Scarecrow & Other Anomalies (9 page)

Although my lack of appetite reduced my intake to bits and pieces, I was not slow to ingest a number of more or less shady anecdotes from his life: the bankruptcy, followed by the suicide and other accessories, of his father; his transit through two or three jobs; his need to pawn his cufflinks, tuxedo and overcoat; the first symptoms of hunger—little shivers in the back, little mute and desperate cramps; a thousand incidents in all latitudes, in all climes, until he came to Buenos Aires, which, according to him, was a place of marvels! The only city in the world where one can live without working and without money, because there it was the rarest of things to have a bloodletting with no profit, even in the case of the most well-bled billfolds.

Afflicted as it is by chronic anemia, mine could not rectify the matter even though it had taken preventative measures to keep its discharges from being overly copious and frequent. Due to this infirmity I had to maintain this regimen religiously, so that I was stricken by the contrast between his habitual skepticism and his hyperbolic enthusiasm for the country. This is illustrated by a consideration of how, prior to embarking for Argentina, he had imagined it an enormous cow with a million udders swollen with milk, and how, after ambling through Buenos Aires for a few days, he understood that, in spite of its appearance of a bombed-out fortress, it was the offspring of the pampas, with which the river had mingled in order to give it birth.

“Europe is like me,” he was apt to say, “something rotten and exquisite; a Camembert with locomotive ataxia. It’s useless to try to smear it with bad odors. The land has nothing left to give. It’s overly old. It’s full of corpses. And, what’s worse, important corpses. In vain we try to avoid them. We trip over them everywhere. There isn’t a threshold or latch that hasn’t been corroded. We live beneath the same roofs where they have lived and died. And as much as it repulses us, we are left with no other remedy but to repeat their gestures, their words, their attitudes. Only a man capable of wearing a crow’s wing attached to his forehead, like Barrès, could take pleasure in learning to fornicate in such cemeteries.

“Here, on the other hand, the earth is pure and unfurrowed. Not a churchyard, not a cross. Here we can gallop through life without encountering more deaths than our own. And if we stumble by chance upon a cadaver, it is so humble that it bothers no one. It lives an anonymous death: a death of the same shape and size as the pampas.

“In the city, life is no less liberated. From all parts blows an air of improvisation that permits us to act on whatever inclination. All anyone talks about is foul depravity. Expectancy takes root in such untilled fields! Having said that, as one who has blossomed here, I have often felt tempted to do something myself, and you may as well know it! I may even come to be convinced that sweat is as respectable a secretion as is generally claimed. I prefer it, in any case, to the glister of European cities, so polished, so perfect, that no one would consent to move a stone out of place. Their cornices inspire in us an aptitude for excellent manners. Sooner or later they end up lacing us into a straitjacket. It’s impossible to commit an error of syntax, to yawn in public, to grab a flowerpot and smash it to bits on the sidewalk.”

These sallies, and others of similar stripe, acquired an accent less rhetorical when they referred to some episode in his life. Because of this circumstance or, perhaps, because of the lamentable state into which he had fallen, I hope I will be able to recapture, with adequate accuracy, what he told me the last time we met.

As I recall, it was in one of those cafés that never shuts its eyes. The chairs had already been stacked on the tables so as to relieve their legs of numbness when the waiter, with a gesture that has long since forgotten the countryside, scattered sawdust over the damp tiles.

Seated before a little cup containing a concoction with a certain resemblance to eyewash, a man appeared in doubt whether to ingest it or use it to cleanse his pupils. From head to toe, his person gave off an aura of ruin and calamity so authentic and so thorough that I recognized him immediately. His pallor of ground glass, his beard spun by a spider, his greasy and discolored fedora lent him I don’t know what resemblance to the lamps that nobody had bothered to put out and that weakly competed with the pitiless light of morning.

It is possible that, during the first few moments, he made a pretense of not noticing my presence but, upon discovering me standing next to him, lowered his head and extended to me a boneless, weedy hand. I experienced a flutter identical to that produced by unsuspected contact with a glove lying at the bottom of a pocket. I wiped off the moisture with which he had contaminated mine and drew up a chair. It was evident that this disturbed him. As we exchanged our first words, his glances grazed objects in a choppy flight and returned to submerge themselves in his pupils without perturbing the reflection of the lights settled in them, as if in a stagnant puddle. It was urgent to draw him out of that apathy. With the greatest possible cruelty I told him that he looked bad and must surely be very ill. This trick, as expected, succeeded. With one gulp, he polished off the whiskey we had ordered and, letting his arms drop off the table, exclaimed:

“I can’t take it anymore! I don’t know what to do! I’m desperate!”

Choked, hoarse, his voice seemed to emerge from behind a closed curtain. As if opening it suddenly, he asked me:

“Have you never been tortured by noises? No! I’m sure you haven’t. It’s so horrible! Horrible!”

The obvious disproportion between the cause and effect of his misery almost made me smile. In any case, it was only then that he looked me in the face before proceeding in a tone accented by a certain rancor:

“No! I am sure not! You can’t understand me. For that, I would have to be like you. You have nothing to grab hold of. I may not count for much, but at least I have this,” he went on, extracting a little flask whose filthy label made plain its pharmaceutical contents. “This! For me, it’s everything. Nothing else is left. Absolutely nothing.”

And, forestalling inferences, he explained:

“It all started with my upstairs neighbor. Night after night I was disturbed by the sound of footsteps above my ceiling. Little by little, their monotonous regularity assumed a stern solemnity! It was like someone knocking on the door of a house where nobody lives. Each time more ponderous, each time closer to my head, I sensed them plunging down from the ceiling, from one end to the other, until I was convinced they would finish me off by pummeling me like hammer-blows.”

“I inquired as to who lived in the room above. It turned out to be a student who spent the greater part of the night reading. As the state of my account and my relations with the landlord precluded the possibility of getting assistance from that quarter, I decided to intervene with my neighbor directly. This initiative produced a satisfactory result. For several days, the rafters remained still. Once in a while a slam or a shout rose from the stairwell, but these noises were intermittent: they let me rest. Between one noise and the next there were great gaps of silence and of happiness.”

“In a short time, however, all my neighbor’s precautions turned into a regime of persecution more torturous than before. Stretched out on my bed, I saw him, for hours at a time, pace from one side of his room to the other, as if the floorboards were translucent. The care with which he opened a drawer, or placed his pipe on his desk, came to agitate me to the point where I had to bury my head in my pillow in order to drown out a yowl of impatience. I believed that he was deliberately engineering ways to prolong my agony, and I attributed every unexpected or improvident disturbance, however small, to his invention. The most treacherous dangled, like spiders, from the rafters and made the pile of the carpet stand on end, then reproduced themselves in the corners, behind the clothes closet, underneath the bed.

“So high was my state of excitement that it was not long before I was able to perceive, from my fifth-floor quarters, simultaneously and with the most pronounced acuity, the conversations of the people who passed along the sidewalk, the purl of the faucet in the patio downstairs, the snores from every room in the building. Although by now I had been spying on them for weeks at a time and ended up knowing the schedules and routines of the majority of these noises, there was always something impossible to locate except inside my head. It was worse plunging myself under the blankets! In direct ratio as those on the outside were lulled and fell asleep, those dwelling in my interior began to awake, one by one, and, not content with gnashing their teeth like newborn mice, scrambled around in my stomach until they wracked me with throes so severe that, as absurd as it seems, I believed I was on the verge of giving birth to a child.

“One exasperating night I decided to go out into the street. I foresaw what awaited me, the effect that would be produced in me by the clatter of the traffic, but anything was preferable to staying in my room. At the corner, I took the first streetcar to arrive. What happened next I can’t describe. One moment I felt fine, the next I felt as if my head were splitting into pieces, but the intensity of the pain engrossed me in such a deep insensibility that when the streetcar stopped to undertake its return trip I was surprised to find myself in the suburbs.

“European capitals lack precise boundaries, they amalgamate and confuse themselves with the towns surrounding them. Buenos Aires, on the other hand, in certain districts at least, terminates brusquely, without preamble. Some scattered houses, like dice on green velvet, and suddenly: the countryside, a countryside as authentic as you please. It’s as if the outskirts cannot bring themselves to go far from the cobblestones. And if a shop or market should run this risk, it does so by fronting on the pampas. At night, above all, you have only to walk a few blocks in the outskirts to find yourself unaccompanied by lights. Of the metropolis nothing remains but a blushing sky.

“Only a few minutes from the spot where I got off the streetcar I found myself in the open country. Never had I experienced such an abundance! My brain was becoming saturated, as if it were a sponge, by an elemental and maritime silence: savoring the night, I fed upon it, I nibbled away, minus condiments,
au naturel
; delightedly picking out its lettucelike flavors, its plush carnosity, the piquant torpor of its stars.

“I’d been influenced, probably, by the anguish of the preceding days. However it happened, this instant alone was sufficient to give me a reason for living and to justify my existence. One has to have undergone the direst moments before he can feel something comparable.”

Since the invidious intent of this last remark was self-evident, I did not want to interrupt him.

“From that day on,” he added, now without boasting, “I adhered to the same itinerary every night. The succeeding ones, nevertheless, were not so fortunate. I looked with loathing at the rough tread of my steps on the earth and was disgusted by the obstinacy with which the insects bored into the silence. I was convinced that the chirping of the crickets possessed an aggressive intention and, what was much more ignominious, that the toads were laughing at me.

“In spite of all this, for a month and a half I kept up these excursions. Anything was preferable to putting up with the echo chamber into which my room had been transformed. A few days later there transpired, however, an event that obliged me to give them up forever.

“It was a magnificent night,” he continued, in a voice still more grating and strained. “As soon as I got away from the city I noticed that no noise bothered me. At first I was afraid that I had gone deaf. On the contrary. I could hear with extraordinary clarity, but without pain or discomfort. I don’t know how many blocks I wandered in the intoxication and the relief of this verification. At one point, my legs refused to take another step. I searched for a spot where I could rest and lean back on my elbows alongside the roadway.

“Nowhere is the sky so rich in constellations. While we are contemplating it in this way, everything else almost disappears and in a short while we become so completely absorbed in it that we lose all contact with the earth. It’s as if we are reclining on the deck of a bobbing boat, gazing at waters so serene that they immobilize the reflection of the stars.

“Immersed in this contemplation, I had completely forgotten myself when suddenly a mellow voice pronounced my name. Although I was sure I was alone, the voice was so clear that I sat up to investigate. The countryside extended out of sight along both sides of the road. One tree after another was lost in the immensity, but nearby, from a tangle of thistles, a bulk emerged that turned out to be a cow grazing in the pasture.

“I was about to stretch out again but, before a minute passed, heard the voice say to me:

‘Have you no shame? Is it possible? What has brought you to this state? So now you can’t even live among people?’

“As absurd as it may seem, I couldn’t escape the conclusion that the voice originated from the place where I had descried the cow. With the utmost discretion, I turned around to observe it. The clarity of the night permitted me to distinguish its every move. After stirring itself and taking a few steps, it paused a couple of yards from where I was and, still chewing its cud, continued in an afflicted tone:

‘You could have been so happy! You are refined, intelligent and egoistic. But what have you done with your life? Deceived, deceived... nothing but deceived! And now it turns out the same old way: you are the only one who is deceived. You make me want to cry! Ever since you were a boy you have always been so proud! You consider yourself to be above everyone and everything. Above reproach. You believe you have been living more intensely than anyone else. But would you dare to deny it? You have never given of yourself. When I think how you would prefer anything to actually finding yourself! How is it possible that you can live with such emptiness? Why do you persist in filling it with nothing? You are incapable of holding out your hand, of opening your arms. It’s truly depressing! It makes me want to cry!’