Augusto Monterroso - Complete Works and Other Stories

6. You are dazzled by the fable of Achilles and the Tortoise and believe that it contains the answer to everything (disadvantageous).

7. You discover the infinite and eternity (advantageous).

8. You are concerned with the infinite and eternity (advantageous).

9. You believe in the infinite and eternity (disadvantageous).

10. You give up writing (advantageous).

Today I feel well, like a Balzac; I am finishing this line.

To the memory of the Wright Brothers

It was late when the civil servant decided to follow the flight of the fly again. And the fly, as if he knew himself to be the object of scrutiny, took great pains in the programmed execution of his acrobatics, buzzing to himself but always aware that he was a common ordinary housefly, and that among the many possible ways he could shine, buzzing could not compare to the increasingly wide and elegant circles he was flying around the civil servant who, on seeing them, remembered dimly but insistently and as if he were denying it all to himself how he had been obliged to circle around other civil servants in order to reach his present high position, and without making too much noise either, and perhaps with less joy and more somersaults but with a little more brilliance if brilliance is what you could call, with no sarcasm, what he had achieved before and during his ascent to the heights of public office.

Then, overcoming the sultry heat, he went to the window, opened it firmly, and with two or three brusque movements of his right hand and forearm, forced the fly to leave. Outside, the warm breeze gently shook the treetops, while in the distance the last golden clouds sank definitively to the bottom of the afternoon.

Back at his desk, exhausted by his efforts, he pressed one of five or six buttons and, leaning comfortably on his left elbow (thanks to a clever mechanism in the swivel chair), waited to hear

“Yes sir?”

so that he could order, almost at the same time

“Have Carranza come in”

whom he quickly saw half-serious, half-smiling, pushing

the door in

coming in

and then turning his back tactfully to bend over the knob to close the door again with all necessary care so that it would make no noise except the slight inevitable click that doors make when they are closed and, turning around immediately, as he usually did, he heard

“Do you have Payroll C handy?”

and answered

“Not really handy but I can bring it in five minutes; you look exhausted; what’s wrong?”

and came back in less than three with a sheet wider than it was blue which the civil servant glanced at, up and down, without enthusiasm, and then raised it to the clear sky as if he wanted to fly away, fly up, fly far, grow smaller and smaller until he lost his tie and his ordinary shape and became a speck the size of a distant airplane which is the size of a fly, and then an even tinier dot, and finally he handed it back to Carranza, his friend and co-worker, who asked him, puzzled, if anything was wrong, and he heard himself answer

“No, tell Señorita Esperanza that tomorrow Señorita Lindbergh is coming in regard to the matter of the vacancy and tell her to send her to Personnel to see Sarabia. You tell Sarabia that I said he should hire her and place her here or wherever, that I’ll explain later.”

Direct acquaintance with writers is harmful. “A poet,” said Keats, “is the least poetic thing in the world.” As soon as you know a writer whom you admired from a distance, you stop reading his works. This happens automatically. As for the works themselves, a sensible idea, and one that is currently being put into practice, is for the best works, or at least the best-known works, which may also be good, to be published simultaneously in various Latin American countries. The very bad ones should be brought out by the State in luxury editions with leather bindings and illustrations in order to put them beyond the reach of the poor and, at the same time, keep the majority of poets and novelists happy.

We see this man walking anxiously up and down in front of the door of the transient hotel on Calle París in Santiago, Chile; he watches and suspects. For the last few days he has done nothing but suspect. He has looked into her eyes and suspected. He has noticed that his wife smiles at him in too normal a way, that everything either seems all right to her or doesn’t, that she does not disagree with him as much as before or disagrees with him more than before, and he has suspected. Anyone would. That’s how these situations are. Suddenly you feel something strange in the air, and you suspect. The handkerchiefs given as gifts begin to be important, and there’s always one missing and nobody knows where it is; just like that, nobody knows where it is. Then this gentleman works up his courage and goes to the hotel. He has finally decided to put an end to his doubts by being man enough to wait until he sees them coming out and then trap them, furtive and surely wearing the expression of unconcern that hides their fear of being discovered. And now, while he waits, he has crossed God knows how many times in front of the large, open, main door, walking back and forth mechanically, and it bothers him when he realizes that sometimes he feels almost no anger. Well, perhaps you have gone through this at one time or another and it is indiscreet of me to remind you, to call to mind something you have buried under other wreckage, other illusions, other films, other facts, for better or worse everything has blurred what at one time seemed to be the end of the world and today, as you know very well, you remember almost with a smile. Or you have leaned against the blue wall across the street. He was a tall, good-looking man with graying hair, about forty years old, it doesn’t matter. It was summer, he was wearing linen, he was sweating. We watched him from the second-story window of the building across the way. It was fun to spy on the couples who kept arriving. Old men with young girls. Young boys with old women. Young girls with young boys. Never old men with old women, I wonder why. Middle-aged men with middle-aged women, both men and women very calm. Experienced men with all kinds of little maids who were terrified. Liberated men with liberated women who went in laughing freely, happily, what envy we felt. Sometimes we spent a whole Sunday afternoon, Enrique, Roberto, Antonio, and I, watching them come from the side streets and go in. Or not go in. We would make bets. These two will go in. These two won’t. You lost or won because the ones you thought would go in, the ones you bet on, would walk right by only to come back and go in after ten steps when you supposed that virtue was going to enjoy one of her most sensational victories but was, happily, defeated. But getting back to this man — how sorry we felt for him. This man was suffering. He nervously watched the falsely confident exit of each couple, fearful they would be the ones he was waiting for and that in a careless moment they would get away from him, lost in the first shadows of twilight as they used to call it. Look how he cranes his neck, how he stands on tiptoe, how nervous he becomes when anyone comes out and how upset when anyone passes in front of anyone leaving. He goes from one corner to the other only to return quickly in a state of agitation. Perhaps he thinks that at this moment they have managed to elude him. It’s incredible. The man is beginning to make us feel sorry for him. If this were not our usual game, we would not have had the patience to observe him from this comfortable window for more than two hours (because it’s already seven o’clock) with no real interest in what was happening inside. But it does interest him, what’s happening inside, and he imagines and suffers and tortures himself and thinks up bloody acts of vengeance at which he stops and trembles, not knowing if from anger or from fear, although in his heart he knows it’s anger. And you and your friends from your comfortable vantage point watch and suffer and are not sure what is happening right now with your own wives and maybe that’s why this man who could be you, could be all of you, disturbs you so, as the twilight turns into night and the clerks anxious to return, who knows why, to their homes, increase in number and run laboriously for the buses and trolleys that go by, jammed with people. Finally, suddenly, you see in him an agitation that is much more intense, a nervousness, an anguish, and you realize that the supreme moment he has been waiting for has arrived and you quickly turn your eyes again to the door of the hotel and you see that the lovers are coming out and have realized what is happening, that is, he is there, and pretending to be calm they quicken their pace looking back in their minds and walking faster and holding one another by the arm they turn the corner of San Francisco and you come down quickly from your vantage point so you won’t miss what is happening and you find the man still on O’Higgins Avenue and you find him distraught, looking around, roughly pushing people out of his way, turning on his heels, searching, looking here and there, anxious, disconcerted, but now certainly tomorrow, or next Saturday, or Monday, or whenever, he will have the chance to watch when he is less distracted, not as slow as he was this afternoon when it probably wasn’t them.