Blow-Up

by Julio Cortázar

  She pushed her nose against one of the glass sides, promptly all attention because she liked for them to look at her; she heard Rema stop in the doorway, just silent, looking at her. She heard those things with such a sharp brightness when it was Rema.

  “You’re alone here? Why?”

  “Nino went off to the hammocks. This big one must be a queen, she’s huge.”

  Rema’s apron was reflected in the glass. Isabel saw one of her hands slightly raised, with the reflection it looked as if it were inside the ant-farm; suddenly she thought about the same hand offering a cup of coffee to the Kid, but now there were ants running along her fingers, ants instead of the cup and the Kid’s hand pressing the finger-tips.

  “Take your hand out, Rema,” she asked.

  “My hand?”

  “Now it’s all right. The reflection was scaring the ants.”

  “Ah. It’s all right in the dining room now, you can go down.”

  “Later. Is the Kid mad at you, Rema?”

  The hand moved across the glass like a bird through a window. It looked to Isabel as though the ants were really scared this time, that they ran from the reflection. You couldn’t see anything now, Rema had left, she went down the hall as if she were escaping something. Isabel felt afraid of the question herself, a dull fear, made no sense, maybe it wasn’t the question but seeing Rema run off that way, or the once-more-clear empty glass where the galleries emptied out and twisted like twitching fingers inside the soil.

  It was siesta one afternoon, watermelon, handball against the wall which overlooked the brook, and Nino was terrific, catching shots that looked impossible and climbing up to the roof on a vine to get the ball loose where it was caught between two tiles. A son of one of the farmhands came out from beside the willows and played with them, but he was slow and clumsy and shots got away from him. Isabel could smell the terebinth leaves and at one moment, returning with a backhand an insidious low shot of Nino’s, she felt the summer’s happiness very deep inside her. For the first time she understood her being at Los Horneros, the vacation, Nino. She thought of the ant-farm up there and it was an oozy dead thing, a horror of legs trying to get out, false air, poisonous. She hit the ball angrily, happily, she bit off a piece of a terebinth leaf with her teeth, bitter, she spit it out in disgust, happy for the first time really, and at last, under the sun in the country.

  The window glass fell like hail. It was in the Kid’s study. They saw him rise in his shirtsleeves and the broad black eyeglasses.

  “Filthy pains-in-the-ass!”

  The little peon fled. Nino set himself alongside Isabel, she felt him shaking with the same wind as the willows.

  “We didn’t mean to do it, uncle.”

  “Honest, Kid, we didn’t mean to do it.”

  He wasn’t there any longer.

  She had asked Rema to take away the ant-farm and Rema promised her. After, chatting while she helped her hang up her clothes and get into her pajamas, they forgot. When Rema put out the light, Isabel felt the presence of the ants, Rema went down the hall to say goodnight to Nino who was still crying and repentant, but she didn’t have the nerve to call her back again. Rema would have thought that she was just a baby. She decided to go to sleep immediately, and was wider awake than ever. When the moment came when there were faces in the darkness, she saw her mother and Inés looking at one another and smiling like accomplices and pulling on gloves of phosphorescent yellow. She saw Nino weeping, her mother and Inés with the gloves on that now were violet hairdos that twirled and twirled round their heads, Nino with enormous vacant eyes—maybe from having cried too much—and thought that now she would see Rema and Luis, she wanted to see them, she didn’t want to see the Kid, but she saw the Kid without his glasses with the same tight face that he’d had when he began hitting Nino and Nino fell backwards until he was against the wall and looked at him as though expecting that would finish it, and the Kid continued to whack back and forth across his face with a loose soft slap that sounded moist, until Rema intruded herself in front of Nino and the Kid laughed, his face almost touching Rema’s, and then they heard Luis returning and saying from a distance that now they could go into the dining room. Everything had happened so fast because Nino had been there and Rema had come to tell them not to leave the living room until Luis found out what room the tiger was in and she stayed there with them watching the game of checkers. Nino won and Rema praised him, then Nino was so happy that he put his arms around her waist and wanted to kiss her. Rema had bent down, laughing, and Nino kissed her on the nose and eyes, the two of them laughing and Isabel also, they were so happy playing. They didn’t see the Kid coming, when he got up to them he grabbed Nino, jerked at him, said something about the ball breaking the window in his room and started to hit him, he looked at Rema while he hit him, he seemed furious with Rema and she defied him with her eyes for a moment. Terrified, Isabel saw her face up to him, then she stepped in between to protect Nino. The whole evening meal was a deceit, a lie, Luis thought that Nino was crying from having taken a tumble, the Kid looked at Rema as if to order her to shut up, Isabel saw him now with his hard, handsome mouth, very red lips; in the dimness they were even more scarlet, she could see his teeth, barely revealed, glittering. A puffed cloud emerged from his teeth, a green triangle, Isabel blinked her eyes to wipe out the images and Inés and her mother appeared again with their yellow gloves; she gazed at them for a moment, then thought of the ant-farm: that was there and you couldn’t see it; the yellow gloves were not there and she saw them instead as if in bright sunlight. It seemed almost curious to her, she couldn’t make the ant-farm come out, instead she felt it as a kind of weight there, a chunk of thick, live space. She felt it so strongly that she reached about for the matches, the night-lamp. The ant-farm leaped from the nothingness, wrapped in shifting shadow. Isabel lifted the lamp and came closer. Poor ants, they were going to think that the sun was up. When she could see one of the sides, she was frightened; the ants had been working in all that blackness. She watched them swarm up and down, in silence, so visible, palpable. They were working away inside there as though they had not yet lost their hope of getting out.

  It was almost always the foreman who kept them advised of the tiger’s movements; Luis had the greatest confidence in him, and since he passed almost the whole day working in his study, he neither emerged nor let those who came down from the next floor move about until don Roberto sent in his report. But they had to rely on one another also. Busy with the household chores inside, Rema knew exactly what was happening upstairs and down. At other times, it was the children who brought the news to the Kid or to Luis. Not that they’d seen anything, just that don Roberto had run into them outside, indicated the tiger’s whereabouts to them, and they came back in to pass it on. They believed Nino without question, Isabel less, she was new and might make a mistake. Later, though, since she always went about with Nino stuck to her skirt, they finally believed both of them equally. That was in the morning and afternoon; at night it was the Kid who went out to check and see that the dogs were tied up or that no live coals had been left close to the houses. Isabel noticed that he carried the revolver and sometimes a stick with a silver handle.

  She hadn’t wanted to ask Rema about it because Rema clearly found it something so obvious and necessary; to pester her would have meant looking stupid, and she treasured her pride before another woman. Nino was easy, he talked straight. Everything clear and obvious when he explained it. Only at night, if she wanted to reconstruct that clarity and obviousness, Isabel noticed that the important reasons were still missing. She learned quickly what was really important: if you wanted to leave the house, or go down to the dining room, to Luis’ study, or to the library, find out first. “You have to trust don Roberto,” Rema had said. Her and Nino as well. She hardly ever asked Luis because he hardly ever knew. The Kid, who always knew, she never asked. And so it was always easy, the life organized itself for Isabel with a few more obligations as far as her
movements went, and a few less when it came to clothes, meals, the time to go to bed. A real summer, the way it should be all year round.

  … see you soon. They’re all fine. I have an ant-farm with Nino and we play and are making a very large herbarium. Rema sends her kisses, she is fine. I think she’s sad, the same as Luis who is very nice. I think that Luis has some trouble although he studies all the time. Rema gave me some lovely colored handkerchiefs, Inés is going to like them. Mama, it’s nice here and I’m enjoying myself with Nino and don Roberto, he’s the foreman and tells us when we can go out and where, one afternoon he was almost wrong and sent us to the edge of the brook, when a farmhand came to tell us no, you should have seen how awful don Roberto felt and then Rema, she picked Nino up and was kissing him, and she squeezed me so hard. Luis was going about saying that the house was not for children, and Nino asked him who the children were, and everybody laughed, even the Kid laughed. Don Roberto is the foreman.

  If you come to get me you could stay a few days and be with Rema and cheer her up. I think that she …

  But to tell her mother that Rema cried at night, that she’d heard her crying going down the hall, staggering a little, stop at Nino’s door, continue, go downstairs (she must have been drying her eyes) and Luis’ voice in the distance: “What’s the matter, Rema? Aren’t you well?”, a silence, the whole house like an enormous ear, then a murmur and Luis’ voice again: “He’s a bastard, a miserable bastard …” almost as though he were coldly confirming a fact, making a connection, a fate.

  … is a little ill, it would do her good if you came and kept her company. I have to show you the herbarium and some stones from the brook the farmhands brought me. Tell Inés …

  It was the kind of night she liked, insects, damp, reheated bread, and custard with Greek raisins. The dogs barked constantly from the edge of the brook, and an enormous praying mantis flew in and landed on the mantelpiece and Nino went to fetch the magnifying glass; they trapped it with a wide–mouthed glass and poked at it to make it show the color of its wings.

  “Throw that bug away,” Rema pleaded. “They make me so squeamish.”

  “It’s a good specimen,” Luis admitted. “Look how he follows my hand with his eyes. The only insect that can turn its head.”

  “What a goddamned night,” the Kid said from behind his newspaper.

  Isabel would have liked to cut the mantis’ head off, a good snip with the scissors, and see what would happen.

  “Leave it in the glass,” she asked Nino. “Tomorrow we can put it in the ant-farm and study it.”

  It got hotter, by ten-thirty you couldn’t breathe. The children stayed with Rema in the inside dining room, the men were in their studies. Nino was the first to say that he was getting sleepy.

  “Go on up by yourself, I’ll come see you later. Everything is all right upstairs.” And Rema took him about the waist with that expression he liked so well.

  “Tell us a story, Aunt Rema?”

  “Another night.”

  They were down there alone, with the mantis which looked at them. Luis came to say his goodnights to them, muttering something about the hour that children ought to go to bed, Rema smiled at him when she kissed him.

  “Growly bear,” she said, and Isabel, bent over the mantis’ glass, thought that she’d never seen Rema kissing the Kid or a praying mantis that was so so green. She moved the glass a little and the mantis grew frantic. Rema came over to tell her to go to bed.

  “Throw that bug away, it’s horrible.”

  “Rema, tomorrow.”

  She asked her to come up and say goodnight to her. The Kid had the door of his study left partly open and was pacing up and down in his shirtsleeves, the collar open. He whistled to her as she passed.

  “I’m going to bed, Kid.”

  “Listen to me: tell Rema to make me a nice cold lemonade and bring it to me here. Then you go right up to your room.”

  Of course she was going to go up to her room, she didn’t see why he had to tell her to. She went back to the dining room to tell Rema, she saw her hesitate.

  “Don’t go upstairs yet. I’m going to make the lemonade and you take it down yourself.”

  “He said for you …”

  “Please.”

  Isabel sat down at the side of the table. Please. There were clouds of insects whirling under the carbide lamp, she would have stayed there for hours looking at nothing, repeating: Please, please. Rema, Rema. How she loved her, and that unhappy voice, bottomless, without any possible reason, the voice of sadness itself. Please. Rema, Rema … A feverish heat reached her face, a wish to throw herself at Rema’s feet, to let Rema pick her up in her arms, a wish to die looking at her and Rema be sorry for her, pass her cool, delicate fingers through her hair, over the eyelids …

  Now she was holding out a green tumbler full of ice and sliced lemons.

  “Take it to him.”

  “Rema …”

  Rema seemed to tremble, she turned her back on the table so that she shouldn’t see her eyes.

  “I’ll throw the mantis out right now, Rema.”

  One sleeps poorly in the viscous heat and all that buzzing of mosquitoes. Twice she was on the point of getting up, to go out into the hall or to go to the bathroom to put cold water on her face and wrists. But she could hear someone walking, downstairs, someone was going from one side of the dining room to the other, came to the bottom of the stairway, turned around … They weren’t the confused, long steps of Luis’ walk, nor was it Rema’s. How warm the Kid had felt that night, how he’d drunk the lemonade in great gulps. Isabel saw him drinking the tumblerful, his hands holding the green tumbler, the yellow discs wheeling in the water under the lamp; but at the same time she was sure the Kid had never drunk the lemonade, that he was still staring at the glass she had brought him, over to the table, like someone looking at some kind of infinite naughtiness. She didn’t want to think about the Kid’s smile, his going to the door as though he were about to go into the dining room for a look, his slow turning back.

  “She was supposed to bring it to me. You, I told you to go up to your room.”

  And the only thing that came to her mind was a very idiot answer:

  “It’s good and cold, Kid.”

  And the tumbler, green as the praying mantis.

  Nino was the first one up, it was his idea that they go down to the brook to look for snails. Isabel had hardly slept at all, she remembered rooms full of flowers, tinkling bells, hospital corridors, sisters of charity, thermometers in jars of bichlorate, scenes from her first communion, Inés, the broken bicycle, the restaurant in the railroad station, the gypsy costume when she had been eight. Among all this, like a delicate breeze between the pages of an album, she found herself wide awake, thinking of things that were not flowers, bells, hospital corridors. She got out of bed grudgingly, washed her face hard, especially the ears. Nino said that it was ten o’clock and that the tiger was in the music room, so that they could go down to the brook right away. They went downstairs together, hardly saying good morning to Luis and the Kid who were both reading with their doors open. You could find the snails mostly on the bank nearest the wheatfields. Nino moved along blaming Isabel for her distraction, said she was no kind of friend at all and wasn’t helping form the collection. She saw him suddenly as so childish, such a little boy with his snails and his leaves.

  She came back first, when they raised the flag at the house for lunch. Don Roberto came from his inspection and Isabel asked him the same question as always. Then Nino was coming up slowly, carrying the box of snails and the rakes; Isabel helped him put the rakes away on the porch and they went in together. Rema was standing there, white and silent. Nino put a blue snail into her hand.

  “The nicest one, for you.”

  The Kid was eating already, the newspaper beside him, there was hardly enough room for Isabel to rest her arm. Luis was the last to come from his room, contented as he always was at noon. They ate, Nino was talking
about the snails, the snail eggs in the reeds, the collection itself, the sizes and the colors. He was going to kill them by himself, it hurt Isabel to do it, they’d put them to dry on a zinc sheet. After the coffee came and Luis looked at them with the usual question, Isabel got up first to look for don Roberto, even though don Roberto had already told her before. She made the round of the porch and when she came in again, Rema and Nino had their heads together over the snail box, it was like a family photograph, only Luis looked up at her and she said, “It’s in the Kid’s study,” and stayed watching how the Kid shrugged his shoulders, annoyed, and Rema who touched a snail with a fingertip, so delicately that her finger even seemed part snail. Afterwards, Rema got up to go look for more sugar, and Isabel tailed along behind her babbling until they came back in laughing from a joke they’d shared in the pantry. When Luis said he had no tobacco and ordered Nino to look in his study, Isabel challenged him that she’d find the cigarettes first and they went out together. Nino won, they came back in running and pushing, they almost bumped into the Kid going to the library to read his newspaper, complaining because he couldn’t use his study. Isabel came over to look at the snails, and Luis waiting for her to light his cigarette as always saw that she was lost, studying the snails which were beginning to ooze out slowly and move about, looking at Rema suddenly, but dropping her like a flash, captivated by the snails, so much so that she didn’t move at the Kid’s first scream, they were all running and she was still standing over the snails as if she did not hear the Kid’s new choked cry, Luis beating against the library door, don Roberto coming in with the dogs, the Kid’s moans amid the furious barking of the dogs, and Luis saying over and over again, “But if it was in his study! She said it was in his own study!”, bent over the snails willowy as fingers, like Rema’s fingers maybe, or it was Rema’s hand on her shoulder, made her raise her head to look at her, to stand looking at her for an eternity, broken by her ferocious sob into Rema’s skirt, her unsettled happiness, and Rema running her hand over her hair, quieting her with a soft squeeze of her fingers and a murmuring against her ear, a stuttering as of gratitude, as of an unnameable acquiescence.