The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Then, on my way to the station, I saw that the sprinkler had not yet returned to its place and that the garden was starting to turn yellow. I conjectured, logically, a series of fantastic conclusions and on the station platform, while my body was on display to the frivolous groups of women, my mind was working on an interpretation of the mystery.

  Looking up at the moon, huge in the sky, one of us, I think it was Di Pinto, always ready to give himself over to the romantic chimera of being a country boy (and this in front of his childhood friends!), said:

  “The moon was dry when it was born. We can’t say that removing this object is a prediction of rain. Don Juan must have had other reasons!”

  Badaracco, who was no fool, who had a mark on his face because at an earlier time, aside from his salary from the bank, he had earned some money from denunciations, said to me:

  “Why don’t you ask the idiot about it?”

  “Who do you mean?” I said politely.

  “Your student,” he replied.

  I took advantage of the opportunity and asked him that very evening, after class. I tried to confuse Don Tadeito first of all with the platitude that rain is good for the plants, then I went in for the kill. The dialogue ran as follows:

  “Is the sprinkler broken?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t see it in the garden.”

  “Why would you see it?”

  “What do you mean why would I see it?”

  “Because it’s watering the warehouse.”

  I should state that the warehouse was the name we gave to the last hut in the town house courtyard, where Don Juan kept all the stuff that was difficult to sell piled up, for example shabby stoves and statues, monoliths and capstans.

  Driven by my desire to tell my friends the news about the sprinkler, I sent my student off without asking him any further about another point. Remembering and shouting happened simultaneously. Don Tadeito looked at me from the doorway with his sheep’s eyes.

  “What does Don Juan do with the texts?” I shouted.

  “He…,” the shout came back. “…He stores them in the warehouse.”

  I ran in stupefaction to the hotel, and what I had to communicate caused, as I expected, confusion among my friends. Each of us formed a different opinion, it would have been unthinkable to have been silent at that moment, but luckily no one listened to anyone else. Or perhaps the hotel manager heard us, enormous Don Pomponio with his dropsical stomach, whom those of us in the group barely distinguished from the columns and tables and cutlery of the hotel, so blinded we were by our intellectual arrogance. Don Pomponio’s brazen voice, smoothed by rivers of gin, called us to order. Seven faces looked up and fourteen eyes were fixed on a single red and shiny face whose mouth opened to ask the following question:

  “Why not head out as a committee and ask Don Juan in person?”

  His sarcasm woke up another fellow, called Aldini, who was studying via correspondence course and who wore a white tie. Raising his eyebrows he said to me:

  “Why don’t you order your pupil to spy on the conversations between Doña Remedios and Don Juan? Then you can put the screws on him.”

  “What screws?”

  “Use your authority as an all-knowing teacher,” he said nastily.

  “Does Don Tadeito have a good memory?” Badaracco asked.

  “Yes he does,” I said. “Whatever goes into his head stays there photographed for a while.”

  “Don Juan asks Doña Remedios for advice about everything,” Aldini continued.

  “In front of a witness like their godson,” Di Pinto said, “they will speak with absolute freedom.”

  “If there is any mystery, then it will be brought into the light,” Toledo stated.

  Chazaretta, who worked as a helper at the market, grunted:

  “And if there’s no mystery, what is there then?”

  As the dialogue was getting out of hand, Badaracco, famous for his equanimity, controlled these polemicists.

  “Come on, fellows,” he scolded them, “this is no time for you to waste your energy.”

  In order to have the last word, Toledo repeated:

  “If there is any mystery, then it will be brought into the light.”

  And it was brought into the light, but not until several days had gone by.

  Next siesta-tide, when I was sunk into sleep, the knocks sounded out once again. To judge from my palpitations, the knocking came at one and the same time at the door and against my heart. Don Tadeito brought the books from the day before and asked for textbooks from the first three years of secondary school. Because the most advanced textbook was not in my possession, I had to visit Villaroel’s bookshop, wake up the Spaniard with hefty blows against the door, and calm him down by telling him that it was Don Juan who wanted the books. As might have been feared, the Spaniard asked:

  “What’s got into this man? He doesn’t buy a single book in his whole life and now he’s randy for knowledge. It’s just like him to be so damn rude as to ask for the books on loan.”

  “Don’t get worked up about it, gallego,” I said, patting him on the back. “You’re so angry that you’re starting to curse like a sailor.”

  I told him about the previous order, the primary school textbooks, and kept an absolute silence about the sprinkler’s disappearance, about which, he gave me to understand, he was well aware. With the books under my arm, I added:

  “At night we meet in the hotel bar to discuss all this. If you want to add your ha’pennyworth, that’s where you’ll find us.”

  As I walked there and back I saw not a soul, apart from the butcher’s reddish-gray dog, who must have been sick again, because no creature in its right mind would expose itself to the heat of two o’clock in the afternoon.

  I told my pupil that he should report to me verbatim the conversations he heard between Don Juan and Doña Remedios. There is something in what they say, that the sin brings its own punishment with it. That very evening I began a period of torture that, in my curiosity, I would not have suspected: to hear the accurate representation of these conversations, interminable and insipid. Every now and then I had a cruelly ironic reply on the tip of my tongue about how little importance Doña Remedios’s opinions about the last batch of yellow soap or the flannels for Don Juan’s rheumatism held for me, but I stopped myself in time: how could I delegate to the child the decision as to what was important or not?

  Of course, the next day my siesta was again interrupted with the books to be returned to Villaroel. And here was the first new development: Don Juan, Don Tadeito said, no longer wanted textbooks; he wanted old newspapers, which Tadeito had to gather by the kilo, from the haberdashery, the butcher, and the baker. He took his time telling me that the newspapers, like the books before them, would be taken on deposit.

  Then there was a period in which nothing happened. There is no way to deal with the feelings of the heart: I missed the loud knocks that had previously woken me from my siesta. I wanted something to happen, whether good or bad. Having become accustomed to an intense life, I could no longer resign myself to sluggishness. But finally one night the student, after a prolix rundown of the effects of salt and other nutritional materials on Doña Remedios’s body, said, without altering his tone in the slightest to suggest that he was going to change theme or topic:

  “Godfather said to Doña Remedios that they had a visitor living in the warehouse and that he had very nearly knocked him down a few days ago, because he was looking at a kind of amusement-park swing which hadn’t been entered in the books and that he did not lose his cool even though he appeared to be in a very bad way and reminded him of a catfish gulping air out of the water. He said that he brought a bucket filled with water, because without thinking about it he realized that he was asking for water and that he was not going to stand by with his arms crossed while a fellow creature died. There was no obvious result and he decided to bring a horse trough across for the visitor. He filled the trough with buckets
and there was no obvious result. Suddenly he remembered the sprinkler and, he said, like the doctor who tries everything to save a patient’s life, he ran to get it and connect it. The result was immediately visible because the dying creature revived as if what it wanted to do was breathe damp air. Godfather said that he spent a while with the visitor, because he asked him as best he could if he needed anything and the visitor was pretty quick-witted because after a quarter of an hour he was giving out a couple of words of Spanish and asked him for the rudiments of how to study and learn. Godfather said that he had sent his godson to ask for first-grade books from the teacher. As the visitor was pretty quick-witted he learned all the grades in two days and after just one he was ready to take his exams. And then, Godfather said, he started to read newspapers to find out what was happening in the world.”

  I ventured a suggestion:

  “Did that conversation take place today?”

  “Of course,” he answered, “while they were drinking coffee.”

  “Did your godfather say anything else?”

  “Of course, but I don’t remember what.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t remember?” I protested angrily.

  “You interrupted me,” my pupil explained.

  “All right. But you’re not going to leave me like this,” I said, “dying from curiosity. Come on, make an effort.”

  “You interrupted me.”

  “I know. I interrupted you. It’s my fault.”

  “It’s your fault,” he repeated.

  “Don Tadeito is good. He won’t leave his teacher like this, in the middle of the conversation, to carry on tomorrow or never.”

  With a deep sigh he repeated:

  “Or never.”

  I was upset, as if someone were taking something of great price away from me. I don’t know why, but I thought that most of our dialogue consisted of repetitions and suddenly I saw a sliver of hope in this. I repeated the final phrase of Don Tadeito’s account:

  “He started to read newspapers to find out what was happening in the world.”

  My student continued indifferently:

  “Godfather said that the visitor was shocked to discover that the government of the world was not in the hands of the best people, but rather in those of people who were decidedly mediocre, if not absolute good-for-nothings. That such riffraff had the atomic bomb under their control, the visitor said, was enough to make you crazy. If the best people had the atomic bomb under their control, they would end up dropping it, because it is clear that if someone has it then it will be dropped, but that this riffraff had it could not be serious. He said that other planets had discovered the bomb before this and they had all exploded with fatal results. They did not mind these planets blowing themselves up, because they were a long way away, but our world was close and they were afraid that a chain reaction would take them with it.”

  The unbelievable suspicion that Don Tadeito was making fun of me made me ask him a question quite severely:

  “Have you been reading Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies?”

  Luckily enough he didn’t hear my interruption and carried on:

  “Godfather said that the visitor said he had come from his planet in a specially built vehicle because there was not enough material there and it was the fruit of years of research and work. That he came as a friend and as a liberator, and that he asked Godfather for his full support in order to carry out a plan to save the world. Godfather said that the meeting with the visitor took place that afternoon and that he, in the face of such a serious situation, had no hesitation in speaking to Doña Remedios about it, in order to hear her opinion, which was also his own.”

  As the pause did not immediately come to an end, I asked what that good lady’s reply had been.

  “Ah, I don’t know,” he replied.

  “What do you mean ‘Ah, I don’t know’?” I repeated, angered once again.

  “I left them talking and came over, because it was time for class. I thought that if I don’t get there late, then the teacher will be happy.”

  His sheep’s face grew conceited as he waited for his praise. With admirable presence of mind I thought that my friends from the bar would not believe my story unless I brought Don Tadeito along as a witness. I grasped him violently by an arm and pushed him to the bar by judicious shoves. My friends were there, with the addition of the Spaniard Villaroel.

  I will never forget that night, not so long as my memory lasts.

  “Sirs,” I cried as I pushed Don Tadeito against our table. “I bring the explanation for everything, an extremely important piece of news and a witness who will not permit me to lie. Don Juan explained the whole story in great detail to his dear mother and my faithful pupil did not miss a single word. In the warehouse at the town house, right next door, with just the wall between us, there dwells—guess who?—a visitor from another world. Now, sirs, do not be alarmed: the voyager is apparently not in the best of health, as it appears that he does not deal well with the dry air of our town—we are still competition for Cordoba—and in order for him not to die like a fish out of water, Don Juan has plugged in the sprinkler, to make the atmosphere in the warehouse damper. There’s more: apparently the motive for the monster’s visit should not cause us to be worried. He has come to save us, sure that the world is on the path to destruction with the atomic bomb, and has told Don Juan of his point of view absolutely openly. Of course, Don Juan, while taking coffee, discussed this question with Doña Remedios. It is just a pity that this child”—I shook Don Tadeito as though he were a rag doll—“should have left just at the moment before Doña Remedios gave her opinion, so we do not know what it was they decided.”

  “We do know,” the bookseller said, pouting with his fat wet lips.

  I was a little taken aback that I should be corrected in mid-delivery of a piece of news of which I thought I was the only holder. I asked:

  “What do we know?”

  “Don’t get your collar knotted,” Villaroel said, the cunning old fox. “If it is as you say and the traveler will die if the sprinkler is removed, then Don Juan has just condemned him to death. I came past Las Margaritas on my way here and in the moonlight I could see the sprinkler watering the garden as before.”

  “I saw it too,” Chazarreta confirmed.

  “With my hand on my heart,” Aldini murmured, “I say to you that the traveler did not lie. Sooner or later we’ll blow ourselves up with the atomic bomb. There’s no way past it.”

  As if he were speaking to himself, Badaracco said:

  “Don’t tell me that these old people have destroyed our last hope.”

  “Don Juan doesn’t want to change his way of living,” the Spaniard proposed. “He would rather that the world blew up than that salvation came from outside. I suppose it is a way of loving mankind.”

  “Disgust in the face of things you don’t know,” I said. “Obscurantism.”

  They say that fear makes one’s mind run more clearly. The truth is that there was something strange in the bar that night and we all brought our ideas to the discussion.

  “Come on, fellows, let’s do something,” Badaracco said. “For the love of humanity.”

  “Señor Badaracco, why do you have so much love for humanity?” the Spaniard asked.

  Badaracco blushed and stammered:

  “I don’t know. We all know.”

  “What do we know, Señor Badaracco? If you think about men, do you think them admirable? I think the exact opposite: they are stupid, and cruel, and mean and envious,” Villaroel declared.

  “Whenever there are elections,” Chazarreta agreed, “then your beautiful humanity stands revealed naked, just as it really is. It’s always the worst ones who win.”

  “So love of humanity is just an empty phrase, then?”

  “No, my dear teacher,” Villaroel replied. “Let us call love of humanity the compassion for other people’s pain and the veneration we have for the works
of our great minds, for the Immortal Cripple’s Quixote, for the paintings of Velázquez and Murillo. In no sense does this love serve as an argument to delay the end of the world. These works only exist for humans to experience, and after the end of the world—and the day will come, whether brought by the bomb or by natural causes—they will have no justification or support, believe you me. As for compassion, it will disappear as the end approaches….As no one can escape death, let it come quickly, for everyone, so the sum of pain will be as small as possible!”

  “We are losing our time in the particularities of an academic discussion and here, just through the wall, our last hope is dying,” I said with an eloquence which I was the first to admire.

  “We must act now,” Badaracco said. “Soon it will be too late.”

  “If we invade the town house, then Don Juan will get angry,” Di Pinto said.

  Don Pomponio, who sidled over without our hearing him and who made us jump when he spoke, suggested the following:

  “Why not send little Don Tadeito along as an advance guard? It would be the sensible thing to do.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Toledo said. “Let Don Tadeito set up the sprinkler in the warehouse and have a look at what happens, so we can see what the traveler from another world is like.”

  We walked out into the night en masse, lit by the implacable moon. Badaracco exhorted us, almost in tears:

  “Come on, fellows, let’s be generous. It doesn’t matter if we risk our skin. All of the mothers of the world, all of the creatures on earth depend upon us.”

  We gathered together in a crowd in front of the town house, there were movements forward and movements backward, suggestions and tussles. Finally Badaracco got his courage up and pushed Don Tadeito forward. My student came back after an interminable stretch of time and said:

  “The catfish is dead.”

  We broke up sadly. The bookseller came back with me. For some reason that I did not understand at all his company cheered me up.

  In front of Las Margaritas, while the sprinkler monotonously watered the garden, I exclaimed: