Scarecrow & Other Anomalies (7 page)

Just as there are men whose presence exerts an unerring abortive efficacy, my special faculty is for provoking accidents at every turn, for helping along unforeseen calamity and upsetting the unstable equilibrium on which all existence depends.

With what anguish, with what anxiety did I confront, in those first days, this propensity for cataclysm!... Life gets complicated when it trips over wreckage at every step!... But the force of habit is invincible... Without noticing, one eventually becomes accustomed to living among disintegrating cadavers andshattered glass, even to the point of discovering the enchantments of floods, the delights of structural collapses, and soon one feels that life acquires color only in the midst of desolation and disaster.

Note that our mere appearance on the scene is enough to cause caryatids to weary of holding up public edifices and thus to cause the downfall—among their crumbling columns of figures, among their portfolios—of hundreds of moneylenders, who feed on the body politic... and on garbanzo beans!

Learn to relish—as if they were delicious plates of boiled maize—the temblors that fill us with awe, earthquakes in which bathtubs sprinkle from the eighth floor while dozens of salesgirls are trapped and perish in the elevators, and though blonde are still called Esther!

Who can deny that before the magnificence of such spectacles mountain landscapes lose all their appeal, even if they are better shaped than the buttocks of the Venus de Milo?

The exoticism of moths or mastodons, the rites of masonry or mastication—at least as far as I’m concerned—hold not the slightest interest. I need pulverized skeletons, railroad decapitations, unidentifiable corpses drawn-and-quartered, and so great is my love for the spectacular that the day on which it doesn’t produce in me a short circuit, I will expire from sheer disillusionment.

Under such conditions, my company would be as uncertain as uncertain can be.

Am I to blame if I prefer conflagrations to third-grade schoolgirls?

Although most men satisfy themselves with musing on their dreams and waking with the submissiveness of a cuckold, he who has pernoctated among vagabond cadavers will comprehend that the rest seems so much molasses, nothing but molasses.

I am—and what can I do?—a catastrophic man, and I cannot sleep unless I can hear the rumblings above my bed of the bodies and the belongings of those living on the floors above, and I’m not interested in any woman, if I haven’t already made this clear, unless, as she lies outstretched in my arms, she sets herself on fire in a blazing conflagration in which she is carbonized to ash... poor thing!

TWENTY-ONE: CURSES

MAY NOISES bore into your teeth like a dentist’s drill, and may memory fill you with rust, broken words and the stench of decay.

May a spider’s foot sprout from each of your pores, may you find nourishment only in packs of worn cards and may sleep reduce you, like a steam roller, to the thickness of your photograph.

When you step into the street, may even the lampposts dog your heels, may an irresistible fanaticism oblige you to prostrate yourself before every garbage pail and may all the inhabitants of the city mistake you for a urinal.

When you want to say “My love”, may you say “fried fish”; may your own hands try to strangle you at every turn, and every time you go to flick away a cigarette, may it be you who is hurled into the spittoon.

May your wife deceive you even with the mailboxes; when she snuggles next to you, may she metamorphose into a bloodsucking leech and, after giving birth to a crow, may she bring forth a monkey wrench.

May your family amuse itself deforming your bone structure, so that mirrors, looking at you, commit suicide out of sheer repugnance; may your only entertainment consist of installing yourself in the waiting rooms of dentists, disguised as a crocodile, and may you fall so passionately in love with a toolbox that you can’t desist, even for an instant, from licking its clasp.

TWENTY-TWO: DEFENSES AGAINST WOMEN

WOMEN VAMPIRES are less dangerous than women with a prehensile sex.

For centuries, we have known various methods for protecting ourselves against the former.

It is known, for example, that a rubdown with turpentine after a bath will, in the majority of cases, immunize us; this is because the only thing women vampires like about us is the maritime taste of our blood—that remnant that perdures in us from the epochs when we were sharks or crabs.

The impossibility of their being able to sink their lancet into us in silence reduces, however, the risk of an unforeseen attack. As soon as we hear them coming we play dead because, after sniffing us and confirming that we are not moving, they hover for a moment and leave us alone.

Against women with a prehensile sex, on the other hand, almost all forms of defense prove ineffective. No doubt prickly underpants and certain other preventatives can offer their advantages, but the violence of the sling with which their sex lashes out at us rarely gives us time to use them; before we notice their presence, they hurl us into a roller-coaster ride of interminable spasms, and our only remedy is to resign ourselves to months of immobility, if we hope to recover the kilos we have lost in an instant.

Nevertheless, among the creations of sexuality’s inventory, those already mentioned are the least dreadful. Much greater dangers, indisputably, proceed from electric women, for one simple reason: electric women operate at a distance. Undetectably, across time and space, they charge us up like a battery, until suddenly we enter into such intimate contact with them that we find ourselves sharing the same currents and hosting the same parasites.

It’s useless to isolate ourselves like hermits or pianos. Asbestos pants and testicular lightning rods afford zero protection. Our flesh, little by little, acquires magnetic properties. The thumbtacks, pins and bottle caps that perforate our epidermis make us kin with those African fetishes pierced with pieces of rusted iron. Progressively, the high-tension discharges putting our nerves to the test galvanize us from the tops of our skulls to the tips of our toes. Hundreds of sparks escape from our pores every instant, obliging us to live in nakedness. All the way up to that little-contemplated day, when the woman who has been electrifying us intensifies her sexual discharges to such a degree that she ends up electrocuting us in a spluttering spasm of disruptions, disconnections and fizzling short circuits.

TWENTY-THREE: SOLIDARITY

ONE CAN CONTEST my ornithologic erudition and the efficacy of my chess openings. It never fails that some dolt will deny the astronomical accuracy of my horoscopes. But no one—and that’s a fact!—will ever take it into his head to doubt, even for an instant, my perfect, my absolute solidarity.

A colony of microbes has lodged itself in some young lady’s lungs? I am in solidarity with the microbes, the lungs and the young lady. It occurs to a student to wait for a streetcar inside a married woman’s clothes closet? I am in solidarity with the closet, the woman, the streetcar, the student and the wait.

At all hours of the night, on national holidays, on the anniversary of the discovery of America, I am disposed to solidarize with whatever may be, a victim of my universal solidarity.

It is useless, completely useless, for me to resist. Solidarity is already a reflex in me, something as unconscious as the dilation of my pupils. If, for a hundredth of a second, I came to desolidarize myself from my solidarity, in the hundredth of a second that followed I would succumb to a veritable maelstrom of solidarity.

I am in solidarity with the waves without sails... without hope. In solidarity with the shipwreck of whale-calf señoras, with the sharks in tuxedos who gobble up their bellies and their handbags. In solidarity with the handbags, the whale calves and the tuxedos.

In solidarity with the servants and the rats that move through the subsoil, along with abortions and wilted flowers.

In solidarity with automobiles, with decomposing cadavers, with telephonic communications cut short at the same time as pearl chokers and hangmen’s nooses.

In solidarity with the skeletons that multiply almost as fast as personal files, with stomachs that ingest tons of sardines and bicarbonate of soda, swollen like glutted reservoirs and warehouses groaning with lost objects.

In solidarity with postal workers, wet nurses, colonels, pedicurists and contrabandists.

I am in solidarity by dint of predestination and by dutiful vocation. In solidarity by virtue of atavism, by virtue of convention. In solidarity in perpetuity. In solidarity with the insolidarious and in solidarity with my own solidarity.

TWENTY-FOUR: THE INESCAPABLE

ON THE 31st of February, at 9:15 p.m., all the inhabitants of the city became convinced that death was inescapable.

This evidence, having become the focal point of everyone’s attention, took on the life of a spider in the folds of our circumvolutions, weaving its web in every consciousness, boring into our brains until it soaked them up like a sponge.

From that moment on, the faintest associations with the idea of death erupted with such violence that it was enough to find oneself opening a can of sardines, for example, to be immediately reminded of the lining of a coffin; or, fixing one’s attention on the stones in the sidewalk, to discover their kinship with the tombstones at the graveyard. Amid enormous consternation, it was determined that whitewashed façades had a color and composition identical to that of bones, and that it was practically impossible to climb into a bathtub without assuming the posture used in a casket, so that no one could ensepulcher himself between the sheets at night without thinking about how the creases resembled those of a shroud.

The heart, with its isochronous and deep-seated rhythm, evoked the most funebrial ideas of all, as if the organ that symbolizes and nourishes life had the power only to irrigate suggestions of death. Hearing its tick-tock through the pillow, who could help but mourn the life that was passing away second by second, listening to its steady march as if it were the echo of steps trudging towards the tomb, or, what is even worse, as if it were the pounding, from the bottom of one’s own entrails, of a heavy brass ring knocking at death’s door?

The urgent need to be free of this obsession with the mortuarial drove the citizens to seek refuge—each according to his or her personal quirks—in mysticism or licentiousness. Churches, bordellos, inns and sacristies filled with people. The multitudes prayed and fornicated on the streetcars, in the public passageways, in the middle of the street... Drunken with supplications or hard liquor, they abused life, squeezing it dry as if it were a lemon, but then a gust of weariness extinguished forever this flash fire of piety and vice.

The excesses of libertinage and devotion lasted long enough, however, for bodies to waste away and skeletons to assume a greater prominence with each passing day. A person had only to put his hands up to a light bulb to learn the most intimate details of his anatomy, since he not only had the benefit of X-ray vision, but also flesh itself became more and more translucent, as if the bones, tired of remaining in darkness, insisted on coming out and taking the sun. The most elegant women—among other things—launched the fashion of trailing enormous trains of crepe and, not content with riding around in hearses first-class, decked themselves out like the deceased so as to receive visitors on their own catafalques, ringed by hundreds of candles and wreaths of immortelle.

Vainly the citizens organized pilgrimages, kermesses, popular festivals. Attempting to uplift the mood of the city, musicians hired in the neighborhoods played “Charlestons,” but as though they were funeral marches, and couples couldn’t take a whirl without their movements acquiring the sinister rigidity of a
danse macabre
. Even inspirational speakers specializing in extolling the sensuality of life proved to be no help at all, not only because their most practiced topics acquired a cadaverous frigidity between their lips, but also because the audience left off its indifference only long enough to shout at them: “Death to this resurrected verbomaniac! To the tomb with this garrulous cadaver!”How could this propensity for the funereal, for the skeletal, fail to instigate, sooner or later, a veritable epidemic of suicides?

In this pursuit, at least, the populace demonstrated a vitality and an inventiveness that were downright admirable. There were suicides of every variety, for every taste; collective suicides, serial suicides, suicides wholesale and
en masse
. Anonymous societies of suicides were founded as well as societies of suicides anonymous. They opened preparatory schools for suicide, with faculties boasting the title of “the perfect suicide.” Festivals, banquets and masked balls for dying were given. The spirit of competition made everyone ingenious in coming up with an original, unedited suicide. One in particular involved the ideal family—a family better organized than an “Innovation” trunk—who directed that they be buried alive in a casket that accommodated, in complete comfort, the four generations making up the family line. Eight hundred suicides wearing Lazarus costumes plunged into the asphalt from the twentieth floor of one of the most prominent buildings in the city. A “dandy,” after transforming the inside of his car into a coffin, sped into the cemetery at 100 mph, pulled up to the grave of his sweetheart and shot himself four times in the head.

Public dismay was too intense for this outburst of annihilation and extermination to persist. Pretty soon no one was capable of draining a cup of strychnine anymore, no one could slit his eyeballs with a Gillette razor. An unspecified torpor benumbed the citizenry and inhibited the hygienic precautions required by certain functions of the organism. Heaps of garbage were left to pile up in the street, transforming every corner into a paradise for cockroaches. Neglectful of the dignity that befits any cadaver, people expired everywhere, in the most degrading positions. Armies of rats invaded homes that gave off a whiff of the tomb. Silence and pestilence strolled arm in arm through the deserted streets, and faced with the inertia of their owners—already putrefying—parrotssuccumbed with empty stomachs, but with mouths full of curses and obscenities.