The Cave (23 page)

The first fifty to emerge from the kiln were the Eskimos, which were nearest to hand, right inside the door. This was, in Marta's immediate view, a fortunate coincidence, Just to get used to the technique we couldn't have a better start, they're easy to paint, in fact, only the nurses, who are all dressed in white, will be easier. When the figurines had cooled completely, they took them over to the drying shelves, where Cipriano Algor, armed with a spray gun and protected by the filter of his face mask, methodically covered them with the matte white of the undercoat. He grumbled to himself that it wasn't worth having that thing covering his mouth and nose, I'd just need to make sure I had the wind behind me, and the paint would be carried away from me, it wouldn't even touch me, but then he thought that he was being unfair and ungrateful, especially considering that, with the good weather they've been having, there could be days when there wasn't any breeze at all. When he had finished his part of the work, Cipriano Algor helped his daughter to set out the paints, the jar of oil, the brushes, the colored drawings on which she had based the dolls, he brought her the bench she would be sitting on, but as soon as he saw her make the first brushstroke, he said, This isn't going to work, if you have the figurines in a row like that, you're going to have to keep moving the bench along and it'll be too tiring, and Marçal said, What did Marçal say, asked Marta, That you should be very careful not to wear yourself out, What I find really tiring is having to hear the same advice over and over, It's for your own good, Look, if I put a dozen figurines in front of me, like that, they're all within easy reach and I'll only have to move the bench four times, besides it does me good to move around a bit, and now that I've explained to you how this assembly line in reverse is going to work, I would remind you that there is nothing more off-putting to someone working than the presence of those who are not, which, in this instance, seems to be you, Right, I'll remember to say the same to you when I'm working, You already have, worse than that, you sent me away, All right, I'm going, there's obviously no talking to you today, Just two things before you go, first, if there's anyone you can talk to, it's me, And second, Give me a kiss. Yesterday it was Cipriano Algor who had asked his son-in-law for a hug, now it's Marta asking her father for a kiss, something is happening to this family, any moment now there'll be comets appearing in the sky, aurora borealises, and witches on broomsticks, Found will sit howling all night at the moon, even when there is no moon, and from one moment to the next the mulberry tree will turn barren. Unless, of course, this is just the result of overly impressionable sensibilities, Marta because she is pregnant, Marçal because Marta is pregnant, Cipriano Algor for all the reasons we already know and some that only he knows. Anyway, father kissed daughter, daughter kissed father, and they made a bit of a fuss of Found too when he tried to join in, so he will have no reason for complaint either. And that, as they say, is that. Cipriano Algor went into the pottery to start making the molds for the next three hundred figurines, and Marta, in the shade of the mulberry tree, beneath the conscientious eye of Found, who had resumed his responsibilities as guard, prepared herself to start painting the Eskimos. Alas, she could not, she had forgotten that first she had to sand them down, remove any sharp edges, any irregularities or imperfections in the finish, then clean off the dust, and, since misfortunes never come singly and since one omission usually reminds you of another, she would not be able to paint them as she had at first thought, moving seamlessly from one color to the next, until the last brush stroke. She remembered the
page in the manual where it explicitly stated that only when one color has completely dried should you apply the next, Now I really could do with an assembly line, she said, with the figurines passing before me, once to receive the blue, then the yellow, then the violet, then the black and the red and the green and the white, and, of course, for the final blessing, the one that carries within it all the colors of the rainbow, May God make you good, for I have done what I could, and it won't be so much because of any additional goodness that God, as subject as any ordinary mortal to lapses and oversights, may contribute to crown my efforts, but because of a humble awareness that the reason we didn't do any better was simply because we couldn't. Arguing with what must be has always been a waste of time, as far as what must be is concerned, arguments are more or less random groups of words waiting to be placed in a syntactical order that will give them a sense they themselves are not entirely sure that they have. Marta left Found to keep an eye on the dolls and, declining all further debates with the inevitable, she went into the kitchen to get the only bit of fine sandpaper in the house, This won't last long, she thought, I'll have to buy some more. If she had looked round the door of the pottery, she would have seen that things were not going well in there either. Cipriano Algor had boasted to Marçal that he had invented a few shortcuts to speed up the work, which, from, shall we say, a global perspective, was true, but speed had soon proved itself to be incompatible with perfection, and produced a far larger number of defective dolls than had been the case with the first batch. When Marta went back to her work, the first spoiled figurines had already been placed on the shelf, but Cipriano Algor, having calculated time gained and figurines lost, decided not to give up his fecund, but, on the other hand, neither reprehensible nor ever fully explained shortcuts. And so the days passed. The Eskimos were followed by the clowns, then came the nurses, then the mandarins and the bearded Assyrians, and finally the jesters, who had been placed along the back wall of the kiln. On
the second day, Marta had gone down to the village to buy two dozen sheets of sandpaper. This was the shop where Isaura had just started work, as Marta already knew, having visited Isaura after the latter's troubling encounter, emotionally speaking, of course, with Marta's father. These two women do not see each other very often, but there are plenty of reasons for them to become great friends. Discreetly, so that her words did not reach the ears of the owner of the shop, Marta asked Isaura if she was settling into the job, and Isaura said yes, she was, I'll get used to it, she said. She spoke without any show of pleasure, but firmly, as if she wanted to make it clear that pleasure had nothing to do with it, that it had been will, and will alone, that had made her accept the job. Marta remembered the words that Isaura had spoken some time ago, Any job will do, as long as I can go on living here. In the question that Isaura asked next, while she was rolling up the sheets of sandpaper, loosely, as prescribed, Marta heard an echo, distorted but still recognizable, of those words, And how's everyone at home, Oh, tired, working very hard, but pretty well really, Marçal, poor thing, had to stoke the kiln on his day off, his back is probably killing him now. The sheets of sandpaper had been rolled up. While she was taking the money and returning the change, Isaura, without looking up, asked, And how's your father. Marta could say only that her father was fine, an anxious thought had just flashed through her mind, What will this woman do with her life when we leave. Isaura said good-bye, she had to serve another customer, Give him my regards, she said, and if, at that moment, Marta had asked her, What will you do with your life when we leave, she would perhaps have replied as calmly as she had before, I'll get used to it. Yes, we often hear it said, or we say it ourselves, I'll get used to it, we say or they say, with what seems to be genuine acceptance, because there really isn't any other way, at least none has yet been discovered, of expressing in as dignified a way as possible our sense of resignation, what no one asks is at what cost do we get used to things. Marta left the shop almost in tears. With a
kind of desperate remorse, as if she were accusing herself of having deceived Isaura, she was thinking, She has no idea, she doesn't even know that we're about to leave.

Twice they forgot to give the dog his food. Recollecting his days as an indigent, when hope for the morrow was all the food he had after many hours spent with his stomach longing for sustenance, Found did not complain, instead, neglecting his duties as guard dog, he simply lay down beside the kennel, for it is ancient knowledge that a prone body can withstand hunger far longer, waiting patiently until one of his owners struck his or her head and exclaimed, Oh, damn, we've forgotten about the dog. It is hardly surprising, since, during that time, they had almost forgotten about themselves. But it was thanks to that total absorption in their respective tasks and to the hours stolen from their sleep, even though Cipriano Algor kept telling Marta, You must rest, you must rest, it was thanks to that parallel effort that, when the time came for Cipriano Algor to go and pick up his son-in-law from the Center again, the three hundred figurines that had emerged from the kiln were sanded, brushed, painted, and dried, every single one of them, and that the other three hundred, erect and impeccable in their raw clay, with no visible defects, were also, with the help of the heat and the breeze, perfectly dry and ready to be fired. The pottery seemed to be resting after a great labor, the silence had lain down to sleep. In the shade of the mulberry tree, father and daughter looked at the six hundred figurines lined up on the shelves and it seemed to them that they had done an excellent job. Cipriano Algor said, I won't work in the pottery tomorrow, that way Marçal won't have to deal with the kiln all alone, and Marta said, I think we should rest for a few days before we launch into the second batch, and Cipriano Algor said, What about three days, and Marta replied, It's better than nothing, and Cipriano Algor asked, How are you feeling, and Marta said, Tired, but well, and Cipriano Algor said, I feel great, and Marta said, That must be what we call the reward of a job well done. Although it
might not seem like it, there was no irony in these words, only a weariness that could be described as infinite if such a description were not a manifestly wild exaggeration. Whatever it was, it was not so much the physical tiredness, but having to stand helplessly by, unable to do anything, watching her father's bitter disappointment and ill-concealed sadness, his ups and downs, his pathetic attempts to appear confident and authoritative, the obsessive, categorical restating of his doubts as if, by doing so, he could remove them from his head. And then there was that woman, Isaura, Isaura Madruga, she of the water jug, to whom she had replied only, He's fine, to the question Isaura had murmured, eyes lowered, while she was counting out the change, And how's your father when what she should have done was to take her by the arm, march her to the pottery where her father was working and say, Here he is, and then close the door and leave them inside until words came to their rescue, because silences, poor things, are just that, silences, everyone knows how often even apparently eloquent silences have given rise to mistaken interpretations, with serious and sometimes fatal consequences. We're too fearful, too cowardly to risk doing something like that, thought Marta, looking at her father, who seemed to have fallen asleep, we are too caught in the net of so-called proprieties, in the web of what is proper and improper, if anyone found out I had done it, they would immediately come to me and say that throwing a woman at a man like that, because that's the expression they would use, shows a complete lack of respect for another person's identity, that it was an act of irresponsible imprudence, after all, who knows what might happen to them in the future, people's happiness is not something that we can build today with any certainty that it will still be there tomorrow, later on, we might meet one disunited half of the couple we had united and risk hearing them say, It was all your fault. Marta did not want to give in to that commonsense argument, the logical and skeptical result of many hard battles with life, It's ridiculous to throw away the present just because
you're afraid there might not be a future, she said to herself, adding, Besides, not everything will necessarily happen tomorrow, some things will happen only the day after tomorrow, What did you say, asked her father abruptly, Nothing, she said, I've just been sitting here quietly so as not to wake you, But I wasn't asleep, Well, I thought you were, You said that there are some things that will happen only the day after tomorrow, How odd, did I really say that, asked Marta, Yes, I wasn't dreaming it, Then I must have dreamed it, I must have fallen asleep and then immediately woken up again, that's what dreams are like, you can make neither head nor tail of them, not because they don't have a head and a tail, but because the head and the tail aren't where you expect them to be, which is why dreams are so hard to interpret. Cipriano Algor got up, It's nearly time to go and pick up Marçal, but I was just thinking that perhaps it would be a good idea to go a bit earlier and drop in at the buying department to tell them that the first three hundred are ready and to agree on a delivery date, That seems like a good idea, said Marta. Cipriano Algor went to change his clothes, put on a clean shirt and some different shoes, and in less than ten minutes he was getting into the van, See you later, he said, See you later, Pa, go carefully, And come back even more carefully of course, Of course, because then there will be two of you, You see what I mean, there's no arguing with you, you have an answer for everything. Found came over to ask his master if this time he could go with him, but Cipriano Algor said no, be patient, cities are not the best places for dogs.

The journey, one of many, would have been of no consequence were it not for the potter's uneasy feeling that something bad was about to happen. He suddenly remembered what he had heard his daughter say, Some things will happen only the day after tomorrow, a few random words, with no apparent rhyme or reason, which she had been unable or unwilling to explain, I doubt very much she was sleeping, but I can't understand why she should have said she was dreaming, he thought, and then, as a continuance of the remembered phrase, he allowed his mind to follow the same road, and the phrase began to ring in his head like an obsessive litany, Some things will happen only the day after tomorrow, some things will happen only tomorrow, some things will happen today, then he took up the sequence again and reversed it, Some things will happen today, some things will happen only tomorrow, some things will happen only the day after tomorrow, and he repeated and repeated it so many times that the meaning of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow finally lost all sound and sense, and all that remained in his head, like a danger light flashing on and off, Happen today, happen today, today, today, today, Today what, he asked himself abruptly, trying to shake off the absurd feeling of apprehension that made his hands shake as they gripped the steering wheel, I'm driving into town to pick up Marçal, I'm going to the buying department to tell them that the first batch is ready to be delivered, everything I'm doing is perfectly normal and ordinary and logical, I have no reason to be worried, and I'm driving carefully, there's not much traffic, the hijackings have stopped, at least I haven't heard about any, therefore, nothing out of the usual monotonous routine is going to happen to me, the same steps, the same words, the same gestures, the reception desk, the smiling assistant head of department or the rude one, or even the head of the buying department himself if he isn't in a meeting and takes it into his head to see me, then the van door opening, Marçal getting in, Afternoon, Pa, Good afternoon, Marçal, how was work this week, I don't know if you can really call ten days a week, but I don't know what else to call it, Oh, pretty much as usual, he'll say, We've finished the first batch of figurines, and I've arranged a delivery time with the buying department, I'll say, How's Marta, he'll ask, Oh, tired, but otherwise fine, I'll say, words we are constantly using, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if, as we were passing from this world to the next, we didn't dredge up the strength to respond to someone who had the imbecilic idea to ask how we were, Oh, dying, but otherwise fine, is what we would say. In order
to shake off the company of the ominous thoughts that persist in bothering him, Cipriano Algor tried to look at the landscape outside, he did so out of sheer desperation because he knew perfectly well that he would find no solace in the depressing sight of plastic greenhouses stretching out on either side, as far as the horizon, which he could see even more clearly from the top of the small hill the van was climbing. And this is what they call the Green Belt, he thought, this desolation, this gloomy encampment, this flock of grubby blocks of ice that melt those who work inside them into pools of sweat, for a lot of people these greenhouses are machines, machines for making vegetables, nothing could be easier, it's like a recipe, mix all the ingredients together, set the thermostat and the hygrometer, press a button, and shortly afterward up pops a lettuce. Cipriano Algor's displeasure does not blind him to the fact that thanks to these greenhouses, he can have vegetables on his plate all year round, what he can't bear is that they should have chosen the name Green Belt for a place where that color is nowhere to be seen, apart from the few weeds that manage to spring up outside the greenhouses. Would you be any happier if the plastic sheeting were green, was the blunt question asked by the thought process that toils away on the lower landing of the brain, a restless thought process that is never satisfied with what was thought or decided by that on the upper landing, but Cipriano Algor preferred not to respond to that highly pertinent question, he pretended that he hadn't heard, perhaps because of the somewhat impertinent tone that all pertinent questions automatically adopt, simply because they have been asked, and however hard they try to disguise themselves. The Industrial Belt, which more and more resembles a continually expanding tubular construction, a network of pipes designed by an eccentric and built by a maniac, did not improve his mood, but at least his agitated, confused presentiment was now merely muttering quietly to itself. He noticed that the visible boundary of the shantytowns was now much closer to the road, like an army of ants that resumes its
march after the rain has stopped, he gave a resigned shrug as he thought that soon the attacks on trucks would be bound to start again, and then, making a heroic effort to drive away the shadow sitting beside him, he joined the city's disorderly traffic. It was early yet to pick up Marçal, he had plenty of time to go to the buying department. He did not ask to speak to the head of the buying department, he knew very well that the matter which brought him there was merely an excuse to remind them of his existence, a visiting card so that they would not forget him or the fact that about thirty kilometers away a kiln was diligently firing clay, a woman was painting, and her father was making molds, and that all had their eyes fixed on the Center, and don't go telling me that kilns don't have eyes, because they do, if they didn't, they wouldn't know what they were doing, so they do have eyes, it's just that they're not like our eyes. He was greeted by the nice, smiling assistant head of department who had dealt with him on the previous occasion, So what brings you here today, he asked, The three hundred figurines are ready, and I just came to find out when you would like me to bring them in, Whenever you want, tomorrow if you like, Ah, I don't know that I can tomorrow, my son-in-law will be home on leave and he'll be helping me put the other three hundred in the kiln, The day after tomorrow, then, as soon as you can, though, because I've had an idea that I want to put into practice right away, To do with my figurines you mean, Exactly, do you remember that I mentioned drawing up a questionnaire, I do, yes, the one comparing the situation before buying and the situation afterward, Congratulations, you've got a good memory, Not bad for a man my age, Well, that idea, which we have used in a number of cases with excellent results, will consist in distributing a certain number of figurines to a fixed number of potential buyers, based on an as yet undefined social and cultural universe, to test their opinion of the product, obviously I'm simplifying matters, the way we ask our questions is, as you can imagine, much more complicated than that, To be honest,
I've no experience in the area, sir, I've never asked the questions or been asked, Well, I'm even thinking of using your initial batch of three hundred in the questionnaire, I select fifty customers, provide each of them with a complete set of six figurines, gratis, and in a matter of days I will know their views, Gratis, said Cipriano Algor, does that mean you're not going to pay us, My dear sir, of course we'll pay you, the experiment is made at our expense, we will make sure any costs are covered, we would not want to do anything that might harm you. The relief felt by Cipriano Algor assuaged for a moment the question that had irrupted into his mind, that is, What will happen if the result of the questionnaire is negative, if the majority of the customers, or all of them, give the same definitive answer to all the questions, No, I'm not interested. He heard himself saying, Thank you, not just out of politeness, but out of fairness too, it isn't every day that someone comes along and soothes us with the benign information that they do not wish to do anything to harm us. Unease had begun gnawing at his stomach again, but now he was the one who would not let the question leave his mouth, he would depart as if he were carrying in his pocket a sealed letter to be opened only once he was on the high seas and in which his fate had been recorded, plotted, written, today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. The assistant head of department had asked, And what brings you here today, then he had said, Tomorrow if you like, and had concluded, The day after tomorrow then, it's true that this is quite simply the nature of words, they come and go, and go, and come, and come, and go, but why were these waiting for me here, why did they leave the house with me and stay with me during the whole journey, not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, but today, right now. Suddenly, Cipriano Algor hated the man standing before him, this nice, genial, almost affectionate assistant head of department, with whom the other day he had been able to discuss practicalities on equal terms, apart, of course, from the obvious distances and differences in age and social class, neither of which, or so
it had seemed then, had been an impediment to a relationship founded on mutual respect. If someone sticks a knife in your guts, they should at least have the moral decency to wear a face in keeping with that murderous act, a face that oozes hatred and ferocity, a face that speaks of wild rage or even of inhuman coldness, but please, dear God, don't let them smile while they are tearing out your innards, don't let them despise you that much, don't let them feed you with false hopes, saying, for example, Don't worry, it's nothing, a couple of stitches and you'll be as good as new, or else, I sincerely hope that the results of the questionnaire prove favorable, believe me, few things would give me greater satisfaction. Cipriano Algor made a vague movement with his head, a gesture that could as easily have meant yes as no, which might indeed have meant nothing, then he said, I have to go and pick up my son-in-law.