Cronopios and Famas (New Directions Classic)

by Julio Cortázar

  SCHOLAR WITH A HOLE

  IN HIS MEMORY

  Eminent scholar, Roman history in twenty-three volumes, sure candidate for Nobel prize, great enthusiasm in his country. Suddenly consternation: library creep and full-time hatchet man puts out scurrilous pamphlet denouncing omission of Caracalla. Relatively of little importance, but omission in any case. Stupefied admirers consult together Pax Romana which artist loses the world Varo return me my legions a man to all women and woman to all men (beware the Ides of March) money has no smell in this sign conquer. Incontrovertible evidence Caracalla missing, consternation, telephone disconnected, scholar cannot receive call from King Gustaf of Sweden, but that monarch is not even thinking of calling him, but rather another one who dials and dials the number in vain, cursing in a dead language.

  PLAN FOR A POEM

  Let Rome be the one that Faustina, let the wind sharpen the pencils of the seated scribe, or behind the hundred-year-old ivy let there appear written one morning this convincing sentence: there is no hundred-year-old ivy, botany is a science, to hell with the inventors of alleged images. And Marat in his bathtub.

  I see as well the persecution of a cricket by a silver salver, with Lady Delia who brings her hand forward softly very like a noun and when it is about to trap the cricket it’s in the salt (then they cross the Red Sea dry shod and Pharaoh damns them from the riverbank), or leaps up toward the delicate mechanism which extracts from the wheat flower the dry hand of toast. Lady Delia, Lady Delia, let that cricket go to wander through the flatware. One day he will sing with such terrible vengeance that your pendulum clocks will be strung up in their standing coffins, or the girl for the laundry will bring to light a living monogram which will run through the house repeating its initials like a tambourine player. Lady Delia, the guests are growing impatient because it’s cold. And Marat in his bathtub.

  Finally let it be Buenos Aires on a day sun up underway whirr like an arrow, with rags drying in the sun and every radio on the block blasting at the same time the price quotations on the free exchange for sunflowers. For a supernatural sunflower, the price in Liniers was eighty-eight pesos, and the sunflower made disgraceful statements to your Esso reporter, a little out of being tired after the recount of its seeds, in part because its ultimate fate did not figure in the ticket sale. In the afternoon there will be a concentration of labor forces in the plaza de Mayo. The forces will advance by different streets until they are counterpoised on the pyramid and it will be seen that they are laboring thanks to a system of reflexes installed by the municipality. No one doubts that the demonstrations will be acted out with the maximum brilliance, what has been provoked like is to suppose an extraordinary anticipation, the balconies will be packed. His Holiness the Cardinal will go, along with the doves, the imprisoned politicians, trolley conductors, watchmakers, the bribes, and the fat ladies. And Marat in his bathtub.

  THE PRISONER

  PRISONER. I’m not asking for much. A piece of bread, a meat pie, a tiny light to hold between thumb and middle finger. All I’d want would be a box of matches so as to hear the rustling of imprisoned ants that walk about inside. Even if it were empty; I’m sure that if I held it against my ear, I’d hear the rustling.

  GUARD. Talking is not permitted except in French or Italian.

  PRISONER. A pity. Just the languages I left at home the night I was arrested. They didn’t leave me time to put them on. Barely got into my undershorts, and the official with the flushed face started to kick me to make me hurry up. They dragged me here, and the French and the Italian were left behind, dumped into some comer. I imagine they’ll get hungry. Do you think someone from the government will give them something to eat?

  GUARD. Don’t know a thing.

  PRISONER. Same as with insects, words go and come, back and forth, getting paler and more exhausted all the time. First the conjunctions will die, their bodies are the weakest and the most easily replaceable.

  GUARD. The conjunctions.

  PRISONER. Then the adverbs and adjectives. The death of the adjectives is going to be very sad; like lights flickering out. Everyone knows that adjectives are the radiance of language.

  GUARD. Death to the adjectives!

  PRISONER. The verbs’ll hold out to the end. And the nouns. Ah, they’re not so easy. It’s not just anybody can knock off a noun, figure it out. Bread. Who’s going to kill that? And Pine. The axe hasn’t been made can chop that down, no silence that’ll hush its branches filled with small birds.

  GUARD. Your imagination’s feverish (consults a manual). You’ve got verbal mania, delirious association, and paralogism. Probably para-amnesia and fallacy of the generalities.

  PRISONER. And am hungry. Very hungry.

  GUARD. We’ll kill you before long, then your hunger will pass.

  PRISONER. I’ll eat myself in delicate nibbles, a bit at a time.

  GUARD. Of course you could always save yourself if you confess who has the plans to Operation H.

  PRISONER. Of course I could always save myself if I confess who has the plans to Operation H.

  GUARD. But …

  PRISONER. Right.

  CAMEL DECLARED UNDESIRABLE

  They are accepting all petitions for entry across the frontier but Guk, camel, unexpectedly declared undesirable. Guk applies to the Central Commissariat of Police, they tell him nothing they can do, go back to the oasis, declared an undesirable, useless to fill out petition. Guk’s sadness, his return to the land of his birth, and the camels of his family and his friends gather around him, and how did it go with you? and it’s impossible, why you, exactly? Then a delegation to the Minister of Transport to present appeal in Guk’s behalf, career functionaries highly scandalized: something on this order never been seen, you camels will return immediately to the oasis, a brief will be drawn up.

  Back at the oasis, Guk grazes one day, grazes another day. All the camels have passed the frontier, Guk alone still waits. This way summer passes, then autumn. Later Guk goes back to the city, he stops in an empty plaza. Much photographed by tourists according to newspaper interviews. Vague prestige for Guk in the plaza. Seizing the advantage he seeks to leave, at the gate everything changes: declared an undesirable. Guk’s head droops, he takes up the sparse wisps of hay around the plaza. One day they call him on the loudspeaker and he comes happily into the prefecture. There he is declared undesirable. Guk returns to the oasis and lies down. He eats a little grass and later lays his muzzle on the sand. He is closing his eyes, meanwhile the sun is setting. From his nose there issues a bubble which lasts a second longer than he.

  DISCOURSE OF THE BEAR

  I’m the bear in the pipes of the house, I climb through the pipes in the hours of silence, the hot-water pipes, the radiator pipes, the air-conditioning ducts. I go through the pipes from apartment to apartment and I am the bear who goes through the pipes.

  I think that they like me because it’s my hair keeps the conduits clean, I run unceasingly through the tubes and nothing pleases me more than slipping through the pipes, running from floor to floor. Once in a while I stick my paw out through a faucet and the girl on the third floor screams that she’s scalded herself, or I growl at oven height on the second, and Wilhelmina the cook complains that the chimney is drawing badly. At night I go quietly and it’s when I’m moving most quickly that I raise myself to the roof by the chimney to see if the moon is dancing up there, and I let myself slide down like the wind to the boilers in the cellar. And in summer I swim at night in the cistern, prickled all over with stars, I wash my face first with one paw then with the other, finally with both together, and that gives me a great joy.

  Then I slide back down through the pipes of the house, growling happily, and the married couples stir in their beds and deplore the quality of the installation of the pipes. Some even put on the light and write a note to themselves to be sure to remember to complain when they see the superintendent. I look for the tap that’s always running in some apartment and I stick my nose out an
d look into the darkness of rooms where those beings who cannot walk through the pipes live, and I’m always a little sorry for them, heavy beings, big ones, to hear how they snore and dream aloud and are so very much alone. When they wash their faces in the morning, I caress their cheeks and lick their noses and I leave, somewhat sure of having done some good.

  PORTRAIT OF THE CASSOWARY

  The first thing the cassowary does is to stare at one with a suspicious contempt. He restricts himself to looking without moving, staring in such a hard and continuous way that it’s almost as though he were inventing us, as if by dint of terrifying strength he would extract us from the nothingness which is the cassowaries’ world and set us down before him, in the inexplicable act of standing there looking at him.

  From this double contemplation which may be single and perhaps basically no one, we are born, the cassowary and I, we settle down, we learn to disacknowledge one another. I don’t know if the cassowary cuts me out and pastes me into its simple world; for my part I can only describe him, devote to his presence a chapter of likes and dislikes. Above all else, dislikes, because the cassowary is unlikable in the extreme and repulsive. Imagine an ostrich with a tea cosy of horn on his head, a bicycle smashed between two automobiles and which is piled up on itself, a decal which has taken poorly in which a dirty violet and a sort of crackling predominate.

  Now the cassowary takes a step forward and adopts a somewhat drier air; he is like a pair of spectacles surmounting an infinite pedantry. He lives in Australia, the cassowary; he is cowardly and fearsome at the same time; the guards enter his cage equipped with high leather boots and a flame thrower. When the cassowary stops his terrified running around the pan of bran they’ve put out for him and comes leaping at the keeper with great camel strides, there is no other recourse than to use the flame thrower. Then you see this: the river of fire envelops him and the cassowary, all his plumage ablaze, advances his last few steps bursting forth in an abominable screech. But his horn does not burn: the dry, scaly material which is his pride and his disdain goes into a cold melding, it catches fire with a prodigious blue, moving to a scarlet which resembles an excoriated fist, and finally congeals into the most transparent green, into an emerald, stone of shadow and of hope. The cassowary defoliates, a swift cloud of ash, and the keeper runs over greedily to possess the recently made gem. The zoo director always avails himself of this moment to institute proceedings against the keeper for the mistreatment of animals, and to dismiss him.

  What more can we say of the cassowary, after this double misfortune?

  FLATTENING THE DROPS

  I don’t know, look, it’s terrible how it rains. It rains all the time, thick and grey outside, against the balcony here with big, hard, clabbering drops that go plaf and smash themselves like slaps, slop, one after the other, it’s tedious. At the moment there’s a little drop appears high on the window frame, and it stays there shivering against the sky which splits it into a thousand smothered glitterings, it goes on growing and totters, it’s going to fall now, no it doesn’t fall yet. It’s hanging on by its nails, it doesn’t want to fall and you can see that it’s gripping hanging by its teeth meanwhile its belly is swelling it’s a big drop already, what a fat one and suddenly whup, there it goes, plaf, effaced, nothing, a wetness on the marble.

  But there are those that surrender and suicide immediately, they emerge on the window frame and hurl themselves down from there, it seems I can see the quaver of the leap, their little legs giving way and the cry that intoxicates them in that nothingness of falling and annihilation. Sad drops, rounded innocent drops. Goodbye drops. Goodbye.

  STORY WITH NO MORAL

  A man sold cries and words, and he got along all right although he was always running into people who argued about his prices and demanded discounts. The man almost always gave in, and that way he was able to sell a lot of cries to street vendors, a few sighs which ladies on annuities usually bought, and words for fence posters, wall placards, slogans, letterheads, business cards, and used jokes.

  The man realized finally that the hour had come and he requested an audience with the dictator of the country, who resembled all his colleagues and received him surrounded by generals, secretaries, and cups of coffee.

  “I’ve come to sell you your last words,” the man said. “They are very important because they’ll never come out right for you when the moment comes, and on the other hand it would be suitable for you to say them at the critical moment so as in retrospect to shape easily an historical destiny.”

  “Translate what he’s saying,” the dictator ordered his interpreter.

  “He’s speaking Argentine, your Excellency.”

  “In Argentine? And how come I don’t understand it?”

  “You have understood very well,” the man said. “I repeat, I’ve come to sell you your final words.”

  The dictator got to his feet as is the practice under these circumstances, and repressing a shiver ordered that they arrest the man and put him in the special dungeons which always exist in those administrative circles.

  “It’s a pity,” said the man while they were leading him off. “In reality you would want to say your final words when the moment arrives, and it would be necessary to say them so as to shape in retrospect, and easily, an historical destiny. What I was going to sell you was what you yourself would want to say, so there’s no cheating involved. But as you refuse to do business, you’re not going to learn these words beforehand and when the moment arrives when they want to spring out for the first time, naturally you won’t be able to say them.”

  “Why should I not be able to say them if they’re what I would have wanted to say anyway?” demanded the dictator, already standing in front of another cup of coffee.

  “Because fear will not let you,” the man said sadly. “Since there will be a noose around your neck, you’ll be in a shirt and shaking in terror and with the cold, your teeth chattering, and you won’t be able to articulate a word. The hangman and his assistants, among whom there will be several of these gentlemen, will wait a couple of minutes for decorum’s sake, but when your mouth brings forth only a moan interrupted by hiccups and appeals for a pardon (because that, sure, you’ll articulate without trouble), they will come to the end of their patience and they’ll hang you.”

  Highly indignant, the assistants and the generals in particular crowded around the dictator to beg that he have the fellow shot immediately. But the dictator, who was-pale-as-death, jostled all of them out the door and shut himself up with the man so as to buy his last words.

  The generals and the secretaries in the meantime, humiliated in the extreme by the treatment they had received, plotted an uprising, and the following morning seized the dictator while he was eating grapes in his favorite pavilion. So that he should not be able to say his last words, they shot him then and there, eating grapes. Afterwards they set about to find the man, who had disappeared from the presidential palace, and it didn’t take them long to find him since he was walking through the market selling routines to the comedians. Putting him in an armored car they carried him off to the fortress where they tortured him to make him reveal what the dictator’s last words would have been. As they could not wring a confession from him, they killed him by kicking him to death.

  The street vendors who had bought street cries went on crying them on streetcorners, and one of these cries served much later as the sacred writ and password for the counterrevolution which finished off the generals and the secretaries. Some of them, before their death, thought confusedly that really the whole thing had been a stupid chain of confusions, and that words and cries were things which, strictly speaking, could be sold but could not be bought, however absurd that would seem to be.

  And they kept on rotting, the whole lot of them, the dictator, the man, and the generals and the secretaries, but from time to time on streetcorners, the cries could be heard.

  THE LINES OF THE HAND

  From a letter thrown on the
table a line comes which runs across the pine plank and descends by one of the legs. Just watch, you see that the line continues across the parquet floor, climbs the wall and enters a reproduction of a Boucher painting, sketches the shoulder of a woman reclining on a divan, and finally gets out of the room via the roof and climbs down the chain of lightning rods to the street. Here it is difficult to follow it because of the transit system, but by close attention you can catch it climbing the wheel of a bus parked at the corner, which carries it as far as the docks. It gets off there down the seam on the shiny nylon stocking of the blondest passenger, enters the hostile territory of the customs sheds, leaps and squirms and zigzags its way to the largest dock, and there (but it’s difficult to see, only the rats follow it to clamber aboard) it climbs onto the ship with the engines rumbling, crosses the planks of the first-class deck, clears the major hatch with difficulty, and in a cabin where an unhappy man is drinking cognac and hears the parting whistle, it climbs the trouser seam, across the knitted vest, slips back to the elbow, and with a final push finds shelter in the palm of the right hand, which is just beginning to close around the butt of a revolver.