Scarecrow & Other Anomalies (4 page)

None of us knows anything at all.

The disorientation of my generation has its explanation

in the direction of our education, whose idealization

                    of action, was—without question!—a mystification,

in distinction to our passion for meditation,

contemplation and masturbation.

(Guttural, as guttural as can be.)

 I believe I believe in that which

 I believe I do not believe.

And I believe I don’t believe

 in what I believe I believe.

“Song    of the   froggies”

        A       A        Is  Is    A   A

        nd    nd    it   it    nd   nd

        a            be    th   thi     a   be

        bove  low   ere   ther   bove   low

        the   ?       ?   the   the

        stair   lad   It        It   stair   lad

        ways  ders   is         is   ways  ders

        climb  cur   n’t         n’t  climb   cur

        ing   ving   he           hi    ing   ving

        over   under  re            ther  over under

        head!  neath!  !               !   head! neath!

ONE: MARIA LUISA

I COULDN’T CARE less if women have breasts like fresh magnolias or withered figs, skin smooth as a peach or rough as sandpaper. I accord it an importance equal to zero whether they wake up with the breath of an aphrodisiac or the breath of an insecticide. I am perfectly capable of enduring a nose on them that could take first prize in a carrot exposition. But here’s the thing!—and in this I am inflexible—I do not pardon them, under any pretext, if they don’t know how to fly. If they can’t fly, they have wasted the time they took trying to seduce me!

It was for this—and no other—reason that I fell in love, so madly, with Maria Luisa.

What did I care that her lips came in installments and that she suffered from jealous rages? What did I care about her duck feet and her looks like those of a fortuneteller holding back a secret?

Maria Luisa was a veritable plume!

From the break of day she was flying. She flew from the bed-room to the kitchen, from the dining room to the pantry. She flew to prepare my bath, to lay out my shirt. She flew to do her shopping, to do her household chores...

With what impatience I awaited her return, on the wing, from some trip in the outskirts! There in the distance, lost among the clouds, would be a rosy little dot. “Maria Luisa! Maria Luisa!” I would cry... and in a few seconds she would already be clasping me with her feathery legs, in order to lift me in flight to someplace or other.For miles of silence we traced the lines of a caress that brought us close to paradise; for hours on end we nestled in a cloud, like the angels, then suddenly corkscrewed, like a dead leaf, to make a forced, spasmodic landing.

How delicious to hold a woman so light... though, now and then, she might make us see stars! How voluptuous to spend the days among the clouds... and to pass the nights in solo flight!

After we have known an ethereal woman, what possible attractions could a terrestrial woman offer us? In truth, is there any substantial difference between living with a cow and living with a woman has her buttocks three and a half feet off of the ground?

I, for my part, am incapable of comprehending the allure of the pedestrian woman, and no matter how hard I try to conceive it, find it impossible to achieve or even to imagine better lovemaking than that which is experienced while soaring through the heavens.

TWO: THE VISITORS

YOU COULDN’T HEAR a sound, not even a faint rattling of chains. The bottles stood still, showing no desire to move from the spot. The day after a button was put on the table you found it still in the same place. The wine and the portraits were gaining dignity with age. You could shave in any mirror without fear of running a cut all the way to your carotid; but no sooner had the first guests rung the bell and stepped into the vestibule than they began to commit the most outlandish incivilities, each of these unpardonable disturbances driving us dangerously close to an unintended suicide.

During the act of proffering their calling cards, for example, the visitors fumbled so clumsily that they all but climbed out of their trousers, and they proceeded into the salon with their shirttails flapping around their navels. As they came in to greet their hostess, some irresistible force compelled them to blow their noses on the curtains, and when they wanted to inquire about her husband, they asked about his false teeth instead. Even with the fiercest application of willpower, no one could overcome the temptation to repeat “holy cow!” each time someone referred to the young ladies of the house; and when the latter offered them a cup of tea, the guests climbed up into the chandeliers to restrain their desire to bite at their calves.

Even the British ambassador, an Englishman steeped in protocol and sporting a well-worn mustache, like one of those toothbrushes one uses to blacken one’s boots, did not accept the bumper of champagne offered him, but instead knelt down in the middle of the salon in order to smell the flowers printed on the carpet; then, after sidling up alongside a pedestal, he lifted his hind leg like a dog.

THREE: MY WIFE

THE ONLY LIFE I had ever known was the humble one afforded me by my position as an employee of the post office. So my wife, who has a mania for thinking out loud and saying the first thing that pops into her head, took it upon herself to assign me fortunes more absurd than any you would ever imagine.

Out of the blue, while reading the evening papers, she turned to me and asked, without preliminaries:

“Why didn’t you give up the house and the cat? It would have been so nice to take a cruise on a frigate!... During the moonlit nights, the sailors gather on deck beneath the outspread sails. Some play the accordion, others fondle a rubber woman. You smoke your pipe with a mate. The sea has hardened your pupils. You have seen it all. Is there any port, is there any city where you have not spent the night? Does there yet remain some undiscovered horizon towards which the sails may loft you? One day when the calm has become a curse, you will go down to your bunk, untie your silk kerchief and hang yourself with a woman’s pigtail.”

And not content with having me circumnavigate the globe, even though I’ve been at anchor in the post office for more than seventeen years:

“Do you remember the braids I had when you first met me?... At that time I imagined that you would become a soldier, and my nipples caught fire at the thought that you would have a rugged, hairy chest, like a doormat.

“You were strong. You scaled the walls of the convent. You went to bed with the abbess. You left her pregnant. To what time, to what place, does a story like yours belong?... You have played the game of life so many times that you have the smell of a worn deck of cards. With what eagerness, with what tenderness I kissed your wounds! You were savage! You were silent! You liked cheeses that tasted like a satyr’s groin... and the first night, when you possessed me, you broke my spine against the backboard of the bed.”

And before I could prove just how far I was from perpetrating these barbarities, that I aspired to nothing greater, during my entire lifetime, than gaining admission to the Vélez-Sársfield Country Club:

“Now I see you kneeling in a church with the smell of a wine cellar.

“Look at your hands; they are good for nothing but turning the pages of missals. Your meekness is so great that you are ashamed of your purity, of your prudence. You fall on your knees at every moment to kiss the pages that sigh and complain. When a woman looks at you, you lower your eyelids and feel naked and ashamed. Your sweat is pleasing to prostitutes and dogs. You like to walk feverish through the rain. You like to lie down in an open field and gaze up at the stars...

“One night—in which you come face to face with God—you will enter a stable without being seen and stretch out on the straw, so as to die with your arms around the neck of some old cow...”

FOUR: FLAGELLATION AND FLAMENCOS

I GAVE UP billiard balls for
calembours
, madrigals for praying mantises, hand-to-hand combat for minute-to-minute details, inverts for invertebrates. Surrendered sociability on account of sociologists, soloists, sodomites and solitaries. Wanted nothing to do with prostatics. Preferred what is sublimated to the sublime. What is edifying to the edified. My repulsion for paternal relationships compelled me to evade patronage and
pater nosters
. I conjured conjurations most concomitant with conjugal conjugations. Stayed celibate with the same
amour-propre
as if I had been an umbrella. Despite my predilections, I had to distance myself from contrabandists and counter-basses, but became intimate, on the other hand, with flagellation and with flamencos.

The irreducible seduced me but for an instant. I believed, with the good faith of a volunteer, in mineralogy and in minotaurs. Come to think of it, why shouldn’t myths repopulate the desert of our circumvolutions? Over the centuries haven’t felicity, fecundity, fortune and
filosofía
enshrined themselves in stone?

My ineptitude managed to confound a colonel with a thermometer!

I renounced charitable organizations, breathing exercises, necking. Memorized the timetables of trains I will never be taking. Little by little was seduced by modesty and codfish. Consented to no concomitance with concupiscence or constipation. Was a methodist, a mountebank, a monogamist. Loved contradictions, contrarieties and countersenses... and fell for cat burglary with cataclysmic violence.

FIVE: RELATIVES

ANYWHERE WE FIND ourselves, at any hour of the day or night, family members! That is to say, relatives more or less distant, but with a line of descent identical to our own.

See that cat sitting by the window licking its hindquarters?... The same eyes as Aunt Carolina! And that cart horse lumbering over the pavement?... The slightly yellowed teeth of my grandfather José María!

A fine state of affairs to find relatives at every turn! To be an uncle whom everyone wants to cozen on every occasion!

And what’s worse, the links of consanguinity are not limited to the zoological chain. Not only is the certainty of the common origin of species corroborated by our racial memory, but the reach of that memory stretches back so far and wide that the borders of the kingdoms blur and disappear, until we begin to sense that we are as closely related to rock crystals or cereal grains as to herbivores. In seven, seventy, or seven hundred generations, it all begins to look the same, and (though appearances can be deceptive) we don’t know whether what we have is a camel or a carrot.

After galloping nine leagues over the pampas, we sit down to a steaming bowl of puchero. Three mouthfuls... and we feel a knot in the esophagus. Give it a geological period of time, and won’t this squash be the son of our papa? Garbanzos have a flavor that is positively paradisiacal, but what if we are devouring our own brothers!

So confused is our existence with other existences surrounding us that we increasingly dread causing injury to some unsuspected member of our family. Little by little, life goes topsy turvy. Remorse corrodes our conscience and begins to numb the most indispensable functions of body and spirit. Before moving an arm, before stretching a leg, we must consider the consequences each gesture may have for all our kith and kin. With each passing day it becomes more difficult for us to eat, more difficult to breathe, until we reach the moment when there is no alternative but to choose—and to resign ourselves to committing all the acts of incest, all the assassinations, all the cruelties, or to being, simply and humbly, a victim of the family.

SIX: NERVES

MY NERVES TWANG out of tune as often as my female cousins. If by chance, when I lie down to rest, I do not have myself tied to the bedposts, fifteen minutes later I wake up on top of my clothes cabinet. In this quarter of an hour, however brief, I have had time to strangle my brothers, to launch myself off some cliff and to impale myself upon the needles of a cactus.

My digestion invents a quantity of crustaceans that amuse themselves poking holes in my intestines. Since childhood I have had to have my drawers unbuttoned before I could sit down anywhere, and when I blow my nose it is a rare occasion when I don’t find expelled into my handkerchief the cadaver of a cockroach.

Also, when it rains, I feel a pain in the leg that was amputated three years ago. My right kidney is a peanut. My left kidney is on display in the Museum of the Medical Faculty. I am a polyglot stutterer. I lost everything in the lottery, right down to my toenails, and at the moment of consummating the matrimonial act, I found myself married to a cockatoo.

The margins of encyclopedias are not sufficiently spacious to channel my weariness and pain. Even the most optimistic ideas travel by funeral coach when they pass through my brain. The yawn of unmade beds repels me, I feel no propensity for brooding the breasts of women and it makes me sick that druggists so infrequently mix up their preparations of strychnine.

Under these conditions, I sincerely believe that the best thing to do is swallow a capsule of dynamite and then, with complete tranquility, light up a cigarette.

SEVEN: LOVE

EVERYTHING WAS LOVE... love! There was nothing but love. Everywhere I looked I found love. I could talk of nothing but love.

There was love that passed the test, love with vanilla, love to go, love on the installment plan. Love to be analyzed, love that’s been analyzed. Ultramarine love. Equestrian love.

Love of
papier-mâché
, love with cream and sugar... full of preparations, of preventions; full of short circuits, of shortcomings.

Love with a big 0, an 0 in majuscule, creaming with meringue, covered with white flowers...