—You’re the one who interprets dreams and searches for confessions and tries to heal the insane. Not me.
—But it is interesting.
—You could be right.
—What’s even more interesting is that our friend, my friend, has had the dream again and other times it’s she who’s riding the horse, which is always a gray horse.
He didn’t say a word.
—There are many things in this dream, Arsenio Cué, just as there are in that dream Lydia Cabrera told us both, do you remember it?, the day you’d gone to her house in your new car and she gave you a cowrie shell to wear as a good luck charm which you passed on to me later, because you didn’t believe in that old Negro magic, and Lydia told us that some years back she’d had a dream in which the sun rose red on the horizon and the whole of the sky and the earth was bathed in blood and the sun had Batista’s face and a few days later the coup of the tenth of March took place. That’s what this dream makes me think of too, that it could be a warning.
He was still silent.
—There are many things in dreams, Arsenio Cué.
—There are more things in heaven and earth, Silvestre, than are dreamt of in your phoenixophy.
Did I smile? I seem to remember I did.
—What are you getting at?
My smile vanished. Cué was ashen, his skin clung to his skull and looked like wax. He was a death’s head. He reminded me of a dead fish.
—Me?
—Yes. You.
—In the dream, you mean?
—I don’t know. That’s for you to say. It’s some time ago, some hours back, that I felt you, saw you trying to say something to me. The words had almost formed on your lips. Now you suddenly ask me, using the pseudo-Eribó as a pretext, something, I believe, about Vivian.
—It wasn’t me who saw an Eribó when there was none.
—Nor was it you who had that dream.
—No. It wasn’t me. I’ve told you so.
There was a sudden confusion in the dining room and people left their tables and the stools at the bar and ran to the door. Cué shouted something and headed in the same direction. I got up asking him what was going on what.
—Nothing! Fuck! Take a look. You’re a great astronomer.
I looked. It was raining. It was the storm in the form of a torrential downpour. Niagara falls on Cué. Niágara undoso. Templad Milira. Pluck my lyre. Who was Milyre? An Heredia swan song? A Canadian girliefriend of Humberedia? Templad mi lira/ Dádmela que siento/ The torrent falls on the last syllable. A wet rhyme.
—It’s not my fault. I’m not the Gunga Din of God.
—I should have put the top up, dammit!
—They’ll see to that in the parking lot.
—The fuck they will if I don’t go myself. You’re so damned naïve.
But he went back all the same and sat down to drink his coffee, quite calmly.
—Aren’t you going?
—Hell no! It must be Bartlett’s Depth in the car by now. I’ll go when it lets up. (He looked at the street.) If it lets up. In any case it looks like we’re stuck here for a while.
I sat down too. After all, it wasn’t my car.
—Forget about the water, he said. —And listen to me. Or don’t you want to listen?
He told me everything. Or almost everything. His story is on page forty-seven. He got as far as the fatal shots. He paused.
—But did he miss?
—No, he didn’t. He got me. As a matter of fact I died that day. What you’re looking at is only my ghost. Shit, wait a minute!
He ordered another coffee. A cigar. Do you want one? Two cigars. A Romeo here and a Juliet there. Generous was his middle name. A. Generouso Cué. Going through a spendthrift thrust in memories and in cigars. The end of the story came in the end.
I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, and he called out with a loud voice like a lion roaring. I couldn’t hear what he said. The voice that spoke to me from heaven spoke to me again and said something else that was as cloudy as his head in the clouds. The heaven brightened and first I saw in the center an extinguished sun, and then, in the same part of heaven, a lamp, two lamps, three lamps—and then, a single lamp that was a conical tube hanging from a white ceiling. The angel had a pistol book in his hand. Could he be Saint Anton? But it wasn’t a pistol book, or even a book, or a little scroll, it was simply a long pistol that he waggled in front of my face. I thought it had to be a book because every time I hear the word pistol, I reach for my book.
Hunger does strange things to you. I even listened to what he was saying.
—Go on.
Go? Where to? To the dining room? To bed with the water nymph? Back to the street and hunger? Because it was he and not He who was speaking.
—Go on, go on, he repeated. —You’re a very good actor. You should have been a comedian and not a writer.
I wanted to tell him (hunger does things like that to you, you know) writers make the best actors, because they write their own dialogue, but I was unable to say a word. —Go on, Go on, said this man with his sudden whims and his steady income. His voice seemed to have a note of fear in it. But it wasn’t fear.
—Go on. Get up. I’ve got a job for you.
I got up. With some difficulty but I got up, by myself. Unaided.
—Uppity-up! That’s better.
All this time I was unable to speak. I looked at the angel and silently gave him thanks for not having let me eat the little book. Then I spoke to the man with my voice.
—When?
—When what?
—When do I begin my work?
—Oh. He laughed. —You’re quite right. Come to the studios tomorrow.
I shook off the dust which those who fall and rise again always imagine they have on them, Lazarus’ syndrome, and I went out. Before I left I looked at the angel for the last time and gave him thanks once more. He knew why. I felt sorry that I hadn’t eaten the little book. However bitter it was, it would have tasted of ambrosia to me—or marzipan.
—What do you make of it?
—If it’s true it’s incredible.
—Every word of it.
—Shi-i-i-t!
—I’m going to let you keep your obscenities and other folk rhetoric to yourself. I won’t tell you the rest.
—But what about the bullets? Why aren’t you dead? How did you manage to recover from your wounds?
—None of his bullets hit me. I could tell you that he was a bad shot but he wasn’t. The bullets were blanks. The perfect host only wanted to frighten me in passing, for a joke. Some time later he explained all that to me, he supported me, then made me a supporting actor, and finally gave me the lead. He told me then that he had wanted to teach me a lesson that day, but that it was actually he who had been taught one, because of the shock I’d given him. D’you see? It’s Poetic Justice. Don’t forget that I introduced myself as bard or troubadour at the court of King Candolle.
—What about your apparent death?
—Possibly it was hunger. Or fear. Or maybe I just imagined it.
I couldn’t make out if he had imagined it then or now.
—Or a combination of the three.
—And Magalena? Is it the same girl? Are you sure?
—Why do your questions always come in threes?
—Everything happens in trees, Tarzan would say.
—It’s got to be the same one. A little older, a bit more worn by the blows of life, her sort of life, not mean but mad now and with that mark across her nose. That was what put me off the track.
—She told me it was cancer.
—Cancer? Don’t give me that shit. It’s a symptom of hysteria.
—It could also be lupus vulgaris or perhaps even the erythematous exanthematic variety.
—Fucking wolf! The sound of it gives me the creeps. But whichever it is, it put me off the track though I was watching her closely tonight.
—I was watching you a
nd thought you liked her. I was afraid you’d decide to swap. I didn’t go for the aunt or pseudo-aunt at all however good-looking she may have been.
—Me? Like her? When have you seen me go for a darkie?
—It’s always possible. She’s a beauty.
—She was out of this world when I first saw her and I didn’t go for her. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen then.
—Thank heavens!
He ordered another coffee. Was he thinking of staying up all night? Why don’t you drink tea? I asked, raising my voice. But
did I raise the question? They make it very strong here and it
tastes bad. Chesterton says that tea, like everything else from the Orient, is poisonous when it’s made too strong. Could he have meant Oriente? I asked him. He smiled, but didn’t say a word. I was sure I’d loaded the dice this time. But Arsenio Cué was more interested in his tragic poker strip than any other game in the world. Right now anyway.
—When I told you I’d spare you the obscenities I didn’t mean any description of the marvels of the opposite sex, but the reverse. Some of them can’t be told anywhere. On that day of disgrace time stopped. It did for me, at least. Afterward I fell from grace and into a pit deeper than the well of my dream or hallucination. The things, the things I had to do, Silvestre, to arrive! If I arrived anywhere at all. You couldn’t imagine it. That’s why I’m not telling you. Besides, it’s you who’d vomit, I’m not going to at this stage, not with this charming chicken chow inside me. I’m speaking like that because our Friedrichmeister Nietzsche says you can’t talk about things that are really important except cynically or in baby talk, and I’m no good at babbling.
Besides his voluntary cynicism there was a lot of instinctive self-pity. He was feeling sorry for himself, for Arsenio Cué or for euC oinesrA, as he called his alter ego—ego altered. Enuc O’Raise. I arse on cue. One is a cure. I waited for him to go on, but he fell silent.
—What about Vivian?
He pulled out his dark glasses and put them on.
—Forget about your sunofabitch glasses for there’s no sun. It isn’t even a clean well-lighted place. Look.
The table was full of ashes and I thought it was from his cigar and that he hadn’t noticed it. But a black speck came flying that I mistook first for an eye-fly, and then for a butterfly, some kind of insect, and it landed on my sleeve. I brushed it away with a finger and it fell to pieces. It was a bit of soot and I was surprised because I’d never seen soot fall in the night. It must be because factories don’t work nights. There are some that work night and day. The sugar mills and the Puentes Grandes paper factory, for example. More flakes of soot came flying and landed on my suit and shirt and on the table and then a flurry of them swirled around the floor like a black snowfall.
—I thought it was a butternightfly.
—In my pueblo they call them tataguas.
—In mine too. Here they’re called moths. Where I live they say they bring bad luck.
—In Samas they say the opposite, that they are a sign of good luck.
—It all depends on what happens after.
—Maybe.
He didn’t like this skepticism among believers. I picked up a flake and it almost glittered, black in my hand between the pale lines of Life and Death and Fate, it swirled around the Mount of Venus for a moment and then flew away and settled on the ground.
—It’s soot.
—Flakes of almost pure carbon. If it crystallized it would be called a diamond.
Cué made a clicking sound with his tongue, lips and mouth.
—And if my granny had wheels she’d be a Model-T Ford. Come on! he said, taking off his dark glasses and putting them on again. —It’s just that all that wind and water have bust the chimney and sent the smoke and soot back into the kitchen.
His common sense astonished me. Of course he was right. I’d never even thought of the kitchen, or of a broken chimney or the torrential downpour that had occurred in another hemisphere: of associating the soot with its maker. Even more practical, Pragmaticue called the waiter and pointed to the table telling him to clean it and close the kitchen door, please.
—They have good service, he said, —at Club 21.
I remembered that there was also a parrot of pragmatism inside him: an announcer of TV commercials.
—My hands are dirty, he said and got up and went to the inhouse. I went too and I don’t think it was a coincidence.
XXI
I went too and I don’t think it was a coincidence they had drawn a realistic top hat to indicate the right door. (There are wrong doors: morality in architecture: on the facade: over the entrance: lasciate ogni ambiguitá voi ch’entrate: there are no epicene ways to the jack.) A top hat. (To the gents.) A silk hat. (Silkroi was here.) Was Killjoy here? I asked Cué over the swinging doors behind which he was going through the sounds of pissing: Which came first, the water closet or the saloon? The answer-question to the other question which was my answer came like a shit. Wyatt Earpsenio Cué whipped out a couple of pistols.
—So you think you’re a gentleman! Ain’t I psychic?
Was he a southpaw? Dunno, but dey doan call me Wildbilly Hitchyourcock for nuttin.
—Mind your p’s, chiaro amiCuo. I fired my sex-shooter thrice and every time I got him with those quick, sharp, dumb bullets of mine:
—Pray tell me, which is worse: to think you’re a caballero or a cabalist? Or am I talking in cablese?
I saw him come out with his hands up and I thought he was giving himself up. But no, it was only a prefatory movement prior to going to wash his hands. He looked at himself in the mirror and parted his hair again. Parting is such sweet sorrow. He wasn’t a southpaw in real life, only in the mirror.
—How about you, have you no faith?
—Oh, sure. I believe in many things, almost everything. But not in numbers.
—That’s because you can’t add.
He was right. He’s right: I can hardly add.
—But didn’t you say that mathematics was a lottery? —Mathematics yes but not arithmatics. There was a magic of numbers before Pythagoras and his theorem, long before the Egyptians, that’s for sure.
—So you believe in the precious stones in Lady Luck’s kidneys, also called hedonic calculi. I believe in other things.
He looked in the mirror, passing a hand over his cheekbones which had been given a hard edge by the night he was leading, over his pale cheeks and his cleft chin. He recognized himself.
—Is this the face—
What did I say? A line of three, a lane of trees, Helena Trois. Who lunched a thousand shits.
—of the man who went into the youngle at twenty-two and didn’t come out rich? I’m the living contradiction of Uncle Ben, not the one of the long-grained riches but Willy Loman’s brother Ben.
—Trovato. Of the famous writing duetto Simone Evero e Ben Trovato.
—You know what I mean. You know I’ve lived dangerously. You still do.
—Yes, I live dangerously.
Arsenietzsche Kué. The poor man’s Nietzsche. A niche for the boor.
—I’m saying that you live dangerously, just by being alive. We live dangerously, Arsenio Lupino. We are alive so we’re all in danger.
—Of dying. You mean we’re all going to die.
—Of living. I mean we the living have to live, as you say, howforever we can.
He looked at me and pointed to the mirror with his index finger and I didn’t know if it was his south or north index.
—A contradictory. Of movies, literature or real life? Or do we have to wait for the final epicoda, like in those old Monogramed serials? Unmasked or Evilly the Kid Strikes Back?
He turned an imaginary crankshaft.
—You do believe in film.
—I was born with a silver screen in my mouth. I’m not a convert.
He pretended to write some invisible letters on the mirror.
—What about writing?
—I a
lways use a typewriter.
He went through an exaggerated mime of someone typing. It was bad typecasting.
—Do you believe in words or in the Word?
—I believe in word benders.
—So you believe in our Honi Father Hugo who art in heavy-
side?
—Nerval heard of him.
—But you believe in literature, right?
—Shouldn’t I?
—Do you or don’t you?
—Sure I do. I’ve always believed in the written word, I always will.
—Don’t forget that two of the men who’ve had most influence on history never wrote a line, or even read one.
I looked at him in the mirror.
—Come on, Cué, we know all that. Your duo’s two names and one mystic mythic misfit. Christ crossed with Socrates. Christocrates. When you say literature, caro, I always understand Literature by it. Another history, in other words. But taking you at phrase value I can ask you, where would they be, The One and the other, without Plato and Paul?
A man of about thirty-three came in like some kind of answer.
—Que sais-je? C’est a toi de me dire, mon vieux, said Cué.
He looked at us as he pissed, puzzled, as though he thought we were talking Greek or Aramaic. Could he be a late-night prophet? Or a latter-day Platonist? Plotinus with physical needs?
—Moi? Je n’ai rien a te dire. C’étais moi qui a posé la question.
The man plugged his leak and turned to us. I saw he hadn’t finished yet. He held up his hands. Suddenly he spoke and he said the one thing in the world that could most astonish us—if anything could astonish us this side of paradise.
—Il faut vous casser la langue. A vous deux!
Shit to Nemesis. To defatecate. He was French. A drunk Frenchman. Chauvin rouge. Cué recovered before I did and fell on him saying, a quién, coño, a quién, and then as though he was dubbing for himself, a qui vieux con a qui dis-moi, and he grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him against the pissoirs, the old man (because he’s suddenly grown old in the washroom) was uttering some astonished borborygms mais monsieur mais voyons and gesticulating like he was drowning in shallow waters. It was then that I decided to intervene. I gripped Cué under the arms. He looked like he was still drunk and the poor Frenchman who’d had his tongue or arm twisted so much he no longer spoke the language of Descartes but a langue de defecate made a getaway from our obtuse triangle, scrambled to the door with the top hat in a faux pas or two and vanished. I think that the three ends of his tie were still hanging. I said so and Arsenio Cué and I we thought they’d take us straight from the head to the headsman. We were killing ourselves laughing. He wasn’t there when we left. I thought Cué had gone after him, but he’d only looked out through the glass doors.
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