Final Exam

by Julio Cortázar

  “Here, wipe yourself off,” Juan handed her his handkerchief and supported her by holding her arm. “You made me remember that night when I went into my room in the dark and picked a record up off the table—the Seventh Symphony (which I’ve subtitled ‘the apotheosis of the Dance’). I grabbed it in the darkness, and I felt something move in my hand. You can imagine my reaction: the Seventh flew to the other end of the room!—and I was feeling all over for the light switch. When I could see, my hand had moving centipede legs on it. The disgusting arthropod was on its spine, and it was enormous.”

  “I hope,” said Clara, “that the Seventh was smashed to pieces.”

  “Not at all. Those records can take it.”

  “Do you hear barking?” asked the chronicler.

  To think I got excited over César Franck, thought Juan. That I liked that praliné … Clara thought: barking, Beethoven, Castelar’s house, “Turk”, Mozart, the Turkish march, the horns in the Fifth:

  all that had a meaning THERE WAS BARKING

  that was incomprehensible

  deep

  (a well in moonlight, frogs)

  “a carbuncle”—there are beautiful words like carbuncle and gem,

  a reach, and it was, yes,

  a vision—of what who could say THERE WAS BARKING

  for what purpose;

  a vision, a reach in the night, of …

  pulse without words the fountain.

  Naked living That’s how destiny barks at the door.

  Living, like an

  immobile fall through the music in the vertiginous

  circle;

  with names: fervor, pretty, stay, tomorrow, die, sacrifice, gem. Sandokan.

  “Be careful,” said a guard. They ran into him at the bottom of the stairs. He seemed to be standing watch at the bend where the platform started. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it had rabies.”

  “Damn,” said the chronicler. “You mean the dog that’s barking?”

  “Yes, sir. They come out of the tunnel. This is the fifth one I’ve seen today.”

  “But if it barks, it doesn’t have rabies,” said Juan, who’d read all the novelized lives of Pasteur. “Now, a dying dog with hydrophobia and blood-shot eyes bites because it doesn’t cry.”

  “Go ahead and joke, but if it bites you …”

  “The fifth today?” said Clara. “Where do they come from?”

  “I don’t know. This has been going on for a few days. Look at him, there he goes.”

  They instinctively stepped back. The dog came along the platform, skinny and hairy, with his head drooping down, his tongue hanging out like a rag. The few passengers were on the other side of the exit to the stairs, and some shouted for the guard, who waved a broom with rapid horizontal movements. The dog stopped about six feet from the broom, whined, and started panting. It might well have been rabid. From back in the tunnel, came another bark, muted.

  “How do they get in?” asked Clara, clinging to Juan.

  “They get in everywhere,” said the guard, carefully watching the dog. “I’ve called ten times to the central office to have a cop sent down to shoot them, but they’re all asleep. And then the mess with the traffic, there was a train wreck at Agüero. I’m going nuts!”

  “They must be trying to escape from the heat,” murmured Juan. “Maybe the fog. They go down into the darkness. But why do they bark, why do they seem so miserable?”

  “Poor doggy,” said Clara, seeing the dog stretched out at the edge of the platform, still panting, looking around and trembling slightly.

  “That dog doesn’t have rabies,” said the chronicler. “He’s thirsty and frightened. Hey, look down the tunnel, way down.”

  In the tunnel, there were two eyes almost at ground level, staring at them. The eyes were there for a second, and then the white shape of a dog could be seen going back inside. The hum of the train could be heard coming from the west.

  “It’s going to smash him to pieces,” said Clara. “How can he get away from it?”

  “There are walkways on both sides. Let’s go, this is our train.”

  They walked out of the stairway, passing next to the guard, who was still watching the dog, his broom ready. The train emitted a dry snort as it came into the station and moved quickly forward. Clara and Juan looked at the dog, expecting to see it get up in fright, but the animal seemed still unconscious, bobbing its head a bit. The guard gathered his strength and hit him with the broom right in the center of his body. He calculated correctly because the dog fell onto the tracks a second before the train passed, and its howl stopped exactly when Clara’s scream did, both swallowed up by the noise of brakes and metal.

  “Just take a look at that!”

  López, the news dealer, like an entomologist, was showing him a box on page two of La Nación:

  THE MINISTRY OF PUBLIC HEALTH WARNS THE POPULACE THAT UNTIL SUCH TIME AS THE RESULTS OF THE ANALYSES

  (He read clicking his tongue, making mental disapprovals, clearing his throat.)

  NO ONE SHOULD EAT THE MUSHROOMS THAT APPEARED IN THIS CAPITAL—EVEN IN VERY SMALL QUANTITIES.

  “Tell me, sir, if that isn’t just the worst.”

  “The mushrooms or not being able to eat them?” asked Andrés with a sigh.

  “I mean the tone of the announcement. Hypocritical, Mr. Fava, that’s what I’d call it! Hypocritical. They’re out to hoodwink folks. As if anyone would think of eating such disgusting things.”

  Mysterious now, he lowered his voice. Giving him a signal (the old vendor to an old customer), he brought Andrés behind an enormous pile of books published by Santiago Rueda, Acmé, Losada, and Emecé. Bending over, he examined a low and empty shelf. Then he stood up, snorting triumphantly; and while looking around with an air of innocence, he gestured for Andrés to bend over and take a look. In the back of the shelf, two silvery little mushrooms were glowing weakly. Andrés stared at them with interest—they were the first he’d ever seen.

  “It’s this filthy humidity,” said the salesman, another López. “They can say anything, but I know what’s going on. There’s never been heat or humidity this horrible.”

  “That’s true,” said Andrés. “The air’s stickier than Rachmaninoff. But I don’t think these mushrooms …”

  “Believe it, Mr. Fava. It’s the humidity, you’ve got to realize it’s the humidity. I’ve been telling Mr. Gomara something’s got to be done here, inside. Look at this book, its physical condition. It’s all curled up!”

  Andrés took the book, entitled The Rainbow. It was soft and smelled of suet.

  “I never thought a book could rot, just like a man,” he said.

  “Well, now …” (Slightly scandalized.

  Rot.

  When there are such pretty words that mean

  the same thing;

  but that tendency of young people

  to,

  and only to apatay luh burshwa.)

  Andrés walked through the vast ground floor of El Ateneo. My years as a student, he thought, drying the palms of his hands. My two little pesos, my little five-peso notes … And it’s all so much the same. What did I buy first? I don’t remember—

  but not remembering is like killing yourself—a betrayal.

  I was here one day, I walked through that door, I looked for a salesman, I asked for a book.

  And now I don’t remember.

  Leaning against a reddish column of Casares’ ideological dictionaries, he closed his eyes. He wanted to remember. A dizziness came over him and he opened his eyes again. He whistled softly:

  It’s easy to remember

  but so hard to forget.

  Damn, the young Bing Crosby. But now he did remember one of his visits: he’d bought Aeschylus, Sophocles, and The ocritus in the little one-peso volumes published by Prometeo in Valencia—

  didn’t Blasco Ibáñez edit the series?

  And also (again) The Picture of Dorian Gray in the Biblioteca Nueva series.

  No
w he remembered the second-hand bookstores where they sold books by the pound. That’s how he’d bought O’Neill, Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems, Sons and Lovers. Then to a café—“Waiter, a coffee and a knife, please”—cutting the pages, you could almost taste the books. Being happy, so happy. The days were lofty. Misfortune helped happiness a great deal.

  The taste, the aroma of cigarettes, he thought. And the shadows of the trees in the plazas. He picked a book off a pile, put it back. He was constantly having to dry his hands. Raising his eyes, he saw the employees on the second floor winding their way around the balustrade. They looked like insects. One of them was whistling “Solveig’s Song.” What an animal, Andrés thought tenderly. He’d entered El Ateneo to buy Ricardo Molinari’s most recent book and stood a while in the doorway watching the Eighty Women parade by. The first of them carried a strange poster of which a few newspapers had taken note: the reference to the prophecies of the sibyls, the invitation to join.

  DON’T WASTE A SINGLE DAY

  A SINGLE DAY CAN WASTE YOU

  OH WOMAN

  SISTER OF THE EIGHTY

  WHO PRAY WHO PRAY

  And also their music, those plastic rattlesnakes they frenetically shook;

  OH WOMAN

  while an announcer hidden in a van from which pamphlets were tossed—with loudspeakers—held forth in a strange, proselytizing monody.

  Purification, thought Andrés looking at the women. What are they afraid of? of what portents are they aware? … The procession paused in front of the Gath and Chaves Clothing store and then disappeared down Florida. Andrés had entered El Ateneo at 4:00 P.M., and another van had passed by rapidly, repeating an official announcement that contained the paragraph about the mushrooms.

  “Mr. Fava, what heat,” said Arturo Planes from the other side of the Colección Austral books. “And how’s it going, old man?”

  “Surviving. Listening to people talk.”

  “You can hear more than that,” said Arturo, holding out a big red hand dripping with sweat. “I’m fed up with these loudspeakers. You don’t live downtown, I think—but those of us who do …”

  “I can imagine. Selling here on Calle Florida—

  what a pain.”

  “And having to sell books, which is so boring,” complained Arturo. “At least there’s more diversion in this place these days. You won’t believe this, but upstairs on the second floor

  (he was suddenly choking with laughter, furtively looking up),

  —man, this is something—

  upstairs, they’ve pulled out all the stops. They think this is the end or something like that. Beginning the day before yesterday—when the north wind started blowing.”

  “What do they do?” asked Andrés, distracted, caressing a volume of tales by Luis Cernuda. He remembered:

  Of what use was summer to us,

  oh nightingale in the snow,

  when only an orb so small

  vainly wraps the dreamer?

  “They wash themselves,” said Arturo, convulsed with laughter.

  López passed by, his arms filled with volumes published by Kapelusz. He was followed by two timid teenage girls, who seemed afraid they might lose their books. Andrés looked at them remotely. Everything passes, he thought, and they’ll still be studying the rivers of Asia, isobars

  and the sad isotherms. One of the girls looked at him, and Andrés smiled faintly at her, seeing how she lowered her eyes. She looked at him again—forgetting him. He felt himself fall into the girl’s oblivion, his image disintegrating in an instantaneous nothingness. Kapelusz; isotherms; the average; Tyrone Power; I’ll be seeing you; Vicki Baum. They went too.

  “Hey man, listen to what I’m telling you,” whined Arturo. “Are you in a daze too?”

  “Of course,” said Andrés. “So they wash?”

  “Yes, right in the office. I swear on a stack of Bibles. Look, go right up. Don’t be afraid. I can’t leave the store area. Go up and then tell me. You want one of these bricks here in my section?”

  “What’s your section?”

  “Urbanism. Traffic,” said Arturo with some chagrin. “Things on functional cities and reinforced concrete.”

  “That isn’t really my line,” said Andrés, replacing the Cernuda volume. The indolent man, he thought, remembering Cernuda. To elaborate a life so that its most beautiful moment culminates in a stone house at the beach: sand and water until the end … He smiled at the bark of a loudspeaker in the street. A nun in charge of a frightened little Chinese girl was staring at the piles of My First English Book. The sweat was hanging from the fine, black fuzz on her upper lip, while from time to time, she’d shoo away a fly with an impatient wave. López and Mr. Gómara were closing the double doors to keep out the fog—which made it impossible to see the sidewalk outside.

  The stairway was empty. He threaded his way through tables and book cases, unenthusiastically searching out what amused Arturo so much. Leaning over the balustrade (now I too will look like an insect, he thought), he waved a sign of confusion to the salesman. Arturo energetically pointed to the side where the offices were located. Andrés saw the paltry little windows. He remembered the credit he’d requested in order to buy Freud, Giraudoux, García Lorca—all read, paid for, almost all forgotten. The employees were emerging, not very gracefully, by a litde door on the right, which opened almost into the balustrade. Andrés had the impression …

  SISTER OF THE EIGHTY

  WHO PRAY WHO PRAY

  —the voice reached him from the street drowned out, but accompanied by a mixture of horns and crackling noises—

  he had the impression the employees were restraining themselves prodigiously—one was so pale, others were red-face, and moving around the store continuously—

  as if obeying an imperious password. They’re not going to let me in there, thought Andrés. It’s shame I’m not with Juan or the chronicler. A telephone was ringing on his left, and the pale employee

  —now there were seven or eight employees, either walking up the stairs or leaving the offices—

  ran to answer it. “Wrong number,” Andrés heard him say. He’d barely hung up when it rang again.

  “No, no. Wrong number,” repeated the pale boy, looking at Andrés with a supplicating air, as if he could do something.

  “Now they’ll call again,” said Andrés at the same instant the phone began to ring.

  “Hello. No, no! Wrong number. Dial correctly. Well, that isn’t the number. No. Call the operator. I don’t know.”

  “Tell them to dial nine-six,” said Andrés.

  “Dial nine-six. Bah, they hung up.” He stood there staring at Andrés as if still expecting something. Someone called: “Filipelli, Filipelli!” from the center of the stairway. The pale salesman left Andrés standing in front of the telephone, which rang again. Andrés laughed, answering.

  “Menéndez?” said a fine but slightly urgent-sounding voice.

  “No, this is El Ateneo.”

  “But if I dial the Menéndez number …”

  “It would be better to speak to a supervisor.”

  “How do you do that?”

  A SINGLE DAY CAN WASTE YOU

  “Dial 96, miss.”

  “Oh. Nine-six. And then?”

  OH WOMAN

  “Then you ask for the supervisor. And you tell him what’s happening with the—whose number was it?”

  “Menéndez. Thank you, sir.”

  “Good luck, miss.”

  “I need it,” the voice said incredibly, hanging up. For a short time, Andrés kept the telephone in his hand, without thinking, living the telephone;

  that thing through which for a second something of yours and something of another’s are united, without being united.

  OH WOMAN

  Listening to himself still on the phone, but why?

  and who might it be? united without being united

  Contact for a second—

  and then nothing; like Clara, like Clara
again.

  DON’T WASTE A SINGLE DAY

  SISTER OF THE EIGHTY

  He hung up. To sit down awhile on the leather benches, to watch from above, with the consolation of looking down on others: López’s bald spot, Arturo Planes’ boiled-crab hands, the books.

  WHO PRAY WHO PRAY

  But since the employees didn’t seem to concern themselves with him, he took advantage and made his way to the little door of the offices. The door swung back and forth lightly; and through the thin partition and the opaque windows, he heard a splashing noise, a collective murmur, a muffled cough. He entered, both hands in his jacket pockets, without looking at anyone in particular, barely stepping aside for a fat gentleman with white hair, who tripped over the doorjamb and swore (not at the door but at himself).

  Andrés had ample space to lean on some shelves packed with folders and survey the scene. He was a bit blinded by the yellow glow in the large windows—where the fog had taken hold, erasing the buildings across the street. But then he got used to the glow and could see clearly the tub in the center of the room. They’d rearranged the desks to form something like a small circus ring, like a neighborhood circus complete with sawdust-covered floors.

  SHOULD NOT BE USED AS FOOD.

  He saw the woman who was the head of credit at the edge of the tub, with two younger women flanking her; and some men— eight or nine of them—a bit further back and at the narrowest end,

  (because it was a zinc-colored kiddy pool, shaped like a nautical coffin, with its charming edge and its gray color that the water filled with white stars and blue reflections).

  And they stood as if it were the intermission of a ceremony. The back of the office where Andrés was standing was dimly lit— the yellow glow illuminated only the circus’ center— but Andrés had already seen more employees crowded in beyond, where a long figure was stretched out on a sofa with split-leather cushions, as if sleeping or in a faint.

  Almost no one spoke in that moment, and although the women glanced at Andrés, and he was certain everyone had noticed his presence, things went on. The head of credit signaled to one of the men, who left the group and