Martín looked at him, misty-eyed with admiration. And Bruno thought to himself: “Well, in the final analysis, aren’t we all in the midst of a sort of war? And don’t I belong to a little platoon? And in a certain way isn’t Martín someone whose sleep I watch over and whose anxieties I try to calm and whose hopes I shield and shelter like a little flame in the midst of a raging storm?”
And immediately he felt abashed.
So he told a joke.
17
He waited for Alejandra’s call all day Monday, but none came. On Tuesday he impatiently phoned her at the boutique. It seemed to him that her voice sounded harsh, but it might have been because she was busy. When Martín pressed her, she said she’d meet him at the bar on the corner of Charcas and Esmeralda and have coffee with him.
Martín rushed to the bar and found her already there waiting for him, sitting smoking and looking out toward the street. Their conversation was brief because she had to go back to work right away. Martín told her he’d like to see her when she wasn’t in a hurry, for a whole afternoon.
“That’s impossible for me, Martín.”
On seeing the look in his eyes, she began to tap on the table with her cigarette holder and appeared to be thinking things over and calculating, frowning and with a worried expression on her face.
“I’m really sick these days,” she finally said.
“What’s the matter?”
“What isn’t the matter would be a better question.”
Terrible dreams, headaches (the pain began in the back of her neck and then spread to her entire body), dazzling lights before her eyes.
“And as though that weren’t enough, there are the church bells. The whole thing’s part hospital and part church, as you can see.”
“So that’s the reason you can’t spend time with me,” Martín commented with a slight edge of sarcasm in his voice.
“No, I’m not saying that. But everything’s connected, do you know what I mean?”
“Everything’s connected,” Martín repeated to himself, knowing that this “everything” included what was torturing her the most.
“So it’s impossible for you to see me?”
Alejandra’s gaze met his for a moment, but then she lowered her eyes and began tapping on the table with the cigarette holder again.
“Well, all right then,” she finally said. “We’ll see each other tomorrow afternoon.”
“For how long?” Martín asked eagerly.
“All afternoon, if you like,” Alejandra answered, without looking up, continuing to tap on the table with her cigarette holder.
Then raising her eyes and seeing that Martín’s were shining, she added:
“But only on one condition, Martín.”
The light in Martín’s eyes suddenly went dead.
18
The next day the sun was shining as it had that Monday, but there was a strong wind blowing and there was a lot of dirt in the air. So everything was similar yet nothing was the same, as though the favorable conjunction of the stars that other day had already degenerated into a far less auspicious one, Martín feared. The agreement they had made conferred a melancholy peace upon this next afternoon together; they had a quiet conversation like two good friends. But for that very reason this meeting seemed a sad one to Martín. And perhaps without being fully aware of the fact (Bruno thought), he couldn’t seem to find the right moment for going down to the river and sitting down on the same bench again, as one tries to make an event happen again by repeating the magic formulas that brought it about the first time; moreover he had no way of knowing, of course, to what degree that Monday, which had seemed perfect to him, had been a time of silent anxiety for Alejandra; so that the same things that for him would constitute a cause for happiness if they were repeated would be a cause of uneasiness for her; not to mention the fact that it is always a bit depressing to return to places that have been witnesses of a perfect moment.
But finally they went down to the river and sat down on the same bench as before.
For a long time they said nothing, amid a sort of serenity. A serenity that for Martín, after his naive hope in the restaurant they had gone to, became increasingly tinged with melancholy, since this peace existed precisely by reason of the condition that Alejandra had imposed. And as far as she was concerned (Bruno thought), that serenity was simply a sort of parenthesis, as precarious, as insubstantial as the one that a victim of cancer manages to secure for himself with an injection of morphine.
They watched the ships, the clouds.
They also watched the ants, toiling away with their characteristic hurried and persistent seriousness.
“Just look how busily they’re producing,” Alejandra commented. “Second Five-Year Plan.”
Her eyes followed one of them that was feeling its way along, staggering beneath a load that in proportion to its size was as enormous as an automobile would be for a man.
As she followed the little creature’s progress, she asked:
“Do you know what Juancito Duarte said to Zubiza when Zubiza arrived in Hell?”
Yes, he knew that one.
“And the one about Perón in Hell?”
No, he hadn’t heard that one yet.
They also told each other the latest jokes about Aloé.
Then Alejandra returned to the subject of ants.
“Do you remember Mark Twain’s story about ants?”
“No.”
“Some ants take it upon themselves to transport a lobster claw all the way back to their nest, thus proving they’re the stupidest creatures under the sun. It’s quite a funny story: a sort of refreshing bath after all the exaggerated sentimentality about insects we’ve had from Maeterlinck and company. Doesn’t that seem to you like the height of stupidity?”
“I never thought about it.”
“But chickens are worse. One afternoon at Juan Carlos’s country place I spent hours trying to train them to have a conditioned reflex, using a stick and some feed. The Pavlov technique, see? But I got absolutely nowhere. I would have liked to see Pavlov trying to work with chickens. They’re so dumb you end up being furious with them. Doesn’t stupidity make you furious?”
“I don’t know, it depends. Maybe if it’s a question both of stupidity and of sheer boring persistence.”
“No, no,” she said heatedly. “I mean pure and simple, out-and-out stupidity.”
Martín looked at her in bewilderment.
“I don’t think so. It would be like getting furious at a stone, it seems to me.”
“It’s not the same! A chicken isn’t a stone: it moves, it eats, it acts purposefully.”
“I don’t know,” Martín said, puzzled by her train of thought. “I don’t quite understand why that should make me furious.”
They fell silent again, for different reasons perhaps—Martín with the impression that there would always be feelings and ideas of hers that he would never be able to understand; and she (Martín thought) with a certain contempt for his obtuseness. Or what was worse, with some feeling that he for his part could not even guess at.
Alejandra looked around for her purse, fished out an address book, and took a photograph out of it.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
It was a snapshot of her on the Barracas terrace, leaning over the balustrade. In it she had that unfathomable expression of profound, anxious desire, that hope of something escaping all definition that had so overwhelmed him when he had first met her.
“Do you like it?” she asked him again. “It’s from those days.”
Martín recognized the blouse and skirt. How long ago it all seemed! But why was she showing him this photograph now?
But she said again insistently:
“Do you like it or don’t you?”
“Of course, why wouldn’t I like it? Who took it?”
“Somebody you don’t know.”
A black cloud suddenly darkened the gloomy but calm sky.
&nbs
p; He took the photo and examined it with mixed feelings, then asked timidly:
“May I keep it?”
“I brought it to give to you. If you liked it, that is.”
Martín was touched, and at the same time he felt sad: it seemed to be some sort of farewell gesture on her part. He said something to that effect, but she didn’t answer; she sat there watching the ants as Martín tried to read the expression on her face.
Disheartened, he bent his head and his eyes fell on Alejandra’s hand lying on the bench alongside him, still holding the open address book: he could see a folded airmail envelope inside it. The addresses she noted down in that little book, the letters she received—for Martín all these things constituted a world from which he was painfully excluded.
And even though he always halted at the very edge of that world, sometimes an unfortunate question escaped him despite himself. This time too.
“It’s a letter from Juan Carlos,” Alejandra replied.
“And what does that bird-brain have to say?” Martín asked bitterly.
“The same nonsense as usual, as you can imagine.”
“What for instance?”
“What do you suppose Juan Carlos talks about in a letter, whether or not it comes by airmail? You there, Del Castillo, answer teacher’s question.”
She smiled at him, but Martín, with a seriousness that (he was certain) must have seemed absurd to her, replied:
“The girls he’s flirting with?”
“Very good, my boy. You get a grade of ninety. And the only reason I’m not going to give you a hundred is that you put it in the form of a question instead of stating it as a fact. Hundreds, thousands of very tall, very stupid Danish girls with soft blonde hair that he’s been flirting with. In a word, the sort who have him falling at their feet every time. All of them with deep tans because they’re fiends for open-air sports, for canoe trips millions of miles long, in fraternal camaraderie with boys who are as blond, as tan, and as tall as they are. And lots of practical jokes: he adores them.”
“Show me the stamp,” Martín said.
He still had the same passion for stamps from distant lands as in his childhood. As he reached for the letter, it seemed to him that Alejandra moved her hand, unconsciously perhaps, so as to keep the letter from him. Upset by this little gesture, Martín pretended to be examining the stamp.
As he handed the letter back to her, he looked at her intently and he had the impression that she was suddenly ill at ease.
“This isn’t from Juan Carlos,” he ventured.
“Of course it’s from Juan Carlos. Can’t you see the fourth-grade handwriting on the envelope?”
Martín fell silent, his usual reaction when such a situation arose and he was once again unable to get any farther inside that region of her soul that was dark and troubled.
He picked up a little stick and began to scratch in the dirt.
“Don’t be silly, Martín. Don’t ruin this day by talking nonsense.”
“You tried to keep me from seeing the letter,” Martín commented, continuing to scratch about in the dirt with the little stick.
There was a silence.
“You see? I was right,” he said.
“Yes, you’re right, Martín,” she admitted. “It’s because he says things about you in it that aren’t complimentary.”
“So what?” he replied, in a seemingly indifferent tone of voice. “I wasn’t going to read it anyway.”
“No, of course not …. But it seemed to me to be a tactless thing to do to just hand it to you when you had no idea what was in it …. Yes, now that I think of it, I realize that was the reason why I did that.”
Martín raised his eyes and looked at her.
“And why does he say uncomplimentary things about me?”
“It’s not even worth talking about. It would only hurt your feelings. Unnecessarily.”
“And what does he think he knows about me anyway, the idiot? He’s never even laid eyes on me!”
“Martín, it must surely have occurred to you that I’ve told him things about you now and again.”
“You said things about me, about us, to that cretin?”
“But talking to Juan Carlos is like not talking to anybody at all, Martín. It’s like talking to a blank wall. I haven’t said a word to anybody, do you understand? Talking to him is like talking to a blank wall, I tell you.”
“No, I don’t understand, Alejandra. Why him? I’d like you to tell me or read me what he has to say about me.”
“But if it’s just some of Juan Carlos’s typical blather, what’s the point?”
She handed him the letter.
“I’ve warned you your feelings are going to be hurt,” she said spitefully.
“It doesn’t matter,” Martín answered, snatching the letter eagerly, nervously, as she moved over closer to him, as one does when one is going to read something along with another person.
Martín surmised that she wanted to soften the impact of the letter, phrase by phrase, and said as much to Bruno. And Bruno thought that Alejandra’s attitude was as absurd as the one that causes us to devote all our attention to the maneuvers of someone who is doing a bad job of driving the car in which we’re passengers.
Martín was about to take the letter out of the envelope when he suddenly realized that by so doing he might well destroy the very few fragile remains of Alejandra’s love. His hand fell dispiritedly, still holding the envelope, and remained in that position for a time, and then he finally handed it back to her and she put it away again.
“So you confide in a cretin like that,” he commented, though with a certain vague awareness that he was doing her an injustice, for Alejandra would never be capable—and this he was certain of—of “confiding” in such an individual. Her feeling for him might be either something more or something less than that, but she would never confide in him.
He felt a need to hurt her, and knew, or sensed, that the words he had just uttered would hurt her.
“Don’t say such absurd things! I told you: talking to him is like talking with a horse. Don’t you understand? It’s true, I admit: I shouldn’t have said anything at all to him. You’re right about that. But I was drunk at the time.”
“Drunk with him” (Martín thought, more bitter still now).
“It’s like showing a horse a photograph of a beautiful landscape,” she added after a moment, her tone of voice already less severe.
Martín felt that a great happiness was doing its best to pierce dense storm clouds: in any event, the expression “beautiful landscape” reached his tormented soul like a message bathed in light. But this message had to force its way through those dense clouds, and above all through those words “I was drunk.”
“Do you hear me?”
Martín nodded.
“Look, Martín,” he heard her suddenly saying. “I’m going to leave you, but you must never allow yourself to have mistaken ideas about our relationship.”
Martín looked at her in consternation.
“Yes. This can’t go on, Martín, for lots of reasons. And it will be better for you this way, much better.”
Martín could not manage to get a single word out. His eyes filled with tears and he began to look straight in front of him off into the distance so that she wouldn’t notice: as in an impressionist painting, all he could see was the blurred image of a boat with a brown hull some way away, and some white seagulls wheeling about it.
“You’re going to start thinking now that I don’t love you, that I never loved you,” Alejandra said.
Martín’s eyes followed the boat, as though fascinated by its movement.
“And yet …” Alejandra added.
Martín bent his head and looked at the ants again: one of them was carrying a big triangular leaf that looked like the sail of a miniature boat: the wind was making it flutter and the slight movement back and forth accentuated the resemblance.
He felt Alejandra’s hand cupping his chin
.
“Come on,” she said to him briskly. “Lift that face up.”
But Martín stubbornly resisted the pressure of her hand.
“No, Alejandra, leave me alone now. I want you to go away and leave me alone.”
“Don’t be silly, Martín. I curse the moment you laid eyes on that stupid letter.”
“And I curse the moment I first met you. It was the most unfortunate moment of my life.”
He heard Alejandra’s voice asking:
“Do you really believe that?”
“Yes.”
She fell silent. After a time she got up from the bench and said:
“Let’s at least walk for a while together.”
Martín rose to his feet with an effort and started off after her. Alejandra waited for him to catch up with her, took him by the arm, and said:
“Martín, I’ve told you more than once that I love you, that I love you lots. Don’t forget that. And I never tell you anything I don’t really believe.”
A gray peace slowly descended upon Martín’s soul with these words. But how much better the storminess of the worst moments with her was than this calm, hopeless, dull gray!
They walked along, each lost in his own thoughts.
When they reached the confectioner’s shop on the bathing beach, Alejandra said she had to make a phone call.
Everything in the place had that desolate air about it that pleasure spots always had for him on weekdays: the tables were piled one atop the other, and the chairs too; a waiter in shirtsleeves and with his pantlegs rolled up, was mopping the floor. As Alejandra made her call, Martín asked for a coffee at the counter, but was told that the machine wasn’t turned on.