Springtime in a Broken Mirror

by Mario Benedetti

  Then the phone rang, and it was easy for him to stretch out his hand. It was a close female friend, who of course knew about the operation but didn’t ask how he was getting on or if everything was all right. She also knew that his apartment on Las Heras and Pueyrredón did not give on to the street, but you could get a glimpse of three or four metres of the square from the tiny bathroom window. And yet she said: ‘I’m just calling so you’ll go out on to the balcony to see the wonderful military parade taking place outside your building.’ With that she hung up. So he told his wife to go and take a look out of the bathroom window. It was what he had expected: a military search operation.

  ‘We’ll have to burn a few things,’ he said, and could imagine the worried look on his wife’s face. Despite the urgency of the situation, he did his best to calm her down. ‘There’s nothing illegal, but if they come in here and find things you can buy at any kiosk, like Che’s diaries or the Second Havana Declaration (I’m not talking about Fanon or Gramsci or Lukacs, because they have no idea who they are) or copies of Militancia magazine or the Noticias newspaper, that’ll be enough to cause us problems.’

  She began to burn books and newspapers, every so often peering out at the corner of the square visible from the bathroom. She had to open other windows (the ones that gave on to the garden between the two blocks) to get rid of the smoke and smell of burning. All this took her twenty minutes. He tried to direct her: ‘Look on the second shelf, the fourth and fifth books on the left, they’re Aesthetics and Marxism in two volumes. Can you see them? And on the shelf underneath are Episodes from the Revolutionary War and The State and Revolution.’

  She asked him whether she should also burn Socialist Cinema and Marx and Picasso. He said she should burn the others first: those two were easier to explain away. ‘Don’t throw the ashes down the rubbish chute. Try to use the toilet.’ The smoke made him cough a little. ‘Won’t it damage your eyes?’ ‘Maybe. But we have to choose the lesser evil. Anyway, I don’t think it will. They’re bandaged tightly.’

  The phone rang again. The same friend. ‘Well, what do you reckon? Did you enjoy the parade? A shame it was over so quickly, don’t you think?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, taking a deep breath, ‘it was magnificent. All that discipline, the colours, they looked so elegant. I’ve been fascinated by military parades ever since I was a kid. Thanks for letting me know.’

  ‘OK, you can stop burning things. For today, at least. They’ve gone.’ His wife also breathed heavily, swept up the last ashes with the brush and pan, tipped them down the toilet, pulled the chain, made sure they were all flushed away. Then she washed her hands and came to sit down, more relaxed, next to the bed. He managed to take hold of one of her hands. ‘We can burn the rest tomorrow,’ she said, ‘but more calmly.’

  ‘It’s a shame. They’re books I need sometimes.’

  He tried to think of the green horse in the rain. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, this time the horse was jet-black, and ridden by a stocky rider wearing a military cap who didn’t have a face. At least, not one he could make out on the inside walls of his eyelids.

  Beatriz

  (The seasons)

  The seasons are mainly winter, spring and summer. Winter is famous for scarves and snow. When it’s winter, old men and women shake and you say that they shiver. I don’t shiver because I’m not an old woman, I’m a girl. And also because I always sit near the stove. In books and films winter means that there are sleighs, but we don’t have those here. There’s no snow either. The winter here is so boring. But there is a wonderful wind that you can feel in the air and all round your ears. Sometimes my Grandpa Rafael says he’s going to withdraw into his winter quarters. I don’t know why he doesn’t withdraw into his summer quarters. It seems to me that if he goes to the winter ones he’s going to shiver, because he’s quite elderly. You should never say old, you say: elderly. A boy in my class says his grandmother is an old bitch. I taught him that he should at least say she’s an elderly bitch.

  Another important season is spring. My mum doesn’t like spring because that was the season they arested Dad. That’s not the same as rested. Without the letter a it means sleep. Spelt like that with an a it means sort of like going to the police. My dad was arested, and as it was spring he was wearing a green pullover. Nice things happen in spring, too, like when my friend Arnoldo lends me his skateboard. He would lend it to me in winter as well, but Mum says I’m susceptible and I’ll catch a cold. No one else in my class is susceptible. Graciela is my mum. Another great thing about spring is flowers.

  But summer is the champion of the seasons because it’s sunny and there is no school. In summer the only things that look as if they’re shivering are the stars. In summer all human beings sweat. Sweat is something that is sort of like damp. When you sweat in winter it’s because you have bronchitis, for example. In summer my forehead sweats. In summer fugitives go to the beach because nobody recognizes them in their swimsuits. At the beach I’m not scared of the fugitives, but I am of dogs and waves. My friend Teresita was not scared of waves, she was very brave and once almost drowned. A man was forced to save her so now she’s scared of waves, too, but she’s still not scared of dogs.

  Graciela, who’s my mum, always insists there’s a fourth season called thortum. I say that’s possible, but I’ve never seen it. Graciela says that in thortum there is a great abundance of dry leaves. It’s always good to have an abundance of something, even if it is in thortum. Thortum is the most mysterious of the seasons because it’s neither cold nor hot so you don’t know what clothes to wear. That must be why I never know when I’m in thortum. If it’s not cold I think it’s summer, and if it’s not hot I think it’s winter. But it turns out to have been thortum. I have winter clothes, summer and spring clothes, but I don’t think they’ll be any use in thortum. It’s thortum now where my dad is, and he wrote that he’s very happy because the dry leaves float in through the bars and he imagines they’re letters from me.

  Intramural

  (How are your phantoms doing?)

  I spent today staring at the damp patches on the wall. It’s a habit I’ve had since childhood. First I would imagine faces, animals, objects in the patches, then I’d turn them into things that caused me fear, even panic. So it’s good, now, to transform the stains into objects or faces and not feel afraid. But it also makes me somehow nostalgic for that distant time when my worst fears were self-inflicted, conjured out of ghostly patches on walls. The adult reasons, or maybe the adult excuses, for the fears we have now are no such phantoms. They are unbearably real. And yet we still sometimes supplement them with phantoms of our own invention, don’t you think? By the way, how are your phantoms doing? Make sure they get enough protein, you don’t want them to starve to death. A life without phantoms isn’t good, a life where all presences are of flesh and blood. But to get back to the damp patches. My cellmate was caught up reading his Pedro Paramo, but even so I interrupted him to ask whether he had ever noticed the patch close to the door. ‘Not especially, but now you mention it, I can see you’re right, there is a patch. What of it?’ He looked surprised, but curious. You have to understand that in a place like this, anything can be interesting. I can’t tell you what it means if all of a sudden we see a bird in between the bars, or (as once happened to me, in a previous cell) a little mouse becomes someone to talk to at the hour of the angelus, or the hour of the demonius, as Sonia used to joke, remember? So I told my companion I was wondering if he could make out any figure (human, animal or inanimate) in that patch. He stared at it for a while, then said: ‘Charles de Gaulle in profile.’ Incredible! To me it looked more like an umbrella. When I told him so, he laughed out loud for about ten minutes. That’s another good thing when you’re in here: being able to laugh. I don’t know, but if you really laugh, it’s as if your insides have settled down, as if all of a sudden there are reasons to be optimistic, as if all this makes some kind of sense. We ought to prescribe ourselves laughter as therapy. But, as yo
u can imagine, the problem is that there aren’t all that many opportunities to laugh. For example, when I realize how long it’s been since I last saw you: you, Beatriz, Dad. And, above all, when I think of the time that may pass before I see you again. When I gauge how long that is, well, it’s hardly a laughing matter. Then again, it’s nothing to cry about. I barely ever cry, actually. But I’m not proud of this emotional constipation of mine. I know a lot of people in here who can just suddenly let it all out and weep inconsolably for half an hour, only to emerge from that pit feeling better, in a better frame of mind. As if the release has helped them adjust. Sometimes I’m sorry I’ve never acquired the habit. Maybe I’m scared that if I let myself go, the result for me personally wouldn’t be better adjustment – it’d be a breakdown. I’ve always had more than enough screws half-loose to want to risk an even greater collapse. Besides, to be completely frank with you, it’s not that I don’t cry out of fear of breaking down, but simply because I don’t feel like crying; that is, the tears just won’t come. That doesn’t mean I don’t experience anguish, anxiety or other such diversions. It wouldn’t be normal if I didn’t, given the circumstances. But everyone has their own way of doing things. Mine is to try to overcome these mini-crises through the power of reason. I often succeed. But there are, also, occasions when no amount of reasoning is enough. To misquote that classical author (who was it?) I’d say that sometimes reason has its hunches that the heart can’t understand. But tell me about you, what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling. How I’d have loved to walk along the streets you’re walking along now, so that we would have something in common there as well. That’s the problem with not having travelled much. It’s possible that you yourself, but for this unexpected turn of events, would never have visited that city, that country. Maybe, if everything had followed the ordinary course of events – our lives, our marriage, the plans we made no more than seven years ago – we might one day have saved enough to make a long journey (not like the little trips to Buenos Aires, Asunción or Santiago, remember those?), and our destination would probably have been Europe: Paris, Madrid, Rome, London perhaps. How far away all that seems. This upheaval has brought us down to earth, back to our own earth. Now, as you see, if you have to leave, you go to another country here in the Americas. It’s only logical. And even those who now, for whatever reason, are in Stockholm, Paris, Brescia or Amsterdam or Barcelona, even they would no doubt wish they were in one of the cities on our continent. After all, I, too, have left our country, in a sense. I yearn for what you yearn for. Exile (internal or external) is bound to be a key word for this decade – you know, someone will probably strike out this sentence. But whoever does so needs to remember that he, too, in some strange way, is also an exile from our real country. If the sentence has survived, you’ll have seen how understanding I’ve become. I amaze myself sometimes. It’s life, my girl, life. If it didn’t get through, no worries. It wasn’t important. Kisses and more kisses for you, from me.

  The Other

  (Solitary witness)

  Shit, what bags under my eyes, Rolando Asuero said to himself in front of the mirror. Confronting the mirror and his hangover. Serves me right for drinking so much, he added, trying to make his eyes look as big as possible, but only managing to appear like a lunatic. Lunang-utan. He pronounced it slowly, and had to smile, despite his thumping headache. That’s what Silvio used to call the military back in illo tempore when he and his friends would meet up in the cabin at the Solís resort, just before the future began to look so unhealthy. They’re not even gorillas, he would declare. Just about orang-utans. And they’re lunatics. In other words: lunang-utans.

  The four of them: Silvio, Manolo, Santiago and he had got together for what turned out to their be last holiday together. The women were there, too, or rather, the wives. Only three of them, in fact: María del Carmen, Tita and Graciela, because he, Rolando Asuero, was a confirmed bachelor and never wanted to get his occasional flings mixed up with his friends’ all-too-stable relationships. But the wives always talked gossip and fashion and horoscopes and recipes, at least back then, and maybe that was why the four men hunkered down on their own to put the world to rights. And they almost succeeded. Silvio, for example, was a really good guy, if a bit naive. He always swore he’d never be able to use a shooter, and yet later on he did, and they certainly used them on him, which is why now he’s in Buceo cemetery, more precisely in his in-laws’ family crypt, who are still wealthy even if they’re sad about it all. And plump María del Carmen far away in Barcelona with her two kids, selling pots on the Ramblas or wherever they are holed up now. Manolo was caustic, sharp and sarcastic, three words that mean almost the same thing but in him were not exactly synonymous. They were more like trenches he had dug to conceal his shyness. The proof of this was that he never went too far, and in the end, he was always gentle and understanding. ‘Titfer, bandana, rope sandals / endlessly gazing.’ Apart from the titfer, that tango could have been describing him. Santiago, of course, was Mister Know-All, but he was a good sort. He knew about botany and Marxism and stamp-collecting and avant-garde poetry, and he was a living encyclopaedia of the history of football. And not just the goal by Peindibeni against the divine Zamora, or the ‘It’s yours, Hector!’ when we won the World Cup. Those had already become popular legend. Santiago also had the complete file stowed away in his mind, game by game, of the Nazassi Domingos duo (he was a supporter of Nacional through and through) or Perucho Petrone’s last season, when out of every ten shots he had on goal eight went straight up in the air, but by some miracle the other two hit the back of the net; and also, to show he had no favourites, he admitted that Skinny Schiaffino was a genius even without the ball, which is the hardest thing to do in a team, and spoke of the respect he had always felt for a mountain of a man called Obdulio, who took no nonsense from anybody, not even Monkey Gambetta.

  And now, shit, just look at those bags under my eyes, Rolando Asuero says out loud to himself as he gazes into the rusty mirror: ‘I grew up knowing sorrow, and drank my youth away.’ While it was true he had known sorrow, he had been drinking other things. Here’s the mystery he puzzles over. Why is it that, every so often, let’s say once a month, he’ll go out on a bender, whereas between sprees he stays sober, almost abstemious? Almost, because there’s the occasional clarete (or rosé, as those who’ve suffered from Cartesian cultural penetration like to call it) and, well, clarete is like communion wine with testosterone. It must be that homesickness comes on with the moon, like women’s menstrual cycles. Not just women, but also the eleven thousand virgins and the holy mother, of whom there’s only one, well that seems a bit out of proportion, doesn’t it? Anyway, better to be a well-known drunk than an anonymous alcoholic. Who can have thought that one up? The fact is, Alcoholics Anonymous always got his goat. You got drunk, or you didn’t, according to your own desires or depression or needs or homesickness or rage, and not according to the dictates of the Immaculate or of coercive Puritans. What a great goddam con trick Puritanism is, thinks Rolando Asuero, pulling a face. And he pauses as he considers the fine example north of the Rio Grande. Another great con trick. A moral campaign against the daily evening martini or bourbon, but hurrah for the daily morning napalm.

  Ah, if only he could blame imperialism for the bags under his eyes. No chance. ‘Lone witness, the oil lamp’s light.’ He doesn’t need individual or group therapy. Everyone knows how hard exile can be. Even that poor psychoanalyst had a tough time. Back there, he refused to hand over the records of his subversive patients, and still less of his impatient subversives. Of course he had a tough time. The cops dole out their own brand of therapy, they don’t want competitors. Lone witness. Silvio dead, Manolo in Gothenburg, Santiago in Montevideo Prison. And María del Carmen, widowed by the repression, selling her bits of pottery. And Tita, separated from Manolo and now living with a really serious kid (I’m going to accompanion myself with Sardine Estévez, she had written a year earlier), in L
isbon, no less. And Graciela, here, thrown off balance, and beautiful, with Santiago’s little Beatriz, slaving away as a secretary. And him? Shit, look at those bags under his eyes.

  In this blessed and cursed country, the people really are great. Why deny it? He likes their broad smiles, especially on the women’s faces. But there are days and there are nights when he doesn’t like them so much. Those are the days and nights when he misses what’s implicit, the shared assumptions, all the things that don’t need to be said … Days and nights when he has to explain everything and listen to everything. One of the modest pleasures of making love to someone from your own country is that if at some point (in that zero hour that always follows the urgency, the enthusiasm, the give and take, up and down) you don’t feel like talking, you can say or hear just a brief monosyllable, and that little word becomes charged with associations, implied meanings, shared symbols, a common past, who knows what else? There’s nothing to explain or be explained. There’s no need to pour your heart out. Your hands can do the talking: they’re wordless, but they can be extremely eloquent. Boy, can they be eloquent. Monosyllables, as well, but only when they bring with them their whole train of associations, implications. Amazing how many languages can fit into a single one, Rolando Asuero says and tells himself, contemplating his own reflection. Then he repeats, gloomily: Shit, those bags!