Scarecrow & Other Anomalies (6 page)

“Life—and I say this from experience—is one long imbrutishment. This much must be already obvious from the state and the style in which you find your poor grandmother. I don’t know how I’d go on if it weren’t for the hope of seeing things a little better after death!

“Habit encrusts us daily, plastering spider webs over our eyes. Little by little, syntax and the dictionary begin to confine us, and though mosquitoes blow their horns as they fly about, it’s a bit of a stretch to call them archangels. When an aunt takes us on a visit, we greet the whole world, but we’re ashamed toextend our hand to mister cat and, later on, should we feel the urge to travel, we buy tickets at a steamship agency, rather than metamorphose an armchair into a transatlantic liner.

“By that—though at this point you probably think me a senile old bat—I mean to say, and I will never tire of repeating, that you must not renounce anything, including your right to renunciation. An aching molar, urban statistics, the proper use of sawdust, wood chips and other discards can afford us an unsuspected pleasure. Open your arms and don’t look down on the clarinet or faulty handwriting. Confect a new virginity every five minutes and follow these counsels as if they were engraved in stone, yet, though experience is a sickness offering little danger of contagion, you must not expose yourself to the influence of others, and that includes your own shadow.

“Imitation has prostituted everything, right down to the pin in your cravat!”

FIFTEEN: THE PROPHET

HE COMMANDED his slaves to spit on his forehead and, dangling from the feet of a stork, abandoned his customs and sandalwood coffers.

But how could he have known that perfume can leave a bitter taste on the tongue? How could he have known that the solitude of asceticism is filled with naked women, and that all knowledge is humbled before the physiomechanics of a mosquito?

During his seclusion in the desert, his navel succeeded in representing the better part of the universe. There even the spiders carry crosses on their back to preserve themselves from foraging succubi. There he became intimate with phantoms who dash about on stilts through all eternity and with cacti exhibiting the quirks of scarecrows, but despite holding consultations with the Devil and with the Lord he could not discover a single new virtue or a single new vice.

Did his fasting and abstinence from all concupiscence permit him to savor the feverish adulation that is everywhere accompanied by a miasma of submission and grief?

Preceded by a breeze that cuts a swath through the filth of the roadway, he passed before the astonished populace, laden with boredom and parasites.

His presence ripened the grain and brought the harvest to fruition. The mere touch of his hands revived virility and his glance instilled in prostitutes the rustic tenderness of quails.

How many times his words fell on the multitude with the mildness of rain calming the ocean!

With a phosphorescent splendor shining around his bald pate and with thousands of bees lodged in the hair of his chest, he appeared simultaneously in different places, each time with a disdain ever more conscious of the pointlessness of all that exists.

His perfection became as repugnant to him as taking a bath or swallowing caviar. He no longer found voluptuous pleasure in taking his siesta or in savoring the backwaters incarnated as a caiman. He derived not the slightest comfort from the fact that lepers waited for him so as to embrace his shadow, nor that the stars stopped twinkling when confronted by the size of his tenderness and his beard.

One afternoon, at a bend in some road, he decided to stop moving for all eternity.

In vain the pilgrims flock from everywhere to his sermons and oblations. In vain they persist, in the face of his indifference, in performing the rites of the cabala and in acts of mortification. Neither their self-abasements nor their ticklings succeed in drawing from him so much as a yawn, and the scare intensifies as a spreading green scum covers his extremities and his modesty, and his body is transformed, little by little, into one of those clods that embeds itself into the road so as to hatch worms and slime.

SIXTEEN: TRANSMIGRATION

SOME HAVE a taste for mountain climbing. Others like to play dominoes. For me, nothing compares with transmigration.

While others spend their lives pulling a rope or pounding a tabletop, I spend my time transmigrating from one body to another, and I never tire of the process.

Up at the crack of day, I install myself in a eucalyptus tree to inhale the morning breeze. I take a mineral siesta inside the first boulder I happen across, and before going to bed I’m thinking of the night and its chimneys with the spirit of a cat.

How delicious it is to metamorphose into a bumblebee, so as to sniff up the pollen of the roses! What voluptuousness to be one with the soil, so as to feel the penetrations of the tubercles and roots, and the percolations of a latent life that fecundate... and tickle us.

To appreciate ham, isn’t it indispensable to be a pig? Can he who has not transformed himself into a horse know the simple pleasure of ruminating in a pasture or fully grasp what it means to “horse around?”

Possessing a virgin is very different from experiencing the sensations of a virgin while she is being possessed, and it’s one thing to look at the ocean while standing on the shore, another to see it through the eyes of a crab.

This is why I love to thrust myself into foreign existences, to live out their hopes and dreams, their moods and humors, fair or foul, their bodily secretions.This is why I love to graze on the pampas at twilight in the person of a cow, feeling the gravity and the foliage with a brain the size of a walnut or chestnut, or to squat in an open meadow singing to the stars with the voice of a toad.

Ah, the enchantment of having been a camel, an apple, or a carrot, and the satisfaction of fathoming the indolence of still waters... and of chameleons!

To think that, during their entire existence, the majority of men have never even once been a woman! How is it possible for them not to be bored with their appetites, their spasms, and not long to experience, from time to time, those of cockroaches... or of the honeysuckle vine?

Though I have put myself, many times, in the brain of an imbecile, I have never understood how anyone could live, perpetually, with the same skeleton and the same sex.

When life is exclusively human—all too human—can the workings of the mind result in anything except an infirmity more grandiose and tedious than any other?

I, for one, am certain that I wouldn’t have been able to stand such a life without this aptitude for evasion that permits me to transfer myself to wherever I am not: to be an ant, a giraffe, to lay an egg and, what’s still more important, to bump into myself at the very moment I have forgotten, almost completely, my own existence.

SEVENTEEN: THE SUCCUBUS

SHE WAS squishing me between her flattened arms and adhering to my body with the violent viscosity of a mollusk. A sticky secretion began to envelop me, little by little, until it succeeded in immobilizing me. From each of her pores oozed a sort of claw that perforated my skin. Her breasts began to boil. A phosphorescent exudation illuminated her neck, her hips, until even her sex—full of spines and tentacles—encrusted my own sex and precipitated me into a series of exasperating spasms.

It was useless spitting on her eyelids or into the cavities of her nose. It was useless screaming my hate and contempt. Until the last drop of sperm slid away from my nape, boring through my spine like a globule of melted sealing wax, her gums continued to slurp at my desperation; and before abandoning me she left her millions of claws embedded in my flesh, and I had no other recourse than to spend the night pulling them out with a pair of pincers and splashing a drop of iodine in each of the wounds...

Some party, being a sleeper who is the private hunting preserve for the sport of a succubus!

EIGHTEEN: WEEPING

WEEP LIVING TEARS! Weep gushers! Weep your guts out! Weep dreams! Weep before portals and at ports of entry! Weep in fellowship! Weep in yellow!

Open the locks and canals of tears! Let us soak our shirts, our souls! Inundate the sidewalks and the boulevards, and bear us along safely on the flood!

Assist in anthropology courses, weeping! Celebrate relatives’ birthdays, weeping! Walk across Africa, weeping!

Weep like a caiman, like a crocodile... especially if it’s true that caimans and crocodiles have no real tears in them.

Weep anything, but weep well! Weep with your nose, with your knees! Weep through your navel, through your mouth!

Weep of love, of hate, of happiness! Weep in your frock, from flatus, from frailty! Weep impromptu, weep from memory! Weep throughout the insomniac night and throughout the livelong day!

NINETEEN: GRATITUDE

SO WHAT IF pulleys have eaten up thousands and thousands of little fingers, and still are not satisfied? So what if sewing machines threaten to stitch up our slightest gaps and fissures? So what if the depravity of globes should lead to the degradation of geometry?

It’s disturbing enough—without a doubt—to consider that there exists not a hectare of the earth’s surface that doesn’t conceal four dozen cadavers; but a big jump to think of oneself as no more than a carcass of microbes... and to have no other aspiration than to receive the title of skull...

Our daily routine might be regarded as a modest manifestation of pure absurdity, through which God—reincarnated as some low-grade molar puller—obligates us to place all our faith in toothpicks, but life, for all that, will never stop being a genuine miracle.

What do we care if cadavers decompose faster than automobiles? What do we care if entire families—full of young ladies!—succumb from their excessive fondness for wild mushrooms?

Doesn’t the mere fact that we have a liver and two kidneys offer ample justification for spending our days applauding ourselves and our lives? Do we have to do anything but open our eyes to be convinced that reality is, in reality, the most authentic of miracles?

For those whose senses are properly attuned, the most insignificant events—a woman who delays, a dog who sniffs at a wall—result in something so ineffable... it’s as if a hidden universe of accumulated coincidences and circumstances had ordained it—so that even in the presence of so slight a spectacle as that of two flies alighting and performing the act of reproduction on a bald head, one would have to have the impermeability of a crocodile not to experience a veritable paroxysm of admiration.

Hence that love, that tremendous gratitude for life that I feel, those constant cravings to lap it up, those impulses to prostrate myself before everything... before equestrian statues, before garbage cans...

Hence that bouncing-ball optimism that makes me laugh till I scream at the skeletons of bicycles, at the lemons attacking my liver; hence that happiness that incites me to rebound from every wall, from every idea, to go running—naked!—through the outskirts of town to tickle the gasometers... the gravestones...

Days, entire weeks, go by in which nothing disturbs me, not even the suspicion that women might be born with taxi-cab meters between their breasts.

Moments of such fervor, of such enthusiasm, that I find God everywhere, as I turn a corner, in the drawers of my nightstand, between the pages of books; moments in which, despite all efforts to control myself, I kneel in the middle of the street and shout in a voice virginal and ancient:

“Long live sperm... though I perish!”

TWENTY: A CATASTROPHIC MAN

OFTEN I GO to visit a relative who lives outside of town. While passing through one of the stations—it certainly did not happen by chance!—the train jumped over the platform, demolished the baggage, wiped out the ticket office and the snack shop. The cars stacked up one on top of the other. The boxcar coupled onto the locomotive. There were arms and legs everywhere: under the seats, along the tracks, up in the nets for the luggage.

Of my compartment all that remains is a splinter from the door. I shove to one side the cadavers that surround me. I straighten my tie and step outside, as cheerful as you please, without a wrinkle in my trousers or in my smile.

Although I foresee everything that will happen, I have embarked on more than one such journey in the hope that my premonitions will prove mistaken...

The passengers were the same as always. There was the adulterous husband with his pious, patronizing smile. There was the young lady whose charms are priced in direct proportion to your distance from the coast. There was the seal woman, the tuna woman; the manufacturer of rubber goods leaning on the guard rail and contemplating the immensity of the ocean, which seems to inspire him only with the thought of spitting on it.

On the third day of the voyage there was heard—in the middle of the night!—a metallic, intestinal screech.

Half-naked women! Men in their nightshirts! Tears! Prayers! Screams! As the passengers strangled one another clawing their way to the lifeboats, I managed to reach an inflatable raft, dove under its tarpaulin cover and, already in the sea, surveyed—with the impassiveness of a cork—the unfolding spectacle.

It was a horrible sight! The ship pitched, shuddered, nosed under at the prow and slipped beneath the waves.

Did I have to convince myself one more time that I was the only survivor?

So as to be sure, I inspected the site of the shipwreck. Here was a lifesaver, a wicker chair... there a school of sharks, a bobbing cadaver...

I calculated the distance, set a course and, after beating all world records, entered, on the eighth day, the port of disembarkation.

My friends, those who knew how many similar debacles I had been spared before, surmised at first that what had happened was a simple accident, but, having to admit that these accidents happened so often, to the point of seeming routine, finally had to treat it as a case of authentic predestination.