nightmare of a man with a fever, it’s something that happened, can you tell me how it’s possible?”
“We were soldiers.”
“What do you mean?”
“We were fighting a war.”
“What war? The war was over.”
“Not for us.”
“Not for you?”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Then tell me what I don’t know.”
“We believed in a better world.”
“What do you mean?”
“ . . . ”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t turn back, when people begin to murder each other you can’t go back. We didn’t want to get to that point, others started it, but then there was nothing else to do.”
“What do you mean, a better world?”
“A just world, where the weak don’t have to suffer for 76
the evil of the others, where everyone has a right to happiness.”
“And you believed that?”
“Of course I believed it, we all believed it, it could be done and we knew how.”
“You knew?”
“Does that seem so strange to you?”
“Yes.”
“And yet we knew. And we fought for that, to be able to do what was right.”
“Killing children?”
“Yes, if it was necessary.”
“But what are you saying?”
“You can’t understand.”
“I can understand, you explain and I’ll understand.”
“ . . . ”
“ . . . ”
“You can’t sow without plowing first. First you have to break up the earth.”
“ . . . ”
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“First there has to be a time of suffering, do you understand?”
“No.”
“There were a lot of things that we had to destroy in order to build what we wanted, there was no other way, we had to be able to suffer and to inflict suffering, whoever could endure more pain would win, you cannot dream of a better world and think that it will be delivered just because you ask for it. The others would never have given in, we had to fight, and once you understood that it no longer made any difference if they were old people or children, your friends or your enemies, you were breaking up the earth—then there was nothing but to do it, and there was no way to do it that didn’t hurt. And when everything seemed too horrific, we had our dream that protected us, we knew that however great the price the reward would be immense, because we were not fighting for money, or a field to work, or a flag. We were doing it for a better world, do you understand what that means?, we were restoring to millions of men a decent life, and the possibility of 78
happiness, of living and dying with dignity, without being trampled or scorned, we were nothing, they were everything, millions of men, we were there for them. What’s a boy who dies against a wall, or ten boys, or a hundred, we had to break up the earth and we did, millions of other children were waiting for us to do it, and we did, maybe you should . . . ”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Of course I believe it.”
“After all these years you still believe it?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“You won the war. Does this seem to you a better world?”
“I have never asked myself.”
“It’s not true. You have asked yourself a thousand times, but you’re afraid to answer. Just as you have asked yourself a thousand times what you were doing that night at Mato Rujo, fighting when the war was over, killing a man in cold blood whom you had never even seen before, without giving him the right to a trial, simply killing him, for 79
the sole reason that by now you had begun to murder and were no longer capable of stopping. And in all these years you have asked yourself a thousand times why you got involved in the war, and the whole time your better world is spinning around in your head, so that you will not have to think of the day when they brought you the eyes of your father, or see again all the other murdered men who then, as now, filled your mind, an intolerable memory. That is the only, the true reason you fought, because this was what you had in mind, to be revenged. And now you should be able to utter the word ‘revenge.’ You killed for revenge, you all killed for revenge, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s the only drug for pain there is, the only way not to go mad, the drug that enables us to fight. But it didn’t free you, it burned your entire life, it filled you with ghosts. In order to survive four years of war you burned your entire life, and you no longer even know—”
“It’s not true.”
“You no longer even remember what life is.”
“What do you know about it?”
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“Yes, what can I know about it, I’m only an old woman who is mad, right?, I can’t understand, I was a child then, what do I know about it?, I’ll tell you what I know, I was lying in a hole, underground, three men came, they took my father, then—”
“Stop it.”
“Don’t you like this story?”
“I’m not sorry for anything—we had to fight and we did, we weren’t sitting at home with the windows shut, waiting for it to pass, we climbed out of our holes and did what we had to do, that’s the truth, you can say anything now, you can find all the reasons you want, but it’s different, you had to be there to understand, you weren’t there, you were a child, it’s not your fault, but you can’t understand.”
“You explain, I’ll understand.”
“I’m tired now.”
“We have as much time as we want. You talk, I’ll lis -
ten.”
“Please, leave me alone.”
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“Why?”
“Do what you have to do, but leave me in peace.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Then what is it?”
“I’m tired.”
“Of what?”
“ . . . ”
“ . . . ”
“Please . . . ”
“ . . . ”
“ . . . ”
“ . . . ”
“Please . . . ”
Then the woman lowered her eyes. She drew away from the table and leaned against the back of the chair.
She glanced around, as if suddenly, at that moment, she had realized where she was. The man was kneading his fingers, one hand clasped in the other, but it was the only thing in him that was moving.
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At the back of the café, the three musicians played songs from other times. Someone was dancing.
For a while they stayed like that, in silence.
Then the woman said something about a celebration many years earlier, where there was a famous singer who had asked her to dance. In a low voice she told how, though he was old, he moved with astonishing lightness, and before the music ended he had explained to her how a woman’s destiny is written in the way she dances. Then he had told her that she danced as if dancing were a sin.
The woman smiled and looked around again.
Then she said something else. It was that evening, at Mato Rujo. She said that when she had seen the trapdoor raised she had not been afraid. She had turned to look at the boy’s face, and everything had seemed to her very nat-ural, even obvious. She said that in some way she had liked what was happening. Then he had lowered the door, and then, yes, she had been afraid, with the worst fear of her life. The darkness that returned, the sound of the baskets dragged over her head again, the boy’s footsteps 83
growing distant. She had felt lost. And that terror had never left her. She was silent for a moment and then she added that the mind of a child is strange. I think that at that moment, she said, I wished for only one thing: that that boy would take me away with him.
She went on talking, about children and about fear, but the man didn’t hear her because he was trying to put together the words to say on
e thing that he would have liked to let the woman know. He would have liked to tell her that while he was looking at her, that night, curled up in the hole, so orderly and clean— clean—he had felt a kind of peace that he had never found again, or at least hardly ever, and then it was looking at a landscape, or staring into the eyes of an animal. He would have liked to explain to her exactly that sensation, but he knew that the word “peace” was not enough to describe what he had felt, and yet nothing else occurred to him, except perhaps the idea that it had been like seeing something that was infinitely complete. Just as many other times, in the past, he had felt how difficult it was to give a name to what had 84
happened to him in the war, as if there were a spell under which those who had lived couldn’t tell the story, and those who knew how to tell the story had not been fated to live. He looked at the woman and saw her speak, but he didn’t hear her because his thoughts again carried him away and he was too tired to resist. So he remained there, leaning back in the chair, and did nothing, until he began to weep. He wasn’t ashamed, he didn’t hide his face behind his hands, he didn’t even try to control his face, contorted in sadness, while the tears descended to his collar, sliding down his neck, which was white and badly shaved, like the neck of every old man in the world.
The woman interrupted. She hadn’t realized at first that he had begun to cry, and now she didn’t know what to do. She leaned over the table and murmured something, softly. Then instinctively she turned to the other tables and saw that two boys, sitting nearby, were looking at the man, and one of the two was smiling. Then she yelled something at him, and when the boy turned to her, she looked him in the eyes and said to him, loudly: 85
“Fuck you.”
Then she filled the man’s glass with wine and pushed it toward him. She didn’t say anything more. She leaned back again. The man continued to weep. Every so often she looked around angrily, like a female animal standing guard at the den of her young.
“Who are those two?” asked the woman behind the bar.
The waiter knew she was speaking of the two old people, over at the table.
“It’s fine,” he said.
“Do you know them?”
“No.”
“The old man was crying, before.”
“I know.”
“They aren’t drunk . . . ”
“No, everything’s all right.”
“But tell me, why should they come here and . . . ”
To the waiter there didn’t seem anything wrong with weeping in a café. But he said nothing. He was the boy 86
with the strange accent. He placed three empty glasses on the bar and went back to the tables.
The woman turned to the old people and watched them for a while.
“She must have been a beautiful woman . . . ”
She said it aloud, even though there was no one to hear her.
When she was young she had dreamed of becoming a movie actress. Everyone said she had wonderful self-confidence, and she liked to sing and dance. She had a pretty voice, rather common but pretty. Then she had met a salesman of beauty products who brought her to the capital to do advertising photos for a night cream. She had sent the photographs home, in an envelope, with some money. For a few months she had tried to succeed with singing, but it didn’t work out. Things went better with the ads. Nail polish, lipstick, once some kind of eye-drops for redness. She had given up on movies. They said you had to go to bed with everyone, and she didn’t want to do that. One day she heard they were looking for TV
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announcers. She went to a tryout. Since she was wonderfully self-confident and had a pretty, common voice, she passed the first three tryouts and ended up in second place. They told her she could wait, and maybe something would open up. She waited. After two months she got a job doing radio shows, on the first national channel.
One day she went home.
She had married well.
Now she had a café, in the center of town.
The woman—the one at the table—leaned forward slightly. The man had stopped crying a little before. He had pulled out of his pocket a big handkerchief and had dried the tears. He had said:
“I’m sorry.”
Then they had said nothing else.
It seemed, indeed, that they no longer had anything to understand, together.
And yet at a certain point the woman leaned toward the man again and said:
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“I must ask you something a little stupid.”
The man looked up at her.
The woman seemed very serious.
“Would you like to make love to me?”
The man stared at her, motionless, silent.
So the woman was afraid for a moment that she had said nothing, that she had only thought of saying those words without having in fact done so. So she repeated them, slowly.
“Would you like to make love to me?”
The man smiled.
“I’m old,” he said.
“So am I.”
“ . . . ”
“ . . . ”
“I’m sorry, but we’re old,” the man said again.
The woman realized she hadn’t thought about that, and had nothing to say about it. Then something else occurred to her and she said:
“I’m not mad.”
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“It doesn’t matter if you are. Really. To me it doesn’t matter. It’s not that.”
The woman thought for a moment and then said:
“Don’t worry, we can go to a hotel, you can choose it. A hotel that no one knows.”
Then the man seemed to understand something.
“You want us to go to a hotel?” he asked.
“Yes. I would like that. Take me to a hotel.”
He said slowly:
“A hotel room.”
He spoke as if by pronouncing the words it had become easier for him to imagine the room, to see it, to understand if he would like to die there.
The woman said he mustn’t be afraid.
“I’m not afraid,” he said.
I will never be afraid again, he thought.
The woman smiled because he was quiet and this seemed to her a way of saying yes.
She looked for something in her bag, then she took out a small purse and pushed it across the table, to the man.
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“Pay with this. I don’t like women who pay in a café, but I invited you, and I’ll stick to it. Take this. Then give it back to me when we’re outside.”
The man took the little purse.
He thought of an old man paying with a purse of black satin.
They crossed the city in a taxi that seemed new and still had plastic on the seats. The woman looked out the window the whole time. They were streets she had never seen.
They got out in front of a hotel called California. The sign went vertically up the four floors of the building, in big red letters that lighted up one by one. When the word was complete it shone for a little while, then went out completely and began again from the first letter. C. Ca.
Cal. Cali. Calif. Califo. Califor. Californi. California. California. California. California. Darkness.
They stood there for a little while, one beside the other, looking at the hotel from the outside. Then the 91
woman said, “Let’s go,” and moved toward the door.
The man followed her.
The desk clerk looked at their papers and asked if they wanted a double room. But without any inflection in his voice.
“Whatever there is,” the woman answered.
They took a room that looked onto the street, on the third floor. The desk clerk apologized that there was no elevator and offered to carry up the suitcases.
“No suitcases. We lost them,” said the woman.
The clerk smiled. He was a good man. He watched them disappear up the stairs and didn’t think badly of them.
They went into the room and neither of them made a move to turn
on the light. The woman placed her purse on a chair and went to the window. She pushed aside the transparent curtains and looked down for a while, into the street. Occasional cars passed, unhurried. In the wall of the house opposite, lighted windows told the domestic tales of little worlds, happy or sad—ordinary. She turned, 92
took off her shawl, and put it on a table. The man waited, standing, in the middle of the room. He was wondering if he should sit on the bed, or maybe say something about the place, for example that it wasn’t bad. The woman saw him there, with his overcoat on, and he seemed to her alone and timeless, like a movie hero. She went over, unbuttoned his coat, and slipping it off his shoulders let it fall to the floor. They were so close. They looked into each other’s eyes, and it was the second time, in their lives.
Then he slowly leaned over her because he had decided to kiss her on the lips. She didn’t move and in a low voice said, “Don’t be silly.” The man stopped, and he stood like that, leaning slightly forward, in his heart the precise sensation that everything was ending. But the woman slowly raised her arms, and taking a step forward embraced him, first gently, then hugging him to her with irresistible force, until her head rested on his shoulder and her whole body pressed against his. The man’s eyes were open. He saw before him the lighted window. He felt the body of the woman who was holding him, and her hands, 93
light, in his hair. He closed his eyes. He took the woman in his arms. And with all his old man’s strength he hugged her to him.
When she began to undress she said, smiling:
“Don’t expect much.”
When he was lying on her, he said, smiling:
“You are very beautiful.”
From a room nearby came the sound of a radio, just perceptible. Lying on his back, in the big bed, completely naked, the man stared at the ceiling, wondering if it was weariness that made his head spin, or the wine. Beside him the woman was still, her eyes closed, turned toward him, her head on the pillow. They held each other by the hand. The man would have liked to hear her speak again, but he knew there was nothing more to say, and that any words would be ridiculous at that moment. So he was silent, letting sleep confuse his ideas, and bring back to him the dim memory of what had happened that evening.
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