by Alan Pauls
How much money can his father be owed? What sum could justify the ritual of those three sadistic nights: his being put to bed—almost like being locked away in a basement—and condemned to the nightmare of insomnia; his father spritzing himself with cologne and dressing and styling his hair so carefully; the revolver being put in his pocket. To say nothing of everything else, all of it as ominous and misshapen as a series of expressionist photograms: the taxi, the city in darkness, the apartment, the head split open by the corner of the trophy, the puddle of blood. How much more money than the dead man was carrying in the helicopter? How much less? The same amount? (In his mind, and this is an illness he won’t be cured of until much later, and even then only by chance, any unknown quantity of money is by definition the same sum.) Three times this scene is replayed, and three times his father gives the same answer when, at the breakfast table the next morning, he gathers his courage and takes advantage of the state of idiotic beatitude his father sinks into on seeing the encyclopedic variety of fruits on offer at the hotel to ask him the question that has been macerating in his terrified imagination for, what, ten, twelve hours? Whether he finally got the money his friend owed him. All three times, the same answer: No. All three times, the same explanation: He couldn’t find him. He went to his house, he rang the bell, nobody answered.
This answer seems possible, logical. That could happen, he thinks, while his little right hand—which is very skilled at drawing and sculpting monsters out of modeling clay and other such feats of dexterity, but astonishingly clumsy when it comes to more basic practical matters—struggles to spread butter on a long, vaguely oval slice of pumpernickel that looks like the sole of one of his shoes. But the third time he hears it, he freezes, stunned, with the piece of bread suspended midway between the plate and his mouth. What did he say? What’s he talking about? It’s not the fact that he’s being lied to that shocks him. It’s the wild disproportion he senses between the answer—which, incidentally, his father gives without even thinking about it, totally unfazed, while his hands pile up slices of abacaxí on his plate and his eyes flit eagerly to the platters of mango, papaya, guava, passion fruit, fruits that drive him crazy, as he often says in Buenos Aires, where they’re nowhere to be found, but whose names he can’t remember, and never will be able to—and the three nights of torment he’s been made to endure. Something inside him darkens, as when a cloud drags its long, slow shadow across a scorched terrace. He no longer thinks of his father as a nocturnal adventurer who distracts night watchmen, forces windows, and slips, armed, into other people’s houses to reclaim what is his at the risk of violent retaliation and even death. What if he’s a coward? He considers the possibility for a second, and the image that had filled him with happiness earlier, when he woke up and almost crashed into it—his father by his side, safe and sound and acting as though nothing had ever happened, sitting on the edge of his bed in the early morning to recruit him for a breakfast orgy of fruit—becomes a proof of disgrace. He survived, which means he didn’t have the courage to see it all the way through. He goes out, stops the taxi, gives the address, but when the taxi driver repeats it, loudly, the alarmed tremor in his voice makes him hesitate. The neighborhood’s dark streets frighten him. He sees a light on in one of the apartment’s windows and worries that his debtor friend is not alone. He arrives just as the other guy is coming out, and realizes that he didn’t remember him being so tall, so stocky, so ready for anything.
The more he thinks about it, the surer he is that he’s been tricked. But by now, after three nights of lying awake until dawn with his heart in his mouth, thinking he’s been left fatherless in a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro, what apart from the scene he fears most could possibly satisfy him? This is how the imagination operates: by submitting its guinea pigs to extreme challenges of its own invention and recognizing their heroism only when they succumb, never when they survive. It’s also how the period operates: those who make it back from the dead come back because they’re cowards, because they’ve sold out or paid up, because they’ve struck a deal with the enemy, never because they’ve overpowered it. Not the dead crostini lover: at least he goes all the way down and doesn’t come back. His father came back; he lives to tell the tale, as they say. But what type of tale would he have to tell to repay the torment he’s made him suffer? Certainly not the string of abstractions he throws out when, and only when, it occurs to him to interrogate him during the remainder of the vacation. Never a single detail. The streets don’t have names, the neighborhoods are “there,” “on the other side of the lagoa,” “before you reach the bridge.” Nothing happens at a precise time. All the recurring events—the taxi, the house, the friend who never answers the intercom—are vague and insipid, like an illustration of a phrase in a foreign grammar book. Occasionally he thinks he’s uncovered an unexpected nuance, a change in his father’s tone of voice, some new piece of information that casts doubt on an earlier version of the facts: the neighborhood isn’t that far away, he lets his taxi go when he gets there (when earlier he had preferred to make it wait), a lit-up balcony with plants appears where earlier there had only been the black square of a window. What type of plants? Ficus? Ferns? Dwarf palms? What emerges here is never the truth. It is, rather, the impression that anything that comes out of his father’s mouth is and always will be a lie.
And another thing, though this occurs to him only later, when he’s already back in Buenos Aires: If he never finds the friend who owes him money, why doesn’t he come back to the hotel? Where does he spend the rest of those three nights? “At the casino, my darling,” his mother says. Or rather releases amid the musical laugh she lets out after hearing his account of those three dismal nights at the Gloria, in particular at the phrase he quotes directly, as if his father were speaking through him—A friend owes me money—which she finds irresistibly comic. At first he doesn’t intend to tell her about it. He is eleven years old. He has spent eight of those years—since the day his father, freshly bathed, as he always is for the decisive moments in his life, filled a bag with his white monogrammed shirts, his sports magazines, his cufflinks, his bottle of lavender water, his packet of imported cigarettes, his suede buckled shoes, and his shaving brush, and left the apartment on Ortega y Gasset forever—avoiding the role of double agent. He knows too well the explosive potential that certain pieces of information acquire when they pass from one camp to another. But then maybe that’s exactly why he tells. Maybe when he gets back, tanner than he’s ever been before or ever will be again, and sees his mother emptying his suitcase, and a little carioca sand falls out of a sock and trickles onto the carpet, maybe at that moment he realizes how much bitterness he has stored up. Casino? He stands staring at his mother in wary astonishment, like a con artist looking at a more skillful rival.
His father dies and not once in almost fifty years has he seen him gambling. Crying, yes, and being humiliated, and punching through the cheap wood of a hotel room’s closet door, and secretly doing all manner of pathetic things, and standing with his hands on his hips, wearing an air of absolute perplexity, to examine the Fiat 600’s engine as it smokes on the shoulder, and putting a piece of toilet paper on a shaving cut to stop it from bleeding, and lying to hide his shame, and furiously rubbing the first age spot to appear on the back of one of his hands. But that scene—the scene of his father sitting at a card table with a glass of whiskey, a cigarette smoking while it lies in a notch on the ashtray, one hand palm down and motionless on the green cloth, the other holding three poker cards in a fan at forty-five degrees, also facedown—will always be denied him. And his father will be the one who denies it, though he’s open in everything, shameless even in matters of bodily intimacy, such as taking a bath or defecating—both of which he always does with the bathroom door open—or farting—one of his hobbies, in which he takes no heed of spatial limitations or social restrictions, and which he practices and teaches as devotedly as a crusader—but rigidly reserved when it comes to gambling. He can tal
k about it, share anecdotes about the casinos he frequents and the gamblers he knows, admit how much he won on his best night and how much he lost on his worst, and even manage to make the figures sound convincing. But his father never allows anybody to see him gambling. Nobody, least of all his loved ones, not even those who haven’t the slightest objection to it—namely him, who as soon as he finds out that he gambles stops disdaining him as a coward and, though he knows he’s deluded, starts to respect him again, to adore him, to envy the intimacy of this new world he’s just discovered he reigns over. He doesn’t want anybody near him when he gambles—period. Neither nearby nor hoping to emulate him. This is the source of the indolence that floods him—his father, who in any of his other strong suits, numbers, of course, and reading between the lines of newspapers, tennis, sports in general, predicting the success or failure of a play, is a born pedagogue if not an outright evangelist, a man who will not rest until he’s emptied himself of everything he has to teach—whenever someone, usually him, begs him to impart a little of his great knowledge, like how to assume a poker face, ruses for winning at roulette, ways of dissembling, shuffling and dealing techniques, the stance to adopt in casinos, which drinks to order, how to pick out rivals with better cards than yours, how to talk to the person throwing the ball at a roulette wheel so that the right numbers come up. Once more, it’s all vague and general or already common knowledge. The cloth is green; you drink whiskey, neat or with ice; it’s a good idea to give a chip or two to the staff when a ball lands in your favor, and also to play at more than one table at a time; knowing how to lie is crucial. In other words, nothing. He can’t decide whether his father refuses to share his knowledge so as not to cement his reputation as a gambler, out of shame—like a victim of some moral disease who believes that passing on what he has learned since catching it will pass on the disease itself—or because he’s scared that if he shares it, his knowledge will take root in another gambler, a conscientious apprentice who, when chance brings them together at a card table someday, will clean up using the very techniques that he taught him. In any case, he will have to content himself with the version of his private gift that his father is prepared to share in public, which remains as opaque, as scandalously far from its original as the mercilessly mutilated versions of certain films that circulate under the censorship of the day: a sly, inconsequential bluff in a game of truco among friends, a rapid sleight with the dice cup at the beach club that gets him five of a kind, the whist tournaments played in the club’s game room, in the middle of the day, while children play between the tables and old people nod off in groups, for a cash prize that, if he wins it—which according to his reputation at the club he does two out of every three times—is not enough to pay for the coffees he’s drunk while competing.
It’s the same for his mother. Recently married, with him already on the way, the unplanned fruit of one of the skirmishes they get entwined in before they’ve thought about whether they’re in love, though they’re both already equally fixated on the idea of getting away from their respective families as soon as possible, she notices that her perfect stomach, which is as flat as a board and blessed with the kind of skin people dream of—one of those stomachs that always appears in black and white and extreme close-up in the artistic photography of the day, looking like a beach or a lunar landscape—is stretching and beginning to bulge as steadily as her husband’s nightly returns to the apartment on Ortega y Gasset grow later. The night she realizes, the telephone is silent, the cleaner at the office tells her that everyone has left, the meal is cold and already inedible, the cinema plans aborted. One night he doesn’t show up until twenty past four in the morning. When he appears, with a long day’s stubble and a halo of cigarette smoke strong enough to knock her flat, he says he got into an accident in the street: he left the office and was crossing the street when some idiot drove right over him. He didn’t get out of the police station at Suipacha and Arenales until half an hour ago. She doesn’t know what to think. She doesn’t know him. She only knows about him, and about the clumsy but comforting force of his Germanic lunges, about everything in him that exasperates and disappoints her, about the collection of flaws that define him, and everything that she will dedicate herself to criticizing for the forty years she spends without him, free of him. She can picture the altercation in the street, although she knows from experience that if it really happened, it wasn’t because of an abuse of his pedestrian’s right of way, unless by right of way her husband understands what he obviously does understand—the right to cross the road when and where he likes, preferably wherever the traffic is densest, when the cars have a green light and no pedestrian with half a brain would think to cross, let alone as defiantly and arrogantly as a true artist of danger.
She thinks he has a lover. His mother is young and beautiful; she’s as voracious as every woman on the run and has the rancor of an aristocratic lady in exile, forced to dress in secondhand clothes and eat reheated food. The ideal candidate to be tied down with a child by the first scoundrel to seduce her while he swans around elsewhere. It happens to all of them. Why should she be the exception? His mother never even mentions it. Every time she feels the urge to ask, she has the sensation of treading on very fragile ground, like a carpet made of glass. It’s as though she’d been born without skin. She’s frightened by her clothes every time they brush against her, of the noise her throat makes when she swallows, and of the tremulous half-moons of light that the sun projects onto the ceiling when it breaks through the crown of the banana palm whose branches overrun the balcony. Some mornings she wakes up and doesn’t even have the courage to open her eyes. But the thing that terrifies her most is giving him a reason to get rid of her—and she thinks anything could be a reason. One night she goes to bed alone. Every minute she passes without him is a minute lost in the torture of waiting for him, sinks her a meter further into a dark morass that won’t kill her but does poison her with hatred. At ten past six in the morning, she hears a key scratching at the door. She shifts onto her side in the bed, turning her back to him, and pretends to sleep. She doesn’t want to speak to him, doesn’t want to see him. Only to sense him, as though she were hidden behind a door with a knife under her clothes, waiting for the perfect moment to sink it into his chest. He doesn’t make any pretenses. He doesn’t even try to be quiet so as not to wake her. He takes off his clothes—a cufflink jangles against the bronze base of the bedside lamp—showers with the door open, gets dressed, goes out again. She doesn’t go back to sleep. She will never forget the sound of those keys.
In the middle of the morning, her mother comes to visit. She brings new clothes for the baby, another of the ensembles covered in belts, ruffles, and bows that she buys compulsively, enchanted by the idea—an accurate one, incidentally, which makes it even more depressing to her daughter—that they’re just like the clothes they bought for her before she was born, and she accepts them and files them away in the closet where she keeps the still lifes, swans made of green glass, and cretonne curtains that have been lavished upon her since she got married. After thirty sleepless hours, she can’t even stir a cup of tea, let alone hold one, and the cup smashes to pieces on the kitchen floor. She starts to cry and confesses, and as soon as she has confessed she realizes her mistake. If there are two people in the world who cannot help her, they are her parents. Her mother is a tiny, bitter woman, who believes she’s given all she had to give—as little as that may have been—and who now limits herself to relaying her daughter’s dramas to her husband. Her father, a corpulent despot who communicates in growls and wears very high-waisted pants, receives the problems and bends them to his own will, using them to support the cause he will never tire of championing: demonstrating to his daughter that, for as long as she chooses to live away from them, her life will be a catastrophe. She pleads with her mother not to say anything, not to humiliate her in front of her father. Her mother, smiling at her, tells her not to worry. But it’s too late. The moment she gets ho
me, the woman picks up the telephone, calls the factory, and passes her report on to her husband.