“Milk is obscene,” said Andrés. “But not as obscene as phallic vanilla beans. Girls, we’ll be getting off on the corner.”
“We’re getting off,” said Clara. It was difficult for her to get out because Stella was … (She says “Excuse me” with the same voice an apprentice matador would use in a bullring. You’ve got to dominate people in streetcars with your voice if you don’t have elbows.) Over the head of one of the sweepers, she passed the package to Juan, and ended up exiting the streetcar with Stella by the rear door. By the time Juan reached the bottom step in the front, the trolley had started moving again, so he touched ground halfway through the streetcar’s turn into Corrientes. Everything was brightly lit. There, the extremely proper city for families happily began two blocks from the poor, eradicated red-light district: the red cap on the mailbox of the little café, the Jousten; and the dumb trolley that takes you to the Amusement Park and offers lots of fights for lots of pesos.
The chronicler was listening to “London Again” and remembering so many, so many pleasant and beloved things, like a perfumed lotion, like Eric Coates’ melodies. The Wurlitzer, an eschatological object, threatened him with its sambas and its machichas—which is why the chronicler prefered to sit next to the speaker even if his ears exploded and feed the Wurlitzer more and more coins so only “London Again” played and afterwards a little tango:
Remember, honey pie, you were
the cutest dolly in Chiclana
with the counterpoint, surreptitious entries of accordions, the dry interventions of the piano, the precise cuts; and the chronicler waved a finger to answer the distant greeting of Andrés Fava, who was coming in with his girlfriend and another couple (but, of course, it was Juan and Clara) while he meditated the style of Juan D’Arienzo, vindication of the pianola, the canary, the wind-up nightingale,
And the emperor was going to die. (It was the nightingale’s fault, yes sir, it was.)
“Give me change for a peso in twenty centavo coins,” said the chronicler. If that guy with dirty eyes got anywhere near the Wurlitzer, he’d play chamamés for sure. (There were three on the Wurlitzer’s list, and an ocean of chacareras and gatos.) I detest folk songs, he declared to himself. I only like other people’s folk songs—that is, folklore that’s free and gratuitous, not what my blood imposes on me. The impositions of the blood are vomitatious in general. Now they’ll come over to chat as soon as they’ve had their drink. If only it was Andrés—that woman is horrible. Now what should I play? The list on the machine was long and in double columns. He chose a record by the Metronome All Star Band: “One O’Clock Jump.” Then Juan and Clara came over.
Eating french fries at the counter, Andrés and Stella looked over to where the chronicler was bestowing his greeting and bringing over chairs. Clara was amusing herself studying the inner workings of the Wurlitzer.
The Moloch of the cafés, thought Andrés. A sacrifice of coins to the potbellied, strident little god. Baal, Melkarth—obscene bug, a musical fish. And the chronicler, a lamentable version of a magistrate from antiquity, a Carthaginian suffete perhaps. He was very fond of the chronicler—a good buddy for boxing nights, late-night cafés, dialogues on love, essays, and miscellanies;
the chronicler, a tranquil guy with his little apartment on Alsina Street (the address was in the 400’s) and his Buenos Aires habits: a good example of “live and let live,” and “I don’t give a damn,” of …
Poor country, you’re on the right track
for the next election (a little tango they whistled together, when they had hung around together more—before Stella, before the fall into the present. Watch out, thought Andrés, don’t rely so heavily on glib lines. We were always already fallen into the present, man.)
“Come on, honey, let’s go chat with the chronicler.”
“You go. These french fries are so good I’m going to finish them,” said Stella.
When he reached the table, the three of them were already seated; and the Wurlitzer was silent but dangerous.
“Look at this guy,” said the chronicler squeezing his hand as if he had it in a monkey wrench. “Come on now, are you ashamed to say hello? Lost man, may your vest be covered with pockets, and in each one may you have a wet cigarette, a counterfeit bank note, and a leaky ballpoint pen—
the horror of our time.”
“The same to you,” said Andrés. They looked each other over, happy. Clara and Juan were having fun just watching them.
“And when are you all having dinner?” asked the chronicler.
“Right now. But we stopped off to moisten our appetites. It’s a special night, see, tomorrow great things are happening.”
“Great things never happen,” said the chronicler, who knew how to be blasé when the occasion called for it.
“Yes they do,” said Andrés. “Except they never happen to us. Tomorrow Clara and Juan are taking their final exams. At 9:00 P.M.”
“I don’t see it as such a great thing,” said Clara.
“Of course, because it’s happening to you,” said Andrés. “But for me and the chronicler it’s a real event. It isn’t everyone who goes around with friends suffering preexam anxiety, people about to take their final examination. You have to hype the event so it becomes great in historical terms! How about this headline: CATASTROPHE IN EGYPT: TWENTY WOMEN BURNED ALIVE. People read it and say it’s really a horrible catastrophe. Meanwhile, ten thousand women have died in other places, and the world couldn’t care less. Ask the chronicler, he knows about these things.”
But Juan was showing a tiny piece of the cauliflower to the chronicler, using two fingers to pull back some of the wrapping. Clara took the package away from him and put it on top of the Wurlitzer, but the bartender waved furiously, and Clara retrieved it and put it on her lap. The things I do for this idiot. For me he wouldn’t even carry an aspirin in his pocket, not even if I asked him. She pet the package—the great white face covered with eyes beneath the paper. Andrés and the chronicler talked and talked, happy to have run into each other.
“Today I went out at eight,” said the chronicler. “I went out at eight and came to listen to ‘London Again.’ It’s incredible how much I like it. Man, why don’t we go have dinner?”
“But it’s just a lot of crap,” said Andrés.
“Okay, okay, I’m not saying it isn’t. You know we all have a sentimental spot somewhere inside us. My sentimental spot knows English, that’s all. So I played ‘London Again,’ and was thinking of playing it again when you all came in. But let’s get something to eat.”
“Stella wanted a grill.”
“We all want a grill. And to talk a lot.”
“Yeah, about Abel,” said Stella incongruently.
“You’re perfect,” said Juan, not at all content. “We’ll give you a double portion of sweetbreads. I think it’s a great idea that the chronicler come with us! His presence will break up our even number, which is always stupid, and also add his personal qualities.”
“And perhaps he’ll pick up the check,” said Andrés, elbowing the chronicler, who was looking at him tenderly. “The chronicler has recently returned from Europe and bears wisdom in his words. Prepare to drink it in with each glass of white wine. Besides, the chronicler reads my essays or did read them in the old days.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” said the chronicler, “I’d still be reading them, volontièri, but you’re one of those guys who disappears for six months, and no one sees hide nor hair of you. Stella, do you keep him locked up?”
“If only I could,” said Stella. “The truth is he writes a lot and spends his time drinking maté. I keep telling him so much studying is going to hurt him someday .”
“Just look,” said Andrés. “They’re painting me as the perfect anchorite, maté included.”
“So why is it no one can find out what you’re writing?” asked Juan. “In this country people at least write for their friends—our publishers are too worried about leaves-in-the-storm
themes and detective novels.”
“Look, you gather up your material, then you’ve got to go over it, then you’ve got to make a clean copy … And besides, why do people have to read so much?” said Andrés, furious. “You’re all talking about what a person does as if it were an absolute necessity. Yes, I keep a day book. So what? It’s really more a night book. Who cares? Let’s be reasonable; with all there is to read out there …”
“You know very well that people read their friends for other reasons,” said Clara.
“Okay, you win, but when a crowd starts to gather, as if it were a car accident,
then things start to smell like a funeral, the kind with speeches and twenty-one gun salutes.”
“But we love cliques in Buenos Aires,” said Clara. “In these parts, we know our obligations. You write something, and five or six relatives or friends read it. The next week, the order changes: Juan writes a story, you and I read it … It works very well, Andrés, don’t tell me it doesn’t. Sometimes I laugh thinking there must be hundreds of cliques in the House that know nothing of one another. Tons of people writing for three, eight, twenty readers.”
“Your description just turned my stomach,” said Andrés.
“Never before dinner, man,” said an alarmed chronicler.
“Let’s get going because I’m dying of hunger.”
“The fog is thicker,” said Clara, sniffing the street.
“It’s not fog, it’s smoke,” said Stella.
The chronicler made a dubious gesture.
“So what is it?”
“No one knows,” he said. “Tonight people were talking about it at the city desk. That’s just the point: no one knows. They were making analyses.”
Since Juan had gone ahead, talking with Stella and the chronicler, Andrés took Clara by the arm and they fell behind. Clara let herself be led, half closing her eyes.
“Are you afraid of the exam?” he asked.
“No, I’m actually rather curious. Usually in life, you know how things are going to happen. You can imagine even in great detail things like what the dentist is going to do to you, what you’re going to eat at your aunt’s house … But this is different: it’s a kind of abyss, the perfect enigma.”
“You’re right, it’s going to be a bad half hour. Maybe I’ll go with you tomorrow. I don’t know if you like seeing people in situations like that. Sometimes it’s worse, like in wakes.”
“No, it’s fine. I think it would be a good idea. That way, no matter how it turns out for us, we’ll all end up drinking somewhere. Don’t you feel hot and something like vertigo?” said Clara confusedly, clutching Andrés’ arm. “How weird this street is, this fog.”
“Sticky.”
“I can’t bear this heat tonight. Juan laughs at me when I tell him that all I have to do is think of coolness and I feel it. It’s true, I always go around surrounded by a climate that’s just for me, but tonight it’s failing me. Probably it’s nerves,” she added with humility.
“And Juan’s calm?”
“He says he is, but just look at him, waving his arms around. And he’s been writing like a madman these past nights. Halfway through a note card, he starts writing poetry. He’s angry at everything, Buenos Aires pains him, I pain him, he doesn’t eat, he yawns.”
“Nice picture you paint.”
“You know that everything affects him in a particular way,” said Clara. “It’s not easy to find the right soup for Juan. You give him tapioca, and it turns out he’s in the mood for pastina. He’s not even in the mood for me sometimes.”
“As long as you get along at night … said Andrés, stating things in shocking terms.
“Oh, that’s the easiest part of all. With Juan, the problems start when we wake up. Ask him to read you the poems he’s written over these past weeks, you’ll see. I have to insist we go out—I make him go out for a walk, take me around. I think he needs it. Last night, half-asleep, he said to me: ‘The house is falling down.’ Then he was quiet, but I know he was awake. But why am I telling you these things? …”
“No good reason, which is how things ought to be told. Where are these people taking us? Oh, the restaurant opposite the stadium. Poems, poems, everything ends up with poems.”
“Everything begins with poems,” said Clara intelligently.
“I didn’t mean what I said before. But look: tonight and every night, all we ever do is talk about what we write and what we read.”
“But that’s okay.”
“You think so? Do you really think we have a right?”
“What do you mean? I don’t follow you.”
“The explanation’s going to be more literary than the question,” said Andrés sadly. “Especially because I don’t really know what the question is. Part of it has to do with an intellectual’s rage against his colleagues and himself. His horrible suspicion of parasites and superfluity.”
“Don’t talk like some resentful gaucho,” Clara joked.
“Let me make myself clear. I’m not denying your right or your reason to be intellectual. Juan’s poetry is fine, my day book and my essays are fine too. But look, Clara, think about it; when it comes down to it, he and I and everyone else show off too much. I write. It makes you want to answer with the shortest and most insolent retort in the English language: So what?”
“But you can’t just say that,” said Clara. “What matters is knowing that people do it. The right to assert comes afterward. I don’t know, a Valéry could say I write. Would it have bothered you to hear him say it?”
“No,” said Andrés meekly. “I suppose that’s the problem. But all this talk, this passing around of papers, these café tables where books and books and books and openings and galleries … Look there’s a lot of sleight of hand here, betrayal.”
“All you’ve got to do is say ‘betrayal of reality, life, action,’ and wear the words on a button on your lapel—then you’re ready to launch any career.”
“Of course, words again. But I was trying to say something else. It’s the nature of our intellectualism that concerns me. There’s something damp about it, like the air down at the docks.”
“But you write your day book,” said Clara, defending Juan.
“And the day book smells of fog. Look, what we’re doing is swallowing this dirty air and fixing it on paper. My day book is flypaper, a disgusting honey filled with dying little animals.”
“Well, at least you know it,” said Clara, consoling him; she had wanted to be a nurse when she was a girl.
Andrés shrugged his shoulders, squeezed her arm, felt vaguely happy. That night he was easy to console.
“I don’t agree,” said the chronicler. “Yes, Stella, I’m going to order an antipasto, and I suggest you do likewise. They serve an entomological antipasto here—fascinating mélange of things.”
“The Yellow Nineties,” said Juan in English. “Ham for me. So in that case you do agree.”
“No. I think there are few of us here and that we are of little use. Intelligence chooses its zones, and Argentina is not among them.”
“A simple case of being blinded by your profession,” said Juan. “Since you’re what my father-in-law calls a man of letters, you forget about the numbers men. Here, intelligence chooses the scientific. We all sit around denying the creative potential of Argentines without seeing that our way of seeing is just one of many, and that other people may be working and doing their own things. A good biologist would have to laugh listening to us sniveling. We don’t even shout; we screech, like rats. I’ll have half a grapefruit.”
“My dear boy,” said the chronicler, “neither you nor I is in the opposite camp! We don’t know enough biology to be able to present an informed opinion about whether things in that field are going well anyway—though what I manage to see doesn’t look out of this world. But, giving you credit for the question you raised, I insist that this is a country of plain and simple observers—nosey bodies who entrust what they see and hear to their pre
carious memories. Fifty-thousand guys watching Labruna make a goal: Argentina! Incidentally, that gives you the possible ratio between those who are useless and those who create. You’re going to tell me we’ve got great poets in these parts, and that’s true. I’ve said before that writing poetry isn’t some great human merit but a fatality people suffer. Around here we’ve got a good stock of men infected with poetry; but I invite you to give me a list of the active, by which I mean, intelligent creators.”
“You paint a pretty sad picture,” said Juan. “But why all this sudden enthusiasm for intelligence? What does that have to do with it? The Argentines, I mean the good citizens of Buenos Aires—the people I know, with whom I live and interact—are always intelligent. Creation is born from morality, chronicler, not intelligence.”
“Mmm,” said Clara. “So what we are is softies.”
“That’s it, softies—no rigor. A common trait of people from Buenos Aires is that they have brilliant ideas, but the ideas are disconnected—I mean, with no context, no real point to them. On the other hand, in a well-ordered mind, one idea tends to agglutinate another, completing the picture. Excuse this vocabulary, but it’s really clearer than using other metaphors. What I mean is that we lack a spirit of system (even if that system is freedom or for freedom)—and that is a moral defect worse than any other kind. We waste tons of subjects, shooting them off in isolated skyrockets that any old professor from Lyon or Birmingham would organize coherently in a few weeks, simply by taking notes on himself and everyone else.”
“So, we are basically on the same page,” said the chronicler. “When I said we lack intelligence, I really meant the creative results of intelligence, rather than its gratuitous manifestation. Now, examining things at closer range, we should look at the causes of this … this status. Man, what expressions I use.”
“If they could only be published in the paper, right?” said Stella, completely happy thinking about the flan with whipped cream she was going to have for dessert.
Final Exam Page 4
