“I’m starting to wonder: from soldiers to savages, I’m not sure where you were going to be better off.”
“They looked like savages because they were so grubby and unshaven, but they weren’t. They kicked the dead off the road, they took away their weapons, tied up the prisoners—not me—we climbed into the truck and took off jolting like lunatics across the countryside, on the point of overturning every ten meters. We arrived in one piece, I don’t know how, at an almost-town or ex-town, and we stopped at a nearly ruined house. One of the sergeants died on the way. The lieutenant was badly wounded but he endured and the other sergeant was more or less all right. They put them in a cellar. To me they gave a foul stew to eat, but if it had been caviar I wouldn’t have put it away with more enthusiasm and the tall, thin one who was called ser Dividis sat down with me to ask me as well, but more gently, who I was. I told him. He smiled a little, like the concierge, only I didn’t want to hit this guy, and he told me, of course, these things could happen and not to worry, how about that? And that unfortunately they didn’t have rhythm charts to inform me with certainty. I didn’t know what the rhythm charts were but I wanted a cup of coffee and I asked if there was any. Other guys who were walking around, like they were keeping watch or out of curiosity, burst out laughing, and one who must be my soul mate sighed and closed his eyes. No, ser Dividis told me, it was a long time since there had been coffee. I took out my cigarettes and when I saw their startled, envious faces, I shared them around. They threw themselves on them like castaways: they left me only one, which I smoked while the thin guy explained, not my own case—unfortunately—but the general situation. For my case, there wasn’t time.”
He sipped coffee very slowly, contrary to his custom.
“They were maquisards, guerrillas, although they melodramatically called themselves Lords of Peace—I don’t want to think what the lords of war would be like—and their leaders took the title ser. They fought, as best they could, against the Captains. The Captains were a military caste that governed the world after its fashion. Moreover, nothing original. The Lords had been very hopeful lately because the Captains were dividing into groups that fought among themselves, nothing original there, either. Each faction of the Captains had an army with uniforms of a different color. The Reds had just defeated the Yellows and were patrolling the zone killing fugitives and, in passing, Lords. ‘Who’s winning?’ I asked. They had no idea. They were confident of bleeding them dry because the Captains were weakened by fighting each other for absolute power with that tendency people thrown about by death have to believe that absolute power is going to save them from something. And they attacked them using the old technique of appearing where the others least expected them. In addition, and in spite of the fact that the Captains paid well and punished better, there were many desertions and herds of soldiers crossed over to the ranks of the Lords. But I, who know a little history, was not so optimistic. They didn’t know anything for certain: there were no newspapers or radios or any kind of communications and land, water, and air transport were in the hands of the Captains, although they stole what they could. They would send spies or messengers to other zones and sometimes men arrived from far away with news that was no longer worth anything. Ser Dividis had been born when the dictatorship of the Captains began to grow powerful and he remembered a little, not a lot, of a world without war. He recounted atrocities, he got worked up, and after a speech that I think was not directed to me or to his men but rather to himself, he asked me what side I was on. I told him on their side, of course, was I going to start arguing?” He thought about it. “Besides, if I had to choose, I would have been with them. I sympathize with lost causes. Which tend to be those that win in the long run and come to power, they become strong, another lost cause appears and everything starts all over again. I was starting to ask ser Dividis why on Uunu I encountered a different world every day when the fight started up again. It was the Reds.”
He finished his coffee and pushed the cup away and put his arms on the table, with the cigarette between his joined hands.
“I’m not going to tell you about the battle. One can’t. When you have experienced one, the description, the memory, everything you can say, everything you read in the newspaper or saw in the cinema, doesn’t go beyond a kindergarten scene. This time they won, the Reds. I had a shotgun someone had put in my hands and I shot out of a window. That lasted quite a while, not as long as it seemed to me at the time, but a while. The Reds had us surrounded and they got closer all the time. I sympathize with lost causes, but I’m not stupid. When I saw the situation was getting ugly, I turned around to see if I could escape somehow, carrying the shotgun and the few bullets I had left. Ser Dividis was doing the same. He made signs to those of us who remained, they pushed aside a table, they raised the floor and we ran away through a subterranean tunnel that came out in the forest. Unfortunately, the Reds were waiting for us in the forest: evidently if the Lords had infiltrators in the armies, the others also had theirs among the Lords’ men. They took down almost everyone, including ser Dividis, and I was sorry because he seemed like a good guy; a nutcase, but a good guy. Four of us managed to escape by some miracle into the trees. At last they left us in peace. The other three said that in a half day’s march we could reach Irbali so long as there weren’t more soldiers on the road, as was very probable: they were crazy, too. I suppose Irbali must be another city, but I said no, I was staying there.”
“Doesn’t sound very prudent to me.”
“The whole world was at war, what did it matter where one was? And I wanted to be close to the port, if it existed, so they left and I remained alone in a forest, with a shotgun in my hand, a dozen bullets, and war all around.”
“Yes, of course, the best thing was for you to keep quiet and wait.”
“Which I did. Until that moment they hadn’t let me decide. But when they left and I could start thinking after a second of panic, I saw that it was best. I didn’t know what was going to happen that next day on Uunu, but why lose hope? I climbed a tree, I placed the shotgun in a hollow branch, I arranged myself as best I could in a fork and I waited. When night fell, I climbed down, I grabbed the shotgun and started walking in the direction of the city. I came very close, much sooner than I had imagined: something was burning there which didn’t surprise me. I decided to wait for dawn. According to my calculations, if each day I had found a different world, there was no reason the next should be an exception. We would see what happened. Granted, I hoped—or rather, desperately desired—that some day I would return to the world of dra Iratoni and I would be able to leave with my wood. I made the firm resolve, which I did not carry out, to return to Karperp, apologize to Rosdolleu for having thought he was lying to me, and then knock him out with a sucker punch for not having explained to me what was happening and just going on with his elegant evasions. I hid myself as I was able among the plants a good ways off the road, I put the shotgun to one side, I lay down, and I slept.”
“‘In a bed of silk and feathers / I put my mother and my dreams to sleep.’”
“As if it had been a bed of silk and feathers. I had passed a night without sleeping and a day as an unknown soldier. That was enough: I needed a rest.”
“I don’t want to rush you, but understand me: I am dying to know what you found the next day.”
“The wooden bowl,” said Trafalgar.
I had forgotten about the bowl and wasn’t expecting it. “The bowl?”
“Yes. Or, at least, a bowl. I woke up and the first thing I saw was that the shotgun had disappeared and it occurred to me that the Yellows or the Reds or the Purples were going to shoot me. The second thing was that I was hungry, incredibly hungry. Also, my unshaved beard made my face itch and my clothes were a mess and I was fed up, understand, fed up.”
“Don’t get mad,” said Marcos, arriving with more coffee and more orange juice. “That won’t get you anywhere.”
“True,” said Trafalgar. “One time I got
mad on Indaburd V with the president of the corporation of veltra manufacturers and I lost a fantastic sale.”
“See?” said Marcos and he went away very satisfied.
“What’s that about veltra?” I said.
“If instead of glass you had veltra in the windows of your house, you wouldn’t need heating or air-conditioning, or bars or blinds or curtains.”
“I like curtains: they’re warm and decorative,” I said, and I remembered Uunu. “How was it that you found the bowl that day on Uunu?”
“And also, the president of the corporation of veltra manufacturers was an old idiot.”
“Trafalgar, I’m going to kill you.”
“You, too?”
And he smiled. So I left him in peace while he drank the coffee that in Rosario, luckily, is not relative.
“All I wanted when it got light,” said Trafalgar, “and I saw that it was a horrible morning, cold and gray, was to eat. That the Reds or the Greens might shoot me, fine. I imagined the succulent last feasts of the condemned, with coffee, cigars, and cognac, and my guts twisted with indignation. So I walked toward the city determined that they should kill me, although I imagined, and I liked that but I didn’t like it, that the world would be a different one and possibly the Captains would not exist. I required very little, when I reached the city, to recognize that the Captains did not yet exist. Nor was there coffee.”
Just in case, he drank the one he had in front of him.
“It was no longer New York nor the bombed-out city but, lamentably, it wasn’t Welwyn either. It was a group of huts of coarse brick, possibly dried in the sun, without mortar, with thatch roofs and curtains of branches in the doorways and without windows. There were corrals for the animals and fire pits in a clear central area. They received me well: with great curiosity and a lot of chatter, but well. Men and women had leather loincloths and the kids ran around naked, in that cold. I, of course, fell like a bombshell, although they didn’t know what bombs were.”
“The war had ended and the world was left like that?”
“The war hadn’t started yet. It was centuries before the Captains’ war, are you getting this?”
“Damn, of course I get it,” I said, “but why didn’t anybody warn you?”
“That was more an error on my part than on theirs. But, as I said, they received me well. They approached me with curiosity but without suspicion, they touched me and sniffed at me, chatting and laughing. They were the perfect good savages: if brother Jean Jacques were to see them, he’d tear right up with emotion. I didn’t understand what they were saying, and they didn’t understand me. But as Raúl says, there are three gestures that work anywhere. They took me to one of the huts and they gave me something to eat. Leaving out the food at dra Iratoni’s, it was the best I ate on Uunu. Roast meat and grains cooked with little pieces of fat that were practically cracklings and some green, very juicy fruits. Coffee, of course, out of the question. I regretted having given the cigarettes to ser Dividis’ men at the moment when out of habit I put my hand in my pocket, and there was the pack, barely started. I don’t know how many I had in the ruined house of the Lords of Peace, but probably nine or ten. And I remembered that on returning that night, the first one, from dra Iratoni’s, I had put a full pack and another, just opened, in another pocket of the jacket and the next day, in the new hotel, I had dressed in that suit, which I was still wearing. I had smoked, it’s true, in New York and with the Lords, but I looked in a pocket and found the full pack, too, just as predicted. I smoked, something that really got their attention. I was surrounded by kids, by fairly young men and women, who suddenly stepped aside to allow a stooped old man to approach. The old man was completely covered in skins and he had, I suppose as an emblem of authority, rough-made boots also of leather. He came and sat in front of me and began to speak with the alphabet of the mute. He didn’t ask me who I was, which is a complicated question to ask with gestures, but he asked where I had come from. I told him the sky and it seemed very good to him. I thanked him for the food and the hospitality and I told him I was pleased. He thanked me for my gratitude and we were already great friends. I also told him I was tired and then, as I saw that the men had long hair but not beards, I told him I wanted to shave. What for? You can imagine they didn’t bring me a Phillips or even a Techmatic. They talked a little and a matron appeared bringing some stones that were shiny from so much use. I backed away, plenty scared, but it was too late.” He grew pensive. “I have been shaved in many parts of this world and of others. In London, for example, and in Venice and in Hong Kong; and also on Oen, on Enntenitre IV, on Niugsa and in the City of the Beings—some day I’ll have to tell you what that is. But no one ever shaved me so well, so softly or so close, so thoroughly, so maternally as that fat matron dressed in a loincloth, adorned with necklaces and bracelets made from the teeth of some animal, almost toothless, dying of laughter and with two stones as her only equipment. The others were also laughing because I was terrified she would cut my jugular or my nose or both of them, but by the time I finished explaining with signs that I had changed my mind and I no longer wanted to be shaved, I could have been dead and buried. I made the fat woman understand that the mustache, no, and that also surprised her and they laughed at that, too. She sharpened the small stone against the other, moistened my face with something that seemed like broth, and began. When she was halfway through, I was already calmer and when she finished, I grabbed her by both hands and I shook them up and down and I laughed, I let her go and I gave her a pat on the back and everyone was happy. You won’t believe me, but it was the most peaceful day I spent on Uunu. I ate, I slept, they took me around and I even got close to the place where the port should have been.”
“Which wasn’t there, nor the Japanese fellow’s house nor anything.”
“Nothing. Except the lake, which perhaps was bigger. And the woods, which was practically a forest. It was a fabulous day. You can’t say it was perfect because we had a visitor.”
“I would almost bet money it was a tyrannosaurus.”
“You just missed by a little. A saber-toothed tiger, so long as saber-toothed tigers were as I imagine them. It seems it had been roaming around eating people and animals, and in the early evening a party went out—as they had been doing for a good while, the old man explained in a conversation that gave us both quite a bit of trouble—they found it and they chased it into a trap they had prepared. But the fellow was well versed in traps and got loose. It didn’t attack, because it was well fed, but, surrounded on all sides, it escaped toward the village. It reached the edge of the land occupied by the huts and there was a big clamor and people scattered in all directions and then the men of the village that had been chasing it appeared and they killed it with lances and axe blows. It was a slaughter. All were left wounded and one dead. But with a sophistication unlooked for in noble savages, first came the celebration and afterward the grief. There was a feast with song and dance which the wounded and the dead attended as guests of honor. They skinned the tiger and we ate the meat: the main course was the entrails marinated in something like vinegar, and the heart, chopped up very fine, of which we each ate a piece.”
“Eating the vanquished enemy,” I said. “What would brother Jean Jacques think of that?”
“Who knows? The tiger was tough, imagine, newly dead meat of a cornered animal accustomed to running and climbing. It wasn’t exactly pheasant, or even close. Dark, fibrous meat, but not at all bland and without a bit of fat. Did I tell you they served the chopped heart in a wooden bowl?”
“No, you didn’t tell me. Was it the same bowl from which you’d eaten the seedless loquats at dra Iratoni’s?”
“No, it wasn’t the same.”
“But then where are we?”
“When I saw the bowl arrive I felt good, as if I no longer had any worries—and did I ever have them. It was like meeting an old, long-lost friend and I almost believed everything was solved, that if this was what I had remember
ed that night, all the rest of it was no longer important. Nonsense, of course, but I was celebrating the death of the tiger and eating its entrails and drinking the fermented juice of something and you know with all that, a certain irresponsibility gets into one. Especially after having seen how a saber-toothed tiger dies. As the bowl was full and I served myself my little bit but there was still a lot left, I watched as it passed from hand to hand until it was empty. They set it down and I stood up to get it. I cleaned it.”
“With a wooden spoon to complete the reminiscence.”
“Wooden spoons in the stone age, come on.”
“Well, yes,” I said, “spoons are almost as old as knives.”
“Let’s not exaggerate,” said Trafalgar.
“Neolithic,” I insisted, “in the Neolithic there were already spoons.”
“Could be. But not on Uunu of Neyiomdav. I cleaned it with my fingers. It wasn’t the same. It looked a lot like it, that’s true.”
“Of course it looked like it. All wooden bowls look like each other. You can’t make great modifications with something so simple.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t the same. It was made of different wood, it was deeper, it didn’t have the same grain. And in addition, I felt nothing: it wasn’t the same, I tell you.”
“I believe you. What I want to know, and right away, is if you ever found that other bowl.”
“I found it,” he said, “but not there. I kept the bowl in my hand and I even asked the old man if I might have it as a gift and he gave it to me with great courtesy. I lost it afterwards, of course, for the same reason I had lost the shotgun and recovered the cigarettes and the documents. And, speaking of which, I smoked the last one before lying down to sleep.”
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