Cronopios and Famas (New Directions Classic)

by Julio Cortázar

  THE LOSS AND RECOVERY OF THE HAIR

  In his struggle against pragmatism and the horrible tendency of reaching useful ends, my eldest cousin proposed the following procedure: to pull from the head a good thick strand of hair, make a knot in the middle of it, and drop it gently down the sink drain. Should the hair get trapped in the metal grate which used to propagate in such drains, all you have to do is open the faucet a bit and it will disappear for good.

  Without a moment of hesitation, you must begin the job of recovering the hair. The first operation is narrowed down to taking the sink trap apart to see if the hair has got itself hung up in one of the corrugations in the pipe. If you don’t find it, you have to begin opening that section of the pipe which runs from the trap via the various conduits to the pipes of the main outlet channel. Now you’re dead sure of finding a lot of hairs in this section, and you’ll have to count on the rest of the family to help examine them one at a time to find the one with the knot. If it doesn’t turn up, one is faced with the interesting problem of breaking open the plumbing all the way to the ground floor, but this entails a major effort, inasmuch as one would have to work eight or ten years in some ministry or business to amass enough money to make it possible to buy the four apartments located under where my eldest cousin lives, all which with the extraordinary disadvantage that while one is working those eight or ten years, there’s no way to avoid the aggravating feeling that the strand of hair hasn’t yet got to that part of the plumbing, and through some remote chance, has only gotten stuck in some rusty out-jutting of the pipe.

  The day comes when we can break open the pipes in all the apartments, and for months we’ll live surrounded by washbasins and other containers full of wet hair, as well as hired helpers and beggars, whom we pay generously to seek out, separate, classify, and bring us the possible globs of hair in order to arrive at that absolute certainty so devoutly to be wished. If the hair does not show up, we begin a much vaguer and more complicated stage, because the next stretch brings us to the city’s sewer mains. After having purchased a special suit, we’ll learn how to creep through the sewer pipes late at night, armed with an immense lantern and oxygen mask, and we shall explore the lesser and the greater galleries, aided if possible by assorted groups of vagrants with whom we will have contracted a working relationship and to whom we shall have to give the larger part of the monies which we earn during the day in a ministry or business office.

  Very frequently we shall be under the impression that we’ve come to the end of the task, since we’ll find (or they’ll bring us) a hair that seems to be the one we’re looking for; but since one never knows in any single case that a knot has not occurred in the middle of the hair without the intervention of human hands, we nearly always decide by comparison that the questionable knot is a simple swelling in the size of the hair (though we know of no similar occurrence ) or a deposit produced by some silicate or whatever oxide during its long residence on a damp surface. By this time it’s likely that we have worked our way through the smaller and larger sections of mains to the point at which no one would decide to go further: the main channel headed toward the river, that torrential consolidation of waste products wherein no amount of money, no boat, no hire or bribery will permit us to continue our search.

  But before that happens, much earlier perhaps, a few centimeters from the sink drain for example, at the second-floor apartment level, or in the first underground pipes, it might happen that we would find the hair. Just think of the happiness this would give us, just the astonishing realization of the efforts saved by sheer chance, to be able to justify, to choose, practically to insist upon some such project, which every conscientious teacher ought to recommend to his students, even those at the most tender age, instead of parching their souls with the principle of multiplication to the third power, or General Custer’s troubles at little Big Horn.

  AUNT WITH DIFFICULTIES

  Why do we have to have an aunt who’s so afraid of falling on her back? For years the family has struggled to cure her of her obsession, but the time has come to admit our crashing failure. The more we do, the more aunt is afraid to fall on her back; and her innocent mania affects everyone, starting with my father who, in brotherly fashion, escorts her to different parts of the house and maintains a constant reconnaissance of the floor so that aunt may walk about without concern, while my mother sweeps out the patio several times a day, my sisters pick up the tennis balls with which they disport themselves innocently on the terrace, and my cousins wash off every trace ascribable to the dogs, cats, turtles, and hens which proliferate through the house. But nothing works; aunt makes up her mind to pass through rooms only after a long tottering hesitation, interminable observations by eye, and intemperate words to any kid who happens by at the moment. Then she gets under way, favoring one foot first, moving it like a boxer in the resin box, then the other, shifting her body in a displacement which seemed majestic to us in our youth, and taking several minutes to get from one doorway to another. It’s really horrible.

  At different times the family has tried to get my aunt to explain with some sort of coherence her fear of falling on her back. On one occasion the attempt was received with a silence you could have cut with a scythe; but one night, after her glass of sweet wine, aunt condescended to imply that if she were to fall on her back she wouldn’t be able to get up again. At which elemental observation, thirty-two members of the family swore they would come to her aid; she responded with a weary glance and two words: “Be useless.” Days later, my eldest brother called me into the kitchen one night and showed me a cockroach which had fallen on its back under the sink. Without saying a word, we stood and watched its long and useless struggle to right itself, while other cockroaches, prevailing over the intimidation of the light, traveled across the floor and passed by brushing against the one who was lying there on its back waving its legs. We went to bed in a distinctly melancholy mood that night, and for one reason or another no one resumed the questioning; we limited ourselves now to alleviating her fear as much as possible, escorting her everywhere, offering her our arms and buying her dozens of pairs of shoes with gripper soles, and other stabilizing devices. That way life went on, and was not worse than any other life.

  AUNT, EXPLAINED OR NOT

  Whether or not anyone cares, my four first cousins are addicted to philosophy. They read books, discuss among themselves, and are much admired, from a distance, by the rest of the family, faithful as we are to the principle of not meddling with the predilections of others, indeed favoring and forwarding them insomuch as possible. These boys, who deserve my great respect, have more than once set themselves the problem of my aunt’s fearfulness, arriving at conclusions, obscure perhaps, but worth looking at. As usual under such circumstances, my aunt was the one least interested in these deliberations, but dating from that epoch, the family’s deference was even more marked. We have accompanied aunt for years now on her wobbly expeditions from the living room to the front patio, from the bedroom to the bath, from the kitchen to the pantry. It never seemed extraordinary to us that she would sleep on her side, and that during the night she would preserve the most absolute immobility, on her right side on even days, the odd ones on her left. In the dining-room and patio chairs, aunt would sit very erect; not for anything would she ever accept the comfort of a rocker or a Morris chair. The night Sputnik went up, the family stretched out on the patio tiles to observe the satellite, but aunt remained seated, and the next day had an incredibly stiff neck. We were convinced slowly, but by now we’re resigned. Our first cousins are a great help to us, for they allude to the question with knowing glances and say things like “She’s right.” But why? We do not know, and they don’t care to explain it to us. As far as I’m concerned, for example, to be on one’s back seems extremely comfortable. The whole body is resting on the mattress or on the tiles in the patio, you feel your heels, the calves of your legs, your thighs, the buttocks, the small of the back, the shoulder blades, the a
rms, and the nape of the neck, which among them share the weight of the body and spread it out, so to speak, against the floor, they come so close and so naturally to that surface, that it draws us down ferociously and seems to want to gobble us up. It’s curious that for me to be flat on my back turns out to be the position most natural for me, and at times I’m afraid that aunt’s a little horrified by that. I find it perfect, and believe that, deep down, it is the most comfortable. Yes, I really said that: deep down, really deep down, on your back. So much so that I’m a bit afraid, a thing I can’t manage to explain. How I would like so very much to be like her, and how I can’t.

  THE TIGER LODGERS

  Long before bringing our idea to the level of actual practice, we knew that the lodging of tigers presented a double problem, sentimental and moral. The first aspect is not so much related to the lodging as to the tiger himself, insomuch as it is not particularly agreeable for these felines to be lodged and they summon all their energies, which are enormous, to resist being lodged. Is it fitting under those circumstances to defy the idiosyncrasy of the above-mentioned animals? But this question leads us directly to the moral level where any act can be the cause, or the effect, splendid or ignominious. At night, in our little house in Humboldt Street, we meditated over our bowls of rice and milk, forgetting to sprinkle the cinnamon and sugar on them. We were not really sure of our ability to lodge a tiger, and it was depressing.

  It was decided finally that we would lodge just one for the sole purpose of seeing the mechanism at work in all its complexity; we could always evaluate the results later. I shall not speak here of the problem of coming by the first tiger: a delicate and troublesome job, a race past consulates, drugstores, a complex chain of tickets, airmail letters, and work with the dictionary. One night my cousins came back covered with tincture of iodine: success. We drank so much chianti that my younger sister ended up having to clear the table with a rake. We were much younger in those days. Now that the experiment has yielded known results, I can supply the details of the lodging. The most difficult perhaps would be to describe everything related to the environment, since it requires a room with a minimum of furniture, a thing rather difficult to find in Humboldt Street. The layout is arranged in the center: two crossed planks, a complex of flexible withies, and several earthenware bowls filled with milk and water. To lodge a tiger is really not too difficult; the operation can miscarry, however, and you’ve got everything to do over again. The real difficulty begins when, already lodged, the tiger recovers his liberty and chooses—in one of the many manners possible—to exercise it. At that stage, known as the intermediate stage, my family’s reactions are pretty basic; everything depends on how my sisters behave, on the smartness with which my father manages to get the tiger lodged again, utilizing the natural propensities of the tiger to the maximum. The slightest mistake would be a catastrophe, the fuses burned out, the milk on the floor, the horror of those phosphorescent eyes shining through the utter darkness, warm spurts with every thud of the paw; I resist imagining what would follow since, up till now, we’ve managed to lodge a tiger without dangerous consequences. The layout, as well as the varying duties all of us must perforce perform, from the tiger down to my second cousins, are seemingly efficient and articulate harmoniously. The fact of lodging a tiger is not in itself important to us, rather that the ceremony be completed to the very end without a mistake. Either the tiger agrees to be lodged, or must be lodged in such a way that its acceptance or refusal is of no consequence. At these moments which one is tempted to call crucial—perhaps because of the two planks, perhaps because it’s a mere commonplace expression—the family feels itself possessed by an extraordinary exaltation; my mother does not hide her tears, and my first cousins knit and unknit their fingers convulsively. Lodging a tiger has something of the total encounter, lining oneself up against an absolute; the balance depends upon so little and we pay so high a price, that these brief moments which follow the lodging and which confirm its perfection sweep us away from ourselves, annihilating both tigerness and humanity in a single motionless movement which is a dizziness, respite, and arrival. There’s no tiger, no family, no lodging. Impossible to know what there is: a trembling that is not of this flesh, a centered time, a column of contact. And later we all go out to the covered patio, and our aunts bring out the soup as though something were singing or as if we were all at a baptism.

  OUR DEMEANOR AT WAKES

  We don’t go for the anisette, we don’t even go because we’re expected to. You’ll have guessed our reason already we go because we cannot stand the craftier forms of hypocrisy. My oldest second cousin takes it upon herself to ascertain the nature of the bereavement, and if it is genuine, if the weeping is genuine because to weep is the only thing left to men and women to do between the odors of lilies and coffee, then we stay at home and escort them from afar. At the most, my mother drops in for a few minutes to represent the family; we don’t like to superimpose our strange life upon this dialogue with shadow, that would be insolent. But if my cousin’s leisurely investigation discloses the merest suspicion that they’ve set up the machinery of hypocrisy in a covered patio or in the living room, then the family gets into its best duds, waits until the wake is already under way, and goes to present itself, a few at a time, gradually but implacably.

  In the barrio Pacífico, affairs are generally held in a patio with flowerpots and radio music. For these occasions, the neighbors agree to turn off their radios and the only things left are the pots of jasmine and the relatives, alternating along the walls. We arrive separately or in pairs, we greet the relatives of the deceased, you can always tell who they are—they begin to cry almost as soon as anyone walks in the door—and go to pay our last respects to the dear departed, convoyed along by some close relative. One or two hours later, the whole family is in the bereaved house, but although the neighbors know us well, we act as if each of us had come on his own account and we hardly speak among ourselves. Our acts are governed by a precise method by which to select conversational partners with whom one chats in the kitchen, under the orange tree, in the bedrooms, in the hallway, and every once in a while one goes out for a smoke in the patio or into the street, or takes a stroll around the block to air political opinions or talk sports. We don’t spend too much time sounding out the feelings of the closest relatives, small tumblers of cane liquor, sweet mate, and the cigarettes are the bridge to confidences; before midnight arrives we are sure we can move remorselessly. Generally, my younger sister is in charge of the opening skirmish; cleverly placing herself at the foot of the coffin, she covers her eyes with a violet handkerchief and begins to cry, silently at first, but to that incredible point where the handkerchief is sopping wet, then with hiccups and gasping, and finally she sets out upon a terrible attack of wailing which obliges the neighborhood ladies to carry her to the bed prepared for such emergencies where they give her orange water to sniff and console her, meanwhile other ladies from the neighborhood look after the nearby relatives infected by the crisis. For a while there’s a pile-up of folk in the doorway of the room where the loved one lies in state, whispered questions and answers, the neighbors shrugging their shoulders. Exhausted by a force for which they themselves have had to go all out, the relatives diminish their demonstrations of grief, and just at that moment my three girl cousins set off into a weeping without affectation, no loud cries, but so touchingly that the relatives and the neighbors feel envious, they realize that they can’t just sit there resting while strangers from the next block are grieving in such a fashion, again they rise to the general lament, again space must be found on beds, fanning old ladies, loosening belts on convulsed little old men. Usually my brothers and I wait for this moment to make our entrance into the viewing room and we place ourselves together about the coffin. Strange as it may seem we really are grief-stricken; we can never listen to our sisters cry but that an infinite dismay fills our breasts and we remember things from childhood, some fields near the Villa Albertina, a
tram that cheeped taking the curve at the calle General Rodriguez in Ban-field, things like that, always very sad ones. We need only to see the deceased’s crossed hands for a flood of tears to demolish us all at once, compelling us to cover our abashed faces, and we are five men who really cry at wakes, while the relatives desperately gather the breath to match us, feeling that, at whatever cost, they have to make it evident that it’s their wake, that only they have the right to cry like that in this house. But there are few of them and they’re faking (we know that from my oldest second cousin, and it lends us strength). Hiccups and fainting fits accumulate in vain, the closest neighbors back them up with their consolation and considered meditations, it’s useless, carrying or leading them off to rest and recuperate so they can throw themselves renewed back into the struggle. Now my father and elder uncle spell us, there’s something that commands respect in the grief of these old men who’ve come from Humboldt Street, five blocks away if you count from the corner, to keep vigil on the one who has passed away. The more coherent neighbors begin to lose their footing, they finally let the relatives drop and go to the kitchen to drink grappa and comment on the state of affairs; some of the relatives, debilitated by an hour and a half of sustained weeping, are sleeping very loudly. We relieve one another in turns, without giving the impression, however, of anything prearranged; before six in the morning we are the acknowledged masters of the wake, the majority of the neighbors have gone back to their houses to sleep, the relations are lying around in different postures and degrees of bloatedness, dawn falls upon the patio. At that hour my aunts are organizing strong refreshments in the kitchen, we drink boiling coffee, we beam at one another passing in the entryway or the bedrooms; we’re a bit like ants, going and coming, rubbing antennae as we pass. When the hearse arrives the seating arrangements have already been decided, my sisters lead the relatives to take final leave of the deceased before the closing of the coffin, support them and comfort them, while my girl cousins and my brothers push forward to displace them, cutting short the final farewell, and remain alone with the corpse. Exhausted, wandering around displaced, understanding vaguely but incapable of reacting, the relatives let themselves be led and dragged, they drink anything brought to their lips and answer the loving solicitude of my sisters and cousins with vague and inconsistent protests. When the time has come to leave and the house is full of relations and friends, an invisible organization, but with no loopholes, decides every movement, the funeral director respects my father’s instructions, the removal of the coffin is accomplished according to the suggestions of my elder uncle. At one point or another, relatives arriving at the last moment start a querulous and disorderly attempt to regain possession; the neighbors, convinced that everything is proceeding apace, look at them scandalized and make them be quiet. My parents and my uncles install themselves in the first car, my brothers get into the second, and my girl cousins condescend to take one of the closer relatives in the third, in which they settle themselves wrapped in great black or purple shawls. The rest get into whatever car they can, and there are relatives who find themselves obliged to call a taxi. And if some of them, revived by the morning air and the long ride, plot a reconquest at the cemetery, they’re in for bitter disillusion. The coffin has barely arrived at the cemetery gates when my brothers make a circle around the orator picked by the family or friends of the deceased, easily recognizable by his long, sad, funereal, and prepared face and the little roll of paper bulging from his jacket pocket. Reaching out their hands and grabbing him, they soak his lapels with their tears, they clap his shoulders softly with a sound like tapioca pudding, and the orator cannot prevent my youngest uncle from mounting the platform where he opens the speeches with an oration that is the very soul of truth and discretion. It lasts three minutes, it refers solely to the deceased, it marks the limits of his virtues and notes his defects, and there is humanity in every word he says; he is deeply moved, and at times it is difficult for him to quit. He has hardly stepped down when my oldest brother takes to the platform and launches a panegyric on behalf of the neighborhood; meanwhile the neighbor designated to this task tries to get through a crowd of my sisters and cousins who weep buckets and hang onto his vest. An affable but imperious gesture of my father’s mobilizes the funeral-parlor personnel; they set the catafalque softly in motion, and the official orators are still standing at the foot of the platform, mashing their speeches in their wet hands. Normally we don’t bother to conduct the deceased to the vault or sepulcher, but usually make a half turn and exit all together, commenting on the incidents during the wake. We watch from a distance the relatives running desperately to grab hold of one of the ropes holding the coffin and fighting with the neighbors who have meanwhile taken possession of the ropes and prefer to carry it themselves rather than let the relatives carry it.