“I don’t understand how you remember so many unconnected things.”
“I remember perfectly because they’re not unconnected.”
“Come on, old man, hello, the cranes, the watch, the retard Alicia, the paper flowers, the imaginary Japanese—come on.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Are you going to tell me my watch has never been five minutes slow and my cousin Alicia isn’t married and you don’t have paper flowers on that coat stand and there is no Japanese married to a woman named Alicia and there aren’t cranes somewhere?”
I wanted to protest but he didn’t let me.
“More than that. Are you going to tell me that at some moment a Japanese—just as much as Alicia and you and I and the crazy—hasn’t seen cranes or thought about cranes or about pink paper flowers and Alicia hasn’t had a wristwatch that ran fast and some crane won’t have flown by—well, I don’t know if cranes fly like storks or if they walk around pecking at worms like chickens—flown by over a tower that had a clock that ran fast and over a store where they sold paper flowers?”
“Yes, I get it,” I said.
And I got it. There in the dark garden everything was one great fresco moving with the wild and strict ballet of the cranes and the watches and the Alicias and the Japanese and the paper flowers and more, many more things and people and animals and plants and Trafalgar and I and the cat, the cats, the book covers, necklaces, salt, warriors, eyeglasses, hats, old photographs, chandeliers and trains, Giorgio Morandi’s bottles, gray moths, streetcar tickets, quill pens, emperors and sleeping pills, axes, incense and chocolate. And even more. Everything, to tell the truth.
Then Alicia isn’t a retard.
“Your cousin Alicia isn’t a retard,” I said, “at least no more than anyone else. Why don’t we always talk, all of us, like you and your cousins in Moreno or like the crazy guy on Aleiçarga?”
“Because we’re afraid, I think,” said Trafalgar. “And he wasn’t crazy, it was that Aleiçarga had finally acquired, like no other world in the universe—in the one I know—the true awareness of total order. For the moment all they can do is reject it, of course, that’s why they say he’s crazy, but I don’t think that will last long.”
As we were also spinning comfortably in the universe, in the one we know for now, we had forgotten about the coffee not because we were thinking about other things but because we were also aware of all of the coffee possible and it was there and I could make more at that moment or three hours or ten months or seven years later because time was there, too.
“In other places,” Trafalgar said, smoking, “right here, that awareness is fragmented and hidden. You would have to put together, for example, I don’t know, a goatherd, a mathematician, a sage, a child who doesn’t yet go to school, a schizophrenic, a woman giving birth, a teacher, a person dying, an I don’t know what, I don’t know how many more, and it could be that you would approach from a distance the true panorama. There they had everything in just two halves. On one side the sensible, logical, rational, efficient Aleiçarganos, incapable of a paradox, a vice, a sonata, an absurd joke, a haiku. And on the other, the crazy.”
“He wasn’t crazy.”
“No, of course he wasn’t crazy. They said he was because if they accepted him, it shook everything up for them. But I decided he wasn’t crazy. He was.”
“I’m going to make you more coffee,” I said.
“Go on.”
And he got up and went into the kitchen with me.
“He was primordial chaos,” he said while the water heated and I washed the coffee pot. “He saw the forms and so what he said seemed unformed; he lived all times and so he spoke without order; he was so complete that one couldn’t span him fully but saw him fragmented, and so normal that the Aleiçarganos said he was crazy. I think he was what we should have already become.”
Trafalgar picked up the coffee pot and we went back to the garden where the cat was lying in wait for gray moths that had come to the light. He drank a cup of coffee and took out cigarettes and he offered them to me but I don’t smoke the black ones.
“I don’t know how you can smoke that trash,” he said. “It rusts your lungs.”
“Oh, of course, the black ones don’t.”
“They do, too, but less.” He served himself more coffee.
“Was it the only time you saw him?”
“Who?”
“Him. Mr. Chaos.”
“Uh-huh. But so what? I saw him one time, two, twenty, a million times. And I was with him until dawn. An entire night talking and talking without stopping and without paying a forfeit for anything because we couldn’t be mistaken, ever; I went back to the hotel when the sun was high but as fresh as if I had slept for ten hours.”
“You came back that day?”
“That night. In the morning I looked for the secretary of the Center of Commerce and asked him directly who he was. The guy smiled. He smiled discreetly, with a smile so reasonable, so without indulgence, without embarrassment, without malice, without anything, so much a smile and nothing more than a smile, that I don’t know how I managed not to grab him by the suit and shake him until his brains were scrambled. He told me he was an unfortunate who had been born that way and he even explained why but I preferred to draw the curtain and I didn’t hear that part. He told me they had tried to cure him but without success and I thought, what luck, and he told me, this will kill you, that they had thought about eliminating him but that as he was harmless, they allowed him to live and the municipality was responsible for feeding and clothing him. And as I kept asking, he told me he lived in a house the municipality loaned him and they also paid people to keep it in reasonable condition. And that he, the crazy, at the beginning gave them a lot to do because every morning the house was disarranged, with the furniture in the patio or the mattress in the bathtub or the rug on the roof or the frying pans hanging from the latch or things like that until they had nailed everything, not the frying pans, to the floor or the walls and since then the guy went there seldom and preferred to live in the forest like the savages, that’s what he said, like the savages.”
“The savages.”
“Yes, but don’t think about Thoreau, think about the savages.”
“Of course.”
“But he told me something more.”
And he was quiet. I served him coffee and I waited for him; I waited for a long time.
“He told me they were thinking about reconsidering the benevolent attitude. Because it seemed that in his way Mr. Chaos had started courting the girls.”
“Those who didn’t know how to flirt before they said yes. The daughters of those who didn’t know how to bargain.”
“The same. I trust one of them will learn,” said Trafalgar, “before the Aleiçarganos have time to reconsider anything. What I rely on is that, as is the case everywhere, the women on Aleiçarga will be more curious, more audacious, wiser than the men; like mother Eve, they will quickly eat the apple while that wimpy Adam waffles. I don’t dare hope it will be many of them but one, one at least, I am confident that one will say yes.”
“And if they kill him?”
“It could be that they kill him. But I think that is no longer important.”
The cat was getting impatient.
“It must be late,” Trafalgar said.
“That’s not important either,” I answered. “I’m going to feed the cat.”
“It seems to me,” I heard him say from the kitchen, “that she tired of the gray moths and the pink paper flowers.”
Constancia
“I can’t,” Jorge said, “I have to leave right away.”
Trafalgar let Marcos know he wanted another coffee.
“Fine,” he said, “but at least have a cup of coffee.”
“I won’t say no to that,” and out came one of those pipes he talks about so much.
“What do you have in that briefcase? Luggage?”
�
��Books, what do you expect me to carry? Books are my good luck and my misfortune.”
“Who do you sell them to, with that beat-up bag?”
“There are always customers. Sentimental spinsters getting on in years (the others don’t waste their time reading), who buy happy endings in sad novels, or first-time parents, a sure bet for encyclopedias.”
“May those specimens never die out on you. It has happened that I have found myself without any customers, not one. Do you know how depressing it is to arrive at a place and there’s no one there?”
“No, I don’t know, and I hope not to find out, thank you.”
“Then don’t ever go to Donteä-Doreä.”
“What a name, what a mouthful of a name.”
“Yes,” said Trafalgar, “for a poem, but not for one of yours.”
“Hold it right there. Leave me with Los Quirquinchos which, as a name, sounds much better.”
“Donteä-Doreä is for heroes lost after a battle and ready to be dumped on by destiny. If it’s possible, at the edge of the cliffs and with the roaring sea there below.”
“And the mists,” Jorge pitched in, “don’t forget the mists, which are important, nor the disheveled blondes who have premonitions in far off lands.”
“Let’s not continue. I don’t think there are cliffs on Donteä-Doreä. And she wasn’t blonde, she was a striking brunette.”
“Ah,” said Jorge and he took a draw on his pipe and then remembered. “But wasn’t there nobody there?”
“The thing is, it’s a little complicated.” Trafalgar drank some coffee, smoked, considered the situation and studied those assembled in the Burgundy. “Are you going to leave with books and everything, or will you stay and listen to me?”
“I’ll stay, but only if you tell me quickly, let’s say in five minutes.”
“Bye-bye,” said Trafalgar.
“What’s this bye-bye?”
“Do you write a poem, let’s say, in five minutes?”
Jorge laughed, cleaned his pipe, put it away and took out another. Trafalgar doesn’t get the pipe thing.
“I don’t get the pipe thing,” Trafalgar said. “All that work, for what?”
“I’ll stay but let’s not digress,” Jorge prodded him.
Marcos came over, left the coffee, heard that about digressions and went away, smiling at Jorge.
“Donteä-Doreä,” said Trafalgar. “The problem is there is a lot of wind, but it’s not ugly. I ended up there by chance,” he drank coffee and lit a black, unfiltered cigarette while Jorge used the twenty-second match on the second pipe. “I was coming from Yereb which is a world you would like a lot. All fertile soil and rivers. Populated by hardworking, hard-drinking, troublemaking farmers. Montagues and Capulets, hereditary enemies, they fight over a woman, over a piece of land, over a pick and a spade, over anything, and afterward they make up at big open-air banquets where two or three more fights are sure to break out.”
“What did you sell them? Boxing gloves?”
“Electrical appliances for the home.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Didn’t I tell you they’re farmers? They export grains, flours, wood, natural fertilizers, fibers, all that, and they import what the surrounding worlds manufacture and on top of that they earn money and live like nobles in huge farmhouses with high ceilings and thick walls and Olympic patios.”
“Not bad.”
“Like hell, it’s not bad. You tell me; there’s a lot of work, otherwise it would be worth going to live on Yereb. And there they saddled me with a passenger.”
“I thought you never took anyone along when you traveled.”
“Uh-huh. That’s my preference. But I’m not inflexible. In a few cases I’m willing to make exceptions and the boy struck me as a nice guy. He was a mechanic from Sebdoepp. Mechanics from Sebdoepp are serious business. It’s a horrible world, full of electrical storms, one after the other, day and night, an unlivable place where you never see the sun and where you have to go out in the open with an anchor because the wind drags you away. As the inhabitants weren’t inclined to emigrate—I don’t know why, because you have to be crazy to want to live there—they started moving into caves, they kept digging tunnels from cave to cave and they ended up living in fabulous cities built underground.”
“Get out of there. I’m dying, it gives me claustrophobia.”
“Don’t talk until you’ve seen the cities of Sebdoepp.”
“Frankly, don’t count on me, leave me in Rosario where on Sunday mornings I can go play soccer in Urquiza Park with the boys.”
“In the cities of Sebdoepp you can also go to the field to play soccer, better put to play pekidep which is a lot more fun although with a higher risk of breaking one or more bones. There’s an artificial sun, and moon, natural rivers, forests—half natural, half artificial—dawns, middays, afternoons, and nights (also artificial), natural lakes, it’s fantastic.”
“Do you want to come to Urquiza Park on Sunday?”
“I don’t play soccer and I warn you I don’t play pekidep either, but if it’s nice out, I’ll go. You can imagine that to have done all that and maintained it in functioning conditions and then answer to millions of inhabitants, you have to be very skilled. There isn’t a man or woman on Sebdoepp who isn’t an artist when it comes to engineering, physics, chemistry, mechanics. All of the worlds recognize the mechanics from Sebdoepp, and there was one on Yereb, installing I don’t know what devices to improve the performance of the agricultural machines, and I took him with me.”
“To the place with the disheveled blonde who was really a striking brunette?”
“Ah, yes,” Trafalgar sighed. “Hey, where’s Marcos?”
The Burgundy was almost full but Trafalgar didn’t manage to turn all the way around looking for him, because Marcos was already there with the coffee.
“To Donteä-Doreä,” he said, “where we weren’t, in fact, going.”
“Huh?”
“No, we weren’t going there. I didn’t even have it registered. We were going to Sebdoepp from where the Yerebianos had brought that young guy, Side Etione-Dól was his name, and where instead of taking him back themselves, they proposed I should take him, since I was going that way, beyond Sebdoepp, to buy Ksadollamis pearls. I said yes and we set out, but not even halfway through the trip, we discovered we had to land somewhere, anywhere, because something had come loose, not in the clunker’s motor, because the clunker’s motor never fails, but on the outside. And we landed on Donteä-Doreä, which is uninhabited.”
“And the brunette?”
“Wait, don’t rush me. As I was telling you, there’s wind there, a lot of wind, and a pile of ruins. Rich and powerful people must have lived on Donteä-Doreä, but so long ago that there’s nothing left but stones. We landed and Side—a tall, tousled blond, nice guy—who plays the harmonica and whistles, it’s a pleasure to hear him, grabbed a pair of pliers, a couple of wires, and a special cement they use, and in two seconds, he had fixed what was broken.”
Trafalgar was quiet, as if he were listening to the conversations in the Burgundy, and Jorge smoked his pipe and waited; he waited a good while.
“And afterward, curiosity did us in,” said Trafalgar.
“And you met the brunette.”
“Tell me, are you obsessed with brunettes?”
“And blondes. And all of them. Admit, there’s nothing nicer than women.”
“Hmmmmm,” went Trafalgar.
They probably thought about whether there was anything nicer than women, although what conclusion they reached is unknown, while Marcos gave them a quick look in passing, a matter of finding out if he needed to bring them more coffee.
“It happened that we had landed close to a city, a city in ruins, of course. And as the clunker was all ready five minutes after we landed, and as there was a wind that for Side was a light spring breeze although to me it was the furious sirocco, and as we had nothing to do, we put our hands in ou
r pockets and started to walk toward the city, which must have been immense. Under the wind and against the light like that, it looked as if it had been carved out in huge bites. When we reached the outer walls, we looked at each other as if to say, now what do we do? And what we did was pick a street and head toward the center.”
“It would be a little bigger than Rosario, I imagine.”
“Easily, easily, a city for ten million inhabitants. And not a bit of brick or cement: stone, all stone. Big, carved stones, sometimes colored and with the round edges made to fit one into another so they’d never move again. Mycenae. A Mycenae the size of Greater Buenos Aires. A lot was still standing and a lot was spilled over the streets, which were double and triple as wide as one of our avenues, and in the plazas which, from their size, could have served as soccer fields. And there we were walking, Side and I, like a couple hicks looking at everything, he whistling and me fighting the wind that was boxed in between the partial walls.”
Jorge settled himself more comfortably in the chair and picked up the pipe, which had gone out a good while ago, put it in his mouth and chewed on it slowly, thinking about ruins in the rain, perhaps.
“We were well inside by then,” said Trafalgar, “where the city was less ruined, more impressive, and lonelier. And suddenly something moved on the second floor of a building that had the look of a ministry or temple or something like that. Marcos, do you believe in destiny?”
“Me?” said Marcos. He set two coffees on the table. “Don’t give me a hard time. I’ll bring you cold water. But on Sunday there’s a racehorse registered in the fourth race named My Destiny and a real loser is riding him. I’m going to put a few pesos on it.”
“There you have it,” said Trafalgar when Marcos was leaving.
“There you have what?” Jorge wanted to know. The question came out a little garbled because he was still chewing on that famous pipe.
“Side said it had been the work of destiny after all, and I said the only destiny that exists is each person’s stupidity.”
“Good, that’s fine, but what was it that moved on the second floor of the ministry?”
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