Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (24 page)

And so the son went off, almost running, without breakfast, to his daily routine.

It was a beautiful clear day, and the sun was golden. On the docks, the railcars rolled along on their rails, the pulleys creaked, the chains clanked. The bustle and confusion on the piers was dizzying—the noise of iron, the rumblings everywhere, and the wind passing through the forest of masts and rigging of the ships at anchor there.

Under one of the davits on the pier, Tío Lucas’s son worked with other stevedores, unloading as fast as they could. They had to empty the ship filled with bales. From time to time, the long chain, clanking like an iron rattle as it rolled over the pulley-wheel, would snake downward with its enormous hook, and the boys would tie a double strand of thick rope about the bale and hook it onto the chain, which would lift the bale like a fish on a fishhook, or the weight on a sounding-line—sometimes the bales would rise straight up, and sometimes they would swing from side to side, like the clapper of a bell.

The cargo was stacked. From time to time the waves would slowly rock the ship filled with bales. The bales formed a sort of pyramid in the center. There was one that was very heavy, very heavy. It was the largest of them all—wide, fat, and smelling of tar. It was in the very bottom of the hold. A man standing atop it looked a very small figure against the massive pedestal he stood upon.

This bale looked like all the other prosaic goods of import wrapped in canvas and bound with bands of iron. On its sides, in the midst of black lines and triangles, there were letters that looked out like eyes—letters in “diamonds,” Tío Lucas called them. Its iron straps were held with rough thickheaded rivets, and in its belly the monster must have had, at least, lemons and percales.

 

It was the last one left.

“Here comes the bruiser!” said one of the stevedores.

“The big-bellied one!” said another.

And Tío Lucas’s son, who was eager to finish the day’s work, was getting ready to collect his pay and go off to breakfast; he tied a checkered bandanna around his neck.

The chain snaked downward, dancing in the air. A large noose was tied to the bale and tested to make certain it would hold, and then someone called out, “Hoist away!” while the chain, creaking, pulled on the mass, slowly raising it into the air.

Some of the stevedores stood below to watch the enormous weight rise, and some were preparing to go ashore, when they saw a terrible thing. The bale, the enormous, heavy bale, slipped from its ropes, like a dog that slips its collar, and it fell on Tío Lucas’s son, who lay now crushed between the bale and the guardrail of the boat, his kidneys ruined, his backbone fractured, black blood flowing from his mouth.

That day there was no bread or medicine in Tío Lucas’s house—the crushed and mutilated body lay there, until, embraced tearfully by the rheumatic father, wept and wailed over by the mother and the other children, it was carried to the cemetery.

I bade good evening to the old stevedore, and with elastic step I left the pier, taking the road home and spinning philosophy with all the deliberateness of a poet, while a glacial breeze, which blew in from far out at sea, tenaciously nipped my nose and ears.

Fantasy, Horror, and the Grotesque

THE LARVA

They were talking about Benvenuto Cellini and one of them had smiled at the great artisan’s declaration in his
Life,
that he had once seen a salamander. At that provocation, Isaac Cocomano said:

“You scoff? O ye of little faith, I swear to you that I have seen, as clearly as I am seeing all of you now, if not a salamander, then a larva or an Empusa. I will tell you the story, and I will be brief. . . .”

 

I was born in a country where, as in almost all of the Americas, the people practiced witchcraft and their warlocks and witches communicated with the invisible world. The mysteries of the native peoples and their religions did not disappear with the arrival of the conquistadors. No, and in fact under Catholicism, there were perhaps even more numerous cases of the evil eye, demonism, the evocation of strange forces than before the Spaniards came. In the city where I spent my early years people talked—and I remember this well, as though it were an everyday occurrence—about apparitions, the sudden presence of demons, ghosts, and sprites. In one poor family that lived near my house, for example, the ghost of a Spanish colonel appeared to a young man and revealed to him that a treasure was buried in the garden. The young man died from this extraordinary visit, but the family profited well enough—they became rich, as their descendants are still today. There was a bishop that appeared to another bishop, to tell him where he might find a document lost in the archives of the cathedral. The devil carried off a woman through a window in a certain house that I recall quite clearly. My grandmother assured me of the frightful nighttime roaming of a headless friar and of a huge hairy hand that appeared of its own locomotion, like some hellish spider. I heard about all these things as a boy. But what I
saw,
what I touched—what I saw and touched from the world of shadows and tenebrous arcana—
that
came when I was fifteen.

In that city, much like other Spanish provincial cities, all the residents shut up the doors of their houses at eight o’clock in the evening, or nine at the latest. The streets were left solitary and silent. The only sound to be heard was the soft call of the owls nesting in the eaves, or the distant barking of the dogs on the outskirts of the city.

Anyone who went out to fetch a doctor or a priest, or on some other urgent nighttime errand, had to make his way down ill-cobblestoned streets full of pitfalls for the unwary and lighted by no more than oil lanterns on posts, which cast but the faintest beams.

From time to time one would hear the echoes of tunes played on guitars and zithers, or of singing. These were the serenades
à l’espagnole,
the airs and romances that spoke tender words of love from lover to lover. Sometimes these would be but a single guitar and the serenading suitor, a young man of scanty means, but sometimes there would be a quartet, or septet, or entire orchestra, with a piano, which some wealthy gentleman would hire to declare his love or plead his case to the lady of his dreams, under her windows.

I was fifteen, with grand yearnings for life and the wide world. And one of the things I yearned for most fervently was to be able to go out into the streets and accompany the others on one of those serenades. But how was I to do this?

Every night, after the rosary beads had been spelled, the great-aunt that watched over my childhood was careful to walk through the house, closing and locking all the doors, and then she would carry the keys with her to her room, leaving me well tucked in under the canopy of my four-poster bed. But one day I learned that that same evening there was to be a serenade. And more: one of my friends, as young as I, was to attend the event, whose enchantments he painted to me in the most tantalizing colors. I spent every hour of the day before that evening restlessly, thinking and rethinking my plan of escape. And so, when my great-aunt’s visitors had gone—among them a priest and two attorneys who had come to discuss politics or play a game of cards—and the prayers had been prayed and everyone was tucked in bed, I could think of nothing but putting into practice my plan to steal a key from the venerable lady.

After three hours had passed, it was not hard to carry out my plan, for I knew where she left the keys—and besides, she slept the sleep of the righteous. Master of that which I’d sought, and knowing which door it opened, I reached the street just at the moment when, in the distance, the sound of violins, flutes, and cellos began to be heard. I considered myself a man. Drawn by the melody, I soon reached the place where the serenade was being sung. While the musicians played, the members of the serenade drank beer and liquors. Then a tailor, in the role of don Juan, sang first “In the Light of the Pale Moon” and then “Remember when the Dawn . . .”

I enter into such detail so that you will see how everything that happened on that night so extraordinary for me has remained in my memory. From the windows of that Dulcinea they resolved to go to another’s. We passed through the Plaza de la Catedral. And then . . .

I have said that I was fifteen, that we were in the tropics, and that all the yearnings—the urges, shall I say—of youth were awakening in me. . . . And there I was, in the prison of my house, which I never left save to go to school, and under my great-aunt’s stern vigilance, and with those primitive customs of our culture. . . . I was ignorant, as I must be, of all the mysteries. Thus, imagine my delight when, as I passed through the Plaza de la Catedral, after the serenade, I saw, sitting on a curbside, wrapped in her rebozo, as though asleep, a woman. I stopped.

Young? Old? A beggar? A madwoman? What did I care! I was in search of some dreamed-for revelation, some yearned-after adventure.

The serenaders walked on, leaving me behind.

The light from the plaza’s lamps was pale. I approached. I spoke: I will not tell you that I spoke sweet words, for they were ardent, urgent. And as I received no reply, I leaned down and touched the back of that woman who would not answer me and in fact was doing all she could to prevent me from seeing her face. I was haughty; I cajoled and chaffed; I spoke to her suggestively. And when I believed that victory at last was mine, the figure turned toward me, uncovered her face, and oh! what horror of horrors! Her face was slimy and misshapen, as though the flesh had all decayed: one eye hung over the bony, suppurating cheek and there came to my senses a reek of putrefaction. From the creature’s horrible mouth there came what seemed to be hoarse laughter, and then that
thing,
making the most macabre of grimaces, produced a sound that I might try to imitate in this way:

“
Kggggg!
”

My hair standing on end, I jumped back and gave a shriek. I called out to my companions.

By the time some of the young men from the serenade arrived, the
thing
had disappeared.

 

“I give you my word of honor,” Isaac Cocomano concluded, “that what I have told you is completely true.”

THANATOPHOBIA
¹

My father was the celebrated Dr. John Leen, member of the Royal Society for Psychic Research in London and very well known in the scientific world for his studies of hypnotism and his famous
Report on the Creature Known as Old.
He died not long ago, and may he rest in peace.

 

James Leen emptied most of his beer into his belly and then went on:

 

You have all laughed at me and what you call my worrying and foolishness. I forgive you, because, frankly, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, as the great Will once said.

You do not know that I have suffered greatly, that I still suffer greatly—the bitterest of tortures—on account of your laughter. . . . Yes, I admit it: I cannot sleep without a light, I cannot bear being alone in an empty house; I tremble at the mysterious sound that in the twilight hours just after dusk and just before dawn emerges from the underbrush along the path; I do not like to see an owl or bat fly up; I never, in any city where I may go, visit its cemeteries; I am burned by the fires of martyrdom when I am exposed to conversations dealing with macabre events, and when I must be exposed, my eyes wait only to close, in love of sleep, until the light reappears.

I have a horror of what—oh, God!—I am about to speak of: death. You will never make me remain in a house where there is a dead body, even that of my dearest friend. Oh, those are the most appalling words in the language:
dead body. . . .
You have laughed at me, and still do—so be it. But allow me to tell you the truth of my secret. I have come to the Republic of Argentina
a fugitive, having lived five years as a prisoner, held as a miserable captive by my father, Dr. Leen,
who, although a great and wise man, I suspect was an equally great scoundrel. On his orders I was taken to an asylum for the insane—on his orders, for he feared that I might perhaps one day reveal that which he intended forever to hide . . . that which you are about to learn, for it is impossible for me to keep silent any longer.

I tell you that I am not drunk. I am not and have never been insane. He ordered my reclusion because. . . . You shall hear.

 

Thin, blond-haired, nervous, seized by a frequent tremor, or shiver, James Leen raised his head at that table in the beer garden where, surrounded by friends, he spoke these words to us. Is there anyone in Buenos Aires who does not know him? He is not an eccentric in his daily life. From time to time he suffers these strange fits. As a professor, he is one of the most estimable in one of our private schools, and as a man of the world he is, though a bit quiet, one of the finest young elements of the Cinderella dances that are held among the city’s higher reaches of society. And so that night he went on with his strange tale, which we dare not call mere
fumisterie,
given the character of our friend. But we shall let our readers judge the thing for themselves:

 

I lost my mother when I was very young, and I was sent on my father’s orders to a public school, as we call them in England, in Oxford. My father, who never showed his affection for me, would come from London once a year to visit me at that school where I grew up, solitary in my spirit, without affection, without praise.

There, I learned to be sad. Physically, I was the image of my mother, I’ve been told, and
I suppose that was why the doctor tried to see me as little as possible.
I shall say no more about this. I hope you will excuse the way in which I choose to narrate my story.

Whenever I have touched upon this subject, I have felt myself stirred by a familiar force.
Try to understand me.
I was saying, then, that I lived as a boy solitary in my spirit, learning sadness in that school with its black walls, which I can still see in my imagination on moonlit nights. . . . Oh! how I learned to be sad. I still see, through a window in my room, the poplars, the cypresses, bathed in a pale and spectral moonlight. . . .
Why were there cypresses at that school?
. . . and throughout the park, decaying old Termini, leprous with time—the perches for those owls raised by the hateful septuagenarian headmaster. . . .
Why did the headmaster raise owls?
. . . And I would hear, in the silent depths of the night, the flight of those nocturnal animals and the creaking of the tables and one midnight, I swear to you, I heard a voice: “James!” Oh, such a voice!