Clara glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. The unusual, habitual, elusive four-eyed roach. And he suddenly laughed, out of happiness.
“Poor you, so you’re studying hard! Why are you wasting your time here?”
“It’s the best thing to do. We couldn’t study anymore,” said Juan. “Light entertainment on the eve of battle. Clara’s going to pass, for sure. As for me, I don’t know. Sometimes they ask the damndest things …”
“How right you are,” said Stella. “It’s like the quiz shows. I bite my nails and get so nervous …
(Stella:
“Now, miss, this question’s worth fifty pesos.
Will you take a chance?”
“Well …”
“Very well, miss. You’re a brave young woman. Let’s see now. Okay. Who discovered the principle of flotation in bodies?”)
“You’ve got to resort to trickery,” said Andrés. “A stupid question deserves an absolutely absurd answer. Then the three guys asking the questions are left wondering if you’re teasing them or if you actually have a brain. Time runs out, they get bored, and they pass you.”
“It looks easy to you,” said Juan, “but a final exam is no joke. Especially for me, because I’m paying the price for my rather disorganized autodidactic methods. You’d have to be an idiot to think you learn something in the sacred halls of higher Argentine learning.”
“Clara must know a lot,” said Stella. “I bet she studied like mad.”
“I knew the entire curriculum,” said Clara with a sigh. “But it’s like a well: I look down to the bottom and see only myself, with a washed face.”
“She’s scared out of her wits,” Juan explained. “But she’s going to pass. So where are you going now?”
“To watch the night pass and have a drink with Stella.” “And with us.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll talk about black masks,” said Clara.
“And the paintings of Antonio Berni,” said Stella, who admired Antonio Berni.
Andrés and Juan brought up the rear. The women walked arm in arm, mixing in with the people coming out of the other lecture halls. They heard the voice of Lorenzo Wahrens, who was hurriedly finishing up a chapter. While many listeners clogged the door, walking out on tiptoe with a slightly mortified air.
“Poor author!” said Andrés. “Look at them running for it before Wahrens finishes.”
“What do you expect, man? He’s reading La Nouvelle Héloise,” said Juan.
“Good point, but can you explain this anxiety people have about leaving places? It’s the same at the movies; half an hour on line waiting to get in and then there’s no time to lose at the end … Superficial forms of anxiety, I suppose. I also suppose it’s the same everywhere. I say that because around here we’ve got myriad pseudo sociologists who think they recognize specifically Argentine forms of behavior when they are only specific forms of behavior. All that crap people have been saying about our solitude, our escapism …”
“The truth is people here are always anxious,” said Juan. “Unfortunately, the things that cause their anxiety are usually things like the teakettle—‘Go see if it’s boiling, hurry up, I’m sure it’s boiling, my God, you can’t take your eye off it for a minute! …’”
“Wait: if they’re boiling water to make maté, then there’s good reason,” said Andrés.
“Or the fear of missing the train, even if there’s another one in ten minutes. Look, once I subscribed to a series of string-quartet recitals. The woman who sat next to me left every concert before the last movement! Since we were already friends, she explained to me after the third time that she’d have to wait twenty minutes at Constitución Station if she missed the train to Lomas de Zamora. Imagine, missing the end of Ravel’s Assez vifet rhythmé to save twenty minutes.”
“Worse things have been exchanged for a bowl of pottage,” said Andrés. “One way or another, people always repeat the same basic crimes. One day you’re Ixion, and the next you’re an office-model Macbeth. And to think, we have the nerve after all that to ask for a good-conduct award.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m always afraid when I go into a police station,” said Juan. “Nobody’s record is spotless.”
“Who knows if the things we take to be disasters or sicknesses are simply penalties,” said Andrés. “I imagine that old man Freud would say pretty much the same thing. Take baldness, for example. Doesn’t it seem to you it might just be that bald men have fallen for a Delilah of the unconscious? Or arthritics turned to look at something they shouldn’t have? Once I dreamt I was sentenced to capital punishment. By which, of course, I don’t mean death: to the contrary. The punishment was capital because it consisted in living on the other side of the dream, constantly remembering that I’d forgotten it. The punishment was just that, having forgotten it.”
“Abel talked like that sometimes,” said Juan. “His own name put him in the club of ‘juicy victims’. Maybe that’s why he’s always turning over papers, plays the bad guy with mirrors.”
Andrés said nothing. They began walking down Cangallo, feeling the heat on their faces.
“Be careful with the package,” said Juan, moving ahead. “Even better, give it to me, Clarita, darling. When you walk down the street you turn into a calamity.”
He dropped back next to Andrés. Stella suggested they walk through the market and eat something in a grill. So they walked up to take the 86 streetcar at Sarmiento Avenue. Clara wanted to call home, so they waited for her on the comer. Andres was casting a calculating eye over Juan.
“You’re quite a guy. Shouldn’t you study a little?”
“I’d rather have some white wine and a chat with you. You know we see very little of each other, almost as if we were intimate friends.”
“God save us from that, and may He save you from more bad paradoxes. Don’t you feel there’s something in the air?”
“Fog, dearest,” said Stella. “Right around now the fog rolls in.”
“Baloney, sweetheart. Right around now it’s only whores and dancers that do that. But you’re right, fog is what it is.”
“It’s humid downtown, too,” said Juan uselessly.
“Your clothes stick to your skin,” said Stella. “This morning when I woke up I thought the sheets were wet.”
When you wake up,
the alarm clock starts to bleed.
When you wake up,
it’s almost time to sup.
Love, moist sheets,
when you wake up,” said Andrés. “I offer these bolero lyrics to you as a gift, to console that immoral little heart of yours.”
Stella pinched his ear and shook him to her heart’s content.
“When I wake up,” said Juan, “the first thing I think of as an emergency measure is to go back to sleep.”
“What we would call turning your back on reality,” said Andrés. “Now listen to this, this is important. You talk about going back to sleep, and you try to do it. But you’re mistaken if you think that’s how you’re going to sink back into yourself, that you’re going to take cover behind something that will protect you from your day. Sleeping is nothing more than getting lost. When you try to go back to sleep, you’re trying to find an escape again.”
“I know, I know, it’s a light little death devoid of consequences,” said Juan. “But, that’s the great prestige, the perfection, of it. Vacation from your self—not seeing, and not seeing yourself. Perfect.”
“Maybe. Anyway, we cling so much like barnacles to ourselves—even when we’re half-asleep, it’s hard to shake off. For instance, sometimes I get up at four in the morning to pee— inevitable consequence of having stayed up late drinking maté. When I get back into bed, I can tell that my body, on its own” (“I feel a warm spot!” shouted Stella) “exactly, sweetheart—it seeks out the warm spot, its copy, its living imprint. The feet in the toasty little corner, the man in his protected niche … Nothing to be done about it, old man, not in vain do we believe that A is A
.”
“The only part that looks for a cool spot is the head,” said Juan, “which proves it’s the thinking part of the person. Here comes Clara, and I think that’s the 86 pulling in.”
The streetcar was hanging on to itself, like a woman stumbling along weighed down with packages. Juan ended up in a corner, a window seat (thanks to one of those odd roulettewheel swirls
that occur in all conflicts among wills
that are almost always resolved by chance
that leave you standing—thought Clara—while that enormous loafer happily sits down).
Juan liked the fog on the windows, the lights like swift tigers (but how pretty it is, how pretty) running across the dripping windows. As always, whenever he sat down on a trolley, he was taken over by a renunciation, a satisfactory abandonment. He deferred to the trolley—allowing a fragment of the city to pass slowly by him, with curves, stops, and sudden accelerations. The fog helped him to feel passive, slip deeper and deeper into a small, fifteen-minute nirvana—ten blocks in length because the good citizens of Buenos Aires never walk if they can avoid it. Buddha’s bo tree was named 86. Cabalistically—86: two even numbers, one number divisible by two, 43. And in his pocket, he had precisely that: a pack of 43’s. But the sign said NO SMOKING NO SPITTING. Beneath the bo tree.
A man can be happy with so little, he thought. Without even a kiss. So little. The cup of tea prepared with its minimal liturgy, an insect asleep on a book, an old perfume. Yes, almost the nothingness … As long as you accept abandoning your-self to the shade of the bo tree, settling for being happy a few blocks on a bit of streetcar.
A numerous and hyperactive family got off at the second stop. Stella made the moves necessary to block access to a seat and let Clara sit next to the window. The two women looked at each other with the smiling joy of all those who manage to get seats on a crowded trolley (a theme for moralists). They tried to see something of the street, but the fog didn’t allow them much.
“Wow, I thought those old ladies would never get off,” said Stella. “I’m too tired to stand, even if it’s only for ten blocks. And to think someone offered Andrés a Morris five years ago for four grand and I told him to wait. I told him that cheaper cars would come later from the United States.”
“Big mistake, dearie. That’s what you get for having ideas in this country.”
“Everyone said it was going to happen.”
“That’s a better reason to doubt it. But Andrés would have gotten fed up with the Morris. Or the two of you would have been squashed by a tractor-trailer. I can just see him letting go of the steering wheel to make a little picture in the moisture on the windshield.”
“Andrés’ mother says the same thing. But you’ve got to try things.”
Clara looked at her out of the corner of her eye. Stella was like that—her thoughts were like the trolley: fixed route. Andrés was Auguste Dupin: all of Stella’s ideas known beforehand. What economy, thought Clara, amused. She did like Stella: she was easy to handle. Women of her kind think they can take the initiative (that’s the worst thing about them); but Stella hung back, like the peasant girl on the maté box. At most she kept up. In any case, Andrés, what a sad situation. Having to put up with an airhead like that, poor guy. At the same time, the fact Andrés had made such a choice made her indignant—even if Stella always ended up moving her to compassion.
“How dark downtown is,” said Stella. “I don’t like it this dark. Hey, look at that shop window with the jodhpurs, how strange it should be lit up like that.”
“Pretty wools,” said Clara, interested. “What’s that bell ringing?”
“Some car coming out of an underground parking lot.”
“No, it must be that the sweepers are getting on.”
Stella refused to believe it and insisted on opening the window. A hot breeze swept over them, so wet with fog that it soaked them. Standing in the aisle, almost next to Juan, Andrés whistled dryly at them to close the window.
“He’s right, because then I catch cold, and he gets furious,” said Stella. “Yes, I think it is the street cleaners. But the wools were nice, weren’t they? You really like to knit Clara, isn’t that so?”
“Only when I’m completely swamped in readings or before an examination.”
“It’s very soothing. Like bitter maté, which I find disgusting, by the way. Andrés says it’s so soothing. You should see him drinking maté at night.”
“Does he write at night?”
“Yes, he writes at night. He puts on his old jacket, asks me to keep quiet, and brews his maté.”
One of the sweepers appeared at the forward door—Clara was surprised to see the doors spread apart, apparently without anyone touching them. When the driver opened them to say something to the conductor it was always the same; surprise— like a disappointment—not just because it was the same man with his mole-like face, his big feet. A bit like the idea of a theater curtain, she thought, amused. The curtain parts and bang, nothing. You were hoping for Edwige Feuillère and what you get is a municipal inspector—peering wearily at the people squashed together in the aisle. When the door closed, he skillfully
slipped in his body and the broom first, leaving the door open
at his back:
and then with a rapid flutter of his hands behind him
like a magician (because now the broom and a
dust bin with a handle were
leaning against one of the door panels),
he closed the door with a dry, unpleasant sound, a snap
like the snapping of a skinny dog.
Ah, how bored they must get, thought Andrés, seeing the street sweeper’s pale face. He knew that boredom (as he conceived it) is the punishment for perfectionism; but all the same it grieved him to project onto the sweeper the possibility of ennui. He saw the other sweeper (because he was a tall man), where he was beginning to work from that side. He grabbed a handle when the trolley took the curve at 25 de Mayo and made its usual fishtail.
Juan had taken out a book and was reading. Great, I write so someone can read me on the trolley. He was just about to slap the book away from him, reach his hand along the back of a lady with packages and snatch it away, before Juan knew what was happening. Oh well, oh well, he thought, less irritated. Come to think of it; at this stage of local sluttification, a streetcar is the perfect reading room. But we should nip that problem in the bud and write with that in mind—thinking about the circumstances in which we’ll be read. Chapters for the café, for the trolley; and chapters for the weekend, when we put on our cologne and opt for a good armchair, a good pipe, and culture. It’s just fine that way. He saw Stella and Clara get up to allow the sweeper to clean the seat. The tall sweeper took charge of their seat, and the bored sweeper was passing his broom between Andrés’ shoes. He raised one after another, and looked in turn at the boy next to him doing the same; the lady wearing sunglasses fearfully kept an eye on the movements of the broom handle and pushed herself harder and harder against a seat until she’d shoved her buttocks in the face of a man with a retired air to him; he lifted his copy of La Razón Quinta but wasn’t brave enough to turn it completely into a screen between his face and the sunglass-wearing lady’s ass.
“But can’t you see I told you twice to get up,” protested the sweeper, and Juan, a bit flustered, closed the book and abandoned his seat muttering something that Andrés couldn’t understand. The lady with the packages sighed at the height of Andrés’ right nipple, and behind stood Juan, so taken by surprise in his reading, a finger stuck in the pages of his book, and foaming with rage.
“See, the poor author doesn’t take these diversions into account,” Andrés informed him. “And consider the word ‘diversion’ in its other meaning. Look, the stylist pauses, modulates, orders, disposes, he accommodates the phrase, and then there you are reading him—and between two halves of a proposition you find yourself confronted by, of all things, a sweeper.”
“The son of a bi
tch,” said Juan, not really showing much respect for the lady with the packages.
Andrés winked at the girls, who were recovering their seat. In the center of the aisle, the confusion was deplorable. The two sweepers were moving toward the center from opposite ends of the trolley, and the passengers, wanting to make room for them, were packed closer and closer. The worst moment was when …
(by now Juan was seated again, but what for
—thought an ironical Andrés—
when they’d be getting off in three blocks)
when one of the sweepers bent over—after opening the dust bin with his foot, which he held in his left hand—picking up the lint, tickets, newspapers, buttons, threads, dust accumulated in a nucleus of spit, hairs, peanut shells, matchboxes, receipts for certified mail;
and when he did (he was bending over even if he didn’t want to; the dust bin had a long handle, but with all the people and the terrible lighting at floor-level, there was a confused darkness), trying to see better,
the passengers
were pushed to one side by the bill of the sweeper’s cap—a cap has a great deal of power when traveling inside on a head attentive to its obligations. On the other,
the other sweeper’s ass moved along on a horizontal axis that corresponded exactly to his being bent over. And given that the two sweepers by now were about to meet at the center of the aisle—Luckily, thought Andrés, they passed me by—and were bent over the whole time, to get their dust bins to open, the space left to the passengers got smaller and smaller. The obvious result was that the passengers tried to avoid bumping against one another (and when two buttons touched, they made a dry noise) and whispered in low voices and made jokes to dissimulate the tension. As long, thought Juan, sticking his book in his pocket, as they haven’t mistreated my cauliflower. He didn’t want to look back where Clara was, fearful she’d understand his nervousness. From now on, I’m going to carry the package.
“Just look at 25 de Mayo,” Andrés said with an it-goeswithout-saying wink. “Remember?”
“Of course,” said Juan. “They haven’t left a single one. Thanks to the milk bars. Until someone discovers milk is obscene and eliminates the milk bars too.”
Final Exam Page 3
