All Men Are Liars
Page 14
The girl asked me what I was reading. I was carrying the banned anthology in my pocket. I showed it to her. She laughed again. Go on, read me something. I don’t remember what I read her, but I was pleased to let her hear my voice, watching her furtively as my eyes followed the verses on the page. I’d like you to read to me in bed. I looked at her as if I had not understood. I’d like to go to sleep with you reading to me. I paid for the coffees and we left.
Now, in the red mist, I bump into great sheets of paper which are hanging in the wind, as though from a washing line. Dry, rough paper, of the type used in books published by Austral, which absorbed the ink so badly. They don’t tear as I advance; they are impervious to my weight: only light and time age them. It’s not that I feel them (I feel nothing), but I know that they are hanging here, as though to obstruct my path. Something is printed on them, but I don’t know what. I see nothing, hear nothing.
I don’t like reading, her voice says to me, but I like being read to. Any old thing. Even the phone book, if you want. I like watching your lips move, I like the color of your tongue.
More names. More words. More verses by Castilla.
I am growing from you
I am a new leaf, barely touched by the breeze,
I am that summer . . .
I can make out letters on the sheets as though on a blurred letter chart at the optician’s. I recite with the book open on the bed, the girl beside me, caressing her own breasts to the rhythm of my voice.
I am that summer that feels its breast
heavy with fruits
and which falls upon you, making you fertile.
Somehow I kept on reading, and later I asked if I could see her again. I’m with someone, she said. But we’ll probably run into each other again. And she handed over my clothes.
I don’t know if it’s different for someone who’s used to surprises. But for me, whose life had until then been a predictable series of more or less sensible events, to fall in love was an intrusion of the impossible. Until then, I could explain everything. Every fact had its cause, every decision its consequence. My world was logical and coherent, as formal as a sonnet, or at least my sonnets, in which the final verse contrived to be surprising, and therefore never was. “Here it comes,” my quartets announced. “Any minute now,” predicted the first tercet. And so it was. Laws of gravity and dynamics ruled my world, inside and out. She was my first encounter with the inexplicable.
During those months, I repeatedly went to the Lorraine, hoping to find her. One day I saw her, on the arm of a very thin, smiling man. I don’t know if she saw me. I realize that with the exception of those few hours we spent together, I was invisible to her. I, on the other hand, never lost sight of her. I remembered her every night; I knew every corner of her body and imagined expeditions across her increasingly familiar geography. That was then. Now I wouldn’t even be able to say what color her eyes were.
After work, I liked to explore the bookshops on Calle Corrientes. I looked for old poetry books in battered editions, by long-dead authors. I bought them for myself, to make me feel less alone, but also in order to read them to her.
One day, while I was riffling through the tables in one of those bookshops, two men ran in and carried off a young man who, minutes before, had been reading at my side. As they bundled him into the car, I heard someone call me: Hey, you with the long hair, aren’t you Colonel Gorostiza’s son? A man in a double-breasted suit and dark glasses placed his hand on my shoulder. Your father wrote to me saying you’d be calling. How about it? He smiled, handed me a card, and walked off up the street. I went back to the books.
Seeing her and hearing her mattered to me less than touching her. Skin is a space that stands in for the world. When we touch it, brush against it, it encompasses everything. Now I move forward through the fog, but then my fingers moved over her valleys and hills like determined pilgrims, barely resting, retracing their steps sometimes to try another route, exploring unknown pathways. Now that all touching is forbidden me, that landscape of skin sinks under my weight, envelops and stifles me. I tumble into a sack that closes over me, damp and spongy, made of my own flesh. My fingers want to climb the slopes of that body, but the slopes keep getting steeper. It’s impossible to get a grip. The skin, warm and sticky now, encloses me and my cloud of claylike dust. The air turns to mud, filling my eyes, mouth, and nostrils. The mud turns to water. I’m drowning. My throat burns. The water turns to air. Then the panic abates. I breathe.
Again.
Every memory, this whole suffocating multitude of memories, leads to nightmares. Here there is nothing more than that, things that I believe once happened. Forgive me, my dreamer, for infecting you with so much horrible stuff. It isn’t willful—I can’t try to do anything. Every time I attempt to retrieve an instant of joy, a moment in which I was happy to live, a black stain spreads over it, obliterating everything. Her in the damp sheets, her panting on the pillow, her digging furrows in my back with her nails, her, too, turning into that fathomless mud in which I am forever sinking. And I rise up again. And I sink in again.
I cannot even salvage that first moment of memory. Nothing clean, nothing happy, nothing that does not grow dark.
Darkness is also Buenos Aires. I’ve never known such a murky city, with those streets which branch off from an illuminated avenue to lose themselves among secret trees and unsuspected sturdy walls, abrasive to the touch. Here, at least at the start of those years, darkness is not frightening. I follow the instructions in her note, which is unsigned, but written in the tidy handwriting of a model pupil. Come to see me tomorrow at eleven. Ring twice and I’ll open the door. I obey. I arrive, I ring the bell, the barred gate opens, I go up some steps, I push open the door. She hasn’t put the light on, but I can see my way. There’s a smell of summer, of apricots, of rain. A hand takes mine and pulls me onto a mattress. I fall, I sink, but I’m not drowning. I breathe deeply. We say nothing to each other.
I like talking to you alone, mouth to mouth.
Telling you all the things you don’t want to say.
In love, there is one condition that is more terrible than the others. Overwhelming, exclusive, jealous, blind to all reason. Its language is coarse, brutal, abusive. Its gestures are sometimes gentle, at other times of a terrifying violence. It never speaks the truth, because it fears itself. And it lies to keep people from believing all the things that it is. It consists almost entirely in an imagined body: enormous hands, enormous eyes, enormous tongue, gigantic sex. Its limbs have atrophied, grown so small as almost to disappear. The lover has no legs or chin. The nose appears and disappears, as do the ears. A breath, a moan conjure them, and then they vanish again. In that amorous reality there are more bloodthirsty armies than the ones commanded by my father, packs of hounds more rabid than the five bitches in my worst nightmares. You may complain now, dreamer, of the nightmares I foist onto you. Thank your stars that you have been spared this other one.
I recognize this sense of suffocation that I’m feeling now, this sinking into mud. I was here before, but it was worse then, when my flesh still existed and my brain was working. Worse was the fear of hearing (and of not hearing anymore) the desired answer to the question. When will I see you again? She looks at me with those amused eyes and says that she doesn’t know, and I’m not to worry—enjoy the moment.
To live in the present: the definition of hell.
I leave, with her perfume clinging to my clothes. I don’t shower. In the office, on the bus, beneath the blanket, at night, I imagine that she is there. I can think of nothing else. I walk aimlessly. I eat, in no particular restaurant, boiled food, on starched tablecloths. I flick through books which I have no intention of reading. I go to the Lorraine, but don’t watch the film. On the contrary, I can’t wait for it to end so that I can go and stand at the entrance and look for her among the women who come out chatting with their boyfriends, or alone, or in gaggles of shrieking friends. She isn’t there, of course. I return to t
he darkness of my street and fumble for the lock. I grow experienced in unlocking doors in the dark.
My mind repeats: she, she, she, she. Ella, ella, ella, ella. I try to hush it, but it’s impossible. Two graceful volutes culminating in infinitely drawn-out lines. The city is full of inverted Ionic columns, like the extended facade of a Greek temple upside down. Everything is ella.
Don Belem dies. One of the sons returns from Brazil to close the business down. He offers me a job in São Paulo, but how can I go so far away from her? The man doesn’t understand, and thinks I’m ungrateful. When saying good-bye to the other employees, he leaves me out. Returning home, I walk past the Military Circle, and remember that this is where Colonel Chartier has his office. I go in and ask for him. A corporal takes my documents and leads me to an office dominated by a gigantic desk and a gold-framed mirror. The ceiling is adorned with cherubs.
Inside the placenta bag in which I am sinking, something (a knife, a saber, a claw) has torn at the walls and is dragging me out, on a viscous and foul-smelling wave. One Roman torture consisted in making a prisoner drink wine, then thrusting a knife into his stomach. Like the wine in that Roman’s stomach, I’m dragged along by a river I can’t see. I spin around several times. I hear nothing, feel nothing. I hit the bottom.
In the watery gloom, I make out three tall military figures, their chests covered in phosphorescent medals. The first has no face, only an immense arc of sharpened teeth, through which protrudes a fat, purple tongue. The second is a tangle of hair, as rough as steel wool, as sharp as barbed wire. The third has the features of Colonel Chartier, well-shaven cheeks, a neat black mustache, dark glasses, a military peaked cap. In front of them are dozens of little naked people, raising their arms before this terrible triumvirate. Then the teeth begin to chew on the tongue, the tangle of hair bursts into flames, and Colonel Chartier’s face breaks up, handfuls of worms pushing their way through the cracks. In unison, the triumvirate utters a howl and vanishes. In the darkness, some whitish, rough-edged residue remains, like phlegm.
Colonel Chartier steps out from behind the desk and takes my hand. My father has spoken of me to him. How is my old friend? Lumbago troubles all of us. But what do you youngsters know of that! Life seems eternal to you. How old are you? Forty-one already? I don’t believe it! Can you manage a coffee? Now then, Corporal, bring us two coffees. Well, well. Where were we? And he offered me a job.
I never inquired as to the official name of the department led by Chartier. We called it COMMUNICATION, and the folders were marked with a capital C and a serial number. A secretary, practically a teenager, had the job of filing them. I never knew who used them, nor when, nor why.
Colonel Chartier declares: As for you, all you have to do is pay attention. Your father told me that you have a special talent for that. “He has a bloodhound’s sense of smell,” my friend Gorostiza said. And that’s what we need here. People who know how to sniff the air, to catch things most people miss. These are treacherous times, my young friend. Anything could be a trap. The enemy looks just like you or me, and no sooner we’re distracted than we’ll have a knife at our throats. Civilization and Barbarism. I don’t need to ask which side you’re on.
My job entailed presenting myself in his office at eight o’clock in the morning to receive my instructions. After coffee with a dash of milk (it was never served black in Colonel Chartier’s office), my six or seven colleagues and I, all men, would be handed a folder (C27658, C89711) with an address, a time, sometimes a name. I spent innumerable days sitting in a particular bar close to Congress or standing on the platform of the Pacífico station, waiting for something to happen, for someone to arrive.
In one pocket I carried a little book of poems, to while away the time; in the other, the identification badge they had given me, with the naval crest in embossed tin, which felt like my father’s saber. Sitting in the bar, or standing at the station, I held the book from which I read in one hand while the other rubbed the crest, warming it with my fingers. At the end of the day, I would return to the office for a debriefing. Occasionally, I had to go out at night.
Whenever I saw what I had been sent to see, I gave a signal with my hand, and the agents got on with their work. I learned not to recognize them; it was they who looked out for me. Nor did I want to know anything about the people I was spying on. Their variety surprised me. It was impossible to generalize. There were all sorts. Gentlemen in overcoats. Workers. Pensioners with the newspaper tucked under their arms. Mulattos. Old ladies with blue rinses. Teenagers with acne. Young men who must have been university students or who worked, as I had done, in some anonymous insurance company. Ditto young women. The odd priest. The odd nurse. The occasional secondary-school teacher.
Once I was sent to spy on an ex-colleague, a woman of about forty who had worked in accounts at Belem Exporters—Chela something-or-other. I had scarcely noticed her when we were working in the firm. Reserved, well turned out, invariably in very high heels, she was, someone told me, a widow with two children. Now she appeared very agitated, her hair disheveled. She was carrying a briefcase which she kept opening and closing. As she got off the train, I immediately recognized her, and motioned with my hand. I think that she saw me and thought that I was waving to her. When the agents closed in on her, she shouted and started to run, but then one of her heels broke, and she almost fell onto the tracks. She looked up at me, or at least in my direction, as she sprawled on the ground. I left before they took her away.
Thick and sticky filaments of phlegm cling to my body, hindering my movements. Its tentacles almost seem to have a life of their own, the way they roam over my arms and legs, my neck and face. It’s like being clasped to the bosom of a jellyfish, like growing another layer, slimy and warm, over my own skin. It’s as though I’ve been turned inside out, my organs exposed, my guts intertwined with this fibrous filth. They tighten my throat, strangling me with gelatinous fingers, finding new methods of suffocation. The filaments probe my nose and mouth, filling my lungs to the point of bursting. And once more, all around me, the dust cloud. The phlegm has disappeared. I move forward in a space I cannot see.
If I could stop thinking, even for a moment, I could rest, regain strength. If I could cease, for a moment, vomiting this string of images, of words, of things past.
I try to focus on a dark point, on a pinprick of nothingness. Impossible. The point expands, fills with twinkling lights, each light something lived, something remembered. And I go back to the beginning. My parents’ house. The bitches. My siblings. The poems. The city at night. My elusive lover. Blood and broken bones. My reports. Her. Ella.
Sometimes I inform on boys and girls who are really very young. It’s a way of protecting them, Colonel Chartier tells me. It’s our duty as fathers of the nation.
I see them gathering outside the school gates (I still live in the little room on Calle Alsina), and I stand close to the newsstand, pretending to be choosing sweets, watching them. It occurs to me that I am rather like a satyr, hidden in the undergrowth, spying on nymphs. Or like the elders devouring Susanna with their eyes, nostalgic for their erections. Or like some depraved pornographer, flashing open his dirty raincoat in the playground.
I watch and make notes. Sometimes I can hear them. They tell each other nonsense, lark about, inventing a rhetorical world and a new golden age. Demonstrations, petitions, declarations, a whole vocabulary of banner waving and end-of-year speeches. I was fifteen once, too.
I make my lists. I question the doorman, perhaps a waiter, the uniformed police officer who barely understands what I am asking him. And then I hand in my homework on time—I’m never late. You and punctuality are like twin brothers, says the Colonel.
And we go back to the start.
Every so often, at unpredictable and overlengthy intervals, I would see her. We met almost by chance; I would receive a note proposing a date, or I would be bold enough to call her at work, in some faculty office. One day, I left my book for her, beside the
bed. I never knew if she had read it. I didn’t dare ask her. It was enough to know that it was there, at her side. It meant that I was there, too, my words on her lips, my tongue in her mouth.
I can see that my story is exciting you, my dreamer. It’s making your blood flow faster, prompting you to delve into your own memory in search of amorous memories. I warn you: don’t follow me. My hunting grounds are dangerous. All of them begin as tended gardens which sprout suddenly into jungles, into minefields, into quicksand. You won’t reach the other side.
Two simultaneous events changed everything.
There is a first moment (we don’t realize it’s the first) when we cross the threshold of a forbidden room, somewhere we ought never to enter. We do it without thinking. A key accidentally placed in the wrong lock, the door unintentionally opened, the splashes of blood on the floor that we ought not to have seen—just like in fairy tales.
Two events: her telling me, as we woke up, I can’t see you again. Not anymore. And then that morning, on the letter of instructions, her name heading a new list of quarries.
She doesn’t want to see me anymore, because she wants to see the other man. I say “other” because I am not unique. I am one of two, one among many. I want to know who my rival is. Who has privileges over her. Who is this person causing my dismissal from her presence. You don’t know him. What does it matter to you? And she smiles. I grab her hair. I yell at her to answer me. She refuses. I shout louder. I shake her, I yank her hair harder, as though to tear it from the fearful, distant face looking back at me. I slap her. She utters a name. What? She repeats it. Say it again. She says it again, crying. My open hand is still hitting her. And now, for sure, I’ve crossed to the other side and the door is closing behind me.