The Truce

by Mario Benedetti

  Saturday 14 September

  Nevertheless, yesterday’s date didn’t pass in vain. Several times during the day today I thought: ‘Fifty years’, and my heart sank. I was in front of the mirror and I couldn’t avoid feeling a little bit of pity and a desire to commiserate with that wrinkled fellow with tired eyes who never amounted to anything and never will. The most tragic thing is not being mediocre, but being unaware of that mediocrity; the most tragic thing is to be mediocre and to know that one is like that, and not to be satisfied with a destiny that is, moreover (that’s the worse part), strictly justified. Then, while I was looking at myself in the mirror, Avellaneda’s head appeared over my shoulder. When that wrinkled fellow who never amounted to anything and never will saw her, his eyes lit up, and for two and a half hours he forgot that he was now fifty years old.

  Sunday 15 September

  She laughs. Then I ask her: ‘Do you know what it means to be fifty years old?’ and she laughs again. But perhaps deep down she realizes everything and will start to place very diverse issues on the plates of the scales. Still, she’s a good woman and doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t mention that there will be an inevitable moment when I will look at her without feeling passion, when her hand in mine won’t be an electric shock, when I will hold for her the same affection one reserves for one’s nieces, for the daughters of one’s friends, for the most remote actresses of the cinema; an affection that is a kind of mental decoration, but that can’t harm nor be harmed, can’t inflict scars nor accelerate the heartbeat; a tame affection, placid, harmless, that looks like a preview of the monotonous love of God. And then I’ll look at her and I won’t be able to feel jealous, because by then the era of turmoil will have ended. When a cloud appears in the clear sky of the septuagenarian, one immediately knows it’s the cloud of death. This must be the most pretentious and ridiculous sentence I’ve allowed to fall on to the pages of this diary. And the most truthful, perhaps. Why is it that the truth is always a little pretentious? One’s thoughts serve to elevate that which is worthy without any excuse, that which is stoic without faltering, balance without reservations. But the excuses, the faltering and the reservations are all ensconced in reality, and when we confront them, they disarm us, weaken us. The worthier the intentions to be fulfilled, the more ridiculous the unfulfilled intentions seem to be. I’ll look at her and I won’t be able to feel jealous of anyone; only jealous of myself, jealousy of this present-day individual who feels jealous of everyone. I went out with Avellaneda and my fifty years, strolling with both of them along 18th. I wanted to be seen with her, but I don’t think I saw anyone from the office. Instead, I was seen by Vignale’s wife, a friend of Jaime’s and two of her relatives. In addition (what a horrible ‘in addition’!), on 18th and Yaguarón, I bumped into Isabel’s mother. It’s incredible: so many, many years have passed over both our faces, and yet, when I see her, my heart still jumps; actually, it’s more than a jump, it’s a leap of rage and impotence. She’s such an admirably invincible woman that one can do nothing less than remove one’s hat in her presence. She greeted us with the same aggressive reticence of twenty years ago, and then literally enveloped Avellaneda in a long stare that was both diagnosis and despair. Avellaneda felt the jolt, squeezed my arm, and asked me who she was. ‘My mother-in-law,’ I replied. And it’s true: she’s my first and only mother-in-law. Because, even if I were to marry Avellaneda, even if I had never been Isabel’s husband, this tall, powerful and decisive seventy-year-old matron had always been and would always be my Universal Mother-in-Law; inevitable, destined to be a woman who descends directly from that God of terror who hopefully doesn’t exist, even if only to remind me that the world is like that, that sometimes the world also stops to contemplate us, with a look which can be both diagnosis and despair.

  Monday 16 September

  We left the office almost at the same time, but she didn’t want to go to the apartment. She has a cold, so we went to the pharmacy and I bought her some cough syrup. Then we took a taxi and I dropped her off two blocks away from her house. She doesn’t want to run the risk of her father finding out. She took a few steps, turned around and happily waved at me. Deep down, none of that is very important. But there was a familiarity, a simplicity, in her gesture. And at that moment I felt comfortable because I was certain there was communication between us, helpless perhaps, but peacefully assured.

  Tuesday 17 September

  Avellaneda didn’t come to the office.

  Wednesday 18 September

  Santini started telling me his secrets again. He’s repulsive and amusing at the same time. He says that his sister no longer dances naked in front of him. She has a boyfriend now.

  Avellaneda didn’t come today either. It seems that her mother called when I wasn’t in, and spoke to Muñoz. She says her daughter has the flu.

  Thursday 19 September

  Today I really started to miss her. They were talking about her in the department, and all of a sudden it felt unbearable that she hadn’t been in the office.

  Friday 20 September

  Avellaneda didn’t come to the office again today. I was in the apartment this afternoon and five minutes later everything became clear to me. It took that long for all of my misgivings to disappear: I’m going to get married. More than all of my lines of argument against it, more than all of my conversations with her, more than all of that, what matters most is her absence just now. How accustomed I am to her, to her presence.

  Saturday 21 September

  I told Blanca about my wedding plans and left her feeling happy. I now have to tell Avellaneda; I have to tell her because now I really have found the strength, the conviction. But, once again, she didn’t come to the office today.

  Sunday 22 September

  Couldn’t she send me a telegram? She’s forbidden me to go to her house, but if she doesn’t come to the office tomorrow, I’ll find some excuse to visit her.

  Monday 23 September

  My God. My God. My God. My God. My God. My God.

  Friday 17 January

  It’s been almost four months since I’ve written anything in this diary. On 23 September, I didn’t have the courage to write about what happened that day.

  On 23 September, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the telephone rang. Surrounded by employees, paperwork and proposals, I picked up the receiver. A man’s voice said: ‘Mr Santomé? Look, this is one of Laura’s uncles speaking. Sir, I have bad news. Very bad news. Laura passed away this morning.’

  In the first moment I didn’t want to understand. Laura wasn’t anyone, she wasn’t Avellaneda. ‘She passed away,’ her uncle’s voice had said. The words are disgusting. ‘Passed away’ signifies a formality: ‘Sir, I have bad news,’ her uncle had said. But what does he know? What does he know about how bad news can destroy the future, the aspect of the face, the sense of touch, the ability to sleep? What does he know, huh? The only thing he knows how to say is: ‘She passed away’, something as unbearably easy as that. I’m sure he was even shrugging his shoulders when he gave me the bad news, and that too is disgusting. And that’s why I did something quite horrible: with my left hand I crumpled a sales account into a ball, and with my right hand I brought the receiver closer to my mouth and slowly said: ‘Why don’t you go to hell?’ I don’t remember exactly, but I think the voice asked: ‘What did you say, sir?’ several times, to which I repeated: ‘Why don’t you go to hell?’ several times in reply. And then the receiver was taken away from me and someone spoke to the uncle. I think I screamed, gasped for air, and spoke gibberish. I could hardly breathe. I felt my collar being unbuttoned and my tie being loosened. Then there was an unfamiliar voice that said: ‘It’s been an emotional shock’, and another voice, this one quite familiar, Muñoz’s voice, which started to explain: ‘She was an employee he held in great esteem.’ In that nebula of sounds there were also Santini’s sobs, Robledo’s crude explanation of the mystery surrounding death, and the manager’s ritual instructions abo
ut sending a wreath. Between Sierra and Muñoz, they finally managed to put me in a taxi and bring me home.

  Blanca was very frightened when she opened the door. But Muñoz quickly calmed her down: ‘Don’t worry, miss, your father is perfectly fine. Do you know what happened? A colleague passed away this morning and he took the news quite hard. And it’s no wonder, she was a great girl”.’ He too said: ‘Passed away’. Well, maybe the uncle, Muñoz and the others might all do well by saying ‘passed away’, because those words sound so ridiculous, so cold, so far away from Avellaneda, that they can’t harm her, can’t destroy her.

  Then, when I was at home, alone in my room, when even poor Blanca withdrew the comfort of her silence, I moved my lips to say: ‘She died. Avellaneda died,’ because ‘died’ is the word, ‘died’ is the collapse of life, ‘died’ comes from within, brings the real breath of pain, ‘died’ is despair, the frigid and total void, the simple abyss, the abyss. Then, when I moved my lips to say: ‘She died,’ I saw my filthy solitude, what remained of me, which was very little. With all the selfishness at my disposal, I thought about myself; the anxious, mended man I would now become. But, at the same time, that was the most generous way to think of her, the most complete way to imagine her. Because up until three o’clock in the afternoon on 23 September, I had much more of Avellaneda than I had of myself. She had begun to enter me, to become me, like a river that blends with the sea too much and finally becomes salty like the sea. That’s why when I moved my lips and said: ‘She died,’ I felt pierced, stripped, empty, worthless. Someone had arrived and decreed: ‘Strip this man of four-fifths of his being.’ And they did strip me. Worst of all, this remnant that I now am, that fifth part of me that I’ve become, is still, however, conscious of its smallness and insignificance. I’ve been left with one-fifth of my good resolutions, my good plans, my good intentions, but the one-fifth part of my sanity that has remained is enough to make me realize that what I’ve been left with is useless. The matter has simply come to an end. I didn’t want to go to her house, I didn’t want to see her dead, because it was an unseemly disadvantage. That I should see her, but that she not see me. That I should touch her, but that she not touch me. That I should be alive, but that she is dead. She is something else, she is her last day, there I can treat her as an equal. It’s her getting out of the taxi with the cough medicine I had bought her, it’s her taking a few steps and turning around to gift me a gesture. The final, the final, the final gesture. I cry and cling to it. On that day I wrote that I was certain there was communication between us. But this certainty existed while she existed. Now my lips move to say: ‘She died. Avellaneda died,’ and the certainty is extinguished, it is a shameless, unseemly condition which doesn’t belong here. I returned to the office, of course, to the piercing, putrefying, sickening comments. ‘Her cousin told me it was a simple and common case of the flu, and then suddenly, bang! She had heart failure.’ I went back to work again, resolved matters, answered inquiries, and wrote reports. I am truly an exemplary civil servant. Sometimes, Muñoz, Robledo or even Santini himself approach me and try to initiate an evocative chat with introductory remarks like the following: ‘To think that Avellaneda did this job,’ ‘Look, boss, Avellaneda wrote this annotation.’ Then I avert my eyes and say: ‘Well, it’s all right, one has to keep on living.’ The points I gained on 23 September, I’ve since lost with interest. I know they mumble that I’m indifferent, an egotist, that someone else’s misfortune doesn’t affect me. But their mumbling doesn’t matter. They’re on the outside. Outside that world which Avellaneda and I had been in. Outside that world in which I am now, alone like a hero, but with no reason to feel brave.

  Wednesday 22 January

  Sometimes I talk to Blanca about her. I don’t cry or despair; I simply talk. I know there’s an echo there. It’s Blanca who cries, despairs. She says she can’t believe in God, that God has been giving and then taking away opportunities from me; nor does she feel strong enough to believe in a cruel God, an absolute sadist. Nevertheless, I don’t feel so spiteful. On 23 September, I not only wrote ‘My God’, a number of times, I also said it, felt it. For the first time in my life, I thought I could talk to Him. But God’s part in our conversation was weak, vacillating, as if He wasn’t too sure of Himself. Perhaps I had almost moved Him. I also had the feeling that a decisive argument existed, an argument that was right next to me, in front of me, and that despite this, I still couldn’t recognize it or add it to my plea. Then, after that time limit He had granted me to convince Him had elapsed, after that hint of vacillation and timidity had come to an end, God finally regained His powers. God went back to being the almighty Negation He had always been. Still, I can’t feel rancour towards Him, I can’t paw at Him with my hatred. I know he gave me the opportunity and I didn’t know how to take advantage of it. Perhaps someday I’ll be able to understand that unique and decisive argument, but by then I’ll already be terribly withered, and at present I’m even more withered. Sometimes I think that if God played fair, He also would have given me the argument I could use against Him. But no, it can’t be. I don’t want a God who doesn’t choose to trust me with the key with which to return, sooner or later, to my conscience to support me; I don’t want a God who offers me everything ready-made, like one of those prosperous fathers from the Rambla, filthy rich, was able to do with his snobby, useless little son. No, definitely not that. Now my relationship with God has grown cold. He knows I’m not capable of convincing Him. I know that He’s a distant solitude, to which I never had, nor will ever have, access. So that’s how we are now, each of us on our own shore, without hating or loving each other, strangers.

  Friday 24 January

  Today, throughout the entire day, while I ate breakfast, while I worked, while I ate lunch, while I argued with Muñoz, I was bewildered by a single idea, which, broken down, led me to have several doubts and ask myself: ‘What did she think about before she died? What did I mean to her at that moment? Did she turn to me? Did she say my name?’

  Sunday 26 January

  For the first time, I reread my diary from February to January. I have to look for all of Her Moments. She first appears on 27 February. On 12 March, I wrote: ‘When she says: “Mr Santomé, she always blinks. She isn’t beautiful, but her smile is passable. Something is better than nothing.’ I wrote that, I once thought that about her. On 10 April: ‘There is something about Avellaneda that attracts me. That’s obvious, but what is it?’ Well, and what was it? I still don’t know. I was attracted to her eyes, her voice, her waist, her mouth, her hands, her laugh, her weariness, her shyness, her tears, her honesty, her sorrow, her trust, her tenderness, her sleep, her walk, her sighs. But none of those traits was enough to attract me compulsively, totally. Every attractive trait supported another. I was attracted to her as a whole, as an irreplaceable sum of attractiveness, by chance replaceable. On 17 May, I told her: ‘I think I’m in love with you,’ and she replied: ‘I already knew.’ I keep saying this to myself, I hear her saying it, and everything about the present time becomes unbearable. Two days later I said: ‘What I’m boldly looking for is an understanding, a kind of agreement between my love and your freedom.’ She had replied: ‘I like you.’ It’s horrible how much those three words hurt. On 7 June, I kissed her and that night I wrote: ‘Tomorrow I’ll think about it. Now I’m tired, or I could also say: happy. But I’m too alert to feel completely happy. Alert about myself, about good luck, and that sole tangible future called tomorrow. Alert, that is to say: distrustful.’ Still, what good did that distrust do? Did I perhaps take advantage of it to live more intensely, more eagerly, more urgently? No, by no means. Afterwards, I acquired a particular sense of security, I thought everything was fine if one was conscious of loving, loving with an echo, with repercussions. On 23 June, she talked to me about her parents and her mother’s theory about happiness. Perhaps I should replace my unyielding Universal Mother-in-Law with this good image, with this woman who understands, forgives. On the 28
th, the most important event of my life took place. I, of all people, ended up praying. ‘May it last,’ and to pressure God I knocked on wood. But eventually, God proved to be incorruptible. Still, on 6 July, I allowed myself to write: ‘All of a sudden, I realized that that moment, that slice of everyday life, was the highest degree of well-being, it was Happiness.’ But I quickly slapped myself alert: ‘I’m sure the pinnacle is only a brief second, an instantaneous flash, and it’s unfair to make it any longer.’ I was being dishonest when I wrote that, however; I know better now. Because, deep down, I had faith there would be extensions, that the pinnacle wouldn’t just be a point, but a long, endless plateau. But there was no right to extensions, of course not. Afterwards, I wrote about the word ‘Avellaneda’, and all of the meanings it had. Now I think: ‘Avellaneda’, and the word means: ‘She’s not here, she’ll never be here again.’ I can’t.

  Tuesday 28 January

  There are so many other things in this diary, so many other faces: Vignale, Aníbal, my children, Isabel. None of that matters, none of that exists. While Avellaneda was here, I had a better understanding of Isabel’s time, and of Isabel herself. But now she isn’t here, and Isabel has disappeared behind a thick, dark curtain of despondency.