“We’re doing just fine,” said the doctor lighting a cigarette instead. “So they’ve still got these jerks helping us who don’t understand.” He lowered his voice, staring intently at Andrés. “But if I were to tell you that a plane just left and that …” He stopped, glancing at the soldier. “Bah, why get all steamed up?”
“How long have you been at it?”
“I haven’t slept in two days. Things were bad in Liniers and in La Boca. But since last night …” He inhaled on his cigarette until he couldn’t, and exhaled as if with a groan. “What a life.”
He looked at Andrés indifferently, actually talking to himself, using Andrés as a comfortable mirror. Andrés smiled at him, happy the doctor didn’t dive into that “confidential puddle.” Flies settled on their hands and they let them stay there. Svelte youth, he thought, weakly. The horror of these encounters. Alumni banquets, silver-wedding anniversaries, diplomas, remember those times, old man … He trembled, averting his eyes. The doctor was speaking with the soldier, who showed him a stain on the back of his hand. Andrés silently backed up, and stepped out into the street through an opening in the canvas. It was drizzling.
“But your trousers are soaked,” said Stella. “Is it water?”
“Worse, wine,” said Andrés, collapsing into a chair.
“Wine! How could you get so much wine on you? Your whole left leg!”
“It was at the intersection of San Martín and Tucumán, my dear. Waiter, bring me a dry caña. Actually, bring the bottle.”
“I thought you’d never get here,” said Stella. “What happened?”
“First you tell me what miracle got you here.”
“No miracle,” said Stella. “The 99 streetcar.”
“It’s still running?”
“Yes, but a lady said it was the last, and the conductor had heard an inspector say so.”
“Any way,” said Andrés. “The thing is you managed to get here.” He drank two shots of caña and a glass of water. He was stupidly happy. He reached over and lightly brushed Stella’s hair. A dust ball stuck to his fingers. He had to use his other hand to get it off. Stella was still waiting for his story.
“Just to test your English, Stella, I’m going to recite this bit of William Blake,” said Andrés, extremely happy. “‘Sund’ring, dark’ning, thund’ring! Rent away with a terrible crash …’”
“Translate it for me.”
“It isn’t worthwhile,” Andrés smiled. “‘No light from the fires, all was darkness in the flames of Eternal fury.’” Which is the same as saying that the corner of the Railroad Savings Bank was a perfect pandemonium. It was a big mistake for me to leave Florida. Everything was going so well on Florida.”
“But the wine …”
“It was a wine delivery truck. It broke an axle in a pothole. Actually, there were whole stretches of pavement that sank, dearest.
And on the sofa, under the yellow light.
The loudspeakers THAT PRAY THAT PRAY.
also that skin so white, ready to sink to …
“So it splashed on you.”
“So it splashed on me. Actually, the accident with the truck happened earlier. It seems they posted a cop to keep an eye on it. I say ‘seems’ because he wasn’t there when I passed by. What was there was a crowd enjoying the hell out of itself. They were putting all the empty bottles at the entrance to the Railroad Savings Bank and dancing on the solid part of the pavement. For dancing, they took a radio from some poor guy wandering around like a lost soul, begging them to give it back. Just when I arrived they’d managed to get a Uruguayan station and were dancing, I think, to one of Pedro Maffia’s tangos. I don’t know if you noticed that our stations are only broadcasting news.”
“I did. I was listening before I went out. But how did you get soaked?”
“I committed the indiscretion of getting in the way of some girl who was vomiting,” said Andrés. “Maybe the poor thing didn’t like Pedro Maffia’s tango. Luckily, there was a faucet working at the Bank. I took off my pants and did a decent job of washing off the affected part. I wrung them out and put them back on. Incidentally, I can tell you that the perpetrator was carried out feet-first and that there was very little wine left.” He passed his hand over his forehead and studied the perspiration on it before drying it with a paper napkin.
The Florida, where they were sitting, was almost empty. A student café. Andrés liked it out of habit because he was unable to let go of that nighttime past: The groups of people with no other object than that of having no object, the verbal skirmishes, rapid love, coffee, paintings, Clara and Juan, nights. With each day that passed, he was further from all that;
but the higher the kite—and he smiled, cruel—the heavier the string weighs on it, its history and support.
Another dry caña, and potato chips (which were moist, aside from not being made from real potatoes).
“I had an easy trip. Nothing happened to me,” said Stella. “Well, wait: on the corner of the University there were some trucks, I think they were shoring up the wall of the Institute.”
“It’s 6:30,” said Andrés. “Outside, you can barely see a thing.”
“People have gone home,” said Stella. “Oh, the porter was at the door of the University. I said hello as I passed, and he didn’t recognize me. You could hear people inside, but I don’t think there were very many.”
“Let’s go over there,” said Andrés. “That way we won’t miss the kids.”
But they stayed a little longer. A boy at a table next to the wall was reviewing some papers, taking notes. Occasionally he would pass his fingers through his hair, would fidget around nervously, then go back to his work. This guy keeps at it, thought Andrés. When you see people like that, it makes you think that after all … But he’s probably going over a dialogue for some soap opera. He felt himself softening, spongy, like the potato chips. We should learn the art of the sponge—full of water, but separate from it, conforming it, a different substance …Stella was waiting for him, very attractive in her blue-silk blouse, her thin legs with the golden down. Passing next to the boy with the papers, Andrés resisted the temptation to stop and talk to him. “Perhaps he’s as lonely as I am,” he said to himself, articulating each word in his dry throat. “The writer’s moral: noli me tangere. That’s how you get there, but that’s also how you die. Like …” and then there were no more words,
only a vision: leather sofa long rigid legs
hand up
(and the glasses—he remembered—dancing on the fingers of one of the employees,
the lenses through which things would no longer pass for sensitive cells to sort out;
he suspected that all that out there: WORLD.
The world, the world, the world …)
“It’s incredible,” he murmured;
by then he was next to Stella, at the door.
“I am also this thing
that continues in the fog
copying itself remaking itself saving itself.
Oh final unity! Access!” (“But I’ve already figured that it isn’t that way,” he said to himself in admonition. “I’ve brilliantly demonstrated that I have nothing to do with the guy who’s going to die. I go on, I am. Is that just talk? Here, this thing I touch. Take a deep breath. This, right now. I, still, always. What can nothingness do to me?”
“Stella, my love,” said Andrés. “We are safe from nothingness.”
“Nothingness?”
“Yes, Stella. Safe. And we didn’t even know it. Before, I had an inkling—but now I’m beginning to live it. Safe, safe, Stella. Nothingness is for others. For that guy who’s dead in a bookstore, he can no longer deny it. But it isn’t just that he no longer is. Irrevocably, we are not the nothingness. We have nothing to do with it! It doesn’t mix with us. When we yield to it—because its inevitable—then it advances; but it is not us. It’s useless to look for words. If we stop singing, it seems that silence takes over the music; but it’s a lie,
Stella. There’s no silence. It’s only that there’s music or there’s no music. Never accept the idea of silence. Watch out for the cab.”
They crossed to the pharmacy at San Martín and Viamonte, orienting themselves by means of some vague lights at the edge of the street—two red lights signaling a depression in the roadway. What they thought was a taxi was a black car with government license plates, filled with cops guarding someone they couldn’t see.
“You have to be careful with ideas,” whispered Andrés, and Stella realized he wasn’t talking to her.
“Papers?” asked the policeman at the door.
They were halfway up the stairs. Andrés and Stella stopped and stared at him.
“No one enters without papers.”
“Why not?” asked Andrés.
“I’ve got my orders, and that’s that.”
Stella took out her identification card, and Andrés had to hunt around in his wallet until he found his. When he looked up, he saw Clara staring at him from the sidewalk. Juan and the chronicler were bringing up the rear, involved in an argument.
“Hi,” said Andrés, holding up his identification card with two fingers.
“Hi,” repeated Stella, marching up the stairs. She had showed her card to the policeman and went inside.
Clara stood next to Andrés. Silent, they went up the stairs together. The policeman looked over their documents and let them pass.
Cuan and the chronicler had been chatting since leaving the subway at the last stop. (The Florida Avenue stop had been closed, and people were saying—Clara heard a young soldier say it—that the station was being used as an emergency hospital, taking people overcome by fumes after being attended to at the first-aid station on the corner.)
The two of them weren’t much in agreement about the House and the University. It was true both institutions hated each other, that on one occasion, a Reader from the House had said about the University: “It’s distinguished only for its solid stairway,” and that a dean from the aggrieved side had invented the title Only His Master’s Voice for the House.
To the chronicler it seemed that …
but when they saw Andrés at the door, they were so happy they stopped arguing. (“A trivial theme,” said the chronicler.) And in the vestibule inside from which ascended the
solid stairway,
the five came together to chat, waiting for a chance to take over the bench next to the cashier of the …
and they stared in some surprise where two proctors were sitting at a table occupying the center of the space, now reduced, with the result that the movement of students became slow and complicated.
“First time I ever saw the proctors looking so important,” said Juan, patting at the sleeves of his jacket as if they might lose the humidity that was wrinkling them that way. “Look at them, they’re Olympian.”
“They’ve always been very majestic,” said Clara, leaning against Juan, worn out. “But the table bit is pretty unnecessary. Let’s sit down on the stairs, anywhere.”
“Can we get into the classrooms?” Juan asked the proctors.
“No.”
“Why?”
“They’re locked up.”
“Couldn’t you open one for us?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“We don’t have the keys.”
“Who has them then?”
The proctor looked toward the other proctor, while Andrés took one step back and assumed control of the end of the bench. He tapped Clara’s shoulder and waited for her to be seated. The chronicler placed himself next to them, and the students occupying the rest of the bench squeezed together to make room. “It would only occur to me to go out wearing this suit,” one of the students said, as if speaking to himself. “But it’s great—it’s light as a feather.” Clara listened as she collapsed in fatigue, having lost all will power in the arrival, then the immediate scene. “But she likes me to get dolled up,” she heard the student say. Andrés was staring at her—against her—but folded into himself in a violent attempt to make contact with her not matter.
“You’re a wreck,” he said to her. It sounded like a clinical evaluation.
“I am. I’m done in. What a day it was …”
“It was?” said Andrés. “I don’t know, somehow I get the impression it’s barely begun. There’s so much suspense in the city.”
“Don’t talk like you’re in a ghost story, Andrés,” said the chronicler. “Man, if I could just take off my shoes. If I were in the office, I’d have taken them off already. I really should be at the office.”
Then he explained he’d come to the University to keep them company, but that he didn’t intend to stay until the exam because there was no doubt his absence would be commented on at the paper.
“Think so?” asked Juan, who’d taken a seat on the floor and was facing them.
“To tell you the truth,” said the chronicler, “I have the impression that at this hour they don’t give a damn if anyone’s at the paper or not. What a pretty blouse, Stella.”
“It is attractive, isn’t it?” said Stella. “I see you have good taste. The best thing about it is that it’s light.”
“That woman who was strangled on Rincón Street was wearing a blouse just like it,” said the chronicler, looking at the legs of a student who was beginning to go up the stairs. He heard the squeal (a rat, he thought) of the fat proctor: the legs became immobile, the order to come down immediately.
“But I have to get some information upstairs,” said the student.
“Come down immediately! No one’s allowed up!”
“Why can’t anyone go up?” asked Juan. “If I feel like it, I’ll go up right now. Want me to go with you?”
“No, no,” said the student, who’d turned pale. “I’d rather stay down here.”
“Good idea,” said a male student. “If you went up, they might not let you take the test.”
Juan stared at him. The proctors had begun to line up green-paper lists—with squares, dotted lines, and numbers telling the order of things, and footnotes. Son of a list, thought Juan staring at the student who was consulting some mimeographed notes. How long will he … The door to the gallery was still creaking painfully.
“Christ, the wind is really blowing,” said the chronicler. “It just can’t be.”
With the gust of wind came an underlying sweet smell, barely perceptible at first—like boiled glue, wet paper, humidity, reheated stew. Those smells from lower school, thought Andrés, shaking himself, that mysterious soapy smell that floated in the air of the classrooms, the playgrounds. Lost, but unforgettable. Was it the smell or our manner of smelling it? Some sounds, or colors of childhood, or substances so close to our faces, to anxiety … This one was a tired smell—a compound of smells—brought in by the air that moved the doors. Even the voices in the room, muted by the woodwork and the humidity, seemed part of the smell. Then it became clear that the smell had been there since they came in, that the gust of hot air did nothing more than bring out that lingering, super-sweet repugnance.
“I owe you one, kid,” the chronicler was saying to Andrés. “Concerts like that just don’t happen every day. I wish I could describe to you the face on Clara’s Dad when the brawl started. In fact, he was great. We were, as you might say, one big, happy family. Too bad you weren’t there. Even that guy from last night passed by. And I won’t say a word about this one, the punches he landed. He took some good ones too.”
“The truth of the matter is I’ve got a bruised rib,” said Juan. “Hey chronicler, don’t you think it’s my turn to enjoy the benefits of the bench a little?”
“Naturally. I’ll sit on the floor and reverently listen to your university conversation. It’s a shame Clarita’s falling asleep.”
“A shame,” said Clara. “But an inevitable shame.”
“Why didn’t you make her rest?”
“Since she became an adult, she’s tended to make her own decisions,” said J
uan.
“She’s in no shape for an exam—unless it’s a clinical one.”
“You’re wrong,” said Clara, closing her eyes. “I’ve got enough phosphorescence. I know all the tables, even the one for Number Eight. And all the problems. Une paysanne, zanne zanne zanne—she hummed, swinging her head back and forth.
“We didn’t think everything would get so complicated,” said Juan. “I’m just about done in myself. Just think, my father-in-law takes us to the concert to relax. And after that, the trip on the subway, the riot on Carlos Pellegrini. On the train, we heard there was a fire on the block where Trust Jewelers is; at least we heard people talking about the smoke and people not being able to take the heat.
“Just as we’re pulling out of the station, the train gets stuck,” said the chronicler. “We’d gone maybe a hundred yards. Then, we couldn’t move. The heat was so brutal some women were screaming. In my presence …
but why bother you with all this.”
“Keep going,” said Andrés. “When you’re done I’ll tell mine.”
“You wouldn’t believe it. A woman started to cry. She was so crammed in, she couldn’t get her arms free, and she was looking at me, crying, the tears pouring down her face, to say nothing of the sweat destroying her mascara. She had eye shadow stalactites, it was horrible. Immobile, you have to realize. She was crying. I couldn’t stop looking at her; and she couldn’t stop crying. It must be the same in jail or in a hospital, but at least there you can turn your face to the wall if you don’t want to see or so no one will see you.”
“Twenty minutes like that,” said Juan. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. After a while, we all felt the earth. I don’t know how to explain it to you. In a subway tunnel the depth doesn’t bother you because of the movement. But suddenly there was that stillness that goes on and on, that feeling of anguish. Then you look at the ceiling of the car, and you know above it is the earth—hundreds of yards of it! I’d make a terrible miner: Geophobia, it you don’t mind my calling it that.”
“That’s a pretty word,” said Andrés. “It stretches like a Chiclet and goes a long way.”
Final Exam Page 20
