The election results put OCLUSIOM in true jeopardy at this point. The afternoon papers print the composition of the Executive Committee with jocular and impertinent comments. The Minister of the Interior spoke with the Director General this morning on the telephone. The latter, having nothing better at hand, had an informational memo prepared containing the curriculum vitae of the new Committee members, all of them eminent personalities in the field of the economic sciences.
The Committee must meet in its opening session this coming Thursday, but rumor has it that Mr. Felix Camusso, Mr. Felix Voll, and Mr. Felix Lupescu will send up their resignations this afternoon. Mr. Camusso has requested instructions as to how his resignation should be worded; in effect, he has no valid reason to offer for his resignation from the Committee, and as with Mr. Voll and Mr. Lupescu, his sole wish and sincerest advice is that the Committee be composed of gentlemen who do not answer to the name of Felix. The resignations, most probably, will cite reasons of health, and will be accepted by the Director General.
As the scribes will persist, the few readers there are in the world are going to have to change their roles and become scribes themselves. More and more countries will be made up of scribes, and more and more factories will be necessary to manufacture paper and ink, the scribes by day and the machines by night to print the scribes’ work. First the libraries will overflow the houses, then the municipalities decide (now we’re really into it) to sacrifice their children’s playgrounds to enlarge the libraries. Then the theaters will go, then the maternity homes, slaughterhouses, bars, hospitals. The poor use the books like bricks, they stick them together with cement and build walls of books and live in cabins of books. Then it happens that the books clear the cities and invade the countryside, they go on flattening wheat-fields and meadows of sunflowers, even though the Department of Highways manages to keep the roads cleared, even if only between two extremely high walls of books. At times a wall gives and there are terrifying automobile accidents. The scribes labor without let because humanity respects vocations, and the printed matter reaches the seashore. The President of the Republic gets on the telephone with the presidents of the republics, and intelligently proposes to cast the leftover books into the sea, which act is accomplished simultaneously on every coast in the world. Thus the Siberian scribes see their works cast into a sea of ice and the Indonesian scribes etc. This allows the scribes to step up their production as the earth again has space to store their books. It does not occur to them that the sea has a bottom and that at the bottom of the sea the printed matter is beginning to pile up, first in the form of a sticky pulp, then in the form of a solid pulp, and finally a tough though viscous flooring which rises several feet a day and will finally reach the surface. Then much of the water invades many of the lands and there is a new distribution of continents and oceans, and presidents of various republics are replaced by lakes and peninsulas, presidents of other republics see immense territories newly open to their ambitions, etc. Sea water, forced to expand with such unprecedented violence, evaporates faster than ever, or seeks rest, blending itself with the printed matter to make that glutinous pulp, to the point that one day ships’ captains on the great trade routes report that their ships are advancing slowly, thirty knots drops to twenty, to fifteen, the engines sputter and pant and the propellers are wrenched and bent out of shape. Finally the ships stop wherever they are at different places in the sea, trapped by the pulp, and scribes all over the world write thousands of articles and books explaining the phenomenon and are filled with an enormous happiness. The presidents and the captains decide to convert the ships into islands and gambling casinos, the public arrives on foot upon the cardboard seas, and on these islands and casinos dance orchestras fill the night and sweeten the air-conditioned atmosphere and the dancing lasts until the early hours of the morning. New printed material is piling up on the seashores, but it’s impossible to put it into the pulp, so that walls of printed matter are growing and mountains are being born on the shores of the old seas. The scribes realize that the ink and paper companies are going to go bankrupt, and their handwriting gets smaller and smaller and they use the most imperceptible corners of each sheet of paper. When the ink runs out they write in pencil, etc. When the paper goes, they write on slabs of wood or rock or on stone tiles, etc. The practice of intercalating one text into another begins to become popular, to take advantage of the space between the lines, or to scrape down the letters already printed with razor blades so as to use the paper again. The scribes are working slowly now, but their numbers are so immense that printed matter now separates the land completely from the beds of the ancient seas. On the earth the race of scribes lives precariously, doomed to extinction, and at sea there are the islands and casinos, or rather the ex-transatlantic liners, where the presidents of the republics have fled to refuge and where they hold enormous parties and exchange wireless messages from island to island, president to president, and captain to captain.
HEADLESSNESS
They cut off this gentleman’s head, but as a strike broke out among the gravediggers and they couldn’t bury him, the gentleman had to go on living headless and manage as well as he could.
He noticed immediately that, along with his head, four of his five senses had disappeared. Left solely with the sense of touch but full of good will, the gentleman seated himself on a bench in the plaza Lavalle and felt the leaves of the trees one by one, trying to distinguish them one from another and name them. Thus at the end of several days, he was reasonably sure that he had gathered and placed on his lap a eucalyptus leaf, one plantain, one wild magnolia, and a small green pebble.
When the gentleman observed that this latter item was a green pebble, he spent a very perplexed couple of days. Pebble was correct and maybe possible, but green, no. To test, he imagined the stone red and at the same moment felt a profound repugnance, a rejection of this flagrant falsehood, this absolutely false red pebble, for the pebble was completely green and disk-shaped, very sweet to the touch.
Furthermore, when he noticed that the stone was sweet, the gentleman was for a time subjected to great surprise. Then he opted for happiness, which is always preferable, since now he saw himself analogous to certain insects which can regenerate their amputated parts, he realized he was capable of feeling in divers ways. Stimulated by this conclusion, he left the bench in the plaza and went down via calle Libertad to the avenida de Mayo which, as everyone knows, is redolent of the smell of fried food from the Spanish restaurants. Confirming this detail, which gave him back another sense, the gentleman wandered vaguely west—or east—he couldn’t be sure which, and he walked tirelessly, expecting from one moment to the next to be able to hear something, for now hearing was the one sense that he was still missing. What he was seeing actually was a sky, pallid as at dawn, he was touching his own hands with sweaty fingers, his fingernails pressing into the flesh of the palms, he smelled something like sweat, and in his mouth there was the taste of metal and cognac. The only sense lacking was hearing, and just then he heard, and it was like a memory, because what he again heard were the words of the prison chaplain, hopeful and consoling words by themselves, even very beautiful, but what a pity, they had that certain air of being used, said too many times, stale from having been said again and again.
ROUGH SKETCH OF A DREAM
He feels abruptly a great desire to see his uncle and hastens through the steep and twisting alleyways which seem to be straining to keep him away from the ancient mansion. After walking for a long time (and it’s as though his feet were sticking to the ground) he sees the great gate and hears a dog bark in the distance, if that was a dog. As he is climbing the four worn-out steps and as he stretches out his hand toward the knocker, which is another hand grasping a bronze globe, the fingers of the knocker begin to move, the little finger first, then the others, which gradually let loose their grip on the bronze globe interminably. The globe falls as though it were made of feathers, rebounds noiselessly on the doorsill and l
eaps chest high, but now it is a fat black spider. He brushes it off with a desperate slap, and at that moment the door opens: his uncle is standing there smiling and expressionless, as though he had been standing there and waiting, smiling, behind the closed door for a long time. They exchange several sentences that seem to have been prepared, an elastic chess game. “Now I have to answer …” “Now he is going to say …” And everything happens exactly like that. Then they are in a brilliantly lit room, the uncle takes out some cigars wrapped in tinfoil and offers him one. He looks for the matches for a long time, but there are no matches or fire of any kind anywhere in the house; they cannot light the cigars, the uncle appears anxious that the visit end, and finally there is a confused leavetaking in a passageway filled with half-opened crates and where there’s hardly room to move through.
Upon leaving the house, he knows that he ought not to look back because … He knows no more than that, but that he knows, and he leaves rapidly, his eyes fixed at the bottom of the street. Little by little he feels a bit more relieved. When he arrives home he is so exhausted that he lies down immediately, almost not bothering to undress. Then he dreams that he is in the Paraná Delta and that he passes the whole day rowing with his girlfriend and eating chorizos in the Nuevo Toro snack bar.
HOW’S IT GOING, LÓPEZ?
A gentleman meets a friend and greets him, shaking his hand and nodding a little.
Like that he thinks that he has said hello, but the greeting already exists and this good gentleman is only putting the greeting on for the umpteen-hundredth time.
It’s raining. A gentleman takes shelter under an arcade. These gentlemen almost never know that they have just slid by prefabricated toboggan from the first rain to the first arcade. It is a wet toboggan of withered leaves.
And the gestures of love, that gentle museum, that gallery of figures of smoke. Let your vanity console itself: Mark Antony’s hand sought what your hand seeks. And neither his nor yours was seeking anything that has not been found since eternity. But invisible things need to materialize themselves, ideas fall to earth like dead pigeons. The genuinely new creates either fear or wonderment. These two sensations equally close to the stomach always accompany the presence of Prometheus; the rest is convenience or profit, that which always comes off more or less well; active verbs contain the whole repertory.
Hamlet has no doubt: he seeks the authentic solution, not the house door or the road already worn by whatever shortcut or crossroads proffer themselves. He wants the tangent that will smash the mystery into smithereens, the fifth leaf on the clover. Between yes and no what an infinite rose of the winds. The princes of Denmark, those falcons who elect to die of hunger before eating dead meat.
When the shoe pinches, it’s a good sign. Something’s happening here, something that shows us, that in a muffled way places and defines us. Which is the reason monsters are so popular and newspapers go into ecstasies over two-headed calves. What opportunities, what a prospect for a great leap toward otherness!
Here comes López.
“How’s it going, López?”
“How’s it going, buddy?”
And like that they think they have said hello.
GEOGRAPHIES
Established that ants are the true rulers of creation (the reader may take this as a hypothesis or as a fantasy; in any case he will do well with a little anthropoescapism), and I have here a page of their geography:
(p. 84 of the book; possible equivalents of certain expressions are given in parentheses, following the classical interpretation of Gaston Loeb)
“… parallel seas (rivers?). The infinite water (a sea? ) grows at certain times like an ivy-ivy-ivy (idea of a very high wall, which would express the tides?). If one goes-goes-goes-goes (an analogous idea applied to distance) one comes to the Great Green Shade (a field under cultivation? a thicket? woods?) where the Great God raises up his perpetual granary for his Best Workers. Horrible Immense Beings (men?) abound in this region who destroy our trails under the earth. On the other side of the Great Green Shade, the Hard Sky begins (a mountain?). And all is ours, though under great threat.”
This geography has been the object of another interpretation (Dick Fry and Niels Peterson, Jr.). The landscape might correspond topographically to a small garden at 628 calle Laprida, Buenos Aires. The parallel seas are two gutters for waste water; the infinite water, a duck pond; the Great Green Shade, a bed of lettuce. The Horrible Immense Beings, they suggest, might be ducks or hens, though the possibility that, really, men are meant cannot be discarded. As for the Hard Sky, a polemic is already being waged which will not soon be resolved. In the opinion of Fry and Peterson, they hold it obvious that it means the brickyard next door, as opposed to the notion of Guillermo Sofovich, who surmises it to be a bidet abandoned among the lettuce.
PROGRESS AND RETROGRESSION
They invented a kind of glass which let flies through. The fly would come, push a little with his head and pop, he was on the other side. Enormous happiness on the part of the fly.
All this was ruined by a Hungarian scientist when he discovered that the fly could enter but not get out, or vice versa, because he didn’t know what gimmick was involved in the glass or the flexibility of its fibers, for it was very fibroid. They immediately invented a fly trap with a sugar cube inside, and many flies perished miserably. So ended any possible brotherhood with these animals, who are deserving of better luck.
A VERY REAL STORY
It happened that a gentleman dropped his glasses on the floor, which, when they hit the tiles, made a terrible noise. The gentleman stoops down to pick them up, very dejected, as the lenses are very expensive, but he discovers with astonishment that by some miracle he hasn’t broken them.
Now this gentleman feels profoundly thankful and understands that what has happened amounts to a friendly warning, in such a way that he walks down to an optician’s shop and immediately acquires a leather glasses case, padded and double-protected, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of, etc. An hour later the case falls, and stooping down to recover it without any great anxiety, he discovers that the glasses are in smithereens. It takes this gentleman a while to understand that the designs of Providence are inscrutable, and that in reality the miracle has just now occurred.
STORY WITH A SOFT BEAR
Now look at this ball of coal tar that oozes as it dilates, growing larger by the window juncture of two trees. Beyond the trees there’s a clearing and it’s there that the coal tar meditates and contemplates its entrance in the shape of a ball, the shape of a ball and paws, in the shape of coal tar hair paws according to the dictionary BEAR.
Now the ball of coal tar emerges damp and soft shaking off infinite spherical ants, goes casting them off into each paw print which is disposed harmoniously as he walks. That is, the coal tar puts a bearpaw down upon the pine needles, Assuring the smooth earth and while pulling loose stamps a slipper in shreds forward and leaves newborn a multiple and rounded anthill, fragrant with coal tar. Thus on either side of the road, this founder of symmetrical realms walks, shaking off each damp pyramid of earth, a shape hair paws contriving a structure for spherical ants.
At last the sun comes out and the soft bear raises a traveled and childlike face to the honeycomb he hungers for in vain. The coal tar begins to smell vehemently, the ball grows to the level of the day, hair paws only coal tar, hair paws coal tar that mumbles a plea and peers for the answer, the profound resounding of the honeycomb on high, honey of the sky on his tongue snout in his happiness hair paws.
THEME FOR A TAPESTRY
The general has only eighty men, and the enemy five thousand. In his tent the general curses and weeps. Then he writes an inspired proclamation and homing pigeons shower copies over the enemy camp. Two hundred foot desert to the general. There follows a skirmish which the general wins easily, and two regiments come over to his side. Three days later, the enemy has only eighty men and the general five thousand. Then the general writes another procl
amation and seventy-nine men join up with him. Only one enemy is left, surrounded by the army of the general who waits in silence. The night passes and the enemy has not come over to his side. The general curses and weeps in his tent. At dawn the enemy slowly unsheathes his sword and advances on the general’s tent. He goes in and looks at him. The army of the general disbands. The sun rises.
PROPERTIES OF AN EASY CHAIR
At the Jacinto house there is an easy chair to die in. When people get old, one day they invite them to sit in the easy chair, which is a chair like any other but with a little silver star in the middle of the back. The invited person sighs, moves his hand a little as though he would like to hold the invitation at a distance, and then he goes and sits down in the chair and dies.
The boys, mischievous as always, amuse themselves in their mother’s absence by playing tricks on visitors, and they invite them to sit in the chair. As the visitors are well informed but know that they must not talk about that, they look at the boys in great confusion and excuse themselves with words that are never used to talk to boys, which of course the boys find extremely hilarious. At the end the visitors avail themselves of any pretext to avoid sitting down, but later the boys’ mother finds out what they’ve been up to and there are terrible beatings around bedtime. Not at all put off by this, every once in a while they succeed in tricking some innocent visitor and they have him sit in the chair. In these cases the parents cover up for them since they are afraid that the neighbors will discover the properties of the chair and will come over to ask the loan of it in order to get one or another of their family or circle of friends to sit down in it. Meanwhile the boys go on growing up and the day comes when, without knowing why, they lose interest in the chair and the visitors. They avoid even going into the parlor, they make a circuit around by the patio, and the parents, who are already very old, lock the parlor door with a key and look at their sons attentively as though wanting to-read-their-thoughts. The sons avoid the look and say that it’s time to eat or time to go to sleep. Mornings, the father is the first one up and always goes to see if the parlor door is still locked, or if one of the sons has opened it so that the chair can be seen from the dining room, because the little silver star shines even in the darkness and it can be seen perfectly well from whatever part of the dining room.
Cronopios and Famas (New Directions Classic) Page 5
