Final Exam

by Julio Cortázar

“All right, we’ve done what we need to do here. You think the water truck will be enough?”

  “Yeah,” said the driver. “Let’em give it the once over lightly and that’s it. Anyway, they’re going to start over again tomorrow anyway.”

  From the orifice—black inside and tremulous on pink edges that vibrated, then contracted, acquiring for a second the perfect immobility of the circumference and then irrupted into the oval, the ellipse, the crude triangle of curved angles—flowed a material of a lighter rose color, agitated with its blind head and receding with the promptness of a whip, only to reappear: a decapitated salamander, crude, a formless phallus;

  and Abelito licked the stamp twice, the first time to soften the glue, the second to feel;

  because all that did not change—

  Governments change,

  republics fade—

  but that foundation

  that affirmative

  compound adhesive;

  the taste of the national glue, the sweet nausea caused by the layer that remains and sticks, the glue behind the face of Bernardino Rivadavia, one of the triumvirs—a man of the land, a founding father, and finally a refugee on the postage stamp

  that remains as a homeland of heroes.

  A stamp is an important thing,

  it’s what remains as a homeland of heroes—

  swept away and blown out,

  already in history;

  but what does “already in history” mean?—

  When

  history is a moment, a miserable word;

  a miserable word that echoes, high-sounding and strong-souled?

  (Despite all that, Abel stuck the stamp on the envelope according to the instructions handed down by Mail and Telecommunications. Perhaps because of that bit of rebellion present in every citizen of Buenos Aires, he put it a bit closer to the middle of the envelope than was proper as if to incommode the cancellation machine, to force it to

  feel around, repeat its grand, iron foot-fall on the poor little blue flattened letter. So much flatness in that envelope:

  the flat writing, the flat envelope

  the stamp—

  (that remains as a homeland of heroes) also flat.

  On the five-peso stamp, San Martín; on the ten-peso stamp, Rivadavia; and on the silence of the night, the enormous wing of the homeland.

  (But the heroes are never there, they are never those ones, they don’t fit, there are decrees that steal from them that glory beginning beyond the stamp: To be born so some guy in the market can lick your nape before sunup. To be born so a cancellation machine smashes your face two million times a day.)

  (Compare Mail Service statistics: the men on the stamps that cost more than one peso:

  well-off,

  less spittle required,

  cancellations by hand, tolerable, and that is one of the ways of being-in-history.)

  The worst thing, availability: Make yourself, construct yourself, commemorate yourself, baptize yourself, exhume yourself, repatriate yourself, transport yourself, mausoleumize yourself, stamp yourself, argue yourself.

  That

  that is what remains as a homeland for heroes: a handsome man unknown to others, his suave farewell,

  and Bam Bam Bam

  Bam Bam Bam

  and the unfading glory and the labarum—the pure devotion of millions of tongues licking your neck and millions of cancellations breaking your face.

  Mailbox, Abel, inside! Tomorrow:

  in the power of the recipient;

  and the envelope: into the garbage with his face, his unfading glory; San Martin. In with the beans and pieces of semolina pudding!

  1 A terrible number of years ago, I set out to hunt wild fowl in the Western swamps—and since there were no railroads in the land in which I was to travel, I hired a carriage …

  Suddenly he remembered. He was probably three or four years old and had to sleep in a bare room in an immense bed. At his feet grew a large window. It was summertime, and the window was open. He remembered even the smallest details. Waking up and seeing a livid sky seemingly stuck to the frame—a rubbery, filthy sky instead of the glass—the dawn. And then a rooster crowed, splitting the silence, a horrible tearing of the air. And it was terror—the abominable machine. Fear. Someone came, consoled him, held him in their arms, …

  “My God.”

  The taxi went slowly down Leandro Alem. The Post Office looked like a stage set, an illustration for Malet’s history. Wounded in an act of sedition, Lycurgus …

  “Please, driver, go as slowly as you can,” asked Clara. “We want to see the sun rise.”

  “Sure, miss. It’s going to be a beautiful day.”

  “Who knows,” said Clara. “The air is so odd. We should have been able to see clearly by now, it’s 6:30.”

  She yawned, her head lolling against the cold leather of the backrest. Juan’s eyes were closed. “A rooster,” he murmured. “What a son of a bitch.”

  “What’s all that about?”

  “Nothing, a memory. In the beginning was the crowing of the rooster.

  O vive lui, chaque fois

  que chante le coq gaulois.”

  “Did you notice the chronicler was hinting that you should make him a gift of the cauliflower?”

  “That’s not a joking matter.”

  “But why would he want it?” asked Clara. “He wouldn’t eat it.”

  “True. It’s mine, anyway, and that’s that.”

  Clara caressed his hair, and her head took refuge on his shoulder. “I think I’m a bit tired now,” she said.

  “Me, too. What a night.”

  “Bah,” said Clara, opening her eyes.

  “Don’t move,” asked Juan. “I like to feel the scent of your hair. Listen to that train howl. Like my rooster.”

  “Ah, your rooster. That train really is blowing. There must be a cow on the tracks,” Clara observed brilliantly. “Cows do wander onto tracks you know—it’s a tradition.”

  “There are no loose cows in the port.”

  “It might have escaped. But the train won’t run it over. First, because the port trains are very slow. Second, the train is howling because of the fog and not because of some cow.”

  “Fog, schmog. The chronicler … Driver, go up Corrientes. But slowly, very slowly.”

  “Did you notice,” said Clara, “that the chronicler saw those two cabs at the same time? What eyes!”

  “He was the most wide-awake of all of us,” said Juan. “I don’t know how we could have walked like that all night. All that time in Plaza de Mayo … Stupendous—then the Chinese guy.”

  “The Chinese guy, and then Abelito, and then that woman who started in with Andrés.”

  “Right, the woman and Abelito.”

  He ran his fingers over her mouth, tickling her nose. Clara bit him, moistening his fingers with her tongue. “You taste like raw cauliflower,” she said. “Look at those cops over there.”

  At the intersection of Corrientes and Maipú, there were two patrolmen and some passersby staring at the pavement as if they were reading an inscription. The cabby stopped the car, and they saw that the pavement had collapsed—an area between six and nine feet long, just before the turn-off to Modart. Not a big deal, but enough to break a car’s axle.

  “It’s the city’s fault,” said the driver, speeding up a little. “In my neighborhood, a light post fell over. It suddenly sank about a foot and a half, and then it tipped over. Bad foundations, I tell you! The city doesn’t check up on those things.”

  “I don’t see how a truck could make the asphalt sink that way,” said Clara, half-asleep. “The chronicler would explain it so well, so well.”

  “She is good,” chanted Juan, letting sleep overcome him. “She is very good …”

  And his face was white

  under his blue hat.

  “She comes from Formosa, from Covunco …”

  “Enough,” begged Clara. “Please. When you think about it, all
that stuff was horrible.”

  “Yes, like my rooster.”

  Clara cuddled against him. “Tell him to speed up. I’m so, so tired.”

  “I,” said the chronicler, “have been thinking.”

  “It’s possible,” said Stella, who cultivated humor from time to time. “These things happen.”

  “I don’t think,” the chronicler continued, “that everything said about our literature tonight was accurate.”

  “Ask the cabby to go up Córdoba,” murmured Andrés, who seemed to be asleep. “And leave literature in peace.”

  “No, man, it’s important. At first I accepted your theory that we don’t create because we’re too soft. Now I’m not so sure that’s the reason. Tell me one thing: why do you write?”

  “To entertain myself, like everyone else,” said Andrés.

  “Perfect, that’s just what I needed. You didn’t even use the term ‘amuse,’ which would have required a detour.”

  “I will say,” said Andrés, “that most of the time I yield to a necessity—a tension that can only be released onto the page. It’s what those who write out of abnegation call ‘the mission,’ based on the reasonable idea that every flexed bow contains an arrow, and that the arrow’s mission is to fly off and hit someplace.”

  “But that necessity,” said the agitated chronicler. “Does it really exist externally to you, let’s say

  as a moral imperative

  a propaedeutic, a maieutic—something that obliges you ethically?”

  “No sir,” said Andrés, opening his eyes. “That we add later, like a hunter who talks about the damage to farms caused by foxes and how good an idea it is to exterminate them. In fact, writing is like laughing or fornicating—like releasing doves.”

  “Agreed. But we’ve got to distinguish between what we call ‘pure’ literature and—God forgive me—the essay used for didactic purposes. There’s more to writing essays than entertainment; usually the person who teaches isn’t just entertaining himself.”

  “Essentially he is,” said Andrés. “If you teach because of vocation, then in principle you’re doing something to fulfill yourself, and I call that entertainment. To realize yourself is to amuse yourself. You don’t think so?”

  “Well, it’s subtle,” said the chronicler, who was plagiarizing sentences from the Spanish version of The Three Musketeers.“Poets, for instance, are extremely happy with their poems, despite the fact that it’s considered elegant to assume the opposite. Poets know very well that their poems are their highest realization; and they most certainly savor the fact. Never believe any story about a poem written through tears; if there are any tears, they’re dredged up—like those of actors. True tears, composed of sodium chloride, are wept for the sake of oneself—not to supply lyrical ink. Remember Saint Augustine when one of his friends died: I wasn’t weeping for him but for myself, for what I’d lost. That’s why elegies are always written much later, recreating the pain and being happy, the way we’re happy when we listen to Isolde die or witness the fall of Hamlet.”

  “Prince of Denmark,” said Stella.

  “Of course the thing is subtle, as you said,” said Andrés. “But I imagine that César Vallejo could weep while he wrote his last pages. Or Antonio Machado, if you prefer. For those poets, their pain was their humanity—you might say they were ‘given to’ pain or ‘taken over by’ pain. Believe me, chronicler, their last pages must have been their best moments; they transformed personal suffering into histrionics of the highest sort, by which, I mean, they transformed it into poetry. But if they were suffering in that moment, they were suffering the way a star or a storm suffers. The worst thing was what happened after, when they closed their notebooks, when they re-entered personal suffering. Then they really suffered, like dogs, like men broken by their fate. And poetry—like a broken toy—could no longer do anything for them until they found a new illumination and a new happiness.”

  “That’s the way it should be,” said the chronicler. “Also, you might explain to me why card-carrying writers—they always give me a pain in the neck!—have to proclaim themselves martyrs to their labor. Why martyrs? In the worst case—if they really suffer while they’re creating—they should be satisfied, like saints; because their suffering turns out to be the proof of the pudding, the corroboration!”

  “Whenever I hear a writer say he suffers like a mother when he writes. I’m inclined to tell him to go to hell,” said Andrés. “The poet’s motto can only be: In my pain is my joy. And this brings us back to national territory again, old boy. Around here we don’t suffer to the extent that our creative joy breaks windows and runs along the roofs. When I say suffering, I mean suffering on a grand scale, the kind that produces a poem like Dante’s. As things stand, Argentina is in a bit of a limbo, a time-out—a soft, little happening between two nothings, as Juan said very well somewhere or other.”

  “So you think that suffering should precede joy?” asked the astonished chronicler.

  “No. Causality only has validity when you’re talking about the epidermic dimension of destiny. To say that someone who doesn’t cry won’t laugh is absurd. Deep down, in the central laboratory, there is neither laughter nor tears, neither pain nor joy.”

  “No?” said the chronicler. “Explain yourself.”

  “I’m speaking, always, about poets,” said Andrés. “In the end, I suspect, the poet is that man for whom pain isn’t a reality. The English say that poets learn through suffering what they will teach by singing. But the poet will never accept that suffering as real, and the proof is that he metamorphoses it, gives it another purpose. And that is precisely what I mean about that kind of pain: you suffer and know it isn’t real. It has no power over you because it’s filtered through a prism and transformed into a poem. The poet enjoys himself as he does it, like playing with a cat that scratches his hands. Pain is only real for the person who suffers it as a fatality—or contingency—by giving it citizenship, allowing it into his soul. Essentially, the poet never admits pain. He suffers—but he is some other person standing at the foot of the bed watching himself suffer. All the time he’s thinking that outside, the sun is shining.”

  “You can drop me on the corner,” said the chronicler. “I really didn’t get where I wanted to. I mean with this theme, not about getting home. Aside from that, I agree with you. Stop right there at that oh so elegant door, driver. Well, it was a stupendous evening. The part with the Chinese guy …”

  “That poor Chinese guy,” said Stella.

  The cab continued along Córdoba where the street is divided by islands with trees on them and progress is as slow as if it were raining. Soon you’re on Angel Gallardo: the entrance to Centenary Park—the vague perfume of the first hours of the morning. For Stella, who was staring at the street with blurry attention, the only things that had consistency were the recognizable cut of the corners, that pharmacy sign—now the plesiosaur in the Museum, the baby whale—the block shape of the apartment houses, the curved streets of the park—where timid people were learning to drive in extremely old, rusted-out cabriolets.

  “It’s going to be a beautiful day.”

  Andrés seemed asleep, his legs pulled up, the back of his neck against the edge of the seat. He barely smiled, agreed with a slight movement of his head without knowing what Stella had said.

  The miracle of nearness, he thought. Meeting, contact. We were going along like this, and sometimes I held her arm and sometimes we argued—

  and sometimes she was bad and forgetful,

  and a bit of a pain;

  but so what

  if we were, if it was, a corroboration—that unpronounceable moment when you leave your ego and say: you. You say it—you, you are it,

  there it is, you are it. Oh clarity!

  Pieces of image—to refuse to allow the voice to invent phrases that isolate. I simply remember, or better yet—

  continue, am there still, praising the edge without words, the edge …

&nbs
p; the gift of that night now gone.

  “One day, it’s over,” he said to himself. One day, it’s over. To know from now on that a day would not even fit sideways in the street—barely to speak or coexist in a single image. We’ve broken bread, tonight;

  and she poured me a glass of wine and said: “Juan, Andrés is angry with me,” and she played at being Clara, at thinking herself this Clara who can still look at me and accept my nearness. But a time will come …

  sparrows, little heaps of dust leaping, bathing themselves

  simple happiness of pure material,

  vacation of stone turned into birds.

  One day it’s over. She alone, or I. Suddenly: a telephone, and it’s death. Yes, it was sudden. Oh my love, my love—

  Revenge of language flood of tropes, but yes, horrible, not to see her ever again, and to know that irreversibly—

  so much on the side of morning

  and then suddenly below so below

  so sweet so cold so bare

  “Stop on the corner. Sweetheart, let’s go. Lord how asleep you are.”

  Nothing can pay for this certitude, thought Andrés fishing out his wallet. Only oblivion brings happiness. All foresight is horror. Fly allegro! stroll along the keyboard, untie breezes and oranges. I know, I know that the other tempo to come————

  is the lento, the terrible andante

  it is what it was before this fleeting lie present indicative

  He was thinking about Clara when they went to bed. (Stella had made café con leche, and he took a long bath, staring at the plane trees on the street out the partly-opened window.)

  And it was peace. Sleep taking over his hands.

  He saw her again, hard and bitter (for him, only for him, and perhaps for Juan), her serene question a lie: “Andrés, why worry so much? You’d think he was going to eat us.” And the chronicler asked: “Who?” Then Clara said, “No one, Abel, a boy.” One day—and by then he was sleeping, but it pained him to think it—one day, perhaps she’d say: “No one, Andrés: a boy.”

  “No one” being the subject of the sentence.

  Stella, asleep, whined and turned toward him, putting her hand on his waist. Andrés let himself fall asleep; softness. Perhaps get a haircut at noon—Now he was near Stella, he didn’t feel it when his hand, replicating hers, stopped on his thigh.