Blow-Up

by Julio Cortázar

  But mama was pulling at my sleeve, there was hardly anyone left in the orchestra section. I’m writing to that point, not wishing to go on remembering what I thought. I’m going to get sick if I go on remembering. But it’s certain, certain; I thought of an odd thing.

  JANUARY 30

  Poor Luis María, what an idiot to get married to me. He doesn’t know what he’ll get on top of that. Or underneath that, Nora says, posing as an emancipated intellectual.

  JANUARY 31

  We’ll be going there. He was so agreeable about it I almost screamed. I was afraid, it seemed to me that he entered into this game too easily. And he doesn’t know anything, he’s like a queen’s pawn that sews up the game without even suspecting it. The little pawn Luis María beside his queen. Beside the queen and—

  FEBRUARY 7

  What’s important now is to get better. I won’t write the end of what I had thought at the concert. Last night again I sensed her suffering. I know that they’re beating me there again. I can’t avoid knowing it, but enough chronicle. If I had limited myself to setting this down regularly just as a whim, as alleviation … It was worse, a desire to understand in reading it over; to find keys in each word set to paper after those nights. Like when I thought of the plaza, the torn river and the noises and afterwards … But I’m not writing that, I’ll never, ever, write that.

  To go there to convince myself that celibacy has been no good for me, that it’s nothing more than that, to be twenty-seven years old and never to have had a man. Now he will be my puppy, my penguin, enough to think and to be, to be finally and for good.

  Nevertheless, now that I shall close this diary, for one gets married or one keeps a diary, the two things don’t go well together—even now I don’t want to finish it up without saying this with the happiness of hope, with hope for happiness. We will go there but it doesn’t have to be what I thought the night of the concert. (I’ll write it, and enough of the diary as far as I’m concerned.) I will find her on the bridge and we will look at one another. The night of the concert I felt echo in my ears the grinding of the ice there below. And it will be the queen’s victory over that malignant relationship, that soundless and unlawful encroachment. If I am really I, she will yield, she will join my radiant zone, my lovelier and surer life; I have only to go to her side and lay a hand on her shoulder.

  Alina Reyes de Aráoz and her husband arrived in Budapest April sixth, and took accommodations at the Ritz. That was two months before their divorce. On the afternoon of the second day, Alina went out to get to know the city and enjoy the thaw. As it pleased her to walk alone—she was brisk and curious—she went in twenty different directions looking vaguely for something, but without thinking about it too much, content to let her desire choose, that it express itself in abrupt changes of direction which led her from one store window to another, crossing streets, moving from one showcase to another.

  She came to the bridge and crossed it as far as the middle, walking now with some difficulty because the snow hindered her and from the Danube a wind comes up from below, a difficult wind which hooks and lashes. She felt as though her skirt were glued to her thighs (she was not dressed properly for the weather) and suddenly a desire to turn around, to go back to the familiar city. At the center of the desolate bridge the ragged woman with black straight hair waited with something fixed and anxious in the lined face, in the folding of the hands, a little closed but already outstretched. Alina was close to her, repeating, now she knew, facial expressions and distances as if after a dress rehearsal. Without foreboding, liberating herself at last—she believed it in one terrible, jubilant, cold leap—she was beside her and also stretched out her hands, refusing to think, and the woman on the bridge hugged her against her chest and the two, stiff and silent, embraced one another on the bridge with the crumbling river hammering against the abutments.

  Alina ached: it was the clasp of the pocketbook, the strength of the embrace had run it in between her breasts with a sweet, bearable laceration. She surrounded the slender woman feeling her complete and absolute within her arms, with a springing up of happiness equal to a hymn, to loosing a cloud of pigeons, to the river singing. She shut her eyes in the total fusion, declining the sensations from outside, the evening light; suddenly very tired but sure of her victory, without celebrating it as so much her own and at last.

  It seemed to her that one of the two of them was weeping softly. It should have been her because she felt her cheeks wet, and even the cheekbone aching as though she had been struck there. Also the throat, and then suddenly the shoulders, weighed down by innumerable hardships. Opening her eyes (perhaps now she screamed) she saw that they had separated. Now she did scream. From the cold, because the snow was coming in through her broken shoes, because making her way along the roadway to the plaza went Alina Reyes, very lovely in her grey suit, her hair a little loose against the wind, not turning her face. Going off.

  THE IDOL OF THE CYCLADES

  “It strikes me the same whether you listen to me or not,” Somoza said. “That’s how it is, and it seems only fair to me that you know that.”

  Morand was startled, as though he’d come back from very far off. He remembered that before he’d been drowsing in a half-dream, it had occurred to him that Somoza was going crazy.

  “Forgive me, I was distracted for a moment,” he said. “Will you concede that all this … Anyway, to get here and find you in the middle of …”

  But that Somoza was going crazy, to take that for granted was too easy.

  “That’s right, there are no words for it,” Somoza said. “At least in our words.”

  They looked at one another for a second, and Morand was the first to avert his eyes while Somoza’s voice rose again in that impersonal tone typical of these explanations which, the next moment, went beyond all intelligibility. Morand chose not to look at him, but then fell again into a helpless contemplation of the small statue set upon the column, and it was like a return to that golden afternoon of cigar smoke and the smell of herbs when, incredibly, Somoza and he had dug her up out of the island. He remembered how Teresa, a few yards off stretched out on a boulder from which she was trying to make out the coastline of Paros, had whirled around hearing Somoza’s cry, and after a second’s hesitation had run toward them, forgetting that she had the upper half of her red bikini in her hand. She had leaned over the excavation out of which Somoza’s hand sprang with the statuette almost unrecognizable under its moldiness and chalk deposits, until Morand, angry and laughing at the same moment, yelled at her to cover herself, and Teresa stood up staring at him as if she had not understood, suddenly turned her back on them and hid her breasts between her hands while Somoza handed the statuette up to Morand and jumped out of the pit. Nearly without transition Morand remembered the hours that followed, the night in the big camping tents on the banks of the rushing stream, Teresa’s shadow walking in the moonlight under the olives, and it was as though Somoza’s voice now, echoing monotonously in the almost-empty studio with its sculptures, would come to him again out of that night, making part of his memory, when Somoza had confusedly intimated his ridiculous hopes to him, and he, between two swallows of retsina, had laughed happily and had accused him of being a phony archaeologist and an incurable poet.

  “There are no words for it,” Somoza had just said. “At least in our words.”

  In the great tent at the bottom of the Skyros valley, his hands had held the statuette up and caressed it so as to end by stripping it of its false clothes, time and oblivion (Teresa among the olives was still infuriated by Morand’s reproach, by his stupid prejudices), and the night turned slowly while Somoza confided to him his senseless hope that someday he would be able to approach the statue by ways other than the hands and the eyes of science, meanwhile the wine and tobacco mixed into the conversation with the crickets and the waters of the stream until there was nothing left but a confused sense of not being able to understand one another. Later, when Somoza had gone back t
o his tent carrying the statuette with him, and Teresa got tired of being by herself and came back to lie down, Morand talked with her about Somoza’s daydreams, and they asked one another with that amiable Parisian irony if everyone from the Río de la Plata had such a simple-minded imagination. Before going to sleep, they discussed what had taken place that afternoon, until, finally, Teresa accepted Morand’s excuses, finally kissed him, and everything was as usual on the island, everywhere, it was he and she and the night overhead and the long oblivion.

  “Anyone else know about it?” Morand asked.

  “No. You and I. Seems to me that was right,” Somoza said. “These last months, I’ve hardly stepped out of here. At first there was an old woman came to clean up the studio and wash my clothes for me, but she got on my nerves.”

  “It seems incredible that one could live like this in the suburbs of Paris. The silence … Listen, at least you have to go down to the town to do the shopping.”

  “Before, yes, I told you already. Now nothing’s missing. Everything that’s necessary’s here.”

  Morand looked in the direction that Somoza’s finger pointed, past the statuette and the reproductions abandoned on the shelves. He saw wood, whitewash, stone, hammers, dust, the shadow of trees against the windows. The finger seemed to indicate a corner of the studio where nothing was, hardly a dirty rag on the floor.

  But these last two years very little had changed between them, there’d also been a far corner emptied of time, with a dirty rag which was like all they had not said to one another and which perhaps they should have said. The island expedition, a romantic and crazy idea conceived on a café terrace on the boulevard Saint-Michel, had ended as soon as they discovered the idol in the valley ruins. Perhaps the fear that they would be found out finished off the cheerfulness of the first few weeks, and the day came finally when Morand intercepted a glance of Somoza’s while the three of them were going down to the beach, and that night he discussed it with Teresa and they decided to come back as early as possible, because they guessed that Somoza, and it seemed to them almost unfair, that he was beginning—so unexpectedly—to be falling for her. In Paris, they continued to see one another at great intervals, almost always for professional reasons, but Morand went to the appointments alone. Somoza asked after Teresa the first time, but afterward she seemed to be of no importance to him. Everything that they should have been saying weighed heavily between the two, perhaps the three of them. Morand agreed that Somoza should keep the statuette for a while. It would be impossible to sell it before a couple of years anyway; Marcos, the man who knew a colonel who was acquainted with an Athens customs official, had imposed the time-lapse as a condition of allowing himself to be bribed. Somoza took the statue to his apartment, and Morand saw it each time that they met. It was never suggested that sometimes Somoza visit Morand and his wife, like so many other things they did not mention any more and which at bottom were always Teresa. Somoza seemed to be completely occupied with his idée fixe, and if once in a while he invited Morand to come back to his apartment for a cognac, there was nothing more to it than that. Nothing very extraordinary, after all Morand knew very well Somoza’s tastes for certain marginal literatures, just as he was put off by Somoza’s longing. The thing that surprised him most was the fanaticism of that hope which emerged during those hours of almost automatic confidences, and when he felt his own presence as highly unnecessary, the repeated caressing of the beautiful and expressionless statue’s little body, repeating the spells in a monotone until it became tiresome, the same formulas of passage. As seen by Morand, Somoza’s obsession was susceptible to analysis: in some sense, every archaeologist identifies himself with the past he explores and brings to light. From that point to believing that intimacy with one of those vestiges could alienate, alter time and space, open a fissure whereby one could comply with … Somoza never used that kind of vocabulary; what he said was always more or less than that, a haphazard language full of allusions and exorcisms moving from obstinate and irreducible levels. For that reason, then, he had begun to work clumsily on replicas of the statuette; Morand had managed to see the first of them even before Somoza had left Paris, and he listened with a friendly courtesy to those stiffheaded commonplaces re: the repetition of gesture and situation as a way of abrogation, Somoza’s cocksureness that his obstinate approach would come to identify itself with the initial structure, with a superimposition which would be more than that because, as yet, there was no duality, just fusion, primordial contact (not his words, but Morand had to translate them in some way, later, when he reconstructed them for Teresa). Contact which, Somoza finally said, had been established forty-eight hours before, on the night of the summer solstice.

  “All right,” Morand admitted, lighting another cigarette, “but I’d be happy if you could explain to me why you’re so sure that … okay, that you’ve gotten to the bottom of it.”

  “Explain?… don’t you see it?”

  He stretched out his hand once more toward a castle in the air, to a corner of the loft; it described an arc which included the roof and the statuette set on its thin column of marble, enveloped in the brilliant cone of light from the reflector. Incongruously enough, Morand remembered that Teresa had crossed the frontier, carrying the statuette hidden in the toy chest Marcos had made in a basement in Plaka.

  “It couldn’t be that it wasn’t going to happen,” Somoza said almost childishly. “I was getting a little bit closer every replica I made. The form was becoming familiar to me. I want to say that … Ah, it would take days to explain it to you … and the absurd thing is that there everything comes in one … But when it’s this …”

  His hand waved about, came and went, marking out the that and the this.

  “The truth of the matter is that you’ve managed to become a sculptor,” Morand said, hearing himself speak and it sounding stupid. “The last two replicas are perfect. Whenever you get around to letting me keep the statue, I’ll never know if you’ve given me the original or not.”

  “I’ll never give her to you,” Somoza said simply. “And don’t think that I’ve forgotten that she belongs to both of us. But I’ll never give her to you. The only thing I would have wished is that Teresa and you had stayed with me, had matched me. Yes, I would have liked it had you been with me the evening it came.”

  It was the first time in almost two years that Morand had heard him mention Teresa, as if until that moment she had been somehow dead for him, but his manner of naming Teresa was hopelessly antique, it was Greece that morning when they’d gone down to the beach. Poor Somoza. Still. Poor madman. But even more strange was to ask oneself why, at the last minute, before getting into the car after Somoza’s telephone call, he had felt it necessary to call Teresa at her office to ask her to meet them later at the studio. He would have to ask her about it later, to know what Teresa had been thinking while she listened to his instructions on how to get to the solitary summerhouse on the hill. He’d have Teresa repeat exactly, word for word, what she’d heard him say. Silently Morand damned this mania for systems which made him reconstitute life as though he were restoring a Greek vase for the museum, glueing the tiniest particles with minute care, and Somoza’s voice there, mixed with the coming and going gestures of his hands which also seemed to want to glue pieces of air, putting together a transparent vase, his hands which pointed out the statuette, obliging Morand to look once more against his will at that white lunar body, a kind of insect antedating all history, worked under inconceivable circumstances by someone inconceivably remote, thousands of years ago, even further back, the dizzying distances of the animal, of the leap, vegetal rites alternating with tides and syzygies and seasons of rut and humdrum ceremonies of propitiation, the expressionless face where only the line of the nose broke its blind mirror of insupportable tension, the breasts hardly visible, the triangle of the sex and the arms crossed over the belly, embracing it, the idol of beginnings, the primeval terror under the rites from time immemorial, the hachet o
f stone from the immolations on the altars high on the hills. It was enough to make him believe that he also was turning into an imbecile, as if being an archaeologist were not sufficient.

  “Please,” said Morand, “couldn’t you make some effort to explain to me even though you believe that none of it can be explained? The only thing I’m definitely sure of is that you’ve spent these months carving replicas, and that two nights ago …”

  “It’s so simple, Somoza said, “I’ve always felt that the flesh was still in contact with the other. But I had to retrace five thousand years of wrong roads. Curious that they themselves, the descendants of the Aegeans, were guilty of that mistake. But nothing’s important now. Look, it goes like this.”

  Close to the idol, he raised one hand and laid it gently over the breasts and the belly. The other caressed the neck, went up to the statue’s absent mouth, and Morand heard Somoza speaking in a stifled and opaque voice, a little as if it were his hands or perhaps that nonexistent mouth, they that were speaking of the hunt in the caverns of smoke, of the number of deer in the pen, of the name which had to be spoken only afterwards, of the circle of blue grease, of the swing of the double rivers, of Pohk’s childhood, of the procession to the eastern steps and the high ones in the accursed shadows. He wondered if, in one of Somoza’s lapses of attention, he could manage to telephone and reach Teresa and warn her to bring Dr. Vernet with her. But Teresa would already have started and be on the way, and at the edge of the rocks where The Many was roaring, the master of the greens struck off the left horn of the handsomest buck and was handing it to the master of those who guarded the salt, to renew the pact with Haghesa.