Cronopios and Famas

by Julio Cortázar

  unstable

  stuff

  AT THE OFFICE

  My faithful secretary is one of those who take their job seriously, down to the last comma, and you realize what that means, crossing up the chain of command, invading others’ territories, sticking five fingers into a glass of milk to fish out one poor little hair.

  My faithful secretary takes care of, or would like to take care of, everything in my office. We pass the day cheerfully, carrying on a friendly battle for jurisdiction, smilingly we undermine and countermine, there are sallies and retreats, captures and rescues. But she has time for it all, she not only tries to dominate the office, but also, scrupulously, fulfills her duties. Words for example, not a day goes by that she doesn’t polish them up, brush them off, she files them in neat orderliness, grooms and readies them for their daily functions. Should an expendable adjective pop out of my mouth—all those occur outside my secretary’s orbit, and in a certain way outside my own—there she is, pencil in hand to trap and kill it, not even leaving it time to weld itself to the rest of the sentence and, through sloppy habit or neglect, survive. If I left her alone, if at this very moment I left her to her own devices, she’d crumple these papers in rage and throw them in the basket. She is so strongly resolved that I live an orderly life that any unforeseen move moves her to sit up, all ears, tail and nose at point, trembling like a sheep bell in the wind. I have to fake it, and under the pretext that I am editing a report, fill a few sheets of pink or green paper with words which happen to please me with their games and their skipping around and their furious wrangling. My faithful secretary, meanwhile, straightens up the office, apparently distracted, but ready to hop to it. In the middle of a verse which was contentedly coming into being, I hear her begin her horrible squeak of disapproval, then my pencil breaks into a gallop to reach the forbidden words, she erases them promptly, orders the disorder, cuts, cleans it up, makes it resplendent, and what’s left is probably fine, but this sadness, this taste of treachery on the tongue, the expression of a boss face to face with his secretary.

  MARVELOUS PURSUITS

  What a wonderful pursuit: cut the leg off a spider, put it in an envelope, write on it Minister of Foreign Affairs, add the address, run downstairs, and drop the letter into the mailbox at the corner.

  What a wonderful pursuit: walk down the boulevard Arago counting the trees, and every five chestnut trees stand for a moment on one leg and wait for someone to look, then give a short, tight yell, spin like a top, arms wide, very like the cakuy bird who laments in the trees of northern Argentina.

  What a wonderful pursuit: go into a café and ask for sugar, again for sugar, three or four times for sugar, continue with great concentration constructing a mountain of sugar, center of the table, while indignation swells along the counters and beneath the white aprons, and then spit, softly, right in the middle of the mountain, and watch the descent of the small glacier of saliva, hear the roar of broken rocks which accompanies it, arising from the contracted throats of five local customers and the boss, an honest man when he feels like it.

  What a marvelous pursuit: take the bus, get off in front of the Ministry, hack your way through quickly using an official-looking envelope with heavy seals, leave the last secretary behind, and then seriously and without flinching enter the great office with mirrors, exactly at the moment that an usher in a blue uniform is delivering a letter to the Minister, watch him slit the envelope with a letter opener of historic origin, insert two fingers delicately and come out with the spider’s leg and stand there looking at it, then imitate a fly’s buzzing and watch how the Minister grows pale, he wants to get rid of the leg but he can’t, he’s trapped by the leg, turn your back and leave whistling, announce down the corridors that the Minister is resigning, and you realize that the next day enemy troops are entering the city and everything will go to hell, and it’ll be a Thursday of an odd-numbered month in leap year.

  VIETATO INTRODURRE BICICLETTE

  (BICYCLES PROHIBITED)

  In the banks and business offices of this world no one gives a hang if someone walks in with a cabbage under his arm, or a toucan, or with the songs my mother taught me spouting from his mouth like a hemp cord, or holding a chimpanzee in a striped T-shirt by the hand. But let someone walk in with a bicycle, what a fuss they raise, the vehicle is ejected forcibly into the street while its hapless owner is subjected to the vehement admonitions of the employees.

  For a bicycle, a docile being of modest conduct, it is a humiliation and a mockery to always find these supercilious notices which keep it waiting outside the beautiful glass doors of the city. Be it understood that bicycles have tried every means to better their dismal social condition. But in absolutely every country on earth BICYCLES ARE PROHIBITED. Some of the placards add “and dogs,” which for bicycles and dogs only increases their natural inferiority complexes twofold. A cat, a hare, a turtle, can in principle enter the import-export firm of Bunge & Born, or the lawyers’ offices in the calle San Martin, without occasioning more than surprise, captivating the overworked switchboard girls, or at worst, an order to the porter on the door to remove the aforementioned animals from the premises. This final alternative can certainly occur, but it is no humiliation, primarily because it constitutes only one probability among many, and secondly because it comes as a cause-and-effect situation and not as a coldly pre-established plot, a dreadfully perpetrated and general conspiracy printed on bronze plaques or enameled notices, inexorable tablets of the law which crush the simple spontaneity of bicycles, the innocent creatures.

  Anyway, you managers, watch out! Roses are also ingenuous and tender, but perhaps you may know that in a war of roses princes died who were like black lightning, blinded by petals of blood. Might it not happen one day that the bicycles appear covered with thorns, that the shafts of their handlebars reverse themselves, grow like horns, and charge, that, armored with frenzy, they might not storm in legion the plate-glass windows of the insurance companies? And that unhappy day close with a general dip on the stock market, mourning dress prepared within twenty-four hours, and printed notes of acknowledgment for the sympathy cards, also printed.

  THE BEHAVIOR OF MIRRORS

  ON EASTER ISLAND

  When you set up a mirror on the western side of Easter Island, it runs backwards. When you set one up on the eastern side of the island, it runs forward. Delicate surveys may discover the point at which that mirror will run on time, but finding the point at which that mirror works correctly is no guarantee that that point will serve for any other, since mirrors are subject to the defects of the individual substances of which they are made and react the way they really and truly want to. So that Solomon Lemos, an anthropologist on fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, looking into the mirror to shave, saw himself dead of typhus—this was on the eastern side of the island. And at the same time a tiny mirror which he’d forgotten on the western side of Easter Island (it’d been dropped between some stones) reflected for no one Solomon Lemos in short pants on his way to school, then Solomon Lemos naked in a bathtub being enthusiastically soaped by his mummy and daddy, then Solomon Lemos going da-da-da, to the thrilled delight of his Aunt Remeditos on a cattle ranch in Trenque Lanquen county.

  THE POSSIBILITIES OF ABSTRACTION

  I’ve been working for years at UNESCO and for other international organizations, in spite of which I manage to preserve some sense of humor and an especially noteworthy capacity for abstraction, which means for instance if I don’t like a guy I wipe him, solely by deciding to do so, and while he talks and talks I’ve gone on to thinking about Melville and the poor guy thinks I’m listening. In the same way if there’s a chick I like, she barely enters my field of vision and I can abstract the clothes off her, and while she talks to me about what a cold morning it is, I’m spending long minutes admiring her little belly button. This power that I have, sometimes it’s almost unhealthy.

  Last Monday it was ears. At the hour when everyone comes to work, i
t was extraordinary the number of ears whipping down the hall from the entrance. In my office I encountered six ears, in the cafeteria at noon there were over five hundred, symmetrically arranged in double rows. It was amusing from time to time to see a pair of ears rise, leave the assembly line, and move off. They looked like wings.

  I picked out something for Tuesday which I thought would be less ubiquitous—wrist watches. I was wrong, however, because at lunch I could see about two hundred of them hovering over the tables with a back-and-forth movement which reminded me particularly of the action of cutting up a beefsteak. Wednesday I preferred (with a certain embarrassment) something more fundamental, and I opted for buttons. What a show, wow! The air of the halls was filled with shoals of opaque eyes which crept horizontally, while alongside and somewhat below each little horizontal battalion, two, three, or four cuff buttons swung like pendulums. The saturation in the elevator was indescribable: hundreds of buttons, motionless or barely moving in an astonishing crystallographical cube. I remember one window especially (it was afternoon) against a blue sky. Eight red buttons sketched an exquisite vertical, and here and there a few small pearly secret disks moved delicately. She must have been a very beautiful woman.

  It was Ash Wednesday, a day on which it seemed to me that the digestive processes would provide an adequate illustration of the event, so that at nine thirty I was the reluctant witness of the arrival of hundreds of guts full of a greyish pap as a result of the mixture of cornflakes, light coffee, and croissants. In the cafeteria I watched an orange being divided into triflingly neat sections which, at a given moment, lost their shape and descended one behind the other until at a certain height they formed a whitish deposit. In that state the orange hurried down the corridor, went down four floors, then, after entering an office, proceeded to immobilize itself at a point situated between the two arms of a chair. Somewhat further along you could see a quarter of a liter of strong tea in an analogous repose. As a curious parenthesis (my faculty for abstraction tends to exercise itself arbitrarily) you could see furthermore a puff of smoke that was descending vertically by a tube, split into two translucent bladders, ascend the tube again, and then with a pretty flourish disperse in its baroque consequences. Later (I was in another office), I found some pretext to go back and visit the orange, the tea, and the smoke. But the smoke had disappeared and in place of the orange and the tea there were two contorted tubes, rather disagreeable. Even abstraction has its distressing side; I said hello to the tubes and went back to my office. My secretary was crying, reading the memorandum informing me that they were letting me go. To console myself I decided to abstract her tears, and for a short time I took considerable pleasure in these diminutive crystalline fountains which appeared in the air and went plash on the bookshelves, the blotter, and the official bulletin. Life is full of such fair sights as these.

  THE DAILY DAILY

  A man clambers onto the streetcar after having bought the daily paper and tucking it under his arm. Half an hour later he gets off, the same newspaper under the same arm.

  Only now it’s not the same newspaper, now it’s a pile of printed sheets which the man drops on a bench in the plaza.

  It hardly stays alone a minute on the bench, the pile of printed sheets is converted into a newspaper again when a young boy sees it, reads it, and leaves it converted into a pile of printed sheets.

  It sits alone on the bench hardly a minute, the pile of printed sheets converts again into a newspaper when an old woman finds it, reads it, and leaves it changed into a pile of printed sheets. But then she carries it home and on the way home uses it to wrap up a pound of beets, which is what newspapers are fit for after all these exciting metamorphoses.

  A SMALL STORY TENDING TO

  ILLUSTRATE THE UNCERTAINTY OF

  THE STABILITY WITHIN WHICH WE

  LIKE TO BELIEVE WE EXIST, OR LAWS

  COULD GIVE GROUND TO THE

  EXCEPTIONS, UNFORESEEN DISASTERS,

  OR IMPROBABILITIES, AND I WANT TO

  SEE YOU THERE

  Confidential memo CVN/ 475 a/W

  fr/ the Secretary of OCLUSIOM

  to/ the Secretary of VERPERTUIT.

  … terrible confusion. Everything was going beautifully, no trouble ever with the regulations. Now suddenly they decide to order a meeting of the Executive Committee in extraordinary session and the troubles begin, you’ll see what kind of messes turn up. Absolute confusion in the ranks. Doubts as to the future. It happens that the Committee meets and proceeds to elect new members to replace the six office holders who fell under tragic circumstances, i.e., they fell into the water with the helicopter that was taking them on a survey of the desert area, all of them perishing miserably in the regional hospital through a nurse mistakenly administering them sulfanilamide in doses clearly unacceptable to the human organism. The Committee meeting, consisting of the surviving Committee member (who’d had to stay home the day of the catastrophe because of a cold) and six alternate members, proceeds to vote on the candidates proposed by the different member-states that form OCLUSIOM. They elect unanimously Mr. Felix Voll (applause). They elect unanimously Mr. Felix Romero (applause). Another vote is called for, result, they unanimously elect Mr. Felix Lupescu (a certain uneasiness). The interim president takes the floor and makes a rather jocular allusion to the coincidence of first names. The Greek delegate requests the floor and declares that although it may seem somewhat peculiar, he has been instructed by his government to offer as candidate Mr. Felix Paparemologos. He is voted on and wins by a majority. The next vote comes up, and the Pakistani delegate, Mr. Felix Abib, carries it. At this point in the proceedings there is great confusion among the Committee, so it presses the final vote, with the result that the Argentine candidate, Mr. Felix Camusso, is elected. Amid the markedly uncomfortable applause of the present members, the senior Committee member welcomes the six new members, whom he qualifies cordially and designates as namesakes (stupefaction). The composition of the Committee is read and ends up organized in the following order: reading from the left, President and oldest surviving member, Mr. Felix Smith. Members: Felix Voll, Felix Romero, Felix Lupescu, Felix Paparemologos, Felix Abib, and Felix Camusso.