Cronopios and Famas (New Directions Classic)

by Julio Cortázar

  cronopios

  and famas

  I.

  The First and

  Still Uncertain Appearance

  of Cronopios, Famas, and

  Esperanzas.

  Mythological Phase

  NORMAL BEHAVIOR OF THE FAMAS

  It happened that a fama was dancing respite and dancing Catalan in front of a shop filled with cronopios and esperanzas. The esperanzas were the most irritated. They are always trying to see to it that the famas dance hopeful, not respite or Catalan, since hopeful is the dance the cronopios and esperanzas know best.

  The famas deliberately, always, locate directly in front of the shops, and at this time the fama was dancing respite and dancing Catalan just to annoy the esperanzas. One of the esperanzas laid his flute fish on the floor—esperanzas, like the King of the Sea, are always accompanied by flute fishes—and went outside to curse at the fama, speaking to him like this:

  —Fama, don’t dance respite or Catalan in front of this store.

  The fama kept on dancing, and laughed.

  The esperanza called out the other esperanzas, and the cronopios formed a circle around to see what would happen.

  —Fama—said the esperanzas—don’t dance respite or Catalan either in front of this store.

  But the fama kept on dancing and laughing to undermine the esperanzas.

  Then the esperanzas hurled themselves upon the fama and wounded him. They left him lying beside a palisade, and the fama was lying there, lapped in his blood and gloom.

  The cronopios, those wet green objects, came forward furtively and commiserated with him, speaking like this:

  —Cronopio cronopio cronopio.

  And the fama understood, and his solitude was less embittered.

  DANCE OF THE FAMAS

  The famas sing in a circle

  the famas are singing and moving

  about in a circle.

  —CATALAN RESPITE RESPITE HOPEFUL

  The famas are dancing in the room

  with tiny lights and curtains

  dance and sing in such a way that

  —CATALAN RESPITE HOPEFUL RESPITE

  O Park Department Employees,

  how is it you let the famas get out, who walk freely

  unrestrained, singing and dancing, the famas singing

  catalan respite hopeful, how

  can you?

  If the cronopios (those green prickly humid things)

  were still walking about the streets, one night

  escape them with a greeting:—Gray day, cronopios

  cronopios

  But the famas.

  GAYETY OF THE CRONOPIO

  An encounter between a cronopio and a fama at a liquidation sale in a shop called La Mondiale.

  —Gray day, cronopio cronopio.

  —Grade A, fama. Respite Catalan hopeful.

  —Cronopio cronopio?

  —Cronopio cronopio.

  —Thread?

  —Two, but one blue one.

  The fama considers the cronopio. He will not utter a sound until he’s certain the words are precisely correct. Fearful that the always alert esperanzas, those sparkling microbes, will simply slip into the air, and through one mistaken word invade the cronopio’s good-natured heart.

  —Raining outside, the cronopio says.—The whole sky.

  —Don’t let it bother you, says the fama.—We’ll go in my automobile. To keep the thread dry.

  He puts his head out the door and looks up and down the street. Not an esperanza in sight. He allows a sigh of satisfaction to escape. Furthermore, it pleases him to observe the touching gayety of the cronopio, who clutches against his chest the two threads—one blue one—and hopes anxiously that the fama is going to invite him to get into his car.

  THE CRONOPIO BLUES

  At the exit gate

  to Luna Park a

  cronopio notices that

  his watch is running slow, that his watch is running

  slow, that his watch.

  The cronopio has the blues

  faced with a multitude of famas coming up calle Co-

  rrientes at twenty after two

  while he, a damp green object, already leaving at two

  fifteen.

  Cronopio’s meditation: “It’s late,

  but not so late for me as for the famas, for the famas

  it’s five minutes later.

  They’ll arrive home later,

  go to bed later. You know,

  I’ve got a watch that’s less lively, less homely, less going

  to bed when I go,

  I’m wet and unlucky.

  I’m a cronopio.”

  While having a coffee in the Richmond Bar, the cronopio dampens a piece of toast with his natural tears.

  II.

  Stories of

  Cronopios and Famas

  TRAVEL

  When famas go on a trip, when they pass the night in a city, their procedure is the following: one fama goes to the hotel and prudently checks the prices, the quality of the sheets, and the color of the carpets. The second repairs to the commissariat of police and there fills out a record of the real and transferable property of all three of them, as well as an inventory of the contents of their valises. The third fama goes to the hospital and copies the lists of the doctors on emergency and their specialties.

  After attending to these affairs diligently, the travelers join each other in the central plaza of the city, exchange observations, and go to a café to take an apéritif. But before they drink, they join hands and do a dance in a circle. This dance is known as The Gayety of the Famas.”

  When cronopios go on a trip, they find that all the hotels are filled up, the trains have already left, it is raining buckets and taxis don’t want to pick them up, either that or they charge them exorbitant prices. The cronopios are not disheartened because they believe firmly that these things happen to everyone. When they manage, finally, to find a bed and are ready to go to sleep, they say to one another, “What a beautiful city, what a very beautiful city!” And all night long they dream that huge parties are being given in the city and that they are invited. The next day they arise very contented, and that’s how cronopios travel.

  Esperanzas are sedentary. They let things and people slide by them. They’re like statues one has to go visit. They never take the trouble.

  ON THE PRESERVATION

  OF MEMORIES

  To maintain the condition of their memories, the famas proceed in the following manner: after having fastened the memory with webs and reminders, with every possible precaution, they wrap it from head to foot in a black sheet and stand it against the parlor wall with a little label which reads: “EXCURSION TO QUILMES” or “FRANK SINATRA.”

  Cronopios, on the other hand, disordered and tepid beings that they are, leave memories loose about the house. They set them down with happy shouts and walk carelessly among them, and when one passes through running they caress it mildly and tell it, “Don’t hurt yourself,” and also “Be careful of the stairs.” It is for this reason that the famas’ houses are orderly and silent, while in those of the cronopios there is great uproar and doors slamming. Neighbors always complain about cronopios, and the famas shake their heads understandingly, and go and see if the tags are all in place.

  CLOCKS

  A fama had a wall clock, and each week he wound it VERY VERY CAREFULLY. A cronopio passed and noting this, he began to laugh, and went home and invented an artichoke clock, or rather a wild-artichoke clock, for it can and ought to be called both ways.

  This cronopio’s wild-artichoke clock is a wood artichoke of the larger species, fastened by its stem to a hole in the wall. Its innumerable leaves indicate what hour it is, all the hours in fact, in such a way that the cronopio has only to pluck a leaf to know what time it is. So he continues plucking them from left to right, always the leaf corresponds to that particular hour, and every day the cronopio begins pulling off a new layer of leaves. When h
e reaches the center, time cannot be measured, and in the infinite violet-rose of the artichoke heart the cronopio finds great contentment. Then he eats it with oil, vinegar, and salt and puts another clock in the hole.

  THE LUNCH

  Not without some labor, a cronopio managed to invent a thermometer for measuring lives. Something between a thermograph and a topometer, between a filing cabinet and a curriculum vitae.

  For example, the cronopio received at his house a fama, an esperanza, and a professor of languages. Applying his discoveries, he established that the fama was infra-life, the esperanza para-life, and the professor of languages inter-life. As far as the cronopio himself was concerned, he considered himself just slightly super-life, but more poetry in that than truth.

  Came lunchtime, this cronopio took great pleasure in the conversation of his fellow members, because all of them thought they were referring to the same things, which was not so. The inter-life was maneuvering such abstractions as spirit and conscience, to which the para-life listened like someone hearing rain—a delicate job. Naturally, the infra-life was asking constantly for the grated cheese, and the super-life carved the chicken in forty-two separate movements, the Stanley Fitzsimmons method. After dessert, the lives took their leaves of one another and went off to their occupations, and there was left on the table only little loose bits of death.

  HANDKERCHIEFS

  A fama is very rich and has a maid. When this fama finishes using a handkerchief, he throws it in the waste-paper basket. He uses another and throws it in the basket. He goes on throwing all the used handkerchiefs into the basket. When he’s out of them, he buys another box.

  The servant collects all the handkerchiefs and keeps them for herself. Because she is so surprised at the fama’s conduct, one day she can no longer contain herself and asks if, really and truly, the handkerchiefs are to be thrown away.

  —Stupid idiot, says the fama—you shouldn’t have asked. From now on you’ll wash my handkerchiefs and I’ll save money.

  BUSINESS

  The famas had opened a factory to make garden hoses and had employed a large number of cronopios to coil and store them in the warehouse.

  The cronopios were hardly in the building where the hoses were manufactured—an incredible gayety! There were green hoses, blue hoses, yellow hoses, and violet hoses. They were transparent and during the testing you could see water running through them with all its bubbles and occasionally a surprised insect. The cronopios began to emit shouts and wanted to dance respite and dance Catalan instead of working. The famas grew furious and applied immediately articles 21, 22, and 23 of the internal regulations. In order to avoid the repetition of such goings-on.

  As the famas are very inattentive, the cronopios hoped for favorable circumstances and loaded very many hoses into a truck. When they came across a little girl, they cut a piece of blue hose and gave it to her as a present so that she could jump rope with it. Thus on all the street-corners there appeared very lovely, blue, transparent bubbles with a little girl inside, who seemed to be a squirrel in a treadmill. The girl’s parents had aspirations: they wanted to take the hose away from her to water the garden, but it was known that the astute cronopios had punctured them in such a way that the water in them broke all into pieces and would serve for nothing. At the end, the parents got tired and the girl went back to the corner and jumped and jumped.

  The cronopios decorated divers monuments with the yellow hoses, and with the green hoses they set traps in the African fashion, right in the middle of the rose park, to see how the esperanzas would fall into them one by one. The cronopios danced respite and danced Catalan around the trapped esperanzas, and the esperanzas reproached them for the way they acted, speaking like this:

  —Bloody cronopios. Cruel, bloody cronopios!

  The cronopios, who had no evil intentions toward the esperanzas, helped them get up and made them gifts of sections of red hose. In this way, the esperanzas were able to return home and accomplish their most intense desire: to water green gardens with red hoses.

  The famas closed down the factory and gave a banquet replete with funereal speeches and waiters who served the fish with great sighs. And they did not invite one cronopio, and asked only those esperanzas who hadn’t fallen into the traps in the rose gardens, for the others were still in possession of sections of hose and the famas were angry with these particular esperanzas.

  PHILANTHROPY

  Famas are capable of gestures of great generosity. For example: this fama comes across a poor esperanza who has fallen at the foot of a coconut palm. He lifts him into his car, takes him home, and busies himself with feeding him and offering him diversion until the esperanza has regained sufficient strength, and tries once more to climb the coconut palm. The fama feels very fine after this gesture, and really he is very goodhearted, only it never occurs to him that within a few days the esperanza is going to fall out of the coconut palm again. So, while the esperanza has fallen once more to the foot of the coconut palm, the fama, at his club, feels wonderful and thinks about how he helped the poor esperanza he found lying there.

  Cronopios are not generous on principle. They pass to one side of the most touching sights, like that of a poor esperanza who does not know how to tie his shoe and whimpers, sitting on the sidewalk by the curb. These cronopios do not even look at the esperanza, being completely occupied with staring at some floating dandelion fuzz. With beings like that, beneficence cannot be practiced coherently. For which reason the heads of philanthropic societies are all famas, and the librarian is an esperanza. From their lofty positions the famas help the cronopios a lot, but the cronopios don’t fret themselves over it.

  THE PUBLIC HIGHWAYS

  A poor cronopio is driving along in his automobile. He comes to an intersection, the brakes fail, and he smashes into another car. A traffic policeman approaches, terribly, and pulls out a little book with a blue cover.

  —Don’t you know how to drive? the cop shouts.

  The cronopio looks at him for a moment and then asks:

  —Who are you?

  The cop remains grim and immovable, but glances down at his uniform, as though to convince himself that there’s been no mistake.

  —Whaddya mean, who am I? Don’t you see who I am?

  —I see a traffic policeman’s uniform, explains the cronopio, very miserable.—You are inside the uniform, but the uniform doesn’t tell me who you are.

  The policeman raises his hand to give him a hit, but then he has the little book in one hand and the pencil in the other, in such a way that he doesn’t hit the cronopio, but goes to the front of the automobile to take down the license-plate number. The cronopio is very miserable and regrets having gotten into the accident because now they will continue asking him questions and he will not be able to answer them, not knowing who is doing the asking, and among strangers there can be no understanding.

  SONG OF THE CRONOPIOS

  When the cronopios sing their favorite songs, they get so excited, and in such a way, that with frequency they get run over by trucks and cyclists, fall out of windows, and lose what they’re carrying in their pockets, even losing track of what day it is.

  When a cronopio sings, the esperanzas and famas gather around to hear him, although they do not understand his ecstasy very well and in general show themselves somewhat scandalized. In the center of a ring of spectators, the cronopio raises his little arms as though he were holding up the sun, as if the sky were a tray and the sun the head of John the Baptist, in such a way that the cronopio’s song is Salome stripped, dancing for the famas and esperanzas who stand there agape asking themselves if the good father would, if decorum. But because they are good at heart (the famas are good and the esperanzas are blockheads), they end by applauding the cronopio, who recovers, somewhat startled, looks around, and also starts to applaud, poor fellow.