Juan José Saer: Scars

Then he adds:

— Unless you’re an exceptional specimen, but those don’t count as people.

I raise my head before I shoot and say:

— There’s a democrat among us.

— I’ve developed a reputation for wiping my ass with any shit-eating brat who tries to put the screws to me, says Tomatis, laughing.

And so on in that fashion. I started working at the newspaper on February seventh, thanks to him, and they gave me the courthouse section and the weather report. He did general reporting and edited the Sunday literary page. My relationship with Tomatis went back a year. I had just read one of his books, and one day I saw him on the street and followed him until I caught up. He was smoking a cigarette and didn’t realize I was next to him until he stopped at a lottery kiosk and started examining the results.

— You’re Carlos Tomatis, aren’t you? I said.

— So they say, he said.

— I wanted to talk to you because I really enjoyed your book, I said.

— Which one? said Tomatis. Because I have more than three thousand.

— No, I said. One you wrote. The last one.

— Ah, said Tomatis. But it’s not the last one. Only the second. I’m planning to write more.

Then he turned to the results, chewing his cigarette.

— Two forty-five, two forty-five, two forty-five, he muttered, looking at the list of numbers. Not once, two forty-five.

He said goodbye and left. But later we saw each other a few times, and even though we were never able to talk about his second book, I went to see if he could find work for me when my father died and I was left alone with my mother. I knew other people I could ask for work, much more connected than him, but I wanted to ask him. I wanted him to give me something. And he did, because somehow on February seventh at ten in the morning I was with Campo, the old man who had been in charge of the section for ages, and who was about to retire, going up and down the dark corridors between the courtrooms, up and down the polished marble stairs, in and out of desolate, high-ceilinged offices overflowing with filing cabinets.

— This, Campo was saying, wrinkling his old monkey nose, is the Second District Civil Court, that’s the secretary. There’s the law school. Go to the press office on the second floor if you have any questions and ask for the manager, a Mister Agustín Ramírez, he will help you with anything you need.

He labored over several words: “District,” “legal holiday,” “press,” “Ramírez,” waiting for me to write them down. I wasn’t even listening. While Campo’s old monkey face (a tame, sweet monkey, stranger to the civilized world) gestured with every one of its folds, I passed my distracted gaze along the dark corridors where the blurry outlines of litigators and staff came and went, the tall filing cabinets that easily called up the word Kafka, the marble staircases that ascended to the first floor with a wide, anachronistic curve, and the February sun penetrating the lobby through the large entrance.

With the weather report my role was pretty much God’s. Every day around three I had to go to the terrace of the newspaper building and take notes from the meteorological equipment, which I never understood. And when I went to ask Tomatis, who had also started out doing the weather, he told me he hadn’t ever understood them either and as far as he could tell the most rational choices were either duplication or fabrication. I used both methods. For twenty days, in the month of February, I sent the same information about the weather to the print shop, copied letter-for-letter from what had appeared the day before I started at the newspaper. For twenty days, according to the observational devices of the newspaper La Región , the meteorological conditions in the city were the following: at eight in the morning, atmospheric pressure 756.80, temperature 24.2 degrees Celsius, relative humidity 64 percent. With Tomatis’s help I came up with a genius headline for the section: No Change in Sight . On the twenty-seventh of February, a piece of shit rain destroyed the project. Unfortunately I had already handed in the report, because I left early, so when I got to the publisher’s office it had already rained fifteen centimeters since noon the day before, and it was only eleven in the morning. The publisher had a stack of the February editions on his desk, and the weather report section on each copy was marked with a furious red circle.

— We’re not going to fire you, said the publisher. We’re going to suspend you for five days. Not out of charity. We don’t want problems with the union. But the day I happen to feel like it’s cooler than usual and a breeze is in the air, even if it’s only because I woke up in a good mood and the sun is slightly farther from the earth, and that sensation isn’t registered in detail in the weather report, you won’t be walking out of here on your own legs.

So I switched to fabrication. At first I was guided by the opinions of the copywriters, and I guessed numbers based on their predictions. For the first week I took it to the publisher for him to look over, then I stopped after I had regained his trust, or maybe after I realized that he just glanced at them quickly and checked them off with the red pencil, completely satisfied. Eventually the copywriters’ opinions on the weather weren’t enough. It seemed like fabrication from scratch was better, and in accordance with the numbers printed in the columns of the paper, the city was oppressed, melted, felt more youthful with spring warmth, and suffered waves of blood in their eye sockets and furious, deafening popping in their eardrums from the atmospheric effects I had created. It was a real fever. I stopped and went back to fabricating prudently after realizing that Tomatis, who knew every detail of my work, was starting to offer increasingly exaggerated alternatives. It was March sixth, the night of the dinner party they threw for Campo because he had just retired. (After the dinner, old Campo went home and poisoned himself.) During the publisher’s toast, Tomatis started suggesting I invent rainstorms that hadn’t happened, for example storms that had supposedly happened at dawn, and which few people would be in the position to confirm or deny. I realized he wanted to get me fired. At the same time I understood that he hadn’t gotten me the job at the paper out of sympathy or for any other humanitarian reason, but to have someone to talk to in the office, and to borrow money from once in a while. I told him that. And he started to laugh and recited:

I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,

and told him so, but friendship never ends

And he was right. But I held out and muttered:

— The weather report is mine. I decide if it rains or not.

— Still, said Tomatis, I am the author of the idea and I suppose I have a say in the matter.

He was smoking a cigarette, chewing it, and squinting his eyes while blowing smoke in my face.

— I’m getting to know you, I said. First I’m supposed to report a storm that never happened, and eventually I’ll end up writing about a rain of fire.

— And why not? said Tomatis, chewing his words behind his cigarette. It wouldn’t be bad. They’ll feel burnt whether it happens or not. And in any case, Sodom was Disneyland compared to this shithole city.

Then he stood up, in the middle of the publisher’s toast, and left the restaurant. He was always doing that — absentminded, I supposed. But people said Tomatis didn’t do those kinds of things out of distraction, but because he was an asshole pure and simple. So the next day, at Campo’s wake, I asked him.

— Tomatis, I said. Didn’t you realize that the publisher was talking when you got up and left the restaurant?