Final Exam

by Julio Cortázar

  “Look,” said Juan, pointing to a little sign for streetcars hanging under the cable. It wasn’t easy to read it: Andrés shaded his eyes.

  MOVE FORWARD AND CONTINUE THE DESCENT OF THE HILL SLOWLY

  “You can’t tell,” said Juan, “if it’s a warning or an encouragement.”

  “Not bad,” said Andrés. “But I’m hungry.”

  “Me, too,” said Clara, blowing her nose like a little girl. “I’d eat the chronicler, I’d eat Andrés...”

  “A praying mantis,” said Juan. “How about that bar called Suizo?”

  “No. I aspire to eat in those elegant places where there’s a napkin for each one of us, as César Bruto says.” She grabbed Andrés’ arm, and he let her lean on him as they stood on the corner. “Actually, I’m thirsty. Inside the University… But you understand that everything…”

  “No,” said Andrés, “I don’t understand it. I merely witnessed it. Poor kids, you didn’t deserve that.”

  “Who knows?” said Juan, pushing them so they would

  MOVE FORWARD AND CONTINUE THE DESCENT OF THE HILL SLOWLY.

  “Right, who knows?” said the chronicler, sighing. “And with this heat;

  listen to the thunder over in the south if it is thunder.”

  “They’ll analyze it in your laboratory,” said Juan. “But really, I’m not sure I didn’t deserve it. We were late for the wedding, and the cake was rotten.”

  “I knew the entire curriculum,” murmured Clara childishly.

  “It has nothing to do with that, old girl. You understand perfectly well that it has nothing to do with knowing anything. Look, let’s all go to the First and Last and drink until the day is done, as a poet I know would put it. But, Andrés, look at that.”

  Out of the bar on the corner he came

  with his old habit of raising his collar (against what? the fog?)

  —there were still distant explosions—

  burdened, as if he were filthy and rapid lights; cars on Leandro Alem.

  “The professor,” whispered Andrés. “What the hell was he doing in that café, when you all… Better he doesn’t see us.”

  THE HILL.

  “No way out,” said Juan. “Good evening, professor.”

  “Good evening, young man,” said the professor, who then extended the greeting to Clara, with a slow nod of his head. When he smiled, he raised half his mouth, the rest remaining like papier-mâché. They saw his face was covered with perspiration, that he was drying the palms of his hands on his trousers.

  “What a night,” he said, peering attentively at Andrés and then at the chronicler. “There are these things in the air that you swallow and…”

  “Dust balls,” said the chronicler. “And some little mushrooms that fly around, which we’ve studied at my newspaper.”

  “Mushrooms?”

  “Yes, the eutrapelic tri-martins,” said the chronicler.

  “Ah. The government communiques…”

  “Look,” said Andrés, and he pointed to the eastern sky where reddish bands were trembling like reflectors in the clouds. “I don’t think that was in the government communiques.”

  “It’s that…” The professor was going to say something more but held back, and it seemed he bent over, became smaller. His courses on the Hittites, thought Clara, staring at him in hatred. His eight-page bibliographies. The big coward… Then the professor took Juan’s arm, and came closer, demanding attention.

  “I spent the whole afternoon over there.” He pointed at the Suizo. “I was supposed to meet the dean and… at seven, and… from my table over there, see it?

  you can keep an eye on the front of the University—I mean if you lean your body over a bit; and I can tell all of you

  because it is rigorously… Idiotic, thought Andrés.

  true

  that the dean’s car never appeared any time during the evening. And when night came, and that fog…”

  (he moved his hand like a spatula in the air, stirring up the yellow substance)

  “then I became so frightened of… You who are young should understand that…”

  Juan softly pushed him away. The professor wanted to go on talking, making signs they should listen to him; but Juan took Clara by the arm and they walked down the hill. Andrés stayed behind, with a word to the chronicler to let Juan and Clara go on ahead a bit, and told Stella to follow them.

  “Leave them alone a minute. They’re so desperate.”

  “You’re right,” said the chronicler. “Man, this…”

  The professor followed them, muttering, twisting his hands. The chronicler turned around and looked at him: “Go to your doctor and get a checkup,” he said politely.

  “I…” said the professor; but he stopped, and the fog ate him up like an acid.

  Andrés and the chronicler enthusiastically embraced the idea of a cigarette, stopping to light up opposite an apartment house with a small garden in front that smelled of grass and recently trodden clover. They couldn’t believe it, so they went into the garden walking on the moist flagstones. The chronicler tore off a leaf and put it in his mouth. He smoked and chewed the leaf. When they left, Juan was waving from the corner.

  “He looks like a ghost,” said the chronicler. “This fog deforms images. That’s the first time that…”

  Andrés swatted him to hit away a flying insect hanging on his hair. They looked toward Reconquista, but the professor was gone.

  “He’s probably at his table in the Suizo,” said the chronicler, “where you can keep an eye on the front of the University. And the dean’s car, look…”

  “Let’s drop it,” said Andrés. “At least we got close to that clover, and saw Juan’s shadow. Don’t go back to what we’ve already vomited up.”

  “Juan’s calling us.”

  “Let’s go, they must have calmed down a little. Hear that piano?”

  “From a high floor,” murmured the chronicler, sniffing the air. “How great that someone still… A little tango! ‘The Butterfly,’ of all things.”

  They caught up to Stella, who was waiting for them silently and sleepily.

  It’s not that I’m sorry

  for having loved you so, sang the chronicler. “The tango, Andrés. Not official communiques. I feel like writing a history from 1900 until today using only tangos.”

  “It would be amusing,” said Andrés, who wasn’t listening to him.

  If you went away for your own good

  for your own good

  I’ll have to forgive you… The Soria Pharmacy.

  “The decision was taken in our corporate state to migrate to the First and Last,” said Juan, leaning against the window, where Clara was staring at perfumes and talcum powder. “No dinner; just drinks and prosciutto.”

  “And later on… ,” said Stella, excitedly. (Later on we go home”)

  “Later on nothing,” Andrés interrupted her. “Forget that word for a while, and look at the firemen, what tough guys.”

  They heard the sirens, the rest was a rolling and a confused color. Near the river, the heat was even more humid, and it was drizzling softly.

  “Explain to me how there can be rain and fog at the same time,” said Juan. “Does the water pass through the fog? Or do they happen in different spaces?”

  “He’s trying to show off,” said Clara crossing the street. “Don’t explain anything to him. It’s better…” She fell silent, staring from the door into the interior of the corner café. Andrés, who was behind her, saw them almost at the same time. The younger man, who had been near them in the vestibule of the University; the other was one of the card players and had argued quite a bit with the proctors. They were seated at a table in the center of the main room with their diplomas unfolded;

  they looked up at them,

  the bottle of grappa was between the diplomas and the french fries

  (a good fan swirled the air around,

  ruffling their hair; Satisfactory.).

  Juan s
tood at the door and cupped his hand in the shape of a megaphone.

  “Assholes!”

  Andrés and the chronicler grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away,

  Move forward and continue the descent

  while Stella laughed, shocked, and Clara went on ahead, cold and silent, as if she were indifferent. The students didn’t bother to come to the door.

  “It’s hard to believe you did that, boy,” complained the chronicler. “Don’t you think we’ve had enough trouble—and then on top of everything you have to curse those guys out in a place like that? You think I came along just so I could get the shit kicked out of me?”

  “Va bene,” said Juan. “You’re right. There’s a proper time and place for everything. To see punches, you can pay fifteen pesos ring side. And have a great time watching other guys slug it out.”

  “Give me a break,” the chronicler complained, expecting some help from Clara and Andrés, but no one spoke. They came into the area of the local street market and suddenly ran into some men running from the direction of Córdoba. Whistling (from Córdoba or maybe further up), and one of the men, coming along on the outside of the market, along the edge of the street. He crossed Viamonte like a whip, and as he passed alongside, Clara panted out something like “Get out of here while you can,” or perhaps “Get out, it bites.” Stumbling, he hesitated, leaning on one foot, then took off; and behind him other shapes came running as if herded by the police whistles. The chronicler ordered everyone to get up against the wall of the market until they could see better; they gathered together in the shadow watching the men run for their lives—there was no light in the street, and the corner café and the cigarette kiosk were closed.

  “Some demonstration,” said the chronicler. “They’re giving them a beating.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Clara. “At this distance they wouldn’t have to be running that quickly. They’re afraid, but not of the cossacks.”

  “Look at those men in the market, they’re carrying someone who’s hurt,” said Andrés.

  “He’s really hurt,” said the chronicler, who’d seen the arms of the wounded man dangling among the legs of the men carrying him. They moved along in silence and very slowly, protected by the market. Then, following the order of a tall man wearing a gray jacket and a beret, they stopped right next to the group. Nice present, thought the chronicler when they deposited the wounded man practically at their feet, amid distrustful mutterings and whispered arguments about if

  it’d be better if we went to Plaza Mayo and scattered. So young… Stop it, you didn’t know it burned

  Ma, what’s gonna burn, paviolo?

  I’m telling you…

  “Use my jacket as a pillow for him,” said a blond boy, who was trembling from—perhaps—excitement. “It looks to me

  that…” He looked suspiciously at Andrés then at Clara. The wounded man was taking big gasping breaths of air, and his moist lips were covered with dust balls and spittle. He was leaning against the wall, and someone put the folded jacket under the nape of his neck. Then he screamed: a dry, short scream, almost a bark; and raising a hand, he squeezed his stomach. In the darkness, it wasn’t possible to see much, but Andrés noticed that the man’s legs disappeared for moments at a time in the yellow vapor hovering over the ground. Only his head, his black curls, stood out from the fog.

  “What happened?” the chronicler asked the man next to him.

  “Whad’ya think happened? We were on our way to Retiro Park, and…”

  “Siamo fregati,” said another, pushing him. “Andiamo via súbito, Enzo.”

  “Ma sì, wait a minute. Anyway, now…”

  But Andrés had already seen the furtive retreat, how one by one they melted into the fog. He tried to convince the man next to him to go on explaining, but suddenly he didn’t see him anymore, he’d turned toward one of the columns in the market, and the darkness swallowed him up. Only the wounded man and the blond boy who’d taken off his jacket were left. Others passed down the middle of the street in groups, or alone, running around the few cars coming down from Retiro;

  and the chronicler noted that no cars were going in the opposite direction. “Pale grumbling,” the words came to him mechanically. “Pale grumbling. Pale.” He repeated—“Pale, pale”—until he drained all meaning from the word, until it was stripped of everything accessory and he discovered its sound, its form—“pale”—its sonorousness, its nothingness—“pale”—the hole where that other resided really without color, the opposite of a ruddy glow, opposite of something else that in turn…

  “He’s dying.”

  Andrés’ voice. Bark, complaint. The guy with the beret disappeared into the market. Soria Pharmacy. Clara?

  Trucks.

  “Carlitos, Carlitos!” the blond boy was saying, kneeling down, looking at the pasty gray face of the wounded man. “Carlitos!”

  Andrés and Juan brought Clara to the edge of the sidewalk, and Stella came back from the corner where she’d gone in order not to see and took hold of Andrés’ arm.

  “You all stay here or go on down,” said Andrés. “I’m going over to that restaurant to call an ambulance.”

  “I’ll go with you and bring back some water,” said the chronicler. “Pale grumbling.”

  “Hurry up,” said Juan. “The other guy’s leaving him alone.”

  When they crossed the street, the blond boy ran up Viamonte. Clara covered her face, screaming something no one understood and went back to the man on the ground even though Juan tried to stop her. Stella was holding her by an arm, and found herself dragged to the shadow with both Clara and Juan—all of them together now with the man flat on his back and silent.

  “But don’t you see he took his jacket back!” Clara was screaming. “He took… !”

  “Wait,” said Juan, stopping her. “Let me.”

  She was groaning, hesitant, and then kneeled down so her face would be at the same level of the wounded man’s. With a shriek, she stood up and reeled back. Stella fled without understanding, looking for the area on the corner with more light. Juan clapped his hands hard on Clara’s back, shaking her shoulders, and bent down in turn in the darkness. The chronicler came running over with a glass of water.

  “The telephones don’t work,” he said. “Here, give him…”

  “He’s dead,” said Juan. “I’d advise you not to look at him. Give the water to Clara. That’s right, to Clara.”

  “Okay,” said the chronicler. “Drink this, Clara.” And he added the magic words: “This will do you good.”

  Arm in arm with the women, they reached Andrés on the sidewalk outside the restaurant and crossed Leandro Alem seeing only two cars and a few people on the traffic islands. Andrés told them that the restaurant wasn’t open and that people had wanted to loot it at nightfall. The owner, a tough guy with a Colt revolver in his hand, was holding the fort, sipping barbera and eating pork sausages. A terrific guy. But the telephone was dead.

  “Now what am I going to do with this glass?” said the chronicler when Clara handed it back to him. A few drops remained, which he drank slowly, peering through the bottom at a low, reddish sky. He saw a plane over in the district of the Post Office flying heavily into the distance.

  “Who’d want to leave like that?” muttered Juan. “Planes are robbery, always. Lean on me, come on. That’s it.” Clara yielded, walking as if she were asleep, and Andrés came from the other direction to help him hold her up, signaling to the chronicler to take care of Stella, who was furtively looking back, deathly afraid.

  “I really don’t understand,” said Stella. The chronicler shrugged his shoulders, and when they started walking on the narrow sidewalk made of boards, alongside the fence around the construction site to their left, he delicately placed the glass on the ground, up against the planks.

  With all that whiskey, all that grappa, all that caña; the First and Last, a little shed a nose in the wind, washed up from the river, filthy from nothing, fro
m nothing’s having happened; filthy from empty… from liquor falling into other people’s mouths.

  The First and Last: everything that happens here happens to others;

  regulars (but here they say customers)

  so a little shed for no reason, a bar for men from the river, where they don’t even leave their thirst, they just use the river as you see

  and then they take off.

  “The morality of taverns,” said Andrés stretching his legs. “Their emptiness is my plenitude, and vice versa.”

  “As obscure as the south wind,” said the chronicler, “which also definitely applies to roulette, movies, to various and sundry objects.”

  “To us,” said Juan, drying his face, “who suck the lives of others to replenish our own. Am I speaking with you? No, I’m not speaking with you. I take speech from you and keep it for myself. I take away that smile, that look.”

  “He took away the jacket,” said Clara, sighing. “Excuse me, I’m very tired. No one should… “

  Take away, thought Andrés. Again, he was seeing El Ateneo, the pair of eyeglasses swinging in the hand of the salesman. That’s right, it’s less than what you might want to lose. That’s for sure. He smiled, mocking himself. Sentimental.

  “And as long as we’re talking about taking away or taking off jackets,” the chronicler was saying, bringing over a chair on which he could hang his own. Andrés and Juan followed suit, with that relief that any change in clothing brings. Because, as Juan said, clothing forms part of our psyche and feels things on its own, so the sooner you hang it up, the better. They were served bottles of beer

  “it isn’t too cold because…”

  (something about the electricity)

  and thick sandwiches of salami and prosciutto. They’d taken a table on the right, against the wall, almost all by themselves, as if the half-light had scared away the customers. A boy with mestizo features watched them from the counter, occasionally turning his head to check the time on an old wall clock between the price list and an air conditioner (which wasn’t working).