Augusto Monterroso - Complete Works and Other Stories

Following a professional custom, I eavesdropped on your conversation. In fact, as soon as you had dispensed as quickly as possible with the obligatory greetings, you began the inevitable recounting of your misfortunes. There was no longer any doubt in my mind. Your narration of events made it easy to see that your friend had received the same confidences no more than twenty-four hours earlier. Following you for the rest of the day until I learned where you lived was, as usual, the part of my duties I enjoyed the most, although the reason for this escapes me.

I don’t know if it will anger or please you, but I must repeat that your case is not unique. I will explain briefly the history of your current situation. And if I am wrong — though I doubt it — the mistake will merely be the exception that proves the ineluctable rule.

You are suffering from one of the most common afflictions of the human race: the need to communicate with your fellow man. Since attaining the power of speech, man has found nothing as agreeable as a friend who will listen with interest as he talks about his sorrows and joys. Not even love can equal this feeling. There are those who are content with one friend. For others, a thousand are not enough. You belong to the latter group, and this simple fact is the origin of your sorrow and my profession.

I would go so far as to swear that it all began when you told an intimate friend of your difficulties in love, and he listened attentively until you had finished, and offered you the best advice he could. But you — and here is where the endless chain begins — you did not think his prescriptions were sound. If he insisted that you go to the root of the problem, as they say, and end it, you found more than one reason for not giving up the struggle. If he advised continuing the siege until you had conquered the fortress, you were drowned in pessimism and saw everything as dark and hopeless. It is only a small step from this to looking for the remedy in another person. How many steps did you take?

You began a hopeful pilgrimage through your crowded address book. You even attempted (with increasing success) to make new friends with whom you could begin to discuss your problem. It is no surprise: Suddenly you noticed that the day has only twenty-four hours, and that this astronomical lack of consideration was an enormous factor working against you. You had to expand your means of travel and plan your schedule with fine precision. The methodical use of the telephone helped, and it certainly broadened your possibilities, but this antiquated system is still a luxury, and sixty percent of those whom you want to keep informed do not have this dubious advantage in their homes.

Not content with late nights and too little sleep, you began to get up at dawn to grasp at a time that passed more and more quickly and was irreparably lost. The neglect of your appearance was flagrant: Your beard was unkempt, your once impeccable trousers sagged at the knees, and a hard gray dust covered your shoes like an affliction. It seemed unfair, but you had to accept the fact that even if you awoke at dawn full of enthusiasm, you had no friends willing to share your morning passion. And so — obviously — the inevitable moment has arrived: You have become physically incapable of keeping your wide circle of acquaintances up-to-date.

That moment is also my moment. For a modest monthly fee, I can offer you the perfect solution. If you accept — and I can assure you that you will because you have no other choice — you can forget forever your incessant traveling, your baggy trousers, the dust, your beard, the tedious phone messages.

In short, I am prepared to offer you a first-rate specialized radio broadcast. Due to the regrettable passing of a former client seriously affected by the program of Land Reform, at present I have at my disposal a quarter of an hour; considering how far your confidences have gone, this would be more than ample to keep your friends informed — not only to the day but to the minute — regarding your truly extraordinary case.

It would probsably be de trop to enumerate in detail the advantages of my system, but I would like to outline some of them for you.

1. A soothing effect on your nervous system is guaranteed from the first day.

2. Discretion is guaranteed. Although your voice will be heard by any individual who owns a radio, I consider it highly unlikely that persons not your friends would wish to continue a confidence whose background they do not know. In this way, we can reject any possibility of morbid curiosity.

3. Many of your friends (who now listen unwillingly to the personal version) would take an active interest in the broadcast if you merely mentioned their names, either openly or indirectly.

4. All of your acquaintances would be informed at the same time of the same facts, thereby avoiding jealousy and subsequent recriminations, since only their carelessness, or a chance malfunction of their radios, would place them at a disadvantage with respect to any of the others. To eliminate this depressing possibility, each broadcast begins with a brief synopsis of what was narrated previously.

5. Whenever you think it appropriate, the story can be made more interesting and varied, and more entertaining, with illustrative excerpts from operatic arias (I will not insist on the sentimental richness of Italian opera) and selections from the great masters. The proper musical background is an absolute necessity, and an extensive record collection containing the most astonishing sounds produced by man or nature is at the disposal of every subscriber.

6. The narrator does not see his listener’s face, thus bypassing all kinds of inhibitions for him as well as for those who hear him.

7. Since the program is aired once a day for fifteen minutes, the confidential narrator has an additional twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes to prepare his text and definitively avoid annoying contradictions and involuntary lapses of memory.

8. If your story is successful and a significant number of spontaneous listeners join your friends and acquaintances, it will not be difficult to find a sponsor, thus adding to the benefits I have already indicated a solid financial profit which, as it grows, would open the possibility of absorbing the entire twenty-four-hour day and turning a simple fifteen-minute broadcast into an ongoing, uninterrupted program. To be perfectly frank, this has not yet occurred, but it could with a man of your talent.

Mine is a message of hope. Have faith. For now, concentrate on this: The world is full of people like you. Tune your radio to 1373 kilocycles on the 720-meter band. At any hour of the day or night, winter or summer, rain or shine, you will hear the most diverse, surprising voices filled with a melancholy serenity: a captain who for the past fourteen years has been telling how his ship went down in a blind storm but he did not make the decision to share its fate; a careful woman who lost her only son during the riot-filled night of September 15; a traitor tormented by remorse; a former dictator of a Central American republic; a ventriloquist. All endlessly telling their stories. All asking for compassion.

“And I could tell you,” the fat man interjected in a rush, “that three years ago in Guatemala an old organist in a neighborhood church told me that in 1929 when he was asked to catalogue the music manuscripts in La Merced he suddenly found some unusual pages that intrigued him and he began to study them with his usual devotion and because the notes in the margins were written in German it took him a long time to realize they were the two final movements of the Unfinished Symphony so I could just imagine his feelings when he saw Schubert’s signature written clearly and when he ran out to the street in great excitement to tell everyone of his discovery they laughed and said he had lost his mind and wanted to trick them but since he was a master of his craft and knew with certainty that the last two movements were as excellent as the first two he did not lose heart but swore instead to devote the rest of his life to making people admit the validity of his discovery and that was why from then on he dedicated himself to methodically visiting every musician in Guatemala with such awful results that after fighting with most of them and without saying anything to anybody least of all his wife he sold his house and went to Europe and once he was in Vienna it was even worse because they said no Guatemalan Leiermann 1 was going to teach them how to find lost works least of all ones by Schubert whose scholars were all over the city and how could those pages have ended up so far from home until almost desperate and with only enough money for his return passage he met a family of elderly Jews who had lived in Buenos Aires and spoke Spanish and listened to him very attentively and became very agitated when God knows how they played the two movements on their piano viola and violin and at last grew tired of examining the pages every which way and smelling them and holding them up to the light that came in through the window and finally found themselves obliged to admit at first very quietly and then with great shouts they’re by Schubert! they’re by Schubert! and began to cry in despair on each other’s shoulders as if instead of finding the pages they had just lost them and I would have been amazed at how they continued to cry although they calmed down a little and after talking among themselves in their own language tried to convince him as they rubbed their hands together that the movements excellent as they were added nothing to the value of the symphony just as it was and on the contrary one could say they detracted from it since people had grown used to the legend that Schubert tore them up or did not even try to write them certain he would never surpass or even equal the quality of the first two and the pleasure lay in thinking if this is how the allegro and the andante are what must the scherzo and the allegro ma non troppo be like and if he really respected and revered the memory of Schubert the most intelligent thing would be to allow them to keep the music because besides the fact that there would be an endless polemic the only one who would lose anything would be Schubert and then convinced he could never achieve anything among the philistines much less the admirers of Schubert who were even worse he sailed back to Guatemala and one night during the crossing under a full moon shining against the foaming sides of the ship with the deepest sadness and sick of fighting bad people and good he took the manuscript and ripped the pages one by one and threw the pieces overboard until he was certain that now no one would ever find them again”—the fat man concluded in a certain tone of affected melancholy—“while great tears burned his cheeks and he thought bitterly that neither he nor his country would ever claim the glory of having returned to the world those pages that the world should have received with so much joy but which the world with so much common sense had rejected.”