by Sam Munson
I managed to force myself forward, one step, one more. Like a crawling dog, I thought. My arm extended and my hand palpating nothing, the shouter’s lips tearing, her bloody spittle starting to leak and spurt, along with the pearly human darkness behind her teeth, gaze, skin, hair, adipose tissue, the darkness lining her cunt and filling the balls of her assailant, carried by their joint bloodstream, lubricating their viscera and their brains, extending to the attic darkness above and the cellar darkness below, below the quadrangle grass, walled up in the libraries and dormitories, flooding the Paraná estuary and flooding the South Atlantic, brought to fruit among the subatomic processes of the sun. Phenomena, friends: they’re wearing me out.
6.
The marble walls of the bathroom beside the lecture hall: they can only be called refulgent. The light bouncing off them made my head hurt, no matter how often I lifted handfuls of water up to splash them on my face. And no matter how often I lapped at the faucet stream, the taste of blood still filled my mouth and throat.
Order had restored itself in the lecture hall when I returned. A chevron of blood marked the site where the boy who looked like Che had struck the shouter. She and her fellow morons had left behind leaflets piled neatly on their chairs. First ethics, then meat. The words from their chant. The remaining students could tell me only that security officers had taken Alma and the other girl, and Victor (the boy who looked like Che). I asked them if they knew Dr. Mariategui, the history professor; they all looked at me with wet pity in their eyes but gave no real answer. Is she a friend of yours, the short, obese young woman with the shaved-bald scalp asked me. I told her that we worked together, we were not friends. Well, said the bald woman, you should try to find her. Try to have her sort things out here for you. It’s not good for foreigners to get involved with the University police, Professor. Even tangentially, like you did. This sentiment provoked opposition among the other attendees: No, that’s not fair, they’re just doing their jobs.
Outside the lecture hall, I found a fainter patch of blood shaped like a clover. From that a brief trail extended along the hallway, ending abruptly at the niche where the white marble statue and its white marble mustache awaited me with frightening equanimity. Two students were sitting and reading — one A Universal History of Infamy and the other Hopscotch — on a bench across from the statue; neither had seen the security officers, Alma, the other girl, or Victor, though they claimed, with a collusive snigger, to have been reading for at least an hour, if not longer. I pointed out the blood, viscid and bright. The Borges reader said simply: Fucking disgusting, but it’s not my responsibility. The Cortázar reader didn’t even answer. She let the author’s too-wide-apart eyes, like those of a mantis, stare at me from the back cover.
All writers, the really talented ones at least, have stupid-looking eyes, I thought as I waited for the elevator in the central lobby. The student flow had dwindled to nothing. Only the apocrine scent of youth persisted. And from somewhere, possibly the radio affixed to the janitorial cart, the faint strains of the Dog Symphony. I had to find Ana. I hoped she would be able to explain this disturbance. It could not be the first or last of its kind, I knew, because the chain of student moronism stretches through all times and places. The chants of the women and the fury of the young man — these truly baffled me. The territory they imagined themselves to be contesting, that’s what I hoped Ana could delineate. She would be at the cocktail reception the brochure had gone into surprising detail about, even listing the wines (all from Mendoza) that would be served. She had warned me about this reception in her last letter, saying that it was to be held on the departmental rooftop, in the rooftop garden. She had spoken of this rooftop garden with distaste and spleen, calling it an abode, a hutment, a bivouac, and other such terms. I was, despite my unease and my increasing headache, curious to see the object of her scorn and hopeful that she would at last be present.
Bloody flecks kept appearing on the white elevator floor. I looked directly at them and they vanished, an ocular trick played either by my injury or by my exhaustion. I whistled the same four note phrase over and over: a bar from the Dog Symphony. The elevator doors showed me a twisted, dulled reflection of my face (like an anti-Semitic caricature, with thick lips pursed around a button of void). The doors opened and I stepped forward. I almost injured myself again. The car was stopped short. At my waist, the grooved metal lip of the “floor.” Above it, the cold, silent hallway leading to the offices of the history department. This hallway was floored in puce linoleum, scored with whitish scars. Beneath it, the grimy metal wall of the elevator shaft. A graffito, just under the lip, had been recently painted out. The elevator cab telephone normally used in such situations had been decapitated: frayed copper wires extended from the sawed-open brass tube.
I climbed out. The puce tiling as cold against my palms as the air. I pressed my aching orbit against it as I climbed out. When I had regained my footing I checked to make sure this infantile moment of mine had gone unobserved. Ana’s name was not listed in the directory posted across from the elevators. I didn’t know why this would be the case, and the most fantastic — also the most dull and domestic — justifications spun themselves out. That she had been fired and been too ashamed to tell me. That she had never worked at the University of Buenos Aires at all, that she was merely an academic impostor. That I myself had dreamed her up from the beginning. But she had tenure (she’d written me the day she received it, saying that the water was now up to her eyebrows), which meant she still had her job. As for her existence and academic credentials, I’d read both her books, both published by the University of Buenos Aires Press. Unless those books were hallucinations, Pasternak, I murmured, this is merely an oversight.
The puce reception desk was empty. A puce fan sliced the air above the desk and the puce vinyl-clad chairs for visitors, standing in obscenely sad array on the puce carpet. The air here stank, not of sweat but of disinfectant, powerful esters, the stink of long-rotten bananas. I tried simply shouting: Hello? Only a damp echo met me. The history department, as I walked along its corridors, seemed to be in a state of physical tumult. Like that which precedes a move or follows a suicide. Open cardboard boxes standing outside doors, crammed with books and papers, photographs, eyeglasses, spare shoes, ossified knickknacks. The contents were all more or less identical from box to box. Almost all the doors stood open. Each had the name of its occupant painted on the ribbed, clouded glass panel in the upper half of the door, as if chiropractors were renting the rooms. The offices themselves looked scoured: the windows (transparent) and furniture (puce) stripped of human greasiness and its slavish ironies. Fingerprints, other oily affairs. Blank, broad planks of sheetrock were stacked against walls and in corners, on the upper and lower levels of the six double-decker contractor’s trolleys I counted. The names on the doors obeyed no schema at all. I had to check each one individually to find Ana’s. The department had two identical wings, precise images of each other, extending east and west from the elevator bank. In fact, Pasternak, I thought as I traversed them, they might as well be mirrors reflecting each other, and you might as well be passing from mirror to mirror. An inane thought. I could not rid myself of it. The cold stagnant air seemed itself to conceal a deep snigger. My shoes squeaked abominably. On my second pass, between De Gandia and Zinny, I found Ana’s door: Mariategui, in the black and gold pseudomedical font the historians had chosen to record their own names.
The door itself was closed. A dark, vague shape was visible through the glass — but I could not determine who or what it was, so I knocked. No answer. I tried the handle: locked stiffly in place. I tried again, pressing myself timidly against the wood of the door, as though my added weight might somehow spring the lock. A shuffling, vague murmur came from within the office. I called out: Hello? Ana? It’s me. Are you there? The same nausea that had assailed me as I attempted to work in the Pensión Vermesser assailed me once more now. I kept trying, repeating myself, knocki
ng and jiggling the handle, but the silence within was now absolute. If this is a joke, I said, it’s not funny — Ana, this sort of humor is beneath you, and if it’s not you in there, come out anyway. That final absurdity echoed through the empty hall, but elicited no response. Or only a notional one. I thought I heard a deep chuckle within my friend’s office. Not her own. Her laugh was short, precise, and dry; this was damp and sloppily comprehensive. It didn’t happen again. I pressed my ear against the warming glass and noted the greasy stain my skin left. I heard nothing. Another dream, another fantasy, like the bloodstains on the elevator floor.
This area is off-limits to the public, sir, a rich, calm voice said. A woman in sky-blue livery was striding down the corridor. Her cap could not contain the lustrous mass of her dark hair. Next to her upper lip, a dense-looking, circular mole. I explained that I was not a member of the public, that I was here to look for my colleague, and that I had come at the invitation of the University, of Ana Mariategui and Professor Sanchis Mira. The officer’s silver nameplate read LUXEMBURG. Around her tall, slender throat a silver whistle hung from a leather cord, and attached to this cord was one of the golden, rabbit-shaped labels I’d seen earlier. I’ve never heard of the Pampas hare, I told the officer. It’s a well-known animal, she said, there’s a real infestation of them in certain areas. Whoever found out you could make leather from them is a benefactor to humanity. The chuckling sound came again from Ana’s office. I leaned against the door, pressed my ear to the glass. Nothing more. Dr. Mariategui went home, said Luxemburg. It’s been a tiring time for the people who work here, as you can see. They’re just getting ready to remodel. What is your name, sir? I told her. She did not say: Like the guy who wrote Doctor Zhivago. This is how I was usually greeted when I revealed my name. Instead, she asked for identification. I handed her my driver’s license. She chewed her lip (red, wet-looking) as she peered at it, peered into the digestive pupil of the state. I’m afraid that I can’t accept this. There’s been a municipal ordinance about documentation. Do you have your passport?
A pistol shone in a holster on her hip. The history of armaments prison guards carried was by necessity a small part of my study. This was, I saw, a Browning, a nine-millimeter, known among my colleagues as dvuglavvy orel, a double eagle. Both military and civilian security forces employed it. Ana was the first to explain the history of this term, which stretched back to the second decade of the fifteenth century. Then, it referred to the two-billed halberds favored by the guards of the Piombi in Venice. The ventilation muttered, and again the wet, baritone chuckle sounded within Ana’s office. Officer, I just want to see if everything is alright, I said. The panic I had expected to constrict my throat, to bring sweat to my forehead and palms failed to inflame me. Due to my injuries, or to the frank impossibility of my regarding this security officer as a “real” policewoman. She was as much a burgherly poltergeist as the students, Pasternak, a ghost. That’s how I explained my refusal internally. If you don’t have your passport, sir, I’m afraid I need you to leave, said Luxemburg, in her viscous, anechoic voice, as if I had not spoken. I can escort you to the reception for visiting scholars, or I can escort you off the premises, it’s your choice, Mr. Pasternak. I tried the handle of Ana’s office again. Sir, please come with me, she said. I understand you’re upset, but you should speak to the boss about your friend. Her hard fingers pressed into my biceps. Their heat perceptible. Sickly light smeared on her cap bill, her holster, her belt, the black butt of her baton. And her boots, patent leather, in which my own attenuated and already half-forgotten form was reflected.
7.
The sun had sunk below the toothed skyline of Recoleta. Its last rich tints colored the air orange, lilac, and crematory gray. The roof garden was already crowded, and the crowd was already rendered indistinct by approaching night. The garden deserved all the scorn Ana had poured on it. It could only be considered a garden because of the pergola edging the roof, which was made of odorous unweathered pine. From it dangled Christmas lights in uneven loops and sky-blue streamers.
Cindery tiles and patches of naked tar formed the “earth” here. At the center of the garden a long trestle table covered in a white cloth held two steel bowls, like the meat and water bowls before Violeta’s door, before the University’s, before all doors I had seen. Nothing filled them. In the northwest corner, a white metal shed emitted the sweet smell and clotted sound of frying. Waiters wearing white shirts and black pants dashed out of this shed, carrying bottles of red wine on silver trays, pouring drinks for the partygoers. Luxemburg had left me alone by the door of the emergency staircase. Guests appeared to be using this because of the elevator problem. She had joined the other officers patrolling the roof edge, staring down at the quadrangles to the east and south. She clearly enjoyed command over this squad. She moved from officer to officer, patting their shoulders or talking to them, joking around, offering them cigarettes from a sky-blue case. I expected her to keep harassing or threatening me once we reached the rooftop, but as soon as we stepped out and the cinders rustled under our soles, she stopped paying any attention to me.
I had come to find Sanchis Mira. Ana’s absence worried me. Her locked office door and the gulping noise I’d heard within worried me, though again I dismissed these worries as sentimental. Sanchis Mira would be able to reassure me, but I knew nothing about him: his first name, what he looked like, his height or weight. I knew that his last name was shared by a company that manufactured turrón, a disgusting nougat candy that Ana and I discovered in Córdoba. And I remembered Ana’s statement that he had once been a professor of French. But that would not help me locate him in the crowd on the roof, all former or present professors of French (professors of coprophagia beneath the chandeliers, in Ana’s phrase) in spirit if not in fact. I could not walk from partygoer to partygoer and ask if they happened to know where Sanchis Mira was. Rather, I could have, but it would have required engaging in fast, trivial conversations, a skill I never mastered. Instead I waited and stared at each male face as it passed. Was he this obese man with the face of a disappointed pederast, like an inflated latex mask? Was he the cadaver swaying in the night breeze as he stared down into the quadrangles? I did not know, and because I did not know, every middle-aged man became him, impersonated him, consumed and excreted him, I thought, yet not one was him, not one could touch the essential being. I realized I was mouthing these absurd sentiments as I stared, which explained the visual hostility that met me, and also explained the cyclonic pattern the waiters formed as they whirled across the roof carrying their trays and their black bottles, ignoring me. It explained the migraine blossoming, along with flashes of ocular white, within my skull, and the fact that whenever I closed my eyes against the pain I saw again the blinding marble benches outside La Chacarita.
The wines of Mendoza have no equal anywhere in the world, said a strong, warm voice. I opened my eyes. This voice emanated from beneath a roach-colored mustache echoing the hard horizon. On it, smears of final chalky light. You are Dr. Pasternak, said the bearer of this mustache, this earthly-law mustache. Yes, I replied. Captain Luxemburg pointed you out. I’m Sanchis Mira, and we should have been introduced before. He explained that he was the new head of the Department of Social Praxis. The Department had absorbed administrative responsibility for the prison studies conference, he added. He apologized again for the misunderstandings that had plagued, as he put it, my time in his bailiwick so far: the interruption of my lecture, the lack of any organized reception. His warm voice easily overcame the shouts drifting up from the campus. Someone was trying, near the walls of the building beneath us, to start up a cry of First ethics, then meat. His small, reddened eyes quivered as he noted the auscultatory stance which I’d assumed without meaning to. A waiter came up and proffered glasses of wine. My host, my chief host, went on: As a professor you will learn to ignore the brutal sentimentality of students, he said (though I was already a professor). The current climate on the fields (his p
hrase) of the social sciences faculty was not safe for a foreign academic. The student agitators who interrupted you (he meant the women) were well known to the University security services, as was the boy who criminally assaulted them. True, he said, only the boy had technically committed a crime, the propagation of false historical ideas violated no law, but the agitators were guilty as well, though that, he knew, must be hard for an outsider to understand.
The cry grew and grew in strength. More throats offered themselves up to it. Guards in sky blue leaned over the parapet to observe the shouting students. I asked Sanchis Mira if he knew how I could get in touch with Dr. Mariategui. I am unfamiliar with that name, sir, Sanchis Mira said. His eyebrows (much thinner and frailer-looking than his mustache, with widely spaced individual hairs visible) bent into a fatherly frown. I gave Ana’s particulars: a historian, in my field, about my age, dark haired. I left out certain other particulars, namely Gogol and Pascal, and I said nothing about my attempted incursion. Sanchis Mira arranged the flukes of his mustache. The guards, I saw, had drawn their guns and were aiming them into the quadrangle, where the cries were most voluminous, most pure. Not from here you couldn’t, Luxemburg shouted, it’s too far. You must know her, I said. I do not, I am afraid, said Sanchis Mira. I am an administrator now and I do not meddle in the affairs of scholars. I was a scholar myself once, sir, a professor of French, and I remember how offensive the interference of administrators was to me. All the administrative work heading the new department required is distasteful to me, but I nonetheless have to perform it. Social praxis, Mr. Pasternak, he said, social praxis and its mysteries.
