The Cave (7 page)

Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are a malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there's a will, there's a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life. Marta said to her father, Let's begin at the beginning, and it was as if all they needed to do was to sit down at the table and start making dolls with fingers grown suddenly agile and exact, having regained their former skill after a long period of inactivity. These are the delusions of the pure and the unprepared, the beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man, the beginning is just the beginning, what came before is nigh on worthless. Which is why what Marta said next was less categorical, We have only three days to prepare our presentation, I think that's what businessmen and executives call it, Sorry, I don't quite follow, said her father, Today is Monday, you'll be picking marçal up on Thursday afternoon, so that's the day when you'll have to show the head of the buying department our proposals for making the dolls, complete with drawings, models, prices, in short, everything we can think of that might persuade them to buy the dolls and help them come to a decision now rather than next year. Without noticing that he was repeating what he had already said, Cipriano Algor asked, Where do we begin, but Marta's answer this time was different, We'll have to choose half a dozen types, possibly fewer, we don't want to make things too complicated for ourselves, then work out how many dolls we can make each day, though that depends on our approach, whether we model the clay like sculptors or make identical male and female figures and then dress them according to their professions, they'll all be standing figures, of course, in my experience, they're so much easier, What do you mean by dress them, Well, dress them, by attaching to the naked figurine the clothes and accessories that characterize them and give them their individuality, I reckon that two people working like that would make faster progress, then it's just a matter of taking care with the painting, there can't be any smudges, You've obviously given this a lot of thought, said Cipriano Algor, Not really, I just thought quickly, And well, Now don't make me blush, And a lot, even though you deny it, Look, I'm blushing already, Fortunately for me, you're capable of thinking quickly, thinking a lot and thinking well all at the same time, You know what they say, naught so blind as a father's love, And what figures do you think we should make, Nothing very antiquated, a lot of professions have completely disappeared, and no one nowadays has a clue what those people did, what purpose they served, on the other hand, I don't think they should be too modern either, that's what plastic dolls are for, with their heroes, their Rambos, their astronauts, their mutants, their monsters, their superpolice and their superbandits, and, of course, their weapons, we mustn't forget their weapons, Hm, I was just thinking, because every now and then I too manage to squeeze a few ideas out of my brain, although not as good as yours, Now, now, no false modesty, it doesn't suit you, How about taking a look at the illustrated books we've got, for example, that old encyclopedia your grandfather bought, if we can find some models for the dolls in there, then we'll also have solved the problem of which drawings I should take with me to show the head of the buying department, he won't know that we've copied them and even if he did he wouldn't care, That idea would have gotten an A+ on the old scale of school marks, No, a B would do me fine, it attracts less attention, Let's get down to work then.

As you might imagine, the Algor family library is neither extensive nor of exceptional quality. You wouldn't expect great erudition in ordinary people and in a place like this, far from civilization, but even so, there are some two or three hundred books on the shelves, some old, some, the majority, middle-aged, the rest more or less recent, although only a few are brand new. The village does not have a shop that would do justice to the old and noble name of bookshop, there is only a small stationer's that will order any textbooks needed from publishers in the city, and, very rarely, some literary work that has been touted a lot on the radio or the television and whose content, style, and intentions correspond satisfactorily to the average interests of the inhabitants. Although marçal Gacho is not himself a keen and conscientious reader, when he turns up at the pottery with a book as a gift for Marta, it must be said that he knows the difference between what is good and what is merely mediocre, although good and mediocre are such slippery terms that they always give rise to discussion and disagreement. The encyclopedia that father and daughter have just opened on the kitchen table was considered the best of its kind at the time of publication, whereas today its only use would be to find out about areas of knowledge no longer considered useful or which, at the time, were still only articulating their first, hesitant syllables. Placed in a line, one after another, the encyclopedias of today, yesterday, and the-day-before-the-day-before-yesterday represent successive images of frozen worlds, interrupted gestures, words in search of their ultimate or penultimate meaning. Encyclopedias are like immutable cycloramas, prodigious projectors whose reels have gotten stuck and which show, with a kind of maniacal fixity, a landscape which, because it is condemned to be only and for all eternity what it was, will at the same time grow older, more decrepit and more unnecessary. The encyclopedia purchased by Cipriano Algor's father is as magnificent and as useless as a line of poetry we cannot quite remember. However, let us not be too proud and ungrateful, let us remember the sensible advice of our elders who counseled us to keep what was no longer necessary because, sooner or later, although we might not think so, it could turn out to be just the thing we needed. Today, bent over the old, yellowing pages, breathing in the smell of damp, untouched by the air, unstirred by the light, and that has been contained for years in the smooth thickness of the paper, father and daughter are learning the value of that lesson, looking for what they need in something they had thought to be useless. They found along the way a member of the academy wearing a plumed bicorn hat, rapier, and lace ruffles on his shirt, they found a clown and a tightrope walker, they found a skeleton with a scythe and immediately moved on, they found a horsewoman astride a horse and an admiral without a ship, they found a bullfighter and a man in a smock, they found a boxer and his opponent, they found a carabineer and a cardinal, they found a hunter and his hound, they found a sailor on leave and a magistrate, a jester and a Roman in a toga, they found a dervish and a halberdier, they found a customs officer and a seated scribe, they found a postman and a fakir, they also found a gladiator and a hoplite, a nurse and a juggler, a lord and a minstrel, they found a fencer and an apiarist, a miner and a fisherman, a fireman and a flautist, they found two puppets, they found a boatman, they found a navvy, they found
saints of both sexes, they found a demon, they found the holy trinity, they found soldiers and military men of every rank, they found a deep-sea diver and a skater, they saw a sentinel and a woodcutter, they saw a cobbler wearing glasses, they found a man playing a drum and another playing a cornet, they found an old lady in a shawl and head scarf, they found an old man smoking a pipe, they found a venus and an apollo, they found a gentleman in a top hat, they found a bishop in a miter, they found a caryatid and an Atlas, they found one lancer mounted and another on foot, they found an Arab wearing a turban, they found a Chinese mandarin, they found an aviator, they found a condottiere and a baker, they found a musketeer, they found a maid in an apron and an Eskimo, they found a bearded Assyrian, they found a pointsman, they found a gardener, they found a naked man with all his muscles exposed and a map of the nervous and circulatory systems, they also found a naked woman, although she was covering her pubis with her right hand and her breasts with her left. They found many more, but they were not suited to the ends they had in sight, either because making the figures would be too complicated in clay, or because overuse of celebrities past and present with whose portraits, accurate, plausible or imagined, the encyclopedia was filled, might be misinterpreted as a lack of respect and even give rise, in the case of famous people still alive, or of famous people now deceased but with greedy and vigilant heirs, to ruinous court cases for offence caused, moral damage and defamation of character. Who are we going to choose from this lot, then, asked Cipriano Algor, we can't possibly cope with more than three or four, you have to remember that, between now and then, while the Center is making up its mind whether to buy them, we're going to have to practice a lot if we want to deliver good-quality, presentable work, Yes, I know, Pa, but I think it would be best if we proposed six different figures, said Marta, then they'll either accept and we can divide production into two phases, in which case it will be a question of agreeing to deadlines, or, and, initially,
this is much more likely, they themselves will choose two or three dolls to start with just to see if their customers would be interested and to test out their possible response, And it might go no farther than that, That's true, but I think we'll have more chance of persuading them if we show them six designs, numbers count, numbers influence people, it's a question of psychology, Psychology never was my strong point, Nor mine, but even in our ignorance we sometimes have prophetic flashes of intuition, Well, don't aim those prophetic flashes at your father's future, he has always preferred to find out each day what that day decides to bring him, good or ill, What the day brings is one thing, what we ourselves contribute to the day is quite another, The day before, Sorry, I don't know what you mean, The day before is what we bring to the day we're actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day, Now you're just trying to depress me, No, I'm not, but if I am, perhaps you're to blame for that, To blame for what, With you I always end up talking about serious things, All right, let's talk about something even more serious, let's select our dolls. Cipriano Algor is not a man much given to laughter, and even frank smiles are rare on his lips, at most one might notice a brief change in his eyes as if the gleam there had suddenly shifted slightly, sometimes one might glimpse a slight compression of the lips as if they had been forced to smile in order to stop themselves from smiling. No, Cipriano Algor is not a man much given to laughter, but, as we have just seen, today there was a smile awaiting its chance to appear. Right then, he said, I'll choose one and then you choose one, until we've got six, but remember we have to bear in mind the ease of the work and the known or presumed taste of our customers, OK, you begin, The jester, said the father, The clown, said the daughter, The nurse, said the father, The Eskimo, said the daughter, The mandarin, said the father, The naked man, said the
daughter, No, you can't choose the naked man, you'll have to choose another one, the Center won't want a naked man, Why not, Well, because he's naked, The naked woman then, That's even worse, But she's covering herself up, Covering yourself up like that is worse than showing everything, How come you know so much about the subject, Because I've lived, I've looked, I've read, and I've felt, What does reading do, You can learn almost everything from reading, But I read too, So you must know something, Now I'm not so sure, You'll have to read differently then, How, The same method doesn't work for everyone, each person has to invent his or her own, whichever suits them best, some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters, Unless, Unless what, Unless those rivers don't have just two shores but many, unless each reader is his or her own shore, and that shore is the only shore worth reaching, Well observed, said Cipriano Algor, you have shown yet again that old people should never argue with the younger generations, we always end up losing, although we do learn a thing or two on the way, Glad to have been of help, Now let's get back to the sixth doll, It can't be the naked man, No, Or the naked woman, No, Then let's have the fakir, In general, fakirs, like scribes and potters, are sitting down, when he's standing up, a fakir is just like any other man, and sitting down, he'll be smaller than the others, In that case, what about the musketeer, The musketeer would do, but we'd have to find a solution to the problem of the sword and the feathers on his hat, we could probably manage the feathers, but the sword would have to be fixed to his leg and then it would look more like a splint, All right then, the bearded Assyrian, Suggestion accepted, let's have the bearded Assyrian, he's easy and compact, And I did consider the hunter and his hound, but the dog would cause even more difficulties than the musketeer's sword, Not to mention the shotgun, said Cipriano Algor, and speaking of dogs, I wonder what
Found is up to, we've forgotten all about him, He's probably sleeping. The potter got up and drew back the curtain, I can't see him in his kennel, he said, He'll be going about his business, fulfilling his duties as guardian of the house, keeping an eye on the neighborhood, Unless he's escaped, Stranger things have happened, but I doubt it. Anxious and fearful, Cipriano pulled open the door and almost tripped over the dog. Found was stretched out on the mat, lying diagonally across the sill, his nose pointing toward the door. When he saw his master appear, he got up and waited. Here he is, announced the potter, So I see, replied Marta from inside. Cipriano Algor was about to close the door, He's looking at me, he said, Well, he's looked at you before, But what shall I do, Either close the door and leave him outside or invite him in and then close the door, Don't be funny, I'm not being funny, you'll have to decide today whether you want Found in the house, but, you know, if he comes in now, that will be it, Old Constante used to come in whenever he wanted to, Yes, I know, but normally he preferred the independence of the kennel, whereas, unless I'm very much mistaken, this dog needs company as much as it needs food, That seems a good enough reason, said the potter. He opened the door wide and made a gesture, Come in. Without taking his eyes off his master, Found took one timid step, then, as if to indicate that he wasn't quite sure he had understood the order, he stopped. Come in, said the potter again. The dog advanced slowly and came to a halt in the middle of the kitchen. Welcome to our house, said Marta, but you had better know the house rules right away, a dog's necessities, both solid and liquid, should be taken care of outside, the same goes for food, now, during the day, you can come and go as much as you like, but at night, you go to your kennel, so as to guard the house, and I don't want you thinking I'm less well-disposed toward you than your master is, and to prove it I was the one who told him that you are a dog who needs company. During the time this lecture lasted, Found didn't take his eyes off her for a moment. He couldn't understand what Marta wanted of him, but his small dog's brain knew that in
order to learn, one must look and listen. He waited for a few moments after Marta had finished speaking, then he curled up in a corner of the kitchen, although he did not even have time to warm the spot up, for as soon as Cipriano Algor had sat down, Found got to his feet again and went and lay by his chair. And just so that there should be no doubts in the minds of his owners that he had a clear understanding of his duties and responsibilities, barely a quarter of an hour had passed before he got up from there and went and lay down beside Marta. A dog knows when someone needs his company.