All Men Are Liars (16 page)

I told myself never to try again, although, at night, in half-waking moments, I would still string words together to the rhythm of certain melodies. What would the colonel have thought, I wonder, of that double treachery, writing instead of doing, talking instead of writing? It disgusted him that any son of his should be a poet rather than a soldier, but also that I should not have continued in the career that I myself had chosen. It would surely have disgusted him even more to know of my Judas vocation for, although he did not believe in Christ, he still regarded him as a good lad, albeit a bit off the rails.
Doubtless it was the father who convinced him that he was a god; in my view a stint in the Roman army would have done him a world of good
.

I advance like an intruder in someone else's garden, at night, in the dark, feeling my way. I imagine the owner of this garden, in the distance, at the mercy of this troubling nightmare, my suffering dreamer.
It's me,
I want to tell him,
don't be scared, whoever you are. It's only me, whoever I am. Keep sleeping, I won't hurt you, I won't do anything, good or bad. I only want to talk to you, just talk
.

Somniloquist: one who talks in his sleep (
Sopena's New Illustrated Spanish Dictionary
).

Even after I stopped writing, I continued to read the dictionary feverishly. A present from my mother.
Parallelepiped. Paremiology
(which means the study of proverbs).
Prosaic. Prostate. Prostitution.
The words flit past, daring me to catch one.
Presbytery. Presidence. Prodigious. Profound. Progeny.

I don't want to do this. That linguistic cosmography has no longer anything to do with me. I wish I could lock all those philological abortions up in a great library and set fire to it. Reduce the universe to illiterate ashes. Find something else to occupy me.

Over the white skeletons of the slaughtered dogs run words which I no longer try to follow with my eyes. Let's allow them to keep running, with their thousand feet, their fibrous wings, their antennae probing the air: there is nothing left to eat. Once, on that dump, I picked up the skull of a boy who had been thrown into a lime pit. Don't ask how. The colonel doesn't like to be asked questions. An adolescent's skull is the same size as an old man's. Like an imbecile, I said to myself:
And what about experience, accumulated memories? How do they fit into a little box like that?
Mark this, master of my nightmare: I once had feelings.

Now I understand more. Now that I have no flesh or bones, I believe that none of that is contained: it comes in and goes out through pores in the rock, like a stream, like air, like this constant cloud of sand, no beginning or end.

First recollection or last memory. Who knows. It's impossible to be sure.

Let's count them. One, two, three, twenty-five, six hundred thousand memories.

The army of letters is joined now by figures. An alphabet of numbers.

Everything is in code.

I feel exhausted.

I know that the true invasion has yet to begin.

Perhaps it will never begin.

The nights before are always the most frightening.

I carry on. I continue.

A writer denounces reality as he sees it.

Imagination filters it.

Inspiration feeds it.

But he has to know when to stop.

To know when what is written is shameful, as I knew my writing to be.

Not this.

Throw it out.

Scratch it out, tear it up.

Then, what remains?

I don't mean this as an excuse, let me make that clear. To give another use to the words. To tell what others do. Because every chronicle is also a file.

My father used to say that the army's strength is in its secrets. Yes, Colonel, sir. I'll tell you about it. This is what I saw. This is what I heard. Tom said this to Dick. Harry's lying: I heard him saying this thing and that thing. The difference between gossip and betrayal is the seriousness with which one operates. A gossipmonger writes novels; I drafted reports. Which is the more honorable craft?

Onward.

Buenos Aires devours everything. For a poor boy from the south, it was like a giant chessboard, with massive, granite pieces, full of sinister nooks, obscene crannies. I went there. I took a room on the third floor of a house on Calle Alsina, friendly landlady, doling out maté and cake. In the neighboring rooms, young couples from the north, El Chaco and Córdoba, bank employees, two single sisters. In the morning, at lunchtime, and in the evening, the barrio filled with youngsters on their way to and from school. At thirtysomething, I'm old now and working for Belem Importers. Now and then, I jot down some verse I've composed, to rid myself of it, to get it off my chest.

I was solitary. Anyone who's had too many brothers and sisters quickly gets used to having none. It was easy, at that time, to put on masks. Nothing had any substance, nothing seemed real. Not even our merchandise, not even the bread or the wine. In the shops no one bothered putting price tags on anything anymore.
This morning it cost ten thousand pesos, this afternoon fifteen thousand.
You had to spend your monthly salary in the first week, or lose half its worth.

I receive a letter from my father.
Things are hard. If you need work, go and see my friend Colonel Chartier, my brother- in-arms. I'll let him know you'll be going to see him. Look your best, get a haircut.

It's true that I didn't know how much longer I would last in that job. What job?
Keep putting on zeros—nothing really has a price anymore.
It was impossible to import anything, or to export anything either.
It's not even worth sending them a bill: translate it into dollars and you'll see that we're the debtors here.
Señor Belem's children moved to São Paulo.
I'll close the shop the day I die,
said the old Belem, as wrinkled as a prune.
You've got a job here until then.
My mother, meanwhile, a prisoner of her own misery, wrote to tell me that nothing at home had changed.

Now I'm struggling to breathe. The invisible sand enters my mouth and nose, filling my lungs, transforming itself. Sand into air, air into blood, blood into mud. Everything is dragging me back. I'm at the beginning again. In fog again, and darkness. Once more, I advance.

That's how it was.

One afternoon, coming out of the Lorraine Cinema, I bumped into a girl with straight, black hair, a smooth brow, very white. We started talking about something or other and she invited me to go for a drink. I've never found it easy dealing with women. I can still hear my father's advice:
The world is divided like this: first, dogs; second, comrades; third, friends; fourth, personal stuff; fifth, women.

I saw out my adolescence as a virgin. My first encounter was at twenty, with the older sister of a classmate, in Río Gallegos. Liliana Fresno. One night, waiting for my friend on the sofa of their house, Liliana started playing around with me. She sat down beside me, unbuttoned my shirt, then took me to her room. I thought:
There it is, that's it, that's enough.

At the insurance company there was a girl, Mirta, who used to smile at me. I wrote her a poem. One afternoon, I saw that she and her friends were laughing and looking at me. I realized that I had been foolish, that my verses had amused her. I didn't speak to her anymore after that. I saw her, years later, in Buenos Aires. I pretended not to recognize her.

The girl at the Lorraine laughed a lot, but she didn't mock me. She would have seen me, I suppose, as an older man, given that she was twenty-eight and I was thirty-five. In those days, thirty-five was a considerable age. Now I could be twice as old and still be younger than I was then.

The girl asked me what I was reading. I was carrying the banned anthology in my pocket. I showed it to her. She laughed again.
Go on, read me something
. I don't remember what I read her, but I was pleased to let her hear my voice, watching her furtively as my eyes followed the verses on the page.
I'd like you to read to me in bed
. I looked at her as if I had not understood.
I'd like to go to sleep with you reading to me
. I paid for the coffees and we left.

Now, in the red mist, I bump into great sheets of paper which are hanging in the wind, as though from a washing line. Dry, rough paper, of the type used in books published by Austral, which absorbed the ink so badly. They don't tear as I advance; they are impervious to my weight: only light and time age them. It's not that I feel them (I feel nothing), but I know that they are hanging here, as though to obstruct my path. Something is printed on them, but I don't know what. I see nothing, hear nothing.

I don't like reading,
her voice says to me,
but I like being read to. Any old thing. Even the phone book, if you want. I like watching your lips move, I like the color of your tongue.

More names. More words. More verses by Castilla.

 

I am growing from you

I am a new leaf, barely touched by the breeze,

I am that summer . . .

 

I can make out letters on the sheets as though on a blurred letter chart at the optician's. I recite with the book open on the bed, the girl beside me, caressing her own breasts to the rhythm of my voice.

 

I am that summer that feels its breast

heavy with fruits

and which falls upon you, making you fertile.

 

Somehow I kept on reading, and later I asked if I could see her again.
I'm with someone,
she said.
But we'll probably run into each other again.
And she handed over my clothes.

I don't know if it's different for someone who's used to surprises. But for me, whose life had until then been a predictable series of more or less sensible events, to fall in love was an intrusion of the impossible. Until then, I could explain everything. Every fact had its cause, every decision its consequence. My world was logical and coherent, as formal as a sonnet, or at least my sonnets, in which the final verse contrived to be surprising, and therefore never was. “Here it comes,” my quartets announced. “Any minute now,” predicted the first tercet. And so it was. Laws of gravity and dynamics ruled my world, inside and out. She was my first encounter with the inexplicable.

During those months, I repeatedly went to the Lorraine, hoping to find her. One day I saw her, on the arm of a very thin, smiling man. I don't know if she saw me. I realize that with the exception of those few hours we spent together, I was invisible to her. I, on the other hand, never lost sight of her. I remembered her every night; I knew every corner of her body and imagined expeditions across her increasingly familiar geography. That was then. Now I wouldn't even be able to say what color her eyes were.

After work, I liked to explore the bookshops on Calle Corrientes. I looked for old poetry books in battered editions, by long-dead authors. I bought them for myself, to make me feel less alone, but also in order to read them to her.

One day, while I was riffling through the tables in one of those bookshops, two men ran in and carried off a young man who, minutes before, had been reading at my side. As they bundled him into the car, I heard someone call me:
Hey, you with the long hair, aren't you Colonel Gorostiza's son?
A man in a double-breasted suit and dark glasses placed his hand on my shoulder.
Your father wrote to me saying you'd be calling. How about it?
He smiled, handed me a card, and walked off up the street. I went back to the books.

Seeing her and hearing her mattered to me less than touching her. Skin is a space that stands in for the world. When we touch it, brush against it, it encompasses everything. Now I move forward through the fog, but then my fingers moved over her valleys and hills like determined pilgrims, barely resting, retracing their steps sometimes to try another route, exploring unknown pathways. Now that all touching is forbidden me, that landscape of skin sinks under my weight, envelops and stifles me. I tumble into a sack that closes over me, damp and spongy, made of my own flesh. My fingers want to climb the slopes of that body, but the slopes keep getting steeper. It's impossible to get a grip. The skin, warm and sticky now, encloses me and my cloud of claylike dust. The air turns to mud, filling my eyes, mouth, and nostrils. The mud turns to water. I'm drowning. My throat burns. The water turns to air. Then the panic abates. I breathe.

Again.

Every memory, this whole suffocating multitude of memories, leads to nightmares. Here there is nothing more than that, things that I believe once happened. Forgive me, my dreamer, for infecting you with so much horrible stuff. It isn't willful—I can't try to do anything. Every time I attempt to retrieve an instant of joy, a moment in which I was happy to live, a black stain spreads over it, obliterating everything. Her in the damp sheets, her panting on the pillow, her digging furrows in my back with her nails, her, too, turning into that fathomless mud in which I am forever sinking. And I rise up again. And I sink in again.

I cannot even salvage that first moment of memory. Nothing clean, nothing happy, nothing that does not grow dark.

Darkness is also Buenos Aires. I've never known such a murky city, with those streets which branch off from an illuminated avenue to lose themselves among secret trees and unsuspected sturdy walls, abrasive to the touch. Here, at least at the start of those years, darkness is not frightening. I follow the instructions in her note, which is unsigned, but written in the tidy handwriting of a model pupil.
Come to see me tomorrow at eleven. Ring twice and I'll open the door
. I obey. I arrive, I ring the bell, the barred gate opens, I go up some steps, I push open the door. She hasn't put the light on, but I can see my way. There's a smell of summer, of apricots, of rain. A hand takes mine and pulls me onto a mattress. I fall, I sink, but I'm not drowning. I breathe deeply. We say nothing to each other.