Final Exam

by Julio Cortázar

  … UNTIL THE RESULTS OF THE ANALYSES …

  (“What pains in the asses they are with their analyses,” said one of the men in back)

  came to stand next to the tub. When the head of credit signaled him a second time he bent over slowly and put his hand in the water, picked it up in the palm of his hand, leaned his head over, and washed his mouth and chin.

  One of the young women waited with a towel that was already quite wet, and the head of credit said something Andrés didn’t hear because he was crossing over to the window side, approaching the employees in the back who were now looking after the man on the sofa. López entered through the other side, extremely nervous, carrying a bath sponge that was soaked in vinegar, or so Andrés thought. (It smelled of vinegar, but then it could have been ammonia, or a mixture of salts like what Stella carried in her purse on the days when …

  although the smell of vinegar predominated.) Behind Andrés, the murmuring continued, the splashing. They’ve lost their minds, he thought. Then he thought they hadn’t, that perhaps what they’d saved was their minds: purification technique—

  because this was a … OH WOMAN

  a clever way of …

  Yes, they were sponging the man’s lips, and then Andrés saw the man who’d fainted more clearly; his extended, inert figure and his face—but of course, now he realized—seen in so many lectures. They’d taken off his glasses, and one of the em-ployees was holding them. He saw the thick eyebrows, the clean-shaven cheeks, the thin neck over which fell, folded and ridiculous, the loosened blue tie. Without knowing who he was, Andrés had the shock of recognition: fraternity of groups, teams, gangs.

  “Not fraternity,” he said to himself, “rather security we feel, knowing we always run into the same faces in bookstores, writers’ societies, the House, concerts. And this guy …” He’d seen him in art galleries, in theaters—where the two of them (now he realized the parallelism) had stayed to the bitter end of movies starring Marcel Carné or Laurence Olivier. He was at the Isaac Stern concerts, Andrés thought, suddenly becoming anguished, at Batlle Planas’ last show, a course given by Don Ezequiel, Borges’ classes at the Cultural …

  “He fainted near the door,” said López, recognizing him. “It seems he was picking out some books, and someone saw him collapse. This will bring him around; and you, Osvaldo, you’d better bring up some water. See if there’s some cognac. With this heat …”

  But López knew (and Andrés knew he knew—he knew that everyone knew)

  that the sponge was a gesture; the vinegar (with ammonia) a gesture.

  “Can’t you get a doctor?” he asked, tired, holding on to the back of the sofa.

  “But it’s nothing, some dizziness that’s all. It happens here all the time.”

  Andrés was looking at the body, the short, dark, disordered hair, the scuffed shoes, the long legs. One hand (enormous, bony) was resting on a knee: the other was palm-up, as if begging. From between the eyelids came a greenish reflection. Who can he be? And why suddenly …? He closed his eyes, staggering a bit. López glanced at him nervously. Andrés opened his eyes when he felt the burn of the ammonia in his nose. He took a deep breath, smiling.

  “It’s okay, it’s nothing,” he said, pushing away the sponge. “Who is that man?”

  “I don’t know,” said López. “He always came in a lot, but he didn’t have an account here. He looks very young. I helped him sometimes.”

  The others were looking over the body. Andrés heard the splashing again behind him, the murmuring. Before he left— because he really had no business being there, standing at the foot of the sofa—he looked down at the dead man, taking him in completely. The hand that was palm-up closed imperceptibly, but it was a trick of the light.

  Sitting on a stair and leaning against the wall, he watched the shoes running up and down. Osvaldo passed by with the glass of water. The pale young man who’d had the problems with the telephone passed by.

  “I just don’t know what to think,” murmured Andrés. “Maybe he died at the right moment or he deserved to go on a bit more. What a disappearing act. What right did he have to die that way, right now?”

  He felt irritated and kept on seeing that face which was so white, so bereft of relief—the protruding cheekbones, the weak chin, and sunken temples. Escapist! he thought, enraged. Between the fog and the Eighty Women, escapist! Coward! And he was suddenly overcome by tenderness. Now he visualized more clearly the thin figure he’d seen in the corridors of the Odeon, remembering an accidental collision and exchange of excuses outside the ticket booth at a movie. Always alone, or speaking with friends, but alone. Who was he? Andrés wondered if he’d left some book or piece of music behind. Smiling, suffering, he reproached himself for that need to qualify. Everything he could say, everything worthwhile, was contained in Marlow’s statement about Lord Jim: He was one of us. And, really, even that didn’t help much.

  All right, he thought, now he’s going to rot. He’ll go through all the phases of a proper cadaver—and it was curious because he saw himself. He thought about the dead man, but it was himself he saw decompose. Why not? If there was one thing you could be sure of it was that final—saponification. Foreseeing it (even if your whole body jumped back like a horse that smells bones) was almost a moral victory. To ponder the notion of life, of having been a man, up to its final consequences. I’m not finished when I die, he thought, burning his mouth on his cigarette. I’ve been my body, and I owe it the loyalty of accompanying it to the end. My imagination goes to the door and says: good-by there, loving hostess. But no, let’s follow it out onto the street, let’s keep going. If I’m really finished when I die, if my body—which I feel living right now, which is myself—goes on horribly night after night, swelling, growing, decomposing, shrinking, the least I can do is foresee its destruction, look at it from life. Ah, Orcagna, painter of putrefaction!

  People passing by on the stair watched him out of the corner of their eye. One of them going up was carrying a briefcase. They must have found the doctor. What for? thought Andrés. They’re just going to pinch his arms and chest, the doctor will give him a shot just to show how efficient he is—shake him, strip him, and vilify him. He wanted to go back, to shout at them that the man was dead. All of them knew it very well, but they all hoped the faint was nothing.

  “I’m getting old,” muttered Andrés. “I sentimentalize everything I touch.”

  From his stair, he watched people buying books, watched Arturo running around his section. They’d just reopened the doors, as if there were less fog. The loudspeakers on the street were no longer audible. Osvaldo passed by with the same glass of water, and Andrés saw that the glass was full. How odd it didn’t occur to him to empty it in the tub. Then he had the horrible thought that they might throw the man into the tub to get him to respond. But of course, if he’s already got the necessary form. Ars moriendi. But dying isn’t an art. That day I discovered that I’ve died other times—so clear, so without solemnity. It isn’t a show, as with dreams, but a light passage instead, like a bird: repeated death,

  returning.

  Rotting again, as many times as it returns. Obligatory ransom of a season in the sun.

  The Sunne who goes so many miles in

  a minut, the starres of the Firmament,

  which go so many more, goe not so fast,

  as my body to the earth.

  —Donne

  Blackmail of the soul, sermons, thought Andrés. The trumpets will revive the bodies. Isn’t that what it says? Death for them was all the sun, all space. Death denies the world: I am not my death, I am the world, I hold it up like an orange against the sun. My death I throw to the depths of myself—to that which is so distant it doesn’t exist. It is my limit, just as my body’s limit is not my body

  —even if I cut it out of the air and imagine it.

  (He would have sworn that hat in the novel section … but he could no longer see it.)

  Dying is like writing, thought
Andrés. Of course, my dear little Pascal, of course we die alone. He remembered his first notebooks of essays, his awkward novels. Everything he discussed about them with his pals—the ideas, the locales, the arguments about how to set things up. And later, in his little room, the bitter maté, late nights; at times his black cat on his lap, distant but so warm. Alone, facing the notebook; without witnesses. Like dying—because the employees hadn’t seen the unknown man die, only collapse. Perhaps in that moment he was with others—thinking about others; perhaps the last thing he saw was the spine of a book, the last thing he heard was the noise of hasty heels behind him. If a book could at least attain the dignity of a death, thought Andrés, and, at times, vice versa. What a temptation to make metaphors. How death invited you to embrace it with words, follow it out to the street, ascribe it attributes, negate its negative qualities.

  But it most certainly is him, there he was again! Some coincidence. And Arturo was speaking with …

  After all, dying won’t be any business of mine, thought Andrés, mocking himself, his throat tight because of the memory of the man upstairs. If I’m anything it’s alive, right? I’m alive, I exist. Therefore, how can I stop living without ceasing to be? Oh reason, oh marvel!

  Then, clearly, it follows that

  if when I die I’m not myself,

  it’s someone else who’s died. So what should it matter to me? I can feel sorry for him beginning now, right this minute. It’s now it grieves me that the guy I was is dead! Poor lad, so meritorious! He wrote and everything. With such a pluperfect future … He lit another cigarette, staring in surprise at his fingers shaking. Abel was standing in front of the economics books, his hands in his pockets

  —indeed, indeed; with both hands in his pockets,

  and he was softly negating something he must have been thinking: his blue hat continuously swinging back and forth. Andrés forgot him. The figure stretched out on the sofa got up, hard and useless. Cadaver. A horrible nuisance.

  He should come sit down next to me, thought Andrés. Leave the other guy on the sofa,

  unless they’ve put him in the tub;

  should come here and tell me: he died. And we’d smoke together. But I, who was his life, what do I care? If he didn’t come, watch out, if he didn’t come,

  then it’s serious. If he doesn’t come, then it’s not enough just to think about this; something atrocious impedes the break. The living person goes off with the dead one … But it can’t be, it isn’t right, it isn’t fitting. I’ve just felt so clearly that it isn’t I who will die one day … It can’t be that he, in some way— air, image, or sound—isn’t here, that he isn’t walking around free …

  Tired, he let his head sink. You’ve done nothing but argue, nothing more than create a double for yourself—the way others create a soul. The ka, old boy. You’re late to this, you repeat yourself … And nevertheless he’d known that only life was his, was he; and the other …

  “So it’s dispossession,” he murmured, tossing down the butt and stepping on it. “Enough fantasizing. Don’t ask from discourse what is proper to poetry. Nice, eh? 5:10, the kids, the exam. Let’s get up, vitalist.”

  Arturo was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs, giggling.

  “Did you wash your face too?”

  “No, and I really need to,” said Andrés, glancing at his wet, dirty handkerchief. “It just didn’t seem right for me, only being a regular customer who gets a 10% discount …”

  “Bah, they’re nuts,” said Arturo, shaking. “That idiot Gomara wanted me to go up. They’re loony.”

  “You can always use a washing,” said Andrés. “If I were you, I’d go. It’s gotten very amusing. There’s a dead man and a lot of first aid.”

  “Are you kidding?” asked Arturo, looking at him out of the corner of his eye.

  “Go on up and see for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

  “You’re kidding me.” He looked at Andrés without looking at him, containing himself. Suddenly he burst into laughter (Andrés recognized the brittle quality of it—the other source of sobbing), and he ran upstairs. Slowly lifting his head, to give him time to arrive, Andrés followed his running steps. He was close to the balustrade and didn’t step aside when López came from the other direction. López, stepping aside, saw him run in. Behind López came the doctor carrying the bag.

  How bizarre, thought Andrés, amused. How he slips away. He looked for Abelito behind the book cases, in the entryway to the elevator, over at the cashier. Then he went out onto the street desiring to walk, to smell the yellow smell. On the corner of Corrientes, a first-aid station had been set up; through the fog he could see the nurses and the orderlies wearing blue smocks. The station took up the diagonal route of the sidewalk on the Mayorga side (it was there they gave injections and distributed flyers about the danger of the mushrooms); but it extended into the middle of the street

  since—after the pavement had collapsed on the corner of Maipú, and there had been more mushrooms since morning, and now they were opening in a star-shaped pattern—the superintendant in person had ordered the detouring of traffic off the street, as well as off Maipú, Esmeralda, and Lavalle. Only ambulances could enter, running over the northern sidewalk of Corrientes. They were made to come from Suipacha, with the stretcher bearers waiting on the corner of Bignoli to bring down those who’d fainted or were overcome by fumes. A federal police truck was on the side of Trapiche, with a detachment ready to intervene, in case (because of that excess of imagination typical of the citizens of Buenos Aires, which tends to see beyond communiques) there might be some panic in the area around the first-aid station.

  “They won’t be able to get to the University,” said Andrés, who was beginning to practice his long-standing tendency to talk to himself out loud right there on the street. He distractedly heard a loudspeaker enumerating the exemplary fines that would be levied against businesses that closed before the legal hour. Bignoli was closed, and Ricordi as well. A ferocious fight involving loudly barking dogs amused a squad of policemen. It was broad daylight, but the area around the first-aid station was illuminated with spotlights set up on roofs and balconies. At regular intervals police whistles could be heard. Ambulances (there must have been a lot of them) announced their presence from a distance with short and continuous howls, but people no longer seemed to listen to them. It was curious that there would be such a crowd in the street and on the corners, and that the police would allow them to stand around, getting in the way of the workers in the aid station. A column of people (actually, compact groups all moving in the same direction) came up Florida, passing by the station and moving on;

  but when they crossed Corrientes, the light leapt onto their filthy faces, their matted hair, and clothing wrinkled by the fog, the kids eating peanuts and drinking Coca-Cola; and the heat getting more intense in the agglomeration

  they went up toward Lavalle and faded getting lost again in the yellow darkness of the fog.

  Andrés slipped along staying close to the buildings, trying to see through the peepholes in the canvas of the first-aid station. No one said a word when he took advantage of an empty space, and entered, peering into the more or less protected space, where people were setting up cots for those overcome by fumes. The light came from above as it would onto the floor of a big-top circus; everything had a circus air, including the white smock with enormous bloodstains of a doctor who was bending over the body of a boy. Two nurses were pulling down the boy’s trousers so the doctor could give him an injection in the buttock. The kid howled. His eyes were shut, as if he were afraid or ashamed. One of the nurses laughed and gave him a mocking pat on the cheek. Up above, against the spotlight, the summer insects were fluttering about, anticipating the night; a moth with ashen wings began to walk tremulously along Andrés’ sleeve. Andrés patted it as if it too were the child’s cheek. Two accident victims were brought in, and from the side of the Mayorga sidewalk appeared orderlies and a nurse. One of the nurses glanc
ed at Andrés, who wasn’t moving. On the cot to his right, an elderly lady was shaking. The moth flew from Andrés’ sleeve and landed right on her hair.

  “Go take a rest,” a recently-arrived doctor said to the one who’d given the injection to the boy. “There’s hot coffee.”

  “Okay, but go see what’s bothering that woman.”

  He passed next to Andrés. They were not surprised to recognize each other.

  “What are you doing here, man?” asked the doctor. “You don’t feel well?”

  “I’m okay. I just thought I’d take a look.”

  “Well, there isn’t much to see. Come and have some coffee. It must be a century since we saw each other last.”

  “Since the meeting of the cellar group,” said Andrés. “Since that long.”

  (And through some unfathomable mental association, he remembered an old record by Kulemkampf playing a siciliana by von Paradis; but they didn’t play that record at the meeting of the cellar group. More likely Louis Armstrong and Petrouchka or La Création du Monde.)

  “I can see you’ve got your hands full,” he said, to say something, hoping to get rid of this vain, useless

  like so many others

  catalyst of memories.

  “They’re driving us crazy,” said the doctor. “This afternoon I must have seen almost four hundred asses, some really weren’t that bad. Come over here.”

  They went into another room, almost completely dark, where relatives waited for the sick to be returned to them. The doctor pushed his way through, but Andrés saw that he wasn’t shoving out of ill will. He was just trying to pretend he wasn’t fed up and worn out. They took refuge in a space barely nine square feet. A soldier was attending a camp kitchen, and frowned when the doctor asked for coffee.

  “You’re going to have to wait. That bastard Romero …”

  “What’s going on?”

  “He took off. He was shitting in his pants from fright, so he ran. He left everything to me.”