Final Exam

by Julio Cortázar

  “Also I was reading. It was the time that I first read Cocteau: I was nineteen and found my book in Opium. Now, I can recite it in French; but things like that didn’t matter to me then. For very little money, I bought the Spanish edition. You can’t imagine what that was like for me. The Iliad was my first jolt of the absolute; and bam, I sink into Cocteau. Cocteau was incredible! I spent weeks without combing my hair, being called an idiot by my sister and my mother, sitting in cafés for hours so I could be alone. Every one of Jean’s sentences was a knife-edge of glass slicing through your neck. Everything else looked like liquid shit next to that. Imagine, not two years earlier I’d been reading Elinor Glyn. And Pierre Loti had made me cry, I shit on his Japanese soul! And suddenly I’m reading that book, which is a summary of an entire life—but a life over there, see, where at the age of nineteen you’re no longer a Buenos Aires asshole. I dive in, and find myself with the drawings, they were there too. I discovered the plastic arts in those drawings—the last naiveté, ‘the most beautiful.’ Now I know they aren’t anything that astounding; but I spent night after night staring at those geometric insects, those sailors, that opium madness—staring at them and suffering, smoking my pipe, and studying and staring at them right in front of me. A crustacean madness.”

  “Holy shit,” said the chronicler.

  “That’s right. The formal severity of that book, how hard it was to understand—not only because of what it said, but because it alluded to things I hadn’t a clue about at the time—Rilke, Victor Hugo (in detail), Mallarmé, Proust, Potemkin, Charlie Chaplin, Blaise Cendrars—dimensions of seriousness were revealed to me without my realizing it! I began to fear writing gratuitously; I’d toss out the papers I’d scribbled on in Plaza San Martin or in La Perla del Once. The two friends I mentioned before, and that book, sent me straight to Mallarmé, I mean to Mallarmé’s attitude. The thing is, I was drying up for lack of confidence and a desire to touch the absolute. I began writing poems so hermetic, I don’t know more than four people who’ve been able to stand the first half-dozen. I began cultivating pure circumstance: to write only when I found an absolutely necessary reason. So I wrote an elegy when D’Annunzio died, I adored him wildly—but by contrast, see, because the same thing happened to him. Except that he wrote very little using a lot of words.”

  “And then?” asked the chronicler.

  But Andrés had closed his eyes and seemed to be sleeping.

  “Then I began to write well,” said Juan, rubbing a finger over his forehead. “I mean, well, he, like all of us, has the color of the moon. He’s here, but the light comes to him from so far off. Cocteau … Sometimes the name of my light is Novalis, sometimes it’s John Keats. My light is the forest of the Ardennes, a sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney, a suite by Purcell, a little painting by Braque.”

  “And me,” said Clara shamelessly stretching.

  “And you, my little mouse. Oh, chronicler, only provincials, very provincial at times, set up a poor little autonomous culture. Notice I don’t say autochthonous because … But ultimately they place tremendous emphasis on the local. Are they right, chronicler, do you think they’re right?”

  “You contradict yourself,” opined the chronicler. “It’s possible to specialize in the local, but a culture is by definition ecumenical. Must I translate my terms? You can only appreciate your own culture when you’re removed from it. I understand Roberto Payró because I’ve read my Mérimée and my Addison and Steele. To remain in the now and think you’ve got enough is fine for women and barnacles, begging the pardon of all ladies present.”

  “It’s so sad, chronicler,” said Juan sighing. “It’s so sad to feel you’re a parasite. An English kid in a certain way, he is Sidney’s sonnet or Portia’s speeches. A cockney is your ‘London Again.’ But I, who love them so much, who know them so well, I’m just a handful of poems and novels. I’m nothing more than Echeverría’s captive woman, the obstinate gaucho, the falcon’s bell, Roberto Arlt’s Erdosain …”

  “It seems small-minded to complain like that,” said Clara, straightening up. “It isn’t proper for a man like you who fights to achieve the poetry that interests him.”

  “All things considered,” said a bitter Juan, “there’s nothing brilliant about belonging to a pampa culture just because of some damned demographic accident.”

  “But really, what does it matter which culture you belong to when you’ve created your own, as Andrés has and so many others? Does the ignorance and helplessness of those people in Plaza de Mayo really bother you?”

  “They have their chimeras,” said the chronicler. “And they’re more from here than we are.”

  “They don’t matter to me,” said Juan. “What matters is my contact with them. It matters that my boss at the office, because he’s a jerk, can stick his fingers in his vest and say that someone ought to cut off Picasso’s balls. It pisses me off that a government minister says surrealism is …

  but why go on?

  Why?

  It pisses me off not to be able to cohabit with others, see. Not-to-be-able-to-coexist. And it isn’t just a matter of intellectual culture—being able to appreciate Braque or Matisse or dodecaphonic music or genes or anything else. It’s a matter of skin and blood. I’m going to tell you something horrible, chronicler. I’m going to say that every time I see limp black hair, long eyes, dark skin, a provincial accent,

  it makes me sick.

  And every time I see an example of the Buenos Aires dandy, it makes me sick. And the chicks make me sick, too. And those unmistakably local white-collar workers whistling in the streets, products of our city with the wave in their hair and their shitty elegance, it makes me feel sick.”

  “Okay, we get the point,” said Clara. “He won’t even stop when he gets to us.”

  “No, I will,” said Juan. “Because people like us make me feel sorry.”

  Andrés listened with his eyes closed. How miserable, he thought. Only in our passions, our elemental mud, are we equal to anyone. Couples marrying, values burning forth—the delicate fit of man into his world, his rigorous confrontation—that’s where we get lost …

  The fuzz ball slipped between the moist leaves that held it prisoner; making a leap and falling onto the gravel. A police-man’s boot came down next to it, just missing. A light breeze made it tremble and spin on its tiny tentacles of thread and dust, minuscule bits of fabric and fiber. When it entered a column of air it quickly rose to the height of the streetlights. It went from one to the other just grazing their opaline gloves. Then it lost its momentum, and it began to fall.

  With his eyes closed, Andrés listened to the voices of his friends. The chronicler recalled some verses Juan had written a long time before. Clara knew them better and recited them in a slightly tired accent; but her fatigue seemed to be born out of the words rather than her voice. Perhaps the poem illustrated what Juan had just said in a very luxurious language. You can puke into a tin bucket or a Sèvres bowl, Andrés thought bitterly.

  “Such elegance,” said Juan, breaking a silence that had gone on for quite a while. “All that isn’t bad—but those salt marshes, those conches …”

  “Very pretty,” said Clara. “With every new day, you have more fear of words.”

  “It’s good someone’s afraid of them in these parts,” murmured Andrés. “I’m with Juan.”

  “But if we’re always afraid of sounding pedantic, we run the risk of indigence. We shed more and more in terms of expression without gaining in the area of essentialism.”

  “Perhaps if we could agree beforehand on the terms of this bitter argument,” suggested the chronicler. “Words like expression, for instance.”

  But Clara did not want to waste time. She liked Juan’s poem and felt that salt marshes and conches were just fine. “In every sense, we’re losing ground,” she insisted. “Our grandparents filled what they wrote with quotations; now it’s considered vulgar. But, the quotations help us avoid saying what someone already said well badl
y; and besides, they point out a direction—the speaker’s preference, which helps us understand the person who uses them.”

  “Quoth the raven: nevermore,” said the chronicler. “Even a parrot can say ‘Panta Rhei.’”

  “Just because he can say it doesn’t mean he’ll fool us,” said Clara. “The fear of quoting, finding comparisons of a classic order, is a form of this rapid impoverishment. But I insist that the worst thing is fear of words—that tendency of ending up in a kind of Spanish for beginners.”

  “Better Spanish for beginners than the Spanish of our Argentine classics, like The Gaucho War.”

  “Don’t waste our time,” said Andrés, as if talking in his sleep. “Always the same confusion between form and content, ends and means. The Gaucho War is bedazzling because it’s bedazzlingly

  —keep an eye on that little adverb for me—

  thought. All of which leads to this wise little saying: ‘Tell me how you write, and I’ll tell you what you write.’ From bedazzlement to bedazzlization.”

  “How much a person learns being with all of you,” the chronicler was saying as he stared at Stella, almost fast asleep at the end of the bench. Now all we need is an excursion through music, a touch of painting, two jiggers of psychoanalysis, and then everybody goes home—because tomorrow we go to work.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Juan, “there are exams to be taken.”

  Andrés removed the fuzz that had flown into his mouth. “If talking less and less meant speaking more and more, Juanillo, then the poet should be monophonic.”

  “Yes,” said Juan, ironic now. “And end up like Hermann Hesse’s rag dolls, who masturbate facing the sun with their famous OM.”

  “Funny, that Swiss gentleman annoys the hell out of me too,” said Andrés. “But look, it’s only proper we recognize the degree to which Clara is right. The language of the Argentines is only rich in exclamation—our false resentful aggressivity— and the remains of what’s transmitted orally in the provinces. Listen, and the first thing that surprises you is how we’ve done away with all our adjectives. When you hear a Spanish cook describe a paella or a cake, you realize she’s using a much richer repertoire of adjectives than what one of us would use to characterize a book or an important experience.”

  “It’s good that we depend on nouns instead of adjectives.”

  “I agree, but do we really? I’m not sure. The modesty of the resentful leads to our epithets having opposite meanings. That’s how there came to be this incredible catalogue of things like: ‘What an animal, how he played Debussy!

  He’s a bestial artist.

  What a savage the guy is, what talent that beast has…’ or the appearance of magic adjectives that function as general expressions in small circles, comfortably replacing an entire series of words: ‘Fabulous’ is one among us. And what people used to say, for one still with us: ‘phenomenal.’”

  “I don’t think that’s specific to Buenos Aires,” said Juan. “But what you’re saying is true in general. I remember that a long time ago I used to visit a house in Villa Urquiza, and a guy with a Catalonian name from Buenos Aires would also go there. It was from him that I heard these things you’ve discussed for the first time. He considered many things ‘horrible.’ They were the great things, the things that excited him. ‘A horrible novel, you’ve got to read it, right now today.’ I actually went to that house to be happy and to learn the technique of translation. Those were horrible years,” he added in a low voice, smiling to himself.

  “If the condition of our language reflects the condition of those who speak it,” said the chronicler, “then we’re screwed. Our language is pasty, yellow, and dry—with a great need for Roget’s lemonade.”

  “Around here luckily, there are some people who don’t hesitate to speak,” said Juan. “I think I’m one of them: and I don’t think Andrés is afraid of expressing himself in the most—well, I’ll say honest—way. To express oneself honestly, without falling into comfortable patterns

  —because when you get down to it, that’s what they are, damn it—

  of some sacerdotal language; a complex trovar clus that no longer has any meaning.”

  “But it does have meaning,” said Andrés. “It has its ownmeaning. Why would you deny an artist the right to express himself in good faith—whether it’s with plastic material or words? It’s good you speak about honesty and you see the two of us at least trying to write with honesty of expression. But accept the other planes as well—the possibility of a trovar clus as valid as your own immediate, essential language.”

  “Andrés is right,” said Clara. The decisive factor is that language means what it says; and that happens very rarely around here. Our meanings are all still multiple—one thing is a poplar with nightingales, another is polenta and sparrows. The important thing is not to call grappa ambrosia and vice versa.”

  “Shit,” said the chronicler. “If you say that tomorrow, they’ll ride you out of the University on a rail.”

  “Very well put,” smiled Andrés, staring at Clara almost surprised. “Of course! Roberto Arlt understood Martín Fierro’smoral better than anyone. He fought hard to unite language and its meaning. He was one of the first to see that what we call ‘the Argentine,’ as in any country, overflows the limits imposed by refined language—that language you call sacerdotal—but that only poetry and novels can contain it fully. He was a novelist and went to the street, which is where the novel runs. He let the taxis pass and got on the trolley. He was a tough guy and should never be forgotten.”

  “It’s actually more complicated than that,” said Juan, turníng around on the bench. “I accept that meaning should have its own language, should be its own language, and all that. I also concede anyone’s right to practice trovar clus. Eduardo Lozano has as much right to his poetry as I do to mine, or Ulises Petit de Murat to his elegies with their open patios and atrocious wakes. The problem, when you get down to it, is never language but the meaning itself. I mean, is it really interesting to go out on the street? Is it really worthwhile? No sooner do you answer yes, than you realize only an idiot would attempt to write about the street in the banal style of La Nación or Dr. Ricardo Rojas. Once he’s made his decision, the intelligent novelist only has one path to follow, the one my wife has defined so beautifully: meaning which is at one with its language. But there is another question: What is the street? Does it represent, does it contain, more than Eduardo Wilde’s salon or Eduardo Mallea’s apartments with a view of the river?”

  “Don’t use metaphors,” said Clara. “You know very well the street is the street because the person who walks along it is mankind, and that in fact, the street means the same as the salon, the apartment, or integral calculus. Up to here we are with you; but if you let yourself be fooled by your own metaphors, you won’t even be able to understand yourself!”

  “Ah, mankind,” said the chronicler. “This girl always hits the nail on the head.”

  “She sure does,” said Andres. “Arlt walked down mankind’s street—his novel The Seven Madmen is about mankind on the street, I mean a looser being—less homo sapiens, less a character in a book. Notice the term ‘character’ almost doesn’t apply to these creatures. And notice that when we deal with Dr. So-and-So, we quite properly call him a character. You’ve got to squeeze the juice out of these little things, my dear chronicler.”

  “How about some coffee?” said Juan. “But to go back to what I was saying. This man who is no longer a novelistic character, this Argentine walking along the street of the novels that interest us which, by the way, are very scarce;

  does it seem to you that we can grasp him from top to bottom, that we know him and help him know himself, and that— for these reasons—we have to talk about him? speak about him?

  in an absolute language, without brakes—a tongue that respects nothing but its own meaning, that has no other value than that of serving the novelist and his novelistic characters?”

  “Yes, I do believe th
at,” said Andres. “I damn sure believe It."

  “Amen,” said the chronicler.

  And the river was near, invisible.

  With a filth of buoys.

  By then, the plaza was almost empty. A few groups remained: one made up of people dressed in white who carried a white box; the police, also just up from the corner of Banco Nación; the laborers with yellow boots from a Department of Sanitation water truck, moving into the plaza to clean away the papers, the orange peels encrusted in the mud—washing the pavement and the surrounding sidewalks.

  Two inspectors in a black Mercury kept watch. Day was begining to break.

  “The boss is an asshole,” said the short inspector.

  “Let’s not talk about that big son of a bitch in Parks and Walks,” said the inspector driving. “You won’t believe it, but he’s got the papers for my transfer in a locked drawer and plays dumb. I know he’s got them, but I don’t have the nerve …” “Of course.”

  “to say anything to him”

  “Sure.”

  “Because you know how he is. When you least expect it, he’ll pull a fast one and not promote you, te la voglio dire.”

  “You can’t make any kind of career in there.”

  “What can you do?”