Scars. Juan José Saer

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СКАЧАТЬ old news, he says, and stands up, his face red from the effort it took to bend over.

      Horacio Barco comes in, covering the entire doorway with his body. He’s chewing something and has a glass of wine in his hand.

      —Carlos, he says. There’s no salt.

      —Impossible, Tomatis says.

      But Barco has already disappeared back into the kitchen. Tomatis goes out behind him.

      —Are you a writer as well? says the girl in green.

      —No, I say.

      —What do you do, besides the paper? she says.

      —Nothing. Sometimes I do some work for the police, but not often, I say.

      —What kind of work? says the girl in green.

      —Follow people, shakedowns, I say. Nothing much.

      —How exciting, says the girl in green.

      —Not really, I say. It’s boring, mostly.

      —Yes, I can imagine, says the girl in green, thoughtfully. Everything ends up boring in the long run.

      Tomatis comes in just as I’m raising his whiskey to take a drink from it. He waits until I’m done and then takes the glass.

      —There are two bottles, in the kitchen, he says.

      Then he goes up to the guy with the raincoat folded over his arm, who must have died by then.

      —You can serve yourself something in the kitchen, Nicolás, he says.

      The guy stands up without saying a word and leaves, taking his raincoat with him. When he disappears I turn to Tomatis:

      —Is it sewn to his arm? I ask.

      —What? says Tomatis.

      —The raincoat, I say.

      Tomatis laughs weakly and tells me to go to the kitchen if I want to drink something, and to shout when dinner is ready.

      —No, I say. I don’t want to drink anything for now. With dinner, in any case.

      —Ángel is a character, Tomatis says.

      —So it seems, says the girl in green, looking at me with some curiosity.

      I throw the cigarette on the floor and jump off the table, crushing the butt with my shoe. The floor is covered with mud stains, and from the center of the room to the kitchen door there’s a trail of puddles. The girl in green has her legs open, and her gathered dress shows half of her thighs, which are madman. I try every possible way to not look in that direction, but some crazy force makes me turn my head again and again. She doesn’t even notice. I even get the impression that she barely knows I’m there, and the questions she asks come out of her mouth mechanically, as though she has them prepared for whenever she’s with someone whose face isn’t totally familiar. The last look she gave me was the most vivid, but she grazed my face with it so lightly that it ended up annoying me.

      —Your face is familiar, I say.

      —Could be, she says. In this city, everyone knows everyone.

      —No, I say. I have a feeling that we were talking once before.

      —Could be, she says. I talk so much. And with so many people.

      —But I have a feeling we were talking intimately, I say.

      This has no effect. She makes an ambiguous gesture and shrugs, admitting the possibility. Tomatis stares at me. Just then the guy with the raincoat over his arm comes in holding a glass of whiskey in his free hand. He stops near the door, motionless. He has on these enormous brown shoes with rubber soles so thick that they look like orthopedics.

      —Nicolás, you’ve filled your tank I see, Tomatis says cheerfully.

      —We can go to the table now, Nicolás says.

      So he could talk. It was pretty amazing, considering his striking resemblance to a human being. I thought it possible that he was some plastic android for whom Barco had quickly improvised a mechanism in the kitchen that made it possible for him to formulate the expression, We can go to the table now. Or that Tomatis himself was the one who responded, like a ventriloquist. The girl in green got up and left.

      —Don’t rush off, Ángel, Tomatis said. Pupé doesn’t have a cunt. She was born that way. But she’s lots of fun, and useful for conversation. In any case, she doesn’t understand anything about anything.

      The dinner was awful. They had opened like fifty cans of peas, boiled them with onions, and ended up with a flavorless, runny stew. I don’t know who convinced Nicolás to leave his raincoat on the back of his chair, but his posture didn’t change much—the whole time his arm stayed in the same position it was in when he’d been holding the coat. Because there weren’t enough chairs, Gloria ate sitting on Barco’s lap, from his plate. Apparently they had gotten quite intimate during the cooking, or most likely they already knew each other before. Gloria had on these very tight black pants, and her hair was in a ponytail. She had a long, thin neck, like a pole, and Barco held her back so she wouldn’t fall. I sat between Tomatis and la Negra—Pupé was sitting next to Tomatis—and noticed that la Negra’s hair even grew behind her ears. I imagined her covered in hair, like a monkey. When he took his first mouthful, Tomatis said that maybe with rotten onions the stew might have come out a little better, but there was still time to dig through the trash for some condiments to add. Then he said a movie producer is easy to recognize right off by the thickness of his cigar, but with a director it’s trickier, because behind the frontal bone of a movie director’s face there’s only air. Then he argued with Barco, who was saying Othello wasn’t a jealous man, that Iago was only presenting him evidence of Desdemona’s deception, and in the end he was just an easily influenced person. What was more apparent, according to Barco, was his masochism, and Shakespeare’s vulgar construction of a tragedy based on the stereotypical idea that all Arabs are jealous and impulsive. From that he starting talking about how the phlegmatism of the English was a product of the intense humidity. Tomatis laughed at Barco’s arguments but admitted that Othello wasn’t a jealous man, agreeing that it was obvious Othello wasn’t jealous because his behavior wasn’t typical for a jealous man, since it’s common knowledge that jealous men don’t beat to death the women who have betrayed them, but rather they dedicate themselves to calculating the dimensions of their banana plantations and examining the path of the shadow cast by the last column in the southeast corridor of their guest house. It’s elementary, Tomatis shouted, punching the table. No jealous man beats his wife to death. That’s cheap psychology. A real jealous man is a maniac for details. And the one time in my life I felt real jealousy, I had the irresistible urge to find a carpenter’s rule and go take the measurements of the queen-size bed where I suspected the deception was being perpetrated.

      In my opinion, Tomatis was exaggerating, but the theory was original. Barco responded that it would have been better to use the carpenter’s rule to measure the object for which Tomatis has been substituted. If you have to unfold it the full meter to measure it, he said, then you’ve found the reason for the deception. Then they stopped yelling and it was silent for more than five minutes, and I spent the whole time hitting the edge of my plate with my spoon. When the silence started to bother СКАЧАТЬ