The One Before. Juan José Saer

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СКАЧАТЬ up. One day when there was a protest we decided not to go to work and followed the bulletins on a transistor radio, arguing over them. We remember distinctly how we would get worked up, especially over a new guy, a young man whom we didn’t much like because his yellow teeth had half rotted away, and how one day, all of a sudden, he disappeared without giving the least notice or saying goodbye to any of his friends. Now we don’t even remember his name. Next year, if all goes well, we’ll go to Brazil or to Punta del Este in Uruguay. When we are melancholy we take the car and drive alone in circles around the city—if we can, we even like to go out past the checkpoint and get into the countryside, and once we got all the way to Esperanza. It was a summer night and people were sitting on the sidewalks drinking beer in the bars spread out around the plaza. Coming home we saw how the moon bleached the endless, motionless fields of wheat so that they looked almost metallic. We sleep well and never dream. In another time, before we got married, we used to suffer bouts of insomnia and we would watch the green and red lines of a neon sign slip through the intermittent cracks in the blinds and project onto the white bedroom walls. Other than that, we’ve never had problems with our health, thank God, either because we don’t smoke or just by chance, and we’ve managed to keep ourselves safe from the terrible things that happen to other people. When our wife is pregnant, we entertain ourselves, in the last month, by putting our ear against her belly to hear what is moving inside, the movement of the child that is beginning to prepare to break away and fall into this multiple marvel, the world. Instinctively we close our eyes, throbbing, terrified, because it seems that from one moment to the next we can hear, clearly, the roar of that terrible crash.

Hands and Planets

      Barco’s familiar and skillful fingers unscrewed the chrome top of the saltshaker, dumped the salt onto the tablecloth and then, under Tomatis’ tranquil but astonished gaze, began to scatter it, his fingertips pressing onto the grains and turning slowly to fully spread out that little white mountain on the blue cloth. Barco’s fingertips had an extraordinarily peculiar shape: they were oval and tapered—they looked like the classical representation of a teardrop. In the whole world there couldn’t have been another pair of hands with fingertips like that, and Tomatis would have recognized them immediately from anywhere.

      “Probably,” said Barco, “in many of these grains of salt there are Ancient Greeces where Heraclitus is thinking that the events of the world are the product of a game of dice played by children.”

      “Probably,” said Tomatis.

      “Last night on television I saw the latest mission to the moon,” said Barco. “No one cares about those missions to the moon anymore. The whole world is convinced that the moon is already a thing of the past, and that science fiction is becoming an anachronism. Fiction can’t keep up with science anymore. Probably, in fifty years everyone will be a scientist, the way that nowadays everybody drives a car.”

      “Probably,” said Tomatis, without taking his eyes off of Barco’s fingers, which were now resting on the scattered salt and remained motionless.

      “Something strange happened,” Barco said. “Everything was going fine when they were showing the inside of the spaceship and the crew working on the screen. But suddenly they began showing pictures of the Earth as it got farther and farther away, getting smaller every minute, and then everyone watching the television in the bar stopped what they were doing, or started to sit up slowly in their chairs, or to strain their necks, all this trying to keep the Earth closer, contorting themselves to help the Earth stop in its tracks, like when you’re bowling and you twist yourself around so that the ball will follow the imaginary path you’ve laid out for it, you know? We all tried to get this obscene distancing to stop, so that the Earth wouldn’t be erased and disappear forever. I was frozen stiff. And when the voice of the narrator announced that the astronauts could still make out Mexico, we all felt a moment of relief and for a moment we all felt as if we were Mexican: Mexico was the final crest, the highest, mounted by the wave of nothingness that pushed up from behind, the wave of nothingness that, when we could no longer make out Mexico, flooded everything and left it smoother and more uniform than this wall here. Then we all felt sad and confused, a bit frightened, and I don’t think we felt any better when the program about the mission to the moon ended and they cut to the live game at Chacarita Stadium. I’m convinced that last night we broke the identity barrier. Breaking the speed of light or the sound barrier is nothing compared to breaking the barrier of identity. We kept on being erased, until we totally disappeared. We thought that things would stop at some point before they got out of hand, at some point from which we could still make out Mexico, for example, but no, nothing like that, we totally disappeared. And I felt something even more vertiginous: sitting in the chair at the bar, the screen showed me how the Earth had been shrinking, that is, I, the chair, the bar, the screen and the earth on the screen, shrinking, how we were being squeezed by the fist of the cosmos that closed upon us, vertiginously, macerating our bodies and turning them into hardened lava. And I felt it so intensely that I closed my eyes and waited for the walls of the bar to start closing in, subtly, molding the four into a single wall with us inside, in an inconceivable contraction, until the whole Earth had shrunken to the size of little dice with which little children would play out the destiny of the world. Probably, these grilled fish the waiter is bringing are ours.”

      “Probably,” said Tomatis, seeing Barco’s familiar fingertips press into the salt and then lift to his thick lips, fingertips that, like no others in the world—and now also because of their flavor—made him think of the solid form of tears.

The Mourner

      One rainy morning in November I slept in until after it was light. The murmur of the water was audible, both complex and monotonous—that’s been said so many times of water! Greenish light came into the room through the blinds. I lay in bed with my eyes open, staring at the semidarkness that was growing ever weaker, but that gathered against the ceiling. The dream I’d just had remained in my mind, persistent, a dream in which I had seen my uncle Pedro, my mother’s brother, who worked for a long time in the factory and then afterward struck out on his own and opened a bakery. My uncle had died the month before. In the dream he seemed to be mourning his own death.

      Dreams scare me, and sleep even more so. Am I afraid of what I dream or am I simply afraid of dreaming? I was sad that morning, thinking about my uncle Pedro who ended up dying just as his bakery was starting to do all right, but then, fortunately, curiosity overcame my sadness and I began to meditate on the meaning of the dream until almost nine. All this time it rained without stopping, and the noise of the rain lulled me almost to sleep, so that now I’m not sure whether at times I didn’t dream up the meaning of what I had dreamed. A female friend of mine, a school teacher who later married a professor of mathematics and moved to Peru, told me that she had always dreamed of mourning over her own coffin. That she saw herself dead and mourned. Do we always mourn for ourselves when we mourn in dreams? Only the mourner knows that. Looking into this fount of tears is a difficult task, and curiosity’s quiet gaze cannot see so deep. To see that pain, we have to be inside it. But what is even more surprising is that he who mourns himself, the one who sees his cadaver or offers condolences to himself over his own death, stands at such a singular point in the great plain of pain that his cry is at the same time a memory and an anticipation. In the great plains the horizon is always a circle, identical, empty and monotonous.

Regarding Autumn Siestas

      The sun in April doesn’t sink, it slims. We go out walking after dinner, avoiding the cold shade and stopping every once in a while to look at a yellowing frond, the ornamentation on a façade. We argue over sex and politics. For me, they are siestas full of statues and delicate sun; after several blocks, my temples begin to throb. We pass through the Plaza de СКАЧАТЬ