Scars. Juan José Saer

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СКАЧАТЬ when I’m alone, I can walk around however I like. It would be something else entirely if I knew people were watching, I say.

      My mother pretends not to hear me and goes back to reading her comic book. Eventually she looks up and realizes I’m still there.

      —Still raining? she asks.

      —Yes, I say.

      My mother looks at me a second, blinking. She puts out the cigarette, stretching her arm out to the night table, sitting up slightly, without taking her eyes off me.

      —Besides, I say, staring back. It’s my bottle. You drank my bottle.

      I see her smooth, white face go suddenly red, but she doesn’t move for a few more seconds. Then she leaves the comic book on the bed and gets up, very slowly, without looking away. She walks toward me, not furious or hurrying, staring me in the eyes, and stops half a meter away. The flush that had stained her face gradually vanishes. My mother raises her hand and slaps me twice, once on each cheek, then stands there, staring, and probably the two red stains are now on my cheeks instead of hers, as though we traded them. After a few unblinking seconds I raise my hand and slap her twice, once on each cheek. The red stains, now disappearing on my cheeks, appear on hers. Tears gush out. She’s not crying—they started gushing for some inexplicable physiological reason, because no one who is crying could have such a hard look on their face. A pale circle forms around her pressed lips.

      —I should have died instead of your father so I wouldn’t have to see this, my mother says.

      —Not just this, I say. Any way you look at it, it would have been more convenient.

      She slapped me again, and I went into a rage and started hitting and pushing her, threw her on the bed, took off my belt, and didn’t stop hitting her until she started screaming. She didn’t even try to defend herself. When I saw all she was doing was crying, I calmly put my belt back on and poured myself a glass of gin, careful to leave some for her, then dropped two ice cubes in the glass and went back to my room.

      I couldn’t concentrate on reading anymore because I had said one unfair thing to her, about the supposed convenience of her dying instead of my father. That was unfair any way you looked at it because my father was so insignificant a man that if the smallest ant in the world died instead of him it would have made more of an impact. He was a middle manager in a public office because he was too stupid to have a regular worker’s responsibility and too weak a personality to be able to give anyone real orders. He didn’t smoke or drink, never felt disillusioned or ever experienced any sort of happiness he might take pleasure in remembering. He had dodged military service through some defect in his sight (he told the story fifty times a day, in such detail and with such enthusiasm that you would have thought he was the general San Martín recalling the battle of San Lorenzo), but it wasn’t such a bad defect that he was prescribed glasses. He was thin but not too thin; quiet but not too quiet; he had good handwriting but sometimes his hands shook. He didn’t have a favorite dish, and if someone asked his opinion on anything at all, he invariably responded, Some people understand those things—not me. But there wasn’t an ounce of humility in his response, rather an absolute conviction that it was the truth. And so when my father died, the only change in the house was that there was now air in the space he had occupied in the bed (for the last six months he hadn’t gotten up). I think that was the most noteworthy change he ever produced: to make space. To open up 1.76 meters (because he was also average height) of vertical space and a certain width so that what he displaced with his body could be reconverted into a breathable substance for the benefit of humanity.

      When I went to the paper the next day and found out that Tomatis had gone to Buenos Aires and wouldn’t be back until the twenty-ninth, I felt bad. I had planned to tell him everything. I don’t really know why, since Tomatis rarely seemed to be listening, but still he was the person I trusted the most, and he might understand me having hit my mother. She, meanwhile, stopped speaking to me, and when she had to she used the formal usted. We barely ever saw each other, and now that it was cooler out (it rained almost every day in April, which made it so I could copy the same weather information several times without anyone noticing) my mother didn’t walk around half-naked anymore, like she often did in the summer. Truth is she would put on these loud sweaters that would have been too tight on a fakir, but that was the way she liked to dress and I had to let her even though I didn’t like it. She kept going out at night, and when she came back would go to bed without coming to my room. I would get up late and go to the paper at ten in the morning and wouldn’t come back until ten at night, and sometimes not even then. I remember the fight over the gin happened on April twenty-third because the next day I turned eighteen. I asked for an advance from the management and went to eat a steak. I barely touched the food, but I drank a liter of wine. I wasn’t angry or anything, just wanted to drink some wine, for the fun of drinking it and for the comfort of knowing that I could always have my cup full, to empty in one swallow, and if the bottle kicked I could call the waiter and ask for another from the long rows stacked up on the walls—all that made me feel amazingly good. Then I hesitated between the movies and a hooker and chose the hooker. I didn’t have to wait or anything. They showed me through an entrance where there wasn’t anything but a wooden bench and a standing coat rack, then down a corridor, and finally they put me in a kitchen with two women in it. Both were blonde. They were drinking mate and didn’t even get up. One had a comic book in her hands. I picked the other one. They were so alike (both had on black pants and a white sweater) that now I’m not sure if in fact I went to bed with the one with the comic book or the other one because they might have passed the comic book from one to the other without me noticing, or the one with the comic could have left it on the table as I came in and the other one grabbed it before I noticed. In any case, my selection wasn’t so precise, since I only made a gesture with my head in the direction of the one I thought didn’t have the comic book, and I’m not even sure anymore which one of them got up first. The one who led me away—the one with the comic, or the other one, I’m not sure anymore—took me through a courtyard into a room filled with what I remember as the odor of Creolin, and which was so clean and organized that immediately I thought of my mother’s, by contrast. When she got naked I saw she had the mark of an operation on her belly, a half-moon scar, crisscrossed by the lines from the stitches. I went to bed with her and then went home to sleep.

      Tomatis came back the morning of the thirtieth, euphoric, smoking North American cigarettes. He walked into the office with energetic steps and sat down in front of the typewriter. He looked freshly washed and shaved. I told him I had problems with my mother and wanted to talk to him.

      —Come have dinner at my house tonight. Bring wine, he said, and started working.

      Then I left for the courthouse. A light rain was falling, so that day I sent the same weather report to the print shop as the day before. The gray courthouse seemed more gray in the rain, but a shining gray. The wide, marble stairs in the lobby were dirty with wet mud. They had scattered sawdust on the floor of the entryway, which was full of people. I passed through the law school and then saw Chino Ramírez, from the press office. Ramírez poured me a coffee that looked like it was brewed from the mud in the lobby. Instead of teeth Ramírez had two tiny, brown sierras. I don’t know what disease could have rotted them so badly. He stopped himself laughing to hide them.

      —Your judge friend wants to see you, he said. He asked for you.

      —I haven’t killed anyone, I said.

      —You never know, said Ramírez.

      —I guess that’s true, I said. I gestured toward the coffee and, standing up, said:

      —Keep an eye on your staff, Ramírez. They’re confused and are serving us the prisoners’ coffee.

      He would have laughed more, had his teeth allowed. СКАЧАТЬ