With the third try, the key was stuck completely. Juan cursed under his breath. José, the watchman on the corner, was having fun observing them from a distance.
“José!” Clara shouted, waving the package. “At least we can’t be robbed! We can’t even get in!” José’s entire fatigued face was filled with a laugh—with its Chinese factions.
“And to think,” Clara said to Juan, “that we’re carrying this beautiful cauliflower.”
“You just take care of the cauliflower,” muttered Juan in a rage. “You’ll probably shred it when we’re thirty feet from a vase.”
“You’re going to put it in a vase?”
“Of course. That is, if we get in.”
“It’s good you look on the bright side, ma’am,” said José, in a high state of amusement.
“It isn’t the lock,” complained Juan. “The bolt is stuck. It’s as if the door were out of line.”
But the door suddenly yielded, and from the hall there came a soapy, nocturnal breath. Juan pushed open the door, leaning against it with all his weight; and it was then they saw that the floor was in fact no longer level. One whole side of the tiling had slightly sunk, bringing the whole door frame out of line. Clara sighed, astonished. They said good night to José and walked to the elevator, suddenly feeling a chill. It didn’t take them long to realize that the elevator was stuck between floors.
“As long as there isn’t a dead body with us,” said Clara. “I’ve heard that a body can stop an elevator between floors.”
“Hold the cauliflower,” said Juan, who’d taken it away from her when they entered. “I’ll go up and see.”
“It might be between the fifth and sixth, but it’s only eight flights,” said Clara to cheer him on.
“Right,” said Juan striding up two steps at a time. “Stupid stairs.”
Later they slept, but Clara was still waiting for the elevator with Juan. The enormous apartment house. The little entry hall from the street (with José outside, but so inept, so much a watchman) had gotten dark and seemed longer—it isn’t easy to prove that light doesn’t affect the dimensions of things. The elevator shaft disappeared into the darkness
—yes, it wasn’t daytime, it wasn’t daytime—
where, doubtless, Juan was tinkering with the elevator.
(Why is that all you have to say is doubtless for the most extreme doubt to arise? End of chapter: “And he separated tenderly from his wife, whom he would doubtless find safe and sound on his return from the expedition …” And the good reader thinks: “Okay, here we go.”)
But Juan was long in coming.
and the cauliflower, that heavy fruit, that whitish object wrapped in green veils, heavier and heavier—fatigue, everything is relative—
or perhaps a trifle larger since she’d begun waiting for the elevator
that wasn’t coming wasn’t coming.
Breathing what darkness the bars of the Otis cage.
BECAUSE THERE ARE STAIRS,
THE OWNER ACCEPTS NO RESPONSIBILITY
FOR PROBLEMS WITH THE ELEVATOR
Oh Juan between the fifth and sixth floors—
Sister Helen
Between Hell and Heaven
but a light little light and the light guided the shepherds to the calendar shepherd’s calendar
coming down little light little light little lantern of the suburb no, the elevator, finally the elevator and Juan; the elevator wrapped in light—slippery—finally coming down
and Abel, laughing;
but don’t look at the floor, don’t look at
Abel’s feet,
because
there on the floor …
Juan woke up with the scream. Clara was trembling, her hands covering her face. He shook her a bit (Clara now was sobbing in her sleep), but then she began to stretch out, calm now, and he supposed it was better to leave her as she was. He caressed her hair, barely a movement, before losing himself in that movement of the caress. Almost instantly he began to dream. The smoke came in under the door, and it was natural that the door was sagging because of the sunken floor, and there was a rather wide gap open on the hinge side. Smoke also came in where the window was partially open. Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head.—
The kid came out from under her skirt but it was the cauliflower. (How absurd, thought Juan, wrapping his bathrobe around himself.) Probably the smoke would hurt Clara,
would hurt the cauliflower, wilted by any smoke. But the thing wasn’t serious because he still held the final trump card (He knotted up the belt on his robe, tightening it like an old-fashioned boxer.), which was to declare
THE DREAM IS FALSIFIED
“You, sir, can do nothing against me,” he said pointing two fingers at the smoke that eddied around the bed. “Arise now, my pint-sized Brunhilde.” But Clara touched her heart with an exhausted air; it was necessary to try something else. “The best thing would be for me to wake up,” Juan said brilliantly, and he did wake up. He was sitting on the bed, both hands squeezing the fat rolls of his stomach. And the fog was entering the room through the partially open window.
Without knowing it completely, she enjoyed the tranquility brought by Juan’s caress. It was finished, nothing more than a nightmare. For an instant, Abel’s face, his teeth, menaced her, then faded away, then nothing. The gallery was of noble beauty. It had brocades, and tables like those in the Pitti Palace—dazzling, tiny pieces of marble arranged in a minute geometry. She walked along, seeing portraits of her sister Teresa, all of them bearing the painter’s name in large but illegible letters. At the same time, she felt she was being led by the hand (she could see no one). It was necessary to reach the basement. Under an arcade with a breakable air, she saw the charlotte russe. But it was a man in pink and white—he was also the arcade—and it was important to pass by him without speaking. Then came stairway after stairway; everything so Italian; open spiral staircases in which the descent was a highly pleasing slide—except for the fact of being led, knowing herself led. On the walls of the spiral stairway there were more pictures and on one of them the painter’s signature was the painting itself, covering the canvas from lower left to upper right, barely leaving space for a greenish hand holding up eyeglasses on the tips of its fingers.
It sounded like a leak, changing tone slightly, higher, higher, lower, higher. Andrés was sure it was Madame Roland’s heart: but then he woke up convinced, happy. What a stupid dream, he thought, sitting up on the bed. Once again, he was annoyed at having yielded to illusion, to believing, accepting, that a noise might be something other than what it was. A moment before, the joy of certainty of the man of faith; that joy shamed him, as did his enjoyment of affirming it was just a leak. He remained seated in the dark room, leaning back against the headboard, listening to Stella’s breathing. He felt around for the glass and drank with pleasure. But is it a glass of water? Who can guarantee that this substance, loose in the shadows, persists after you can’t see it? Later he asked himself why his dreams were so silly, why he didn’t dream the marvelous things other people told him about. A friend’s wife had dreamed herself dead, buried, in the style of “The Strange Adventure of David Grey.” From her crystalline depth, she could see the faces weeping for her, bent over the grave. Everything took place in great serenity, but even so, she wanted to shout, to say she was there, not alive, not the same person as before,
only that she was there
that she was seeing,
but, the mechanics of the grave wouldn’t let her. Then she saw her mother, still weeping for her, planting a rose bush over her grave. From the glassy depth, she observed everything. And her mother left, but not the bush: it grew, and its root came down, growing like a white sword. She felt it reach her and pierce her chest.
Fingers holding up a pair of eyeglasses. The frames were ancient, as if made of worm-eaten plaster with green and pink veins. Softly, tiptoeing onto a step, Clara breathed again. Again she
was being summoned, she had to get to the basement. She walked into the dining room in her house, laughing. “Something really funny happened to me.” And her mother raised her eyes from her embroidery.
“I was going to work, and Andrés was waiting to sell me the paper. He was wearing a newsboy’s cap and had a cruel air to him.”
“That is strange, because in general, military men are different,” said her mother. Clara didn’t like the tone of her voice and went over to look into her eyes. She always did that with her mother when she was a little girl. “I want to listen to your eyes,” she would say. (From her eyes, she learned when her mother was going to die, long before the hemiplegia.) Ah, this table, she thought, with discomfort, trying to get around it, but the table—as if covered with gulfs—got between her and her mother, who was again immersed in her stitching. Why does she think that Andrés can’t sell me the paper? And that way of not looking at me, that foxiness … She pushed the table with her stomach and her hands. She moved forward as if leaving a river in sand made of air. The river was a softish water made of mahogany with a macramé doily at its center.
This time he liked feeling the belt of his bathrobe between his fingers. Being careful not to wake up Clara—she had slept badly and was once again tossing and whimpering—he walked to the window and closed it. The fog smelled of roasted chestnuts, chlorine. Incredible that it can be so dense, thought Juan. He sniffed it greedily, a bit surprised. It may well be that the chronicler’s right and that it’s a new phenomenon, he thought. Leaning his nose against the window, he moved until a crack in the outside shutter allowed him to see the house opposite them, the street, and a vague streetlight enveloped in an enormous halo. He was almost asleep standing there, pressing his forehead against the warm glass, and was looking at the light on the corner with half-closed eyes. His childhood in Paraná, a humid summer—Urquiza Park, with the gullies and the soccer pitch lower down. He’d played soccer and drank ginger beer, then swam at the island, dazzled by the sun and the terrible mass of the river, dying of hunger after his swim, eating sandwiches until he was full. But it was the light he was remembering now, the streetlights at night, the universe of the streetlight: thousands of insects in a madness of fulminating orbits around the light, vibrating in unison with a throbbing palpitation, buzzing with the movement of wings and the incessant rebounding of little bodies off the hot glass. The dung beetles dragged themselves along the ground, and at times a mamboretá unleashed its green nightmare. The rest were little parrots, cascarudos; little bulls, wasps; and sometimes a small, lost, yellow planet, a disconcerted bee, extremely dumb, that allowed itself to be killed by a slap.
The mosquitoes of Uspallata, he thought, returning to bed almost completely asleep, dropping his robe with a gesture of surrender. He saw the light at its zenith, a mountain stream, watercress and reeds; he heard a distant bleat, a shepherd’s loud shout. In the air, a vibrant spindle-shaped mass of mosquitoes whirled in millions of luminous dots of light. Aerial screen—a space threatening to become concrete, the geometry of a living crystal, the mosquitoes! They occupied their spindle, made it alive and whirling; they spun within it, limit and content of their transparent world, without moving from the place they occupied in the air. Sitting a short distance away, he saw the spindle suspended in space, as if only that space were theirs and next to them or above it wasn’t proper to reach. He never knew when the dance was over, where the mosquitoes went, and at what time the translucent phantom dissipated into the liquid air.
“But yes, yes, he sold me newspapers. Why can’t I get closer, Mama?”
“Because your father would get mad.”
“Oh how ridiculous,” said Clara, stuck in the swamp a short distance from the table. And when she looked back, astonished at feeling herself hemmed in, she saw that she was now in the center of the table, that she had managed to move to its midpoint—she was a ballerina wearing a rigid tutu that paralyzed her. Andrés, Andrés, she thought—and her voice resounded as if in an empty chamber; but her mother went on embroidering without raising her eyes. “Andrés, let’s listen to fanfares.” It was urgent they listen to fanfares together, because that would be the sign of their pact, their meeting. It didn’t matter that her mother had pronounced that horrible sentence. “A fanfare and a counterpoint.” Then it would be perfect. “Or just a fanfare.” She could distantly hear
an echo of fanfare but it wasn’t: fan fan la fanfarlo
fanfan la tulipe
the fan-tan the fan gogh c’est I’Ophan …
You’ve really got to be an imbecile, thought Andrés, slipping down until he was flat on his back. Madame Roland! Hipnos, how many follies are committed in your name! He was wide awake, feeling the fatigue flatten his head into the pillow, unable to fall asleep. He hypothesized plans of action, needful of something that would distance him from the idea to which he always returned like a fly. Clean up your life: stop going to the House, stay away from the usual haunts, cultivate idiotic relationships that will, as a result, keep you connected. Never go back to the House. Why go? Let Stella arrange her own affairs. She should be with the Doctor, not with me; and acquire learning on her own. Meanwhile … That’s the rub, he thought Meanwhile. Life is already an enormous meanwhile. Oh solitude, thanatogenic! It wasn’t a matter of being alone, but of isolating oneself within a community, achieving total self-awareness. After that it didn’t matter whether you were in Florida or Atacama. But never to know oneself: to keep going to the House in order to be close to Clara, hear Clara’s voice. Living with Stella; always self-doubting, dilatoriness that lasts a lifetime. putting off until the end the only obligation that matters: “to thine own self be true.” How, without knowing it beforehand, without doing anything to know? In my inaction is my action, he thought, smiling bitterly. Every day I choose not to choose. He began to fall asleep, still smiling. He managed to think that there were no problems, that a problem is always a solution facing the opposite direction. To decide, to choose … Epiphenomenon—the other thing, the root of the wind, hidden in the flesh of guilt. It’s a shame that this should be the problem; because that isn’t the problem. Who would have said that? He fell asleep laughing.
Before, and because the honey vision of the mosquitoes had filled him with tenderness and melancholy, Juan amused himself thinking about the likely development of the exam. I shall begin by summarizing, in general terms, the basic principles of Whitehead’s metaphysics. It must be said that the structure of being, for Whitehead, manifests itself with the compact solidity of Parmenides’ universe; the proof is that no sooner does he establish the analytic vision of the cosmos, the almost monstrous interdependence of each being with all beings, then he turns it into a game of …
“Young man, might it be possible to know what this ‘monstrous’ business is?”
“Why yes, professor, of course. Whitehead
White
head White Horse
O sleep sweet embalmer of the night.
In his little room, very near the stars, the chronicler was sleeping.
“But the government has categorically denied it,” said Mr. Funes.
“Don’t believe in their categories, Dad,” said Clara.
“And you, don’t start in with your too-wise-by-half expressions!”
Juan whistled violently, astounding Clara’s brother, Bebe, who with genius (if genius means having a lot of patience) was cleaning his cigarette holder with its anti-nicotine mouthpiece.
“Che gelida manina,” sang Juan, tugging at Clara, who was looking sulkily at her father. “Andiamo in cucina, cara, Ho fame, savee?"
“Just wait a minute here. We all saw that last night. Government denials, my foot.”
“Your foot,” said Bebe, blowing through the mouthpiece and then peering through it. “Look on the bright side: at least you’ve got a foot. You have to take things as they come, girl.”
“You win, Bebe,” said Juan, patting him affectionately on the back. “You just unconsciously steppe
d on her little foot, but it doesn’t matter because what you said had some singular moments. But, Clara’s right, my dear father-in-law. We saw it last night, and no one can deny that the opening of the season is full of strange omens and even stranger observances.”
Clara smiled.
“The diabolic children have probably arrived,” she said. “Gilles et Dominique, Dominique et Gilles.”
“Just hints,” muttered Juan, looking at Bebe’s mouthpiece against the light bouncing off all the glasses in the cabinet. “Nothing at all, really.”
“Some people go around playing the fool,” said Mr. Funes, trying to make the strong impression that what he was saying had nothing to do with them. “It’s mass psychology, an irrational panic. Like when comets appear. The government’s right to try to calm the people down. It’s ridiculous to get carried away by all that nonsense. Like when they started in with polio whatyacallit.”
“Poliomyelitis,” said a very serious Bebe.
“That’s it. Anyway,” said Mr. Funes, totally convinced, “there’s nothing to be gained by spreading confusion, especially when no one knows what’s going on.”
“Which is the best time to do it,” said Juan. “Let’s eat, Clara. Tell the cook to get a move on.”
“But the concert’s at two,” said Mr. Funes.
“Why so early?”
“It’s a matinee.”
“Oh. But I think we can eat, Dad. Shall I tell Irma?”
But Irma was already coming in with the fish salad, and the four of them sat down in some haste and energetically spread their napkins. Bebe had nicotine on his fingers, sniffed them with disgust, and went to the bathroom. Juan saw his chance, mumbled an excuse, and went after him. Bebe was washing slowly, snorting. Not satisfied with soaping up his hands, he washed his face, snorting twice as much.
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