“Examples:
“ ‘What a Crashing Bore of a novel!’
“ ‘Look, I’m sorry, but what I have to tell you is going to be a Crashing Bore.’
“ ‘So-and-so’s paintings are a Crashing Bore.’
“ ‘What a Crashing Bore that there’s riff-raff (meaning Peronistas) even on the Calle Santa Fe these days.’
“Examples of Real Class:
“ ‘Monique’s latest story in La Nación has Real Class.’
“ ‘That film with Michèle Morgan—now there’s Real Class for you.’
“The world is divided between what’s a Crashing Bore and what’s Real Class. The Eternal and Never-Ending Struggle between these two powers is responsible for all the world’s ups and downs. When Crashing Bores predominate, everything’s unbearable: hideous fashions, complicated theological novels, lectures by Alberto Larretafn4 at Amigos del Libro that One simply has to go to because otherwise poor little Albertito’s feelings will be hurt, visitors who arrive at impossible hours, rich relatives who refuse to kick the bucket (‘What a Crashing Bore Marcelo is, he’s going to live forever—and with all those acres and acres of land he’s got!’). But when Real Class predominates, things get quite amusing (another word that’s part of Zaza’s basic vocabulary) or at least bearable: a youngster who’s decided he wants to write, for instance, though for all that he hasn’t given up playing polo; a colonel who has no intention of wooing the masses.fn5 But things aren’t always that clear-cut, because, as I said, there’s a perennial struggle between the two forces, so that sometimes reality is more complicated and suddenly Larreta turns out to have actually told a joke during his latest lecture (thanks to the mysterious influence of Real Class), or else the opposite can happen, as with Wanda, who’s got Real Class as a fashion designer, though when she takes it into her head to imitate Seventh-Avenue clown costumes straight from New York, it’s a Crashing Bore. In a word, the world used to be rather amusing, but lately, what with the Peronistas and their street demonstrations, one has to admit that it’s become more or less an absolutely Crashing Bore. That’s my cousin Zaza’s philosophy anyway. As you can see, it’s a sort of cross between Anaximander, Schiaparelli, and Porfirio Rubirosa.”
At that moment the voices of Wanda and the customer could be heard as they came down from the fitting room. They entered the boutique, followed by Alejandra a moment or so later. She seemed not at all surprised to see Martín there, but since he knew her so well, this very impassivity was a sure sign that she was taking great pains to conceal her enormous irritation. In that absurd milieu, answering his greeting with the same superficial cordiality with which she might have greeted a mere casual acquaintance, without bothering to step aside for a second to explain why she hadn’t shown up at the bar as they’d arranged, with that frivolous air that she affected in the presence of Wanda and Bobby, Alejandra appeared to belong to a race that did not speak the same language as Martín and would perhaps not even be able to understand the other Alejandra.
The customer kept up a steady stream of conversation with Wanda on the subject of the urgent necessity of killing Perón and his followers.
“Those Peronistas are scum. All that riff-raff ought to be killed,” she said. “It’s getting so we decent people can’t even walk down the streets any more.”
A succession of confused and contradictory sentiments made Martín feel even more depressed.
“Communism is just around the corner, I tell you,” the woman went on, after exchanging kisses on the cheek with Bobby. “But I’ve got everything all planned: if the country turns Communist, I’ll simply go out to my estancia and that’ll be the end of that.”
And as she absent-mindedly acknowledged Martín’s polite greeting when Alejandra introduced him to her, Bobby looked over her shoulder at Alejandra with a wicked grin, for as he said later: “How could anybody possibly invent a phrase like that?”
Martín looked at Alejandra, struggling to keep his expression as impassive as possible, but on his face, as though independent of his will, there gradually appeared the inevitable signs of reproach, pain, and questioning that always displeased her so.
20
Martin kept waiting for a sign from Alejandra, for her to call him aside. Then, risking everything, he went over to her and asked her if they could leave the shop together for a moment. “All right,” she answered. And turning to Wanda, she said to her:
“I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“A few minutes,” Martín thought.
They walked down Charcas to the bar on the corner of Esmeralda.
“I waited for you for an hour and a half,” Martín said to her.
“A rush job came up that I couldn’t leave and there was no way to get word to you.”
Foreseeing catastrophe, Martín did his best to change at least the tone of his voice, to take things more calmly, to be indifferent. But that proved impossible.
“You seem altogether different when you’re with those people. I can’t understand why …” He fell silent and then went on: “I think you really are an entirely different person with them.”
Alejandra didn’t answer.
“Isn’t that so?”
“Perhaps.”
“Alejandra,” Martín said. “When are you your real self, when?”
“I try to be my real self all the time, Martín.”
“But how can you forget moments like the ones we’ve had together?”
She turned away indignantly:
“And who says I’ve forgotten them!”
Then after a moment’s silence she said:
“It’s for that very reason—because I don’t want to drive you out of your mind—that I’d rather not see you any more.”
She was grim-faced, silent, evasive. And then suddenly she said:
“I don’t want us to have any more moments like that together.”
And with biting sarcasm she added:
“Those famous perfect moments.”
Martín looked at her in despair; not only because of what she was saying but because of her withering tone of voice.
“You’re probably wondering why I’m saying such bitter things to you, why I’m making you suffer this way, isn’t that so?”
Martín began to stare at a little brown spot on the dirty pink tablecloth.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know why,” she went on. “And I don’t know why I don’t want to have even one more of those famous moments with you either. Listen, Martín: all this has to end once and for all. It’s just not working out. And the most honest thing to do is not to see each other at all.”
Martín’s eyes had filled with tears.
“If you leave me, I’ll kill myself,” he said.
Alejandra looked at him gravely. And then, with an odd mixture of severity and melancholy in her voice, she said:
“I can’t help that, Martín.”
“Don’t you care if I kill myself?”
“Of course. How can you possibly think I wouldn’t care?”
“And yet you’d do nothing to prevent it.”
“What could I do to prevent it?”
“In other words it would be all the same to you whether I killed myself or went on living.”
“I didn’t say that. No, it wouldn’t be all the same to me. It would be awful for me if you killed yourself.”
“Would it matter to you very much?”
“A whole lot.”
“Well then?”
He looked at her anxiously and intently, as one looks at someone in imminent danger, searching for the slightest sign that that person will be saved. “This can’t be,” he thought. “Someone who has experienced the things she has with me, only a few weeks ago, can’t really mean all that.”
“So then?”
“So then, what?”
“I’m telling you I may very well kill myself straightway, by jumping under a train in Retiro station, or in the subway. Would you care at all?”
>
“I’ve already told you I’d care a lot. I’d suffer terribly.”
“But you’d go on living.”
She didn’t answer: she stirred what was left of her coffee, staring at the bottom of the cup.
“So everything we’ve had together these last few months is nothing but garbage that ought to be thrown out into the street!”
“Nobody said that!” she almost shouted.
Martín fell silent, confused and heartsick. And then he said:
“I don’t understand you, Alejandra. I’ve never understood you, really. These things you’re saying, these things you’re doing to me, change everything that’s happened between us.”
He tried desperately to think clearly.
Alejandra sat there glumly, not even listening perhaps. Her eyes were fixed on some point or other out in the street.
“Well then?” Martín said again insistently.
“It makes no difference,” she replied drily. “We won’t see each other any more. That’s the most honest thing to do.”
“Alejandra! I can’t bear the idea of not seeing you any more. I want to see you, I don’t care when or where or how, whatever way you like …”
She said nothing in reply and began to cry then, though her face was still set in the same rigid, seemingly vacant expression as before.
“Well, Alejandra?”
“No, Martín. I can’t stand things that are neither one thing nor another. Either there’ll be other scenes like this one, that hurt you so much, or we’ll meet and things will end up the way they did last Monday. And I don’t want to—do you hear me?—I don’t want to go to bed with you again. Not for anything in this world.”
“But why?” Martín exclaimed, taking her by the hand, feeling in an overwhelming rush of emotion that something, something very important, still existed between the two of them, despite everything.
“Because I don’t!” she shouted, looking at him with hatred in her eyes and wrenching her hand away from his.
“I don’t understand you ….” Martín stammered. “I’ve never understood you …”
“Never mind. I don’t understand myself either. I don’t even know why I’m doing all this to you. I don’t know why I’m making you suffer this way.”
And burying her face in her hands, she exclaimed:
“How awful all this is!”
And covering her face with both hands she began to weep hysterically, repeating between sobs: “How awful, how awful!”
During their entire relationship, Martín had rarely seen her cry, and it had always affected him deeply. He found it almost terrifying, as though a mortally wounded dragon were shedding tears. But those tears were frightening (as he supposed a dragon’s would be); they were not a sign of weakness nor of a need for tenderness: they seemed, rather, like bitter drops of liquid rancor, spilling over boiling hot and all-consuming.
Martín nonetheless dared to take her hands, trying to pull them away, tenderly but firmly, so that he could see her face.
“How you’re suffering, Alejandra!”
“And despite everything you can still feel pity for me,” she stammered from beneath her hands, in a tone of voice that as far as he could tell could be an expression of rage, scorn, sarcasm, or heartfelt sadness, or of all these feelings at once.
“Yes, Alejandra, of course I pity you. Don’t you think I can see that you’re suffering terribly? And I don’t want you to suffer. I swear to you that this will never happen again.”
She calmed down little by little and finally dried her tears with her handkerchief.
“No, Martín,” she said. “It’s better if we don’t ever see each other again. Because sooner or later we would have to separate in a way that would be even more painful. I can’t control the horrible things I have inside me.”
She hid her face in her hands again and Martín tried once again to pull them away.
“No, Alejandra, we won’t hurt each other any more. You’ll see. It was all my fault, because I insisted on seeing you. Because I went looking for you.”
Trying his best to laugh, he added:
“It’s as though someone were to go looking for Dr. Jekyll and met up with Mr. Hyde. At night. In disguise. With Frederic March’s long fingernails. Eh, Alejandra? We’ll see each other only when you want to, when you call me. When you feel well.”
Alejandra did not answer.
Long minutes passed and Martín desperately regretted all the time that was going by to no point or purpose, knowing that she should be getting back to the boutique, that she should be leaving, that she would go off from one moment to the next and leave him in this state of total disarray. And then would come the black days far away from her, completely outside her life.
And the inevitable finally happened: she looked at her watch and said:
“I have to go now.”
“Let’s not separate this way, Alejandra. It’s awful. Let’s decide first what we’re going to do.”
“I don’t know, Martín. I just don’t know.”
“Let’s at least plan to see each other some other day, when things are less pressing. Let’s not make any final decisions when we’re in this state of mind.”
As they left the bar, Martín thought how little, how frightfully little time he still had left in the two blocks before they reached the boutique. They made their way along slowly, but even so, soon all that separated them from the boutique was fifty steps, twenty steps, ten steps, then none at all. In desperation Martín took her by the arm then and drawing her close to him he pleaded with her once again to at least see each other one more time.
Alejandra looked at him. Her gaze seemed to be coming from very far away, from a sadly inaccessible, alien region.
“Promise me that, Alejandra!” he begged with tears in his eyes.
Alejandra gave him a long, hard look.
“All right then. Tomorrow night at six, at the Adam.”
21
The hours were painfully long: as though he were climbing a mountain, the last stretches of which were well-nigh unconquerable. His feelings were complex ones, for on the one hand he felt a sort of nervous happiness at the idea of seeing her one more time, and on the other, he sensed that this meeting would be precisely that: one more time that he would be seeing her, perhaps the very last time.
Long before six o’clock, he was there in the Adam, keeping a watchful eye on the door.
Alejandra arrived sometime after six-thirty.
She was no longer the hostile Alejandra of the previous day, but on the other hand her face had that blank expression that always filled Martín with such despair.
Why had she come?
The waiter was obliged to ask her two or three times what she would like to drink. She finally ordered gin and immediately looked at her accursed watch.
“You mean you have to leave already? You’ve just gotten here,” Martín remarked, at once sadly and sarcastically.
Alejandra glanced at him with a vague look in her eye, and without noticing the sarcastic edge in his voice said no, she could stay a little while longer. Martín bent his head and stirred his drink around in his glass.
“Why did you come?” he couldn’t keep himself from asking.
Alejandra looked at him as though trying to gather her thoughts together and focus her attention on his question.
“Well, I promised I would, didn’t I?”
The minute the waiter brought her gin she drank it down in one gulp. Then she said:
“Let’s go. I’d like to get a little air.”
Once outside, Alejandra headed for the square, walked up the grassy slope, and sat down on one of the benches facing the river.
They sat there for quite some time in a silence that she finally ended by saying:
“How restful it is to hate oneself!”
Martín contemplated the Torre de los Ingleses, with its clock marking off the time going by. The Cade wharf, with its great squat smokestacks, stood out b
ehind it, and the Puerto Nuevo with its grain elevators and cranes: abstract antediluvian animals, with their steel beaks and their heads of giant birds bending down as though to peck at the ships.
Silent and depressed, he watched night descending over the city, the red lights at the top of the smokestacks and towers, the brightly lighted signs of the Parque Retiro, the streetlamps of the square beginning to gleam against the blue black sky. Meanwhile thousands of men and women streamed out of the maw of the subways and with the same daily despair entered the maw of the suburban trains. He contemplated the Kavanagh, where lights were beginning to go on in the windows. Perhaps up there too, on the thirtieth or thirty-fifth floor, a lonely man turned on a light to chase away the darkness of his little room. How many failures of two people to understand each other, as was happening to him and Alejandra, how many lonely lives there might be in that one skyscraper!
And then he heard what he had been fearing he would hear from one moment to the next:
“I have to go now.”
“Already?”
“Yes.”
They walked down the steep grassy slope together and once they had reached the bottom she said goodbye to him and began walking away. Martín followed her, keeping a few steps behind.
“Alejandra!” he shouted. (The voice was almost that of another person.)
She stopped and waited. The light from the display window of a gunsmith’s shop fell full upon her: her face was set in hard lines, her expression impenetrable. What most pained him was that bitter resentment of hers. What had he done to her? Despite himself, driven to do so by his suffering, he asked her precisely that question. She clenched her jaws even more tightly and turned her eyes toward the window of the gunsmith’s shop.