Who Among Us?

by Mario Benedetti

  I’d seen Lucas on three occasions. Everything happened as you, without saying so, had wished. How you’d waited for those meetings! What you wouldn’t have given to be once again the implicated witness, to peer deep into our eyes and at last discover the complicity you prophesied. After the announcement, you prepared the ground, just like those gospel writers who rewrote history to fit their prophecies.

  Eleven years have gone by with you dreaming of the moment when you could hand me back to Lucas, revelling in advance at your sacrifice. And you were so clever that you never once mentioned it, as if our imperturbable life, our ineffable, loathsome idyll, were nourished solely by that ghastly complicity.

  I have to admit you were right, right in the dreadful way you dreamed up. But I can’t forgive you. I can’t forgive you for making me prefer Lucas, when it was so much better to love you. I can’t forgive you for the feeling of weariness and sordidness that inexorably accompanied my falling in love with Lucas. I can’t even forgive you the simple fact of discovering I can’t love him without utterly despising you. I can’t forgive you for having become so much worse than I had hoped.

  My mind is made up, in spite of the children. Now that we’re going to confront everything with abominable sincerity, I not only have to work out what place they will have in our future, but also what importance they have had until now. Children unite, the most gullible happy couples say. Children tie you down, those who are unhappy say, those who are most demonstrably stupid. You and I are proof of the fact that they didn’t unite us, and they don’t even tie us down. They are witnesses, too.

  But you’ll be expecting all the details. Well, everything went as you planned. From our first meeting, when we talked at length about you, to the next one, in two hours’ time, when I’m thinking of reading him your repugnant letter. That will be the best way to separate myself from you. I can only do that if I feel contempt for you. And I need to feel that contempt. I need to see his mocking, understanding look when I read him the affectionate words you dedicate to me.

  We haven’t talked about the immediate future, but you’ve no need to worry, I know I’m leaving with him. I can tell that from the provocative way he talks about our adolescence, from the nervous, hurtful laugh he often breaks into that always wounds me, in the pitying repulsion with which he speaks of you, from his eyes, which again show their desire for me.

  Besides, I know that with him I’m not going to stay silent. I no longer have any faith in implicit understanding, modesty or a sense of shame. This time I want everything to be said out loud, both the delightful and the repugnant, so that nothing is left to the imagination, so that nothing can betray us.

  In the end, I have to thank you for the constant availability of your scruples. I don’t need to toss a coin. You’ve spared me the anxiety of dignity, and that’s already enough.

  Of course, this isn’t going to be the love I once hoped for. I don’t even remember what it was meant to be like, I can’t recover it from the depths of my memory. Surely it can’t be this basic desire to be touched by him without regard for his opinions, past or present. It can’t be the hysterical wish I have to go to bed with him, completely oblivious to any future conversations, constructively reconciling our ethics and ideals, and all the other tiresome conventions that used to concern me so much with you. It can’t be any of that, and yet that’s not important.

  If with her violent beatings my mother taught me not to have any illusions, I’ve learned for myself not to have any great hopes. Lucas is here, a limited, extraordinary but accessible source of happiness, and I, with the excusable feelings of guilt that both you and I are aware of – that only bother me like a minor ailment, a toothache or lumbago – I want to seize this opportunity, I want to offer myself to him, because he is the present, and I believe in the present. After all, it’s the only religion I have to hand.

  For now, allow me to believe that the children won’t complicate your life, and that you will no longer complicate the life of the woman who can no longer be your

  Alicia.

  Part Three

  * * *

  LUCAS

  I

  For the first time in recent years, he had deliberately tried to imagine what she might look like now.fn1 She would be changed, of course. But he had no idea how much he would notice the change. The immediate shock, so piercing he still hadn’t recovered from it, was that he simply didn’t remember her when she appeared.fn2 Or, more exactly, he recognized her demeanour, the way her hands fluttered nervously, her slim legs, a hint of irony noticeable above all in her chin; he registered all these details, all these descriptions. And yet he didn’t remember her. His memory seemed to have baulked at the evidence of these clues and refused to accept the complete image, the living proof of her face. Nor could he locate his adolescent feelings in time to recover them, to brace himself strategically. When it came down to it, what had she been to him? The mere fact of having her name echo in the present implied an allusion to ‘the life that ought to have been lived’. But that proved nothing. People always transform history into legend. To begin with, the past is a series of perfectly ordinary pleasures and anxieties; it is the subsequent moments of tedium, of emptiness, that confer upon it a certain retroactive prestige. Would it be possible for him to make out, in his Claudia stage,fn3 how much she in fact had contributed by her attitudes, and how much was the product of unconscious ruses he had employed to convince himself of an image that was, most probably, completely false?

  To a certain extent, his curiosity was a slender justification of the past. At least there was something. He would have been glad to discover other deposits, other areas of interest. But in later years everything became routine, altered only by the occasional day of hunger, or a woman who wafted nostalgia like a cheap perfume,fn4 by the grim sensation of being superfluous, or of not being truly alive. All at once he got a taste of cold tobacco, and so relit his cigarette.fn5

  He was in the café again, the mechanical part of his day. His work as a translator, his nights as a journalist, his reading, the stories he wrote, all demanded their share of invention, each one an opportunity to use his imagination. But sitting here at the corner table, free of fawning admirers, simply being Oscar Lamasfn6 without false modesty or notoriety, not talking to the Spaniard who had finally learned to bring him four lumps of sugar instead of three; and not making any clever comments to himself about the careerists, the garrulous, the tired women and the gossips who congregated in the café at dusk; all this created a circular mechanism, a dead weight for his monotonous awareness.

  He began to think more methodically. That other era of café-dwelling hadn’t been bad, with Claudia sitting beside him as they listened to the idiots around them. In the midst of all the boredom, greasy lapels, visceral metaphors, there had been flashes of lucidity and a rancorous thick-skinned posturing that refused to be astonished by anything and was, after all, something to be experienced. You became rather giddy, but unlike the ones that came later, those nights didn’t end up locked away as bad memories. They were perfectly balanced, because you could always imbibe the weary smell of clichés, droopy haircuts, half-stifled yawns. With Claudia beside him. Maybe that was the key. That they faced this tide of people together. And yet it was somehow incredible he had never even touched her breasts.fn7 He vaguely remembered having desired her. More than one night he had been kept awake trying to recall her little girl’s walk, the way she held her hands palms upward.

  He glanced absent-mindedly towards the door, and suddenly the memory of her struck him with full force now that he was confronted by the image of this other woman, cautious yet proud, literally stuffed into an otterskin coat, who was turning her head as though looking for him. She’s the only one, he thought. Then also thought that only a fool could think that.

  Eventually she spotted him, waved with an air of renewed familiarity and came over, coughing at the smoke.fn8

  ‘What kind of place is this, Oscar?’

&n
bsp; She held out her hand and he suddenly found he was indescribably dependent on this contact from the past. It was only a fleeting instant, but he was able to recognize her entirely. As if, rather than her fingers, which seemed to him more fragile than ever, he had at the last possible moment grasped hold of a lifetime slipping away for ever.

  ‘I thought that …’

  But he didn’t say it. That would have been to invent a fake nostalgia. This was the moment for creating nostalgia.

  ‘That was different. And I did enjoy it back then. But those days are gone. We’re serious, aren’t we? Every café in the world is the same, it’s just that we’re too old to realize it. Isn’t that what you feel?’

  Her voice was grave and condescending, as if she were performing for everyone there while concealing herself from him; as if she had studied these lines and taken a lot of trouble rehearsing them. At this thought, Oscar couldn’t help but smile, poking fun at himself, and she was immediately on her guard. Something about his smile seemed obscene, inexplicable.

  ‘No, I don’t feel that way. You have to remember I’m still on my own. That’s important. Nobody dragged me away from our situation.’fn9

  She pursed her lips, not angry or puzzled, but with a kind of involuntary tic he didn’t recognize. He didn’t know why he had begun their encounter like this, with no fear of disappointing her, now stumbling awkwardly into cheap philosophy.

  ‘It was Andres who dragged me away.’fn10

  That was at least partly true. That had been the beginning. Andres exactly the same as him, with those tame ox’s eyes of his. Andres who never clenched his fists. Andres whose guard was always down.

  ‘I’m sorry, I should have asked after him.’

  She stretched her hand across the table, as though waking up with an elegant gesture. He was captivated by her tiny, tensed muscles: her hand wasn’t as white as it had been eleven years earlier, but it was steadier. She smiled an easy smile, and her face relaxed a little.

  ‘Of course. He’s fine. He’s always fine.’

  It was impossible to tell if there was disdain or gratitude in the almost explosive vehemence of her reply. It certainly wasn’t love.

  ‘Why always? Is something wrong?’

  ‘No, nothing’s wrong.’

  She was on edge again. He thought of the boring ties Andres always wore, his tasteful grey suits, invariably a handkerchief in his top pocket. He thought of the perfect way Andres folded the newspaper, his economics textbooks with their blue covers and white label, his meticulous, academic approach to everything. She was right, he was always fine. Difficult to imagine him in his underwear or making love.

  ‘You’re on the defensive.’

  ‘From whom?’

  He had no idea. There’s a constantly renewed and vague defensiveness that is a clear symptom of indecision. A way of protecting oneself against an immense, but honest, mistake that might threaten whatever the future holds.

  ‘I don’t know who from. I don’t know if it’s from me, from Andres, or from yourself. But in the past you used to attack rather than retreat.’

  She moved her head to and fro, as though she were comparing past and present and couldn’t make up her mind.

  ‘Back then we were incredibly foolish. We let everything happen and only had enough courage to blather on and to listen to others blathering.’

  ‘So, do you talk a lot with Andres these days? Or have you become less foolish?’

  She enjoyed his mocking thrust. Her face relaxed again, as if to prove she could still resemble the other Claudia.

  ‘Now you’re being defensive. You’re showing that you’ve changed, too. Before, you’d have admitted you’d been waiting for me to talk about Andres.’

  ‘Now I’m the other man.’

  ‘And before?’

  ‘Maybe I was nothing. But the other man was him.’fn11

  II

  The second time was a Sunday afternoon in Palermo.fn1 Like two adolescents. She was hatless, clinging on to her youth, as if she refused to enter another compartment of life.

  ‘Well, tell me what you did,’ she said, ‘with all those years.’

  It wasn’t just something to say. She really wanted to know, to penetrate that so far unrevealed region. She wasn’t carrying a bag, and her arms hung down by her sides like a young girl running an errand. Everything about her inspired a wary kind of trust.

  ‘You already know.’

  ‘You mean because of the letters?’

  He laughed out loud, throwing his head back.fn2 How he had lied in those letters. Lied on Andres’s behalf, and so that Claudia would realize he was lying.

  ‘I thought you believed all my boasting.’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘And Andres?’

  ‘Andres believes anything that deepens his pessimism.’

  ‘And do my letters do that?’

  ‘Yes, they do.’

  That was it, basically. Of course, in his letters he had deliberately tried to deepen Andres’s pessimism. Andres always responded with tedious moans, complaining endlessly about life, his job, his salary and his vices; but of course he never said anything about Claudia, because at the end of each letter Claudia added her affectionate regards.

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘Well, then, what?’

  ‘Tell me what you did.’

  ‘Does it really interest you?’

  He began to question himself ruthlessly about what she wanted from him and what he wanted from her and from himself. That had been the past. A threefold camaraderie: Andres, Claudia and him. There was an implicit misunderstanding: that the friendship between him and Claudia was going to lead to something more. But it didn’t lead to anything. She married Andres, and he came to Buenos Aires. Quite a gesture. This was the present: after eleven years of marriage, Andres was sending her to Buenos Aires with the errand (the excuse) of giving him a book (a book by J. B., to make matters worse). She had fulfilled that mission so eagerly that carried on seeing him, as she was this afternoon.

  So many possibilities suddenly opened up that he started to feel disoriented. Obviously there was something ridiculous going on. Maybe he was the fool for having let her get away, for never having touched her. Or Andres was, for offering her to him now on a silver platter. And what if she were the fool, and that was why she had kept her distance from both of them.fn3

  ‘Look, what I’ve done is so banal I almost prefer to tell you what I didn’t do. That way we can both feel bitter.’

  She wasn’t the fool. He was sure of that now. She walked in such an unguarded way it was almost impossible not to embrace her. They were becoming part of a spontaneous double line of couples: the little housemaid with her fixed smile and the boy with the flattened nose, stiff in their rigid Sunday best; the two adolescents isolated in their last enchantment, their first selfishness; the sad, dirty old lecher convinced of the fervent devotion of the young woman with the pert, swaying buttocks trotting along beside him, displaying herself.

  That was the past: Claudia full of admiration and promises; him telling himself there was no need to hurry, believing that life would stay where it was, pausing for who knew what reason, just the two of them in the cloud of smoke and scabrous metaphors. This was the present: she, spurred on, seeking him out, by her burning hatred of Andres, turning to him like someone calling on the understudy when the star of the show has died or is no good or has quit, and he, in turn, inevitably rendered impotent yet again by the weight of the past and the promises it contained, but also imperceptibly hurt by the feeling that he was a leftover being fished out of the rubbish bin.fn4

  ‘I think we can be frank with one another. You know, I was never one of those men who stick pin-ups of naked women above my bed.’fn5

  ‘Men do that?’

  Her persistent, anachronistic naivety was not an affectation. Her new face, suggestive of the impenetrable experience she had acquired over those eleven years, lacked any hint of pornography.r />
  ‘The men who do that are those who don’t dare to have them there in body and soul.’

  ‘And you dared to?’

  ‘I dare to now.’

  ‘Body and soul?’

  That was the past: Andres acting as witness, paralysed by resignation and inertia; Claudia, caught in the trap of friendship, affection and compassion; and him for his part so silent because he didn’t think a lot, he didn’t like to think or speak, or worry. This was the present: Claudia with her bogus cynicism and desire to triumph; him watchful once more, seeing the past very clearly and the present in a very confused manner; Claudia and him now walking behind the dirty old man and the swaying buttocks, buying tickets for the Zoo; and then as now, Andres acting as witness.

  ‘In fact, every new leap forward in time catches me unawares,’ he was saying. ‘When you reappeared I hadn’t yet made sense of the images from our early adolescence. Just as I’d begun discovering who you were, you were already married to Andres. And I hadn’t yet accepted the miserable solitude that event condemned me to, when other women appeared. One after another, before I even knew what to do with the previous one.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now you’re here again. And I don’t know what to do with the other Claudia.’

  She said nothing. The old man and the young girl were throwing sweets to the monkeys. A little boy in a sailor suit was buying a yellow balloon, and the dominant male monkey was ostentatiously showing off his bright-red rump.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with the Claudia from back then.’

  For the first time, she looked sad, perhaps embarrassed by her earlier cynicism, which seemed uncomfortable, like a new suit. The small monkey picked up only the green, mint-flavoured sweets. The female scuttled away with another baby clinging to her like an unpleasant excrescence.