Blow-Up

by Julio Cortázar

  “Listen, let me breathe,” Morand said, rising and taking a step forward. “It’s fabulous, and furthermore I have a terrible thirst. Let’s drink something, I can go out and get a …”

  “The whiskey is there,” said Somoza, slowly removing his hands from the statue. “I shall not drink, I must fast before the sacrifice.”

  “Pity,” Morand said, looking for the bottle. “I hate to drink alone. What sacrifice?”

  He poured a whiskey up to the brim of the glass.

  “That of the union, to use your words. Don’t you hear them? The double flute, like the one on the statuette we saw in the Athens Museum. The sound of life on the left, and that of discord on the right. Discord is also life for Haghesa, but when the sacrifice is completed, the flutists cease to blow into the pipe on the right and one will hear only the piping of the new life that drinks the spilt blood. And the flutists will fill their mouths with blood and blow on the left pipe, and I shall anoint her face with blood, you see, like this, and the eyes shall appear and the mouth beneath the blood.”

  “Stop talking nonsense,” Morand said, taking a good slug of the whiskey. “Blood would not go very well with our marble doll. Yeah, it’s hot.”

  Somoza had taken off his smock with a leisurely and deliberate movement. When he saw that he was unbuttoning his trousers, Morand told himself that he had been wrong to let him get excited, in consenting to this explosion of his mania. Austere and brown, Somoza drew himself up erect and naked under the light of the reflector and seemed to lose himself in contemplation of a point in space. From a corner of his half-open mouth there fell a thread of spittle and Morand, setting the glass down quickly on the floor, figured that to get to the door he had to trick him in some way. He never found out where the stone hatchet had come from which was swinging in Somoza’s hand. He understood.

  “That was thoughtful,” he said backing away slowly. “The pact with Haghesa, eh? And poor Morand’s going to donate the blood, you’re sure of that?”

  Without looking at him, Somoza began to move toward him delineating an arc of a circle, as if he were following a precharted course.

  “If you really want to kill me,” Morand shouted at him, backing into the darkened area, “why this big scene? Both of us know perfectly well it’s over Teresa. But what good’s it going to do you, she’s never loved you and she’ll never love you!”

  The naked body was already moving out of the circle illuminated by the reflector. Hidden in the shadows of the corner, Morand stepped on the wet rags on the floor and figured he couldn’t go further back. He saw the hatchet lifted and he jumped as Nagashi had taught him at the gym in the place des Ternes. Somoza caught the toe-kick in the center of his thigh and the nishi hack on the left side of his neck. The hatchet came down on a diagonal, too far out, and Morand resiliently heaved back the torso which toppled against him, and caught the defenseless wrist. Somoza was still a muffled, dull yell when the cutting edge of the hatchet caught him in the center of his forehead.

  Before turning to look at him, Morand vomited in the corner of the loft, all over the dirty rags. He felt emptied, and vomiting made him feel better. He picked the glass up off the floor and drank what was left of the whiskey, thinking Teresa was going to arrive any minute and that he had to do something, call the police, make some explanation. While he was dragging Somoza’s body back into the full light of the reflector, he was thinking that it should not be difficult to show that he had acted in self-defense. Somoza’s eccentricities, his seclusion from the world, his evident madness. Crouching down, he soaked his hands in the blood running from the face and scalp of the dead man, checking his wrist watch at the same time, twenty of eight. Teresa would not be long now, better to go out and wait for her in the garden or in the street, to spare her the sight of the idol with its face dripping with blood, the tiny red threads that glided past the neck, slipped around the breasts, joined in the delicate triangle of the sex, ran down the thighs. The hatchet was sunk deep into the skull of the sacrifice, and Morand pulled it out, holding it up between his sticky hands. He shoved the corpse a bit more with his foot, leaving it finally up next to the column, sniffed the air and went over to the door. Better open it so that Teresa could come in. Leaning the hatchet up against the door, he began to strip off his clothes, because it was getting hot and smelled stuffy, the caged herd. He was naked already when he heard the noise of the taxi pulling up and Teresa’s voice dominating the sound of the flutes; he put the light out and waited, hatchet in hand, behind the door, licking the cutting edge of the hatchet lightly and thinking that Teresa was punctuality itself.

  LETTER TO A YOUNG LADY IN PARIS

  Andrea, I didn’t want to come live in your apartment in the calle Suipacha. Not so much because of the bunnies, but rather that it offends me to intrude on a compact order, built even to the finest nets of air, networks that in your environment conserve the music in the lavender, the heavy fluff of the powder puff in the talcum, the play between the violin and the viola in Ravel’s quartet. It hurts me to come into an ambience where someone who lives beautifully has arranged everything like a visible affirmation of her soul, here the books (Spanish on one side, French and English on the other), the large green cushions there, the crystal ashtray that looks like a soap-bubble that’s been cut open on this exact spot on the little table, and always a perfume, a sound, a sprouting of plants, a photograph of the dead friend, the ritual of tea trays and sugar tongs … Ah, dear Andrea, how difficult it is to stand counter to, yet to accept with perfect submission of one’s whole being, the elaborate order that a woman establishes in her own gracious flat. How much at fault one feels taking a small metal tray and putting it at the far end of the table, setting it there simply because one has brought one’s English dictionaries and it’s at this end, within easy reach of the hand, that they ought to be. To move that tray is the equivalent of an unexpected horrible crimson in the middle of one of Ozenfant’s painterly cadences, as if suddenly the strings of all the double basses snapped at the same time with the same dreadful whiplash at the most hushed instant in a Mozart symphony. Moving that tray alters the play of relationships in the whole house, of each object with another, of each moment of their soul with the soul of the house and its absent inhabitant. And I cannot bring my fingers close to a book, hardly change a lamp’s cone of light, open the piano bench, without a feeling of rivalry and offense swinging before my eyes like a flock of sparrows.

  You know why I came to your house, to your peaceful living room scooped out of the noonday light. Everything looks so natural, as always when one does not know the truth. You’ve gone off to Paris, I am left with the apartment in the calle Suipacha, we draw up a simple and satisfactory plan convenient to us both until September brings you back again to Buenos Aires and I amble off to some other house where perhaps … But I’m not writing you for that reason, I was sending this letter to you because of the rabbits, it seems only fair to let you know; and because I like to write letters, and maybe too because it’s raining.

  I moved last Thursday in a haze overlaid by weariness, at five in the afternoon. I’ve closed so many suitcases in my life, I’ve passed so many hours preparing luggage that never manages to get moved anyplace, that Thursday was a day full of shadows and straps, because when I look at valise straps it’s as though I were seeing shadows, as though they were parts of a whip that flogs me in some indirect way, very subtly and horribly. But I packed the bags, let your maid know I was coming to move in. I was going up in the elevator and just between the first and second floors I felt that I was going to vomit up a little rabbit. I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don’t think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit. Always I have managed to be alone when it happens, guarding the fact much as we guard so many of our privy acts, evidences of our physical selves which happen to us in total privacy. Don’t reproach me for it, And
rea, don’t blame me. Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny. It’s no reason not to live in whatever house, it’s no reason for one to blush and isolate oneself and to walk around keeping one’s mouth shut.

  When I feel that I’m going to bring up a rabbit, I put two fingers in my mouth like an open pincer, and I wait to feel the lukewarm fluff rise in my throat like the effervescence in a sal hepatica. It’s all swift and clean, passes in the briefest instant. I remove the fingers from my mouth and in them, held fast by the ears, a small white rabbit. The bunny appears to be content, a perfectly normal bunny only very tiny, small as a chocolate rabbit, only it’s white and very thoroughly a rabbit. I set it in the palm of my hand, I smooth the fluff, caressing it with two fingers; the bunny seems satisfied with having been born and waggles and pushes its muzzle against my skin, moving it with that quiet and tickling nibble of a rabbit’s mouth against the skin of the hand. He’s looking for something to eat, and then (I’m talking about when this happened at my house on the outskirts) I take him with me out to the balcony and set him down in the big flowerpot among the clover that I’ve grown there with this in mind. The bunny raises his ears as high as they can go, surrounds a tender clover leaf with a quick little wheeling motion of his snout, and I know that I can leave him there now and go on my way for a time, lead a life not very different from people who buy their rabbits at farmhouses.

  Between the first and the second floors, then, Andrea, like an omen of what my life in your house was going to be, I realized that I was going to vomit a rabbit. At that point I was afraid (or was it surprise? No, perhaps fear of the same surprise) because, before leaving my house, only two days before, I’d vomited a bunny and so was safe for a month, five weeks, maybe six with a little luck. Now, look, I’d resolved the problem perfectly. I grew clover on the balcony of my other house, vomited a bunny, put it in with the clover and at the end of a month, when I suspected that any moment … then I made a present of the rabbit, already grown enough, to señora de Molina, who believed I had a hobby and was quiet about it. In another flowerpot tender and propitious clover was already growing, I awaited without concern the morning when the tickling sensation of fluff rising obstructed my throat, and the new little rabbit reiterated from that hour the life and habits of its predecessor. Habits, Andrea, are concrete forms of rhythm, are that portion of rhythm which helps to keep us alive. Vomiting bunnies wasn’t so terrible once one had gotten into the unvarying cycle, into the method. You will want to know why all this work, why all that clover and señora de Molina. It would have been easier to kill the little thing right away and … Ah, you should vomit one up all by yourself, take it in two fingers and set it in your opened hand, still attached to yourself by the act itself, by the indefinable aura of its proximity, barely now broken away. A month puts a lot of things at a distance; a month is size, long fur, long leaps, ferocious eyes, an absolute difference. Andrea, a month is a rabbit, it really makes a real rabbit; but in the maiden moment, the warm bustling fleece covering an inalienable presence … like a poem in its first minutes, “fruit of an Idumean night” as much one as oneself … and afterwards not so much one, so distant and isolated in its flat white world the size of a letter.

  With all that, I decided to kill the rabbit almost as soon as it was born. I was going to live at your place for four months: four, perhaps with luck three—tablespoonsful of alcohol down its throat. (Do you know pity permits you to kill a small rabbit instantly by giving it a tablespoon of alcohol to drink? Its flesh tastes better afterward, they say, however, I … Three or four tablespoonsful of alcohol, then the bathroom or a package to put in the rubbish.)

  Rising up past the third floor, the rabbit was moving in the palm of my hand. Sara was waiting upstairs to help me get the valises in … Could I explain that it was a whim? Something about passing a pet store? I wrapped the tiny creature in my handkerchief, put him into my overcoat pocket, leaving the overcoat unbuttoned so as not to squeeze him. He barely budged. His minuscule consciousness would be revealing important facts: that life is a movement upward with a final click, and is also a low ceiling, white and smelling of lavender, enveloping you in the bottom of a warm pit.

  Sara saw nothing, she was too fascinated with the arduous problem of adjusting her sense of order to my valise-and-footlocker, my papers and my peevishness at her elaborate explanations in which the words “for example” occurred with distressing frequency. I could hardly get the bathroom door closed; to kill it now. A delicate area of heat surrounded the handkerchief, the little rabbit was extremely white and, I think, prettier than the others. He wasn’t looking at me, he just hopped about and was being content, which was even worse than looking at me. I shut him in the empty medicine chest and went on unpacking, disoriented but not unhappy, not feeling guilty, not soaping up my hands to get off the feel of a final convulsion.

  I realized that I could not kill him. But that same night I vomited a little black bunny. And two days later another white one. And on the fourth night a tiny grey one.

  You must love the handsome wardrobe in your bedroom, with its great door that opens so generously, its empty shelves awaiting my clothes. Now I have them in there. Inside there. True, it seems impossible; not even Sara would believe it. That Sara did not suspect anything, was the result of my continuous preoccupation with a task that takes over my days and nights with the singleminded crash of the portcullis falling, and I go about hardened inside, calcined like that starfish you’ve put above the bathtub, and at every bath I take it seems all at once to swell with salt and whiplashes of sun and great rumbles of profundity.

  They sleep during the day. There are ten of them. During the day they sleep. With the door closed, the wardrobe is a diurnal night for them alone, there they sleep out their night in a sedate obedience. When I leave for work I take the bedroom keys with me. Sara must think that I mistrust her honesty and looks at me doubtfully, every morning she looks as though she’s about to say something to me, but in the end she remains silent and I am that much happier. (When she straightens up the bedroom between nine and ten, I make noise in the living room, put on a Benny Carter record which fills the whole apartment, and as Sara is a saetas and pasodobles fan, the wardrobe seems to be silent, and for the most part it is, because for the rabbits it’s night still and repose is the order of the day.)

  Their day begins an hour after supper when Sara brings in the tray with the delicate tinkling of the sugar tongs, wishes me good night—yes, she wishes me, Andrea, the most ironic thing is that she wishes me good night—shuts herself in her room, and promptly I’m by myself, alone with the closed-up wardrobe, alone with my obligation and my melancholy.

  I let them out, they hop agilely to the party in the living room, sniffing briskly at the clover hidden in my pockets which makes ephemeral lacy patterns on the carpet which they alter, remove, finish up in a minute. They eat well, quietly and correctly; until that moment I have nothing to say, I just watch them from the sofa, a useless book in my hand—I who wanted to read all of Giraudoux, Andrea, and López’s Argentine history that you keep on the lower shelf—and they eat up the clover.

  There are ten. Almost all of them white. They lift their warm heads toward the lamps in the living room, the three motionless suns of their day; they love the light because their night has neither moon nor sun nor stars nor streetlamps. They gaze at their triple sun and are content. That’s when they hop about on the carpet, into the chairs, ten tiny blotches shift like a moving constellation from one part to another, while I’d like to see them quiet, see them at my feet and being quiet—somewhat the dream of any god, Andrea, a dream the gods never see fulfilled—something quite different from wriggling in behind the portrait of Miguel de Unamuno, then off to the pale green urn, over into the dark hollow of the writing desk, always fewer than ten, always six or eight and I asking myself where the two are that are missing, and what if Sara should get up for some reason, and the presidency of Rivadavia which is what I want to read in L
ópez’s history.

  Andrea, I don’t know how I stand up under it. You remember that I came to your place for some rest. It’s not my fault if I vomit a bunny from time to time, if this moving changed me inside as well—not nominalism, it’s not magic either, it’s just that things cannot alter like that all at once, sometimes things reverse themselves brutally and when you expect the slap on the right cheek—. Like that, Andrea, or some other way, but always like that.

  It’s night while I’m writing you. It’s three in the afternoon, but I’m writing you during their night. They sleep during the day. What a relief this office is! Filled with shouts, commands, Royal typewriters, vice presidents and mimeograph machines! What relief, what peace, what horror, Andrea! They’re calling me to the telephone now. It was some friends upset about my monasterial nights, Luis inviting me out for a stroll or Jorge insisting—he’s bought a ticket for me for this concert. I hardly dare to say no to them, I invent long and ineffectual stories about my poor health, I’m behind in the translations, any evasion possible. And when I get back home and am in the elevator—that stretch between the first and second floors—night after night, hopelessly, I formulate the vain hope that really it isn’t true.

  I’m doing the best I can to see that they don’t break your things. They’ve nibbled away a little at the books on the lowest shelf, you’ll find the backs repasted, which I did so that Sara wouldn’t notice it. That lamp with the porcelain belly full of butterflies and old cowboys, do you like that very much? The crack where the piece was broken out barely shows, I spent a whole night doing it with a special cement that they sold me in an English shop—you know the English stores have the best cements—and now I sit beside it so that one of them can’t reach it again with its paws (it’s almost lovely to see how they like to stand on their hind legs, nostalgia for that so-distant humanity, perhaps an imitation of their god walking about and looking at them darkly; besides which, you will have observed—when you were a baby, perhaps—that you can put a bunny in the corner against the wall like a punishment, and he’ll stand there, paws against the wall and very quiet, for hours and hours).