Although it’s only ten after five, Gabriela decides it would be a good idea to start preparing now so she’s ready by six; she can call Rosario and Caballito before she leaves for their date at the Amigos del Vino, and so, translating her decision into actions, she walks out to the tiled corridor and takes the short walk toward the back of the house, sidestepping the doormat that guards the entrance to her aunt’s bedroom, opens the next door, where there is no doormat, and enters the bathroom. Maruca, the girl who’s taken care of the house for the past seventeen years—she started when she was single, but by now her eldest son, who’s Ángela’s godson, is at least fourteen—responsible for the gleaming neatness that dominates even the most remote corner of the house, pays special attention to the kitchen and the bathroom, and when she turns on the light, Gabriela realizes that Maruca must’ve waited till her aunt left before she finished cleaning, because the mirrors, tiles, railings, shower, tub, toilet and bidet, plastic curtain, medicine cabinet, towels, shower caps and bathrobes, slippers, combs and toothbrushes, shampoo and soaps (rose-colored for the sink, green in the shower, white on the bidet), lotions, creams, powders, and perfumes are all clean and polished, each one in its place, so carefully scrubbed and arranged that as she enters, and as often happens in certain places, Gabriela perceives less the bathroom itself, which is displayed, overwhelmingly, before her senses, than the ideal that inspired its style, its arrangement, its cleanliness down to the millimeter, as though it were decoration, a hyperrealist illusion or some sample display at a trade show. It wouldn’t be smart to take a bath under the circumstances, and so, after undressing and urinating, and before entering the shower, she turns on the tap and tests the temperature with the back of her hand as she adjusts the mix of cold and hot water, opening and closing the respective taps until she finds the appropriate level, and when she finds it she steps into she shower, closes the flower-patterned plastic curtain to keep the water from splashing out, and lets the warm rain soak her. Washing her hair carefully keeps her in the shower a long time, and when she finally comes out she dries herself off energetically, wraps her hair in a towel, puts on a bathrobe, slips on a pair of plastic and wood clogs, gathers her dirty clothes, and puts them directly into the washing machine in a small room behind the kitchen, in the rear courtyard. When she’s back in her room, she opens the bathrobe and slowly examines her body in the dresser mirror. Are her breasts any larger? Apparently yes. And her belly? Gabriela looks at herself face on and then, turning sideways, gathers up the white bathrobe and studies the contours of her belly, unable to decide if it is or isn’t slightly more prominent than usual. By the time she finishes drying her hair, dressing, putting on makeup, it’s twenty after six. No one answers when she calls Caballito, which means her father hasn’t come home yet, and José Carlos’s cell phone goes straight to voicemail. Gabriela doesn’t leave a message, and as she’s hanging up an unexpected realization strikes her, a feeling that, paradoxically, combines defiance and pain: In the end, this is happening inside my body, and whether anyone else knows it or nor, whether they like it or not, they’ll always be outside of what’s happening.
She crosses, calmly, in the warm evening, the blocks that separate her from the bar, and when she arrives, she feels hot on her face and legs and damp on her temples—for several minutes, she’s been walking down the street wrapped in a spring-like warmth, the seasons confused on her own skin, which, in contact with the air, has revived her flesh, her organs, and the spark that flickers behind her forehead, sensations related to other days of the year, to October and November. The door to the bar is closed because of the air conditioning, but through the window, sitting at the last table, she sees Tomatis, Violeta, and another young woman who she doesn’t recognize. Soldi is standing at the bar, behind Tomatis, talking and laughing with Nula, who, from the other side of the bar, is uncorking a bottle of wine as though he were the bartender. Of the seven or eight tables in the tiny bar, the one at the back is the largest; besides theirs, only three others are occupied, and two young men are at the bar, near the entrance, drinking red wine and snacking on something. The real bartender—Gabriela’s already seen him several times before—wearing a white jacket over a red and green check shirt, visible at the collar and at the wrists, who smiles when he sees her come in, is arranging some salmon slices on a plate. As she enters, a few somewhat loud exclamations erupt from the last table, causing Gabriela to check her watch to see how late she’s arriving, because her friends’ excessive happiness seems to suggest that they’re already on their second or third glass of wine. But it’s only seven fifteen, and there’s nothing on the table yet, not a bottle, or glasses, or plates, nothing apart from an ashtray, a metal stand that, vertically, contains a stack of napkins, and a glass toothpick container. Gabriela leans in toward Violeta and Tomatis and kisses each of them on the cheek. Tomatis asks:
—Do you know Diana? The wife of our friend Nula, who as you can see is opening a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, which honors us this night at the Amigos del Vino.
Gabriela steps aside and leans in to give Diana a kiss, and as their cheeks quickly and delicately graze, Gabriela’s gaze lands on the stump on the end of her left arm; she controls her surprise in time, pretending not to have seen anything, but her face burns suddenly, and she hopes that her summer tan hides the blush. But from Diana’s vaguely mocking expression—How incredibly beautiful you are!—she suspects that she must’ve noticed the look and is amused by her distress. Diana, possibly to calm her, raises her left arm and, with a slow and natural gesture, slides her hair behind her ear with the stump and then returns it to her lap, under the table. Hesitating, Gabriela continues standing next to the table, staring at the wall behind them, and after a few seconds the memory of the previous moments returns, as she crossed the threshold and closed the door, the tableau that has become fragmentary and confused by her intrusion, the bartender in the white jacket, smiling as she comes in, arranging, at the end of the bar near the door, oval salmon slices on a plate, the two people drinking red wine at the bar, the blurry patrons at the small tables near the entrance, and her friends at the last table, Tomatis at the head, his back to the bar, and to his left, their backs to the wall, Violeta and Nula’s wife, and behind Tomatis, on either side of the bar, Nula and Pinocchio, talking and laughing as Nula uncorks a bottle, the noisy greeting from her friends, like actors sitting around a table on a stage, performing the arrival of an actress who plays the role of the friend, in a typical bar scene with some extras who play the parts of the bartender and of the patrons pretending to have a conversation, all forming a scene so external to her that Gabriela feels nostalgia for its loss in the bottomless abyss where it collected with the more remote past, the previous week, the years of her childhood, the centuries buried forever, the innumerable masses dispersed over the world and eventually erased, the first moment of the universe, despite the fact that it occurred only a few seconds before.
—My father was an architect, my ex-husband is an architect, my first son is in his first year studying architecture in Rosario, and of course I’m an architect, so I think there’s still some hope of keeping these old ruins from collapsing; we might even modernize him, Violeta says to Diana, nodding toward Tomatis, who seems to draw extreme pleasure from the declaration, though he must’ve heard it several times by now.
Since they called him at La Región yesterday at noon to tell him about the publisher’s death, Tomatis has been running around, from the paper to the wake, and this morning to the private cemetery, Oasis de Paz, in the north end of the city, more than half an hour by taxi. The publisher had retired years earlier, long before he decided to leave, but Tomatis would see him every so often and had even visited him the year before at the hospital where he was admitted a few days and from which no one thought he’d come out alive, but he lasted another year, until that Wednesday morning, the day after turning eighty-three. Although he’d edited the Sunday literary page for a long time, Tomatis didn’t publish a si
ngle line in it after he started at the paper. In the first few weeks, he tried to include a few less-conventional authors than the usual group of contributors, all from the city and the surrounding region, and who were only read by each other, he even decided to invite some writers from Buenos Aires of differing political and literary tendencies to contribute, but about a month later, Tomatis and two other journalists with some literary sense were called in to discuss the upcoming issues of the supplement when suddenly the publisher appeared with a copy of the previous week’s literary page and told them, in a way that, despite being friendly and cheerful didn’t allow any room for objection, more or less the following: Look boys, this is a mediocre city and La Región is a mediocre paper. Which means that the literary page has to be mediocre too.
Thirty years later Tomatis still laughs, somewhere between incredulous and in awe, when he tells someone about it. And he’d admired the relationship they’d had too. The publisher, who’d been retired for a while, when he found out that Tomatis had decided to leave the paper, called him up to tell him it was a mistake, and when Tomatis told him that he’d already wasted too much time putting lipstick on a pig just to watch someone else butcher it, the publisher understood that his ex-employee, for some reason that he was unaware of, had lost the quality that had been so necessary to his work: his cynicism. And because his retirement had pushed him to the margins of power, because his children and the children of his partner, who’d died years before, had taken over the business, he said that it was good to leave, that it wasn’t worth looking after such trivial things. He didn’t say it out of cynicism: his was an average intelligence, his values were as relativistic as they come, and if old age and death hadn’t existed he would have gone on defending those values and judging the world according to them. Tomatis was fascinated by that sincere, slightly myopic mediocrity that nevertheless forced him to be a shrewd deal maker. His father, who founded the paper, had been an anarchist, and he was a member of the Jockey Club. From that combination he’d retained a taste for the popular, which made him feel more comfortable at cookouts with the print shop staff or at parties thrown by the newspaper carriers union than at ceremonies with the Archbishop, with the governor, or with military officials (although, while he was running the paper, he never missed one). The ideals that turn out lucrative become loathsome or sinful according to the moral resources of those who, disinterestedly at first, insist they can live by them. He spent his free time laboriously translating Shakespeare in order to improve his English, and writing, even more laboriously, stories about the peasants who lived along the river and the islands, and at the end he would shut himself up in his office to write them, ignoring everything at the paper, and eventually the heirs forced him to retire. He never doubted for a second that Tomatis’s worldview was the exact opposite of his own, but he trusted his cynicism more than the sincerity of the other journalists, the ones who thought like he did but who were incapable of measuring exactly what had to be said and how to say it, as Tomatis could, thanks to his energy and his education. When he’d stop by Tomatis’s desk, especially early on, he always, out of curiosity, tried to see what books he was reading, and if Tomatis, when he showed up at the paper, or before he left, passed by his office for some reason, most often to ask for an advance on his wages, he’d quickly swipe the book that he carried under his arm or in his pocket, looking carefully at the cover or thumbing through it slowly, knowing that their authors, of which he was totally ignorant, came from a world that he’d never be allowed into. In the obvious and natural indifference with which Tomatis treated the ostensible seriousness of the paper, and in the scrupulous and slightly humiliating (for the other journalists) facility that he had for doing his job, the publisher, who was aware of the strict limits to what he could demand, saw less an employee than a sort of counterpoint to himself.
Yesterday, Tomatis made the trip to the funeral home and stood a while before the publisher’s impassive, sharp, and now pale face, unable to suppress, at first, the clichés that death occasions, like What if he’s faking it? What if he suddenly opened his eyes and sat up? or maybe, It won’t be long before I’m in that box, or, Does cerebral activity continue briefly postmortem, in a confused, delirious way, at first neutral or increasingly painful, or less painful, until it becomes pleasant, which those who’ve come out of a deep coma or a long period of inertia have ended up calling limbo, inferno, purgatory, and paradise? But then he remembered the call he’d gotten from the publisher when he found out that he was planning to leave the paper, and how he tried to make him understand, by his tone, that he, Tomatis, was the only one he still trusted to do things the way he understood them, because the new generation of publishers and administrators, under the pretext of “internal restructuring,” as they say, had ceded control to the military dictatorship. Even for the publisher’s visceral mediocrity, that control was dangerous—its hungry opportunism lacked the weapons of his kingdom, which were cunning and negotiation. And he, Tomatis, was the only one who knew how to use them, and though he didn’t share those values, even disdained them, and actually worked constantly against them when he wasn’t at the paper, while he was there he was the only one who could understand the need for them and integrate them to the work.
When he walked out to the street and stopped on the first corner to wait for a taxi, Nula offered to take him home, and on top of that gave him a couple of local chorizos that neither he nor his sister could really consider disposable after they’d cut a few slices before dinner. Violeta was having dinner with her mother and her grandmother, and afterward would stay over, so Tomatis went up to the terrace and worked a while in his room, with the window open and the door ajar, allowing a current of air to sneak in. But just now there was no breeze, in fact, and the atmosphere in the room, having been shut up the whole afternoon, in the increasing heat of the day, had become humid and stifling. He got up and went out back to the terrace and looked up at the sky, but neither the moon nor the clouds nor the stars were visible: there was only a hazy, gray dome, fading to black, and the sun that he’d seen, staining red the horizon and the low sky in the west, as he got out of Nula’s car, had not dissolved the nebulous, smooth cap that had covered the sky the entire day. And so, when he went back to his room he didn’t shut the door as he went in because in the open darkness of the terrace there hadn’t been the slightest hint of a breeze. The night was warm and pleasant. Under the lamplight, Tomatis took out some white sheets of paper from a drawer, removed the cap from a black pen, and on the first page, where the date and location of the correspondence usually appear, he wrote, Wednesday night. And after thinking for a second, he began to write his letter. Dear Pichón: Guilt always precedes the crime, and is even independent of it. Myths accept no refutation, they just are: thus, in the myth, Oedipus, though he doesn’t know it, is guilty. The tragedy, meanwhile, translates the myth to the level of action. As I was saying on the phone Sunday, in this particular tragedy the development of the plot is more ambiguous, and the statements that trigger the disaster are merely verbal assertions and do not contain the slightest proof. Everyone says that Oedipus Rex is a detective story, which means that the rules of the genre force us to ask ourselves who benefitted from the crime and who had the opportunity, the means, and the motive to devise it and make it look like an inevitable misfortune. The plot, as I see it, is as follows: 1.) Oedipus arrives in Thebes, solves the Sphinx’s riddle, and marries Jocasta. 2.) Oedipus’s clairvoyance puts him in conflict with Tiresias, who’d been unable to solve the riddle and who sees in Oedipus a serious competitor, and also disrupts Creon’s plans: after Laius’s death he’d planned to overthrow and murder Jocasta and take the throne of Thebes. 3.) The shepherd, who did in fact abandon Jocasta and Laius’s true offspring (who didn’t survive) on Mount Cithaeron, and who foresaw the death of Laius and his attendants at the crossroads, fled not because he recognized Oedipus after so many years, but rather to save his own life because, as the only survivor and witness to
the crime, he figured, rightly, that Oedipus would eventually kill him too. 4.) Creon sends him to Corinth to figure out why Oedipus exiled himself, and he learns that it’s because the Oracle at Delphi predicted that he would kill his father and marry his mother, which meant that he had to put space between himself and his family to avoid incest and parricide. It’s worth noting that, according to various traditions, the Oracle wasn’t infallible—far from it—and not only was it often mistaken, forcing people to return for repeated consultations, but also its prophesies were generally formulated in such obscure ways that its visitors’ interpretations were often mistaken. In this version of Oedipus, we can apply the domino theory to the successive Oracles: if a single one is false, the rest will be too; and if nothing in the tragedy, except the statements of the shepherd and the messenger, proves that Oedipus is actually the son of Laius, the only thing that’s proven by the end is that superstition makes more innocent victims among children than among their parents. Oedipus consulted the Oracle because some drunk in a tavern in Corinth called him a bastard, which made him start to doubt his own identity. 5.) Creon plots, with Machiavellian cunning (avant la lettre), to eliminate Oedipus and Jocasta by making them believe that Oedipus was the child that Laius had sent to Mount Cithaeron because an Oracle had predicted that the child would kill him. 6.) Creon relies on the complicity of the shepherd and the messenger from Corinth, who have no choice but to follow his plans. Insidiously, Creon convinces Tiresias—who is old and all but senile and who detests Oedipus for humiliating him by solving so quickly the riddle of the Sphinx that he’d been unable to solve—that Oedipus is the son of Laius and Jocasta and the true source of the curse upon the city. 7.) The false testimonies from the shepherd and the messenger convince Oedipus that he’s committed two horrible crimes, parricide and incest, and that the man in Corinth who called him a bastard had been telling the truth: Oedipus is unaware that, while he was certainly a bastard, he wasn’t the same child that the shepherd had abandoned on Mount Cithaeron, but another. Creon had exploited the rumor, the false prophesy, the murder of Laius, and the wedding of Jocasta, weaving his own version of the story in order to achieve his goals. 8.) Jocasta hangs herself, Oedipus gouges out his own eyes and exiles himself to Mount Cithaeron, Creon takes power of the throne of Thebes, and the shepherd and the messenger, of course, were never heard from again.
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