Final Exam

by Julio Cortázar

  Andrés was listening and looking at Clara. Without knowing why, he found himself thinking of Curzio Malaparte. “Everyone knows how egoistic the dead are. There’s no one but them in the world. No one else counts. They are colossi— envious: they forgive the living everything except being alive …” He wondered if the dead might be arguing somewhere the way Juan and the chronicler were—if among them there might be one who’d look, as he was looking, at Clara (and Stella was looking at him, amused but not knowing why). For an instant, the position each of them was sitting in around the table with its tablecloth and food, the reflection from a knife flashing in his eyes—all of it seemed inconceivable. Thinking something, knowing it, but not taking the step to fix it with some mental reference. They talked and talked: bread and butter, Clara, Stella, the fog, the night; you know that what we have here is a borrowed culture, the groups coming in, the strange creaking of the door, the acid smell of grapefruit juice. They forgive the living everything except being alive. He took a deep breath, to put the brakes on an up-and-down pressure that suddenly anguished him. If it were possible …

  But he never finished the idea (which had no basis and could be stopped just like that, halfway: dissolved in nothingness, in that black thing without blackness inside, that sensation of an interior without space) and he continued to look at Clara, trying to find relief in her immobile face as she listened to the dialogue of her friends.

  “I concede the point—we don’t have a great deal to say,” admitted Juan, “because in reality we Argentines spend our time avoiding committing ourselves individually to the human adventure. We’re part of our mud and our river—those elements devoid of history, or whose history belongs to others. We’re tired beforehand of not having anything true that would whip us up into a frenzy. We’re so free, we live tied down only so slightly by a past or future. It’s an ineffable quality that would seem our most authentic way of being. Think of a book making the rounds in 1930: the Complete Works of Hipólito Yrigoyen. You open it up, and all the pages are blank. That also explains why our stationery stores are more inviting than our bookstores.”

  “This guy cranks up his machine, and he’s a happy man,” said the chronicler, offended. “Look here, if it’s true we don’t have much to say, we should at least shut up, or, what would be more fitting for people like us,

  victims of Ardolafath, the demon of language, the powerful one—

  commit the act of pure creation, the absolute ex nihilo: A bit the way Buenos Aires rises up between the two plains of water and grass.”

  “You’re wrong. There is no such thing as pure creation without a morality of creation,” said Juan. “You can’t write without personal dignity. You can be contemptible in your personal life, but passing from that contemptible state to a work of art—the chronicle of that contemptible state you’re in—requires morality, by that I mean you’re safe from compromises and transactions, the Argentine Society of Writers, and the photo section of the Sunday paper. You’ve got to have both feet on the ground even if you’re a son of a bitch. And now lend me your ear for a little while longer. Around here, what you call pure creation—which might be a great way of getting around determinism and creating something, even if you weren’t given the bricks to do it—still seems to me, even today, a disgusting escapism. I myself, me first, chronicler. I write poems, and I know why I write them. I’m a traitor. And if I talk about furies and widowhood in my poems, it’s that I’m seeing myself with exploded eyes, I’m following myself down the street, and I spit on my shadow so others will realize what kind of a swine I am.”

  “You’re always blaming yourself,” said Stella, distressed. “Let’s eat first, and above all don’t get your bile flowing. We all have a bad image of ourselves because in fact we’re really better than lots of people.”

  “Surprising,” said the chronicler, staring at her in praise.

  Clara shrugged her shoulders and bit into the juicy meat. She was used to Juan, his vocabulary, his boxes of puzzles. Next to her, on the chair, the bag containing the cauliflower rustled every time the floor shook. Through one of the windows it was possible to see the fog over Bouchard. For a while it would thicken, and then suddenly rise as if it were going to lift; the street and the cars became visible. Clara imagined herself on the street, walking through the fog. The words around her became distant and higher pitched, as if she were hearing them over the telephone. She thought, without fear, almost without expectation, about the examination. Andrés was looking at her, slowly breaking into a smile. Oh, she’d been hard on him a little while before. To defend Juan, she always had to hurt others. Abel, Andrés. Everything being said was absurd, innocent: college students having an intellectual discussion, Aristotle’s idea of pleasant conversation: eutrapely—just innocent fun.

  “The word eutrapely smells of a heliotrope,” she said to Andrés in a low voice. “It’s a shame, don’t you think, that we have to live in such a metaphysical age? Literarily speaking, of course.”

  “Of course I don’t understand you.”

  “Me neither,” said a wide-eyed Stella.

  How dense they are. “Listen: these guys—and just look at the way they wear themselves out—they base their arguments on whether man as man, man as flesh and destiny, is embodied in writing. You’re completely Frenchified, as you see, but I’m telling you that Malraux is metaphysics: Behind the 170 or so pounds each of you weighs is a destiny, and your destiny is your reason for being, or the other way around. Your reason for being leads you back to your self like a root or a point of departure, and that’s metaphysics.”

  “Oh Clarita,” said Juan, sadly caressing her cheek.

  “On the other hand, if eutrapely smells of a heliotrope: that’s concrete, a problem of the sort Mallarmé and his age liked. Just look how we always end up referring to Mallarmé. But in this case it’s appropriate.

  I would prefer to hear them,

  let’s say hear us, talking about something more concrete and not so metaphysical—as the elucidation of why the word eutrapely puts a heliotrope in my nose. Philology, analogy, semantics, symbolism, now these are beautiful things! How well we would live with them! But no, Juan has to save himself from elegance like that, he has to find in himself a reason for being. That’s what he calls making a work, or the basis of a work, concrete. I call it bringing a lighted match to the fuse of a skyrocket and up she goes, whizz”—Clara dixit.

  “Astounding,” conceded the chronicler. “What’s already gone by during this century can just retire. Eutrapely. Shit!”

  “Coffee,” said Andrés. “No, sweetheart, I don’t want flan with whipped cream on it. No, dearest.”

  “I’ll have flan with whipped cream on it,” said Stella.

  Abel, thought Clara, fatigued. Poor Abelito. He would have turned to stone if he’d heard me perorating like that. And tomorrow … No, Andrés, it’s too late for you to be looking at me that way. It’s always too late, Andrés. Always. The waiter dropped a glass, and the noise made Stella laugh. Then the waiter explained to her that the glass had slipped, and Stella stopped laughing to show she was very interested in the explanation.

  “Occupational hazards,” said the waiter, intelligently kicking the chunks of glass towards the wall. “Every day three or four get broken. The boss gets pissed off, but what can you do? It’s just part of the job.”

  “And then there’s the question of helping the guy who makes the glasses turn a profit,” said Stella.

  “Eat your flan,” ordered Clara, still looking at Andrés out of the corner of her eye. His eyes he’d closed. He seemed to be awaiting either an electric shock or a miracle. The horrible screeching of a newsboy rattled all of them. The kid ran in, threaded his way around the tables, and shouted the name of his paper, though in a lower voice. The chronicler watched him leave and made a gesture of fatigue. “I write it, and he sells it. You all read it, and the trinity becomes complete—the paper Juggernaut, and all. Okay, let’s go.”

  It�
��s so absurd to talk just for the sake of talking, thought Juan as they walked out, listening to oneself talk and knowing that you’re never very right. That’s another of our cowardly traits, perhaps the worst. Those of us around here who are worth something aren’t sure of anything by now. You’ve got to be an animal to have convictions.

  “Let’s walk down Leandro Alem to Plaza de Mayo,” said Stella. “I want to see what’s going on.”

  “If we can actually see anything,” complained the chronicler, sniffing the fog.

  They passed by the Mail and Telecommunications building, feeling sticky, not wanting to talk. A sudden clamor from the Amusement Park reached them. The noise became louder, shriller, until it faded into something like a bland fall, a loss.

  “Something’s down for the count,” said the chronicler. “Juancito, boxers are so happy, they sock each other around so enthusiastically, they’re the music of life.”

  “Lysippos’ statue of the athlete is singing,” said Juan. “But no one’s singing around here tonight. Listen to this, chronicler: a present from me to you, still fresh and uncorrected. I think it will be called ‘Fauna and Flora of the River.’”

  This river leaves the sky and settles in in order to last,

  pulling the sheets up to its neck, and sleeping

  right in front of us who come and go.

  The river of silver is this thing that by day

  soaks us with wind and gelatin; and it is

  the renunciation of the east, because the world

  ends with the lanterns of the Costanera.

  Don’t argue the point closer to us, read these things

  in cafés preferentially; a tune of coins,

  where you take refuge from the outside, from the next workday,

  harassed by dreams, by the river’s spittle.

  Almost nothing’s left; yes, shameful love

  entering mailboxes to weep or walking

  alone on street corners (but being seen just the same)

  putting away his sweet objects, his photos and watch chains

  and hankies

  storing them in the region of shame,

  the zone of the pocket, where a small night whispers

  amid bits of fuzz and small change.

  For some people everything is the same, but I

  don’t like Rácing, I don’t like

  aspirin, I resent

  the return of days, I tear myself apart in hopes,

  I curse sometimes, and people say to me

  what’s the problem, friend?

  North wind, damn it.

  “I like it,” Andres said, simply

  (because they’d all fallen silent, surrounding Juan, whose eyes where shining and who suddenly ran the back of his hand over his face and turned around so they wouldn’t see him).

  When they crossed the parking lot of the Automobile Club, they saw all the papers. A gust of wind lofted them over the parked cars, where they condensed in a filthy copy of a snowstorm, draping themselves over door handles, slipping over the soaped roofs of Chevrolets and Pontiacs. The entire lot was covered with pieces of newsprint, clumps of cardboard, marbleized paper, envelopes, cigarette packs torn into five or ten pieces, onionskin paper, old carbon copies, rough drafts. The gust of wind had bunched them together between cars, on sidewalks, in the gutters.

  Juan was walking ahead. When he saw the sea of dirty paper he wanted to make a detour, to go down to the market, and continue from there. The others were commenting

  they’d begun talking in lower voices

  the kind that lingers at the end of a sonata or a thunderclap;

  and Juan was walking ahead, squeezing the cauliflower, wondering how they were going to pass the hours left before the examination. The examination seemed a fixed boundary to him, a buoy towards which he could advance. Fixed boundaries, examinations are good things. Above all, a fixed boundary is like a pencil mark on a ruler: it delineates what comes before, marks a distance

  here a time a space of time an impulse that at a certain moment stops

  like resetting a watch by calculating it will stop at

  7:15

  and at 7:10 the watch begins to tick slowly,

  getting lazy,

  drifting on until

  7:18 most painfully

  a heartbeat a heartbeat

  nothing more than a heartbeat

  a thing shrunken become cold without reason faceup;

  schedule, toothpick; minute hand, toothpick; second hand, toothpick.

  From Bartolomé Mitre (there were no more papers), they saw the violent light of Plaza de Mayo. Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, grew in the air of fog, appearing in shreds with lights on its balconies and doors. A reception, thought Juan. Or a change of cabinet. But that last possibility was absurd, they wouldn’t turn on extra lights for a little thing like that. Probably the illumination of Plaza de Mayo was reflecting onto the nearby buildings. From far off came metallic-sounding music— that abjection of music, even if it’s bad, when broadcast from rows of loudspeakers—the degradation of something beautiful. Antinous tied to a garbage truck, or a lark in a shoe. Or a lark in a shoe, repeated Juan.

  Clara came up alongside him and peered at him over his eyes. “Give me the package if you’re getting tired.” “No, I want to carry it myself.” “Suit yourself.” “I have no idea why we’re going to Plaza de Mayo.” “Stella always liked it,” said Clara. “It looks as though they’re still going on with the ceremonies.”

  The chronicler joined them. He walked with his hands in his trouser pockets, and since he hadn’t unbuttoned his jacket it bulged out on both sides like two fins.

  “All of Buenos Aires is coming to see the bone,” he said. “Last night, a train from Tucumán pulled in with 1,500 workers—they’re having a dance in front of Town Hall. Hey, look! They’re rerouting traffic at the corner. We’re going to be in incredible heat.”

  They walked up the slope on the side of the government offices. From above (now they were all in line, and no one was talking), they saw people flow toward the other side of the plaza, moving along Rivadavia and Yrigoyen. But at the center, the multitude was almost immobile, swaying barely back and forth in enormous waves that could only be seen from a distance.

  “They constructed the Sanctuary using the pyramid as one of its supports,” explained the chronicler. “The rest is nothing but burlap.”

  “You were there?” asked Juan.

  “In my professional capacity,” said the chronicler. “I wrote a terrific article.”

  “Ergo, it was you who sanctified the pilgrimage. Don’t look at me that way, because it’s the truth. They put up the canvas, and your newspaper brings in the people, at twenty centavos per jerk.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Andrés, very seriously. “People don’t come only because of the paper. No publicity campaign can explain certain furors and enthusiasms. I’ve been told the rituals in the square are spontaneous. Every so often new ones are invented.”

  “Rituals aren’t invented,” said the chronicler. “They’re either remembered or discovered. They’ve been there for all time.”

  “Let’s go into the plaza,” said Stella. “We can’t see anything here.”

  Behind them a siren howled, obliging them to turn around. Two ambulances were racing south along Alem followed by motorcycles, behind which came a third ambulance.

  They crossed the plaza under the balconies of the Government Building. There the fog gave way to the heat of lights and people—the other, dark fog at street level. Thousands of men and women, all dressed alike in blue, tobacco, mouse-gray, and sometimes dark green moleskin. The ground had been muddy ever since they’d removed the wide sidewalks in order to clear the plaza, although nothing was helped by doing that, the chronicler declared, and he furiously stamped the ground. They had to make their way carefully, from time to time grabbing the elbow or shoulder of someone on a firmer piece of that shapeless field, where the only thing that loo
ked solid was the Pyramid.

  Andrés saw Clara stumble and caught her by the arm. Juan had raised the package containing the cauliflower to his chest to protect it. They moved forward that way a few yards, trying to get a better view of the Sanctuary.

  “You should be in bed, Clara, strengthening yourself for tomorrow,” said Andrés.

  “I wouldn’t be able to sleep,” she said. “It’s better to be tired for exams, your phosphorescence is greater. Maybe they’ll ask me about crowd psychology; I’ll tell them about this, and that will be that.”

  “Well, that’s certainly something to tell them about,” said Andrés, forcing his way through so she could get a good view. But getting a good view was a matter of elbows and shoves and watch your manners, you’d think you didn’t know how to walk down a street properly,

  tell your little brother not to get so far ahead, forgodssake, the kid is really the living end!

  Stop your shoving, sonny, you’re driving me nuts! in a confusing proliferation of bodies and necks with handkerchiefs tied around them, breaking like waves against a barrier of silent men who seemed to be waiting for something. Jammed up against Andrés, Clara could peer through a crack between two black jackets and stare into the magic circle,

  it was a circle, the men had their arms locked and were surrounding the woman dressed in white. She was wearing a tunic somewhere between a schoolteacher’s apron and something from an allegory about the homeland never trampled by any tyrant; her extremely blond hair was a mess, cascading down to her breasts. And at the center of it all, two or three lean men dressed in black, with reddish complexions—Clara saw they were acting as officiants, serving in the ceremony with movements like those in some ill-timed quadrille. She thought about Prilidiano Pueyrredón, about glazed pumpkin. She sniffed the soapy air, as if this would help her see better. One of the men in black went over to the woman and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “She is good,” he said. “She is very good.”

  “She is good,” the others repeated.