstrate something, always discreetly and without bothering anyone or getting involved. Or a few crackpots or maniacs, which are almost nonexistent on Uunu so there aren’t problems on that side. I don’t know if the sensitivity of the Neyiomdavianos of Uunu doesn’t come from knowing the consistency of time and knowing they could avail themselves of it if they wished.”

  “But wait,” I said, “then you were bouncing here and there, from the future to the Captains to the Neolithic, because you were a foreigner and weren’t adapted?”

  “I was born in Rosario, not on Uunu. I don’t have a syncretic awareness of time or if I have it, it’s atrophied. And to top it off, I have the eagerness, the anguish of time. In me, time isn’t something natural, a part of me, it’s almost a saddlesore. In me and in all of us. I got to Uunu and I was defenseless for that reason—floating, let’s say. And when the chrono-synclastic infundibulum came along, there I went to the most consistent part of that eternal and infinite temporal unity.”

  “I don’t want to think about the matter too much. It’s very simple and very complicated.”

  “Very. And very unpleasant. Now notice that on the first night, when I went to bed in room 132 of the Hotel Continental and dra Iratoni and his family went to sleep in their house, for me, who am not an adapted native, there followed the morning of many years later and I woke up in a Hotel Continental that was going to exist, in a changed city, with robot taxis and skyscrapers. The next day, hundreds
of years later, under the paranoid tyranny of the Captains, and the next, in the Stone Age. But the next, when I once again woke up in room 132, dra Iratoni and his family woke up on the morning after the night when I had been having dinner at their house.”

  “But how? And those three days in which you were going from one side to the other of Uunu’s history?”

  “For them, they didn’t exist or, better put, they didn’t elapse, because as far as existing, they always exist. For them the chrono-synclastic infundibulum of my first night on Uunu was an everyday event that their syncretic awareness of time can ignore. I was snatched away to a hundred or two hundred years later and there another chrono-synclastic infundibulum carried me various centuries later when there was another that carried me to thousands of years before and so on until I was returned to the world of dra Iratoni, luckily. He explained to me, furthermore, that sooner or later that was going to happen, and he showed me the rhythm charts that are something like logarithm tables but thicker than the Tokyo telephone book and that predict toward where and when the most consistent parts of time are moving every night.”

  “I was mistaken,” I said. “It’s more complicated than I thought. But tell me—so they know both what has happened and what is going to happen?”

  “Of course. From the point of view of knowledge, it’s very useful. And if you need something that has not been discovered, you get into a syncretic temporal trance or whatever it is and you find out, because the rhythm charts tell you when the time in which you believe whatever it is will be already known will be most consistent. Now, from the personal point of view, with the good sense and the calm they have about everything, it doesn’t occur to anyone to try to spy into the future to see when or how they’re going to die or anything like that. I think that would be frowned upon, I don’t mean as criminal but definitely as something that would discredit one.”

  “No, what I mean is, if they know the dictatorship of the Captains, which from what I see looks pretty bad, is going to come along some day, why don’t they do something to change things now so it doesn’t happen?”

  “Can you stand another turn of the screw?”

  “Well, yes, what do you expect me to do?”

  “I told you to imagine time as an infinite and eternal bar of varying consistency, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it is possible that there are infinite eternal and infinite bars, et cetera.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Think about the arborescent universes.”

  I said nothing: I thought about the arborescent universes.

  “What in reality coexists isn’t time, a time, but the infinite variants of time. That’s why the Neyiomdavianos of Uunu do nothing to modify the future, because there isn’t a future, there isn’t anything to modify. Because on one of those bars, those variants, those branches, the Captains don’t come to power. In another, the one who comes to power is ser Dividis. In another Welwyn doesn’t become New York. In another dra Iratoni doesn’t exist, in another he exists but he’s a bachelor schoolteacher, in another he exists and he is what he is and as he is but he doesn’t have a house stuck out into the woods and the lake that would make Frank Lloyd Wright kill himself from envy if he saw it, in another I never come to Uunu, in another Uunu is uninhabited, in another.”

  “All right,” I said. “Enough.”

  Marcos came to bring coffee and I asked him for a small one for myself.

  “Seriously?” Marcos said. “You don’t want another orange juice? Or grapefruit juice?”

  “No, seriously, a coffee. I need something stronger than juice.”

  Marcos laughed and told me he was going to bring me a double whiskey and I said if he did, I would never set foot in the Burgundy again and he laughed a little more.

  “Something’s missing,” I said to Trafalgar. “What happened with the wooden bowl?”

  “I’m going to tell you. When dra Iratoni finished, I told him I was leaving that very day and he answered that it seemed the safest course. But he invited me to lunch at his home and I accepted. I had flowers sent to Madame Iratoni and I went and found the whole family and I again had a very good time and dessert was served in a crystal dish and not in wooden bowls. I went to the hotel, I paid, I took out my luggage and I went to the port and readied the clunker. My friend Iratoni came to say good-bye along with two of those business cronies he had introduced me to that morning, he gave me some bottles of wine from Uunu and I cast off. I sold the wood on Anidir XXII, where they bargain like Bedouins, but, as wood is a luxury item there—as it is going to be here before long—I made them take the bit and pay what I wanted and I left.”

  “And the bowl?”

  “Oh, the bowl. Look, I planned to travel again a week later. But three days after I arrived, I ran into Cirito and Fina at a concert and they invited me to dinner the next day. You know I prefer going to Cirito’s when Fina isn’t there, but they insisted and I had to say yes. I went, we ate in the garden because it was quite hot, almost like today. Cirito gave himself the treat of doing a barbeque and he served the meat on those boards that come with a channel on the side and rustic utensils. So as not to clash, there were raffia rounds for placemats, and dessert came in wooden bowls. It wasn’t loquats without seeds but chocolate cream with meringue on top. And when I scraped, with that rustic, wooden spoon, the bottom of the bowl.”

  “I know.”

  “You guessed it. Then, only then, did I understand what dra Iratoni had told me and I guessed much more. I think that not only do all of us, everywhere, have a syncretic awareness of time, but also that everywhere infinite variants of what has happened and what is going to happen and what is happening coexist, and maybe at some points and at some instants they cross and you think you remember something you have never experienced or that you could have experienced or that you could experience and will not experience, or as in my case with the bowl, that you come to experience if there is the almost impossible juncture, I don’t want to call it chance, of two crossings in which you are present. It is a memory, because in one or in some variants of time you experienced it or you will experience it, which is the same. And it is not a memory, because most likely in your line of variants it has not happened nor is it ever going to happen.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Pay and let’s go, because I’ve had enough for today.”

  And while Marcos went to get the change, Trafalgar put out the next to last cigarette, looked at the card on which he had drawn the grain of the bowl for me, put it back in his pocket and said, “Don’t forget that every day is the best day of the year. I don’t know who said that, but it’s true.”

  “I can imagine where this advice is leading,” I answered.

  Marcos brought a pile of bills on a little plate, he left it on the table, waved his hand, and went back behind the bar.

  On the street, it was still very hot.

  “I’ll walk you to the bus stop,” Trafalgar said.

  [1] In truth, this story belongs to my son Horacio. That I have written it is no more than chance and the reader will please overlook that detail.

  The González Family’s Fight for a Better World

  Excess profits, that’s what I’d say. And in every sense of the word, because Edessbuss is an amiable world where everyone finds humor and an occasion for fun in everything. One almost—almost—starts to want to stay there to live, but if one maintains a bit of sense, not easy to do after a week of partying, one realizes that amusing oneself for two weeks or a year or three months is all very well, but to spend one’s whole life playing, for one who wasn’t born there, must be as boring as toiling thirty years as an office worker on Ortauconquist or on Earth. Yes, costumes, a shipment of costumes, masks, veils, confetti, streamers, and balloons, the works. I have bought and sold many crazy things in all these years, but until then I had never traveled with boxes of masks and perfume-sprayers. I already knew Edessbuss because I buy the clay from them that I sell on Dosirdoo I
X where they make the finest porcelains, china, and ceramics in that whole sector, but I had never stayed more than a day or two, enough for the purchase and the loading. Really nice people, always good humored, easy to make friends with. I have a couple of excellent friends there, The Owner of the Cold Winds and The Toughest Tamer of the Pale, Pale Star. Not counting The Duchess of Bisque or The Splendorous Girl, who are two fantastic people. No, no, those are their names, they’re not titles or nicknames. At twelve years old, each one chooses their definitive name and as they have imagination and a sense of humor and everything is permitted, the results are terrific. And that’s not all. I met the Blue and Glaucous Giant, and Possessed by Women, The Angel Archangel Ultraangel, The Savage Captainess of the Storm Clouds, The Inventor of a New Color Every Day, The SuperFat Empress—anyway, you would not believe. Of course, what happened that time was there was a problem in Flight Control in the port and they asked me to suspend my departure, if I could, while they planned I don’t know what all arrivals, departures, and layovers. I stayed, of course. A week of partying, as I said. Then I learned things had not always been so easy. Edessbuss was an inhospitable world, almost dead. Seriously: it is the only one that revolves around Edess-Pálida, a killer star. It gives off so much energy, it burnt up plants, animals, rivers, and people. For generations and generations, hundreds, thousands of years, the Edessbussianos lived in semi-subterranean hovels, fighting against the heat, the droughts, the plagues, the floods, hunger, until finally, their brains racked to the maximum by so much misfortune, they invented the Roof. No, they call it the Roof but it’s a screen, an anti-energy cover that surrounds the whole world. What the theoretical principle is or how they placed it, that I don’t know. All of us who go to Edessbuss, and there are a lot of us, the majority to have a good time and a few like me to do business, cross it with no problems, we don’t even notice. The energy from Edess-Pálida doesn’t pass, or rather it passes up to a certain point: enough to turn Edessbuss into a garden full of lakes and flowers and birds. And then, and it could hardly be otherwise, for the last five hundred years the Edessbussianos have been getting even for everything that those who lived before the Roof had to go through. Everyone laughs, sings, dances, makes love, plays, makes up games and jokes. And I was the victim of one of those jokes. But I bear them no grudge. First because you can’t, they’re too nice. And two because the result was more than interesting. If I was a sentimental person, and I probably am, I would say it was touching. Yes, I’m getting to that. As I was saying, I stayed a week, in a hotel bungalow on the shores of Lucky Bounce Lake where one had to resign oneself to sleeping fitfully because there was a party every night. Of course, there’s no place on Edessbuss where they’re not having a party every night, so it didn’t matter where I stayed. And nevertheless, they know how to do business, believe me. Between laughter and exaggerations and jokes, but nothing escapes them, it’s a pleasure to see. No, I had already delivered the merchandise, the costumes and all that, and they had paid me and very well—hence my comment about excess profits. Of course they weren’t giving charity but sweetening me up for the next order and then we’d see, but as I knew it and they knew I knew it, we all took advantage without bitterness, they of the costumes and I of the cash, and devoted ourselves to having a good time. The true art of fun is learned on Edessbuss: no one rolls under the table drunk, no one vomits from eating too much, no one has a heart attack while trying to break records in bed. There aren’t fights, no one comes to blows with anyone over a woman because in the end they can have as many as they like. And as the women can have as many men as they like, they’re good-humored and they’re prettier all the time and a forty-year-old easily gets the better of a twenty-year-old and the seventy-year-olds stroll around with the airs of queens of the world and deign, when they’re in the mood, to teach subtleties to the eighteen-year-old guys. But yes, of course they work. And they study and they look through the microscope and they write novels and they pass laws. Like anywhere else. Only the spirit of the thing is different: for them, life is not a tragedy. It was a tragedy, before the Roof. Nor is it a farce; it’s a cheerful comedy that always ends well. A judge can let out a guffaw in the middle of a trial if the prosecutor says something funny, and an atomic physicist who is the dean of a college can meticulously prepare a monster joke for his students, and if the oldest kid took dad’s car out without permission, the old man falls over laughing and puts half a dozen toads in the boy’s bed and hides in the closet to see what happens. I assure you, it’s just a matter of getting used to it. The first day, one doesn’t know which way to turn. On the second, one starts to laugh. On the third, one imagines playing a joke, or invents one to tell, nothing original yet. And on the fourth, one’s a veteran. Go figure what I was after a week. But even so, they made me fall in their trap. That last night, to say good-bye, The Toughest Tamer of the Pale, Pale Star took me to a party at The SuperFat Empress’s place—she has a kind of Babylon with hanging gardens but smaller—and they made me fall like a fool. At midnight, I said I was going to bed, I had an early departure scheduled for the next day. No one tries to convince anyone of anything there and no one contradicts you: courtesy is something else. If one wants to leave, one leaves; if one wants to stay, one stays; and when the host decides the party is over, he says good-bye to everyone and everyone accepts it and no one thinks it’s wrong. I said I was leaving and they crowded around to wish me a good night. A really nice little guy, The Crazy Minstrel of the Still Waters, asked where I was headed and I said I was going home after stopping at Dosirdoo IX and Jolldana.