Juan José Saer - Scars

— Don’t be scared, I said. It’s me. I saw you through the window.

Gloria was pale.

— Carlitos isn’t here, she said.

— Splendid, I said. I’m going to change the olive water and come right back.

I left the room and started walking down the hall. When I passed in front of Tomatis’s half-opened bedroom door, I saw light coming through it and heard the voice of Tomatis himself, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. I stopped suddenly and opened the door. They were naked on the bed together, Tomatis and Mamá. The yellow dress was balled up on the floor. I slammed the door so hard that it sounded like an explosion. I took off running and shoved Gloria, who had come into the corridor, and then went out into the street. I think Gloria called out to me, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t even look when I passed the illuminated window.

The first three blocks I ran full speed. Then I started slowing down. By the fifth or sixth block I was walking calmly. The city was a cemetery, and except for the weak streetlights it was covered in darkness. When I started crossing an intersection at a diagonal, under the light that reflected the whitish masses of rain suspended in the air, I saw a human figure coming in my direction. It emerged slowly from the darkness; at first it was blurred by the rain, but then it became clearer. It was a young man, wearing a raincoat that looked familiar. It was exactly like mine. He was coming right at me, and we stopped a half meter apart, directly under the streetlight. I tried not to look him in the face, because I had already guessed who it was. Finally I looked up and met his eyes. I saw my own face. He looked so much like me that I started wondering whether I myself was there, facing him, my flesh and bones really holding together the weak gaze I had fixed on him. Our circles had never overlapped so much, and I realized there was no reason to worry that he was living a life forbidden to me, a richer, more exalted life. Whatever his circle — that space set aside for him, which his consciousness drifted through like a wandering, flickering light — it wasn’t so different from mine that he could help but look at me through the May rain with a terrified face, marked by the fresh scars from the first wounds of disbelief and recognition.

MY GRANDFATHER, TOWARD THE END OF HIS LIFE,would say to me, There are three ways to win at cards, son — a bankroll, a steady nerve, or a marked deck. But the bankroll, no matter how large, always runs out. And no matter how well you play, there will always be someone out there better than you. So, the best method is to mark cards. That’s how my grandfather would talk toward the end of his life, which went on a long time.

My grandfather knew. He died when he was eighty-two. The moqoit indians called him father. Two months before every election, my grandfather would sit down at the desk in his general store in San Javier and wait. The political bosses would show up, one by one. My grandfather would listen silently, chewing his cigar and spitting out brown globs. After making their case, the political bosses would leave, without my grandfather saying word one. A week later he would call for one of them. Sometimes the same boss for two or three consecutive elections, sometimes the party would change every election. He would talk for ten minutes with the political boss — spitting his brown globs onto the floor — and then would have his carriage prepared and go out to visit the moqoit reservations. That year, the political boss he had summoned would win the election.

With that, my grandfather made something of a fortune. In 1945, during the February election, my grandfather lost an eye. He had called in the Radicalist boss, and then had gone to the moqoit reservations, where they called him father, begged him for dysentery medicine, and followed his carriage to the edge of the reservation and waved goodbye until the sandy dust it raised had completely settled. But the Peronists won the election. Early the next morning, my grandfather, who lived alone with his desk in the immense shed next to the general store, heard a knock at the door. He asked who it was, and they said there was someone who was very sick. He opened the door and was shot. The bullet emptied his eye socket, but, miraculously, he lived.

So my grandfather retired from politics, sold the store, and moved to my mother’s house in the city. In San Javier, when I was a kid, he liked holding me on his lap, but in 1945, when he came to the city, I had already been shaving for years. He put his entire fortune in my mother’s name, saying he was going to die soon. But five years later, my mother, who was the widow of a man I never knew, my father I suppose, my mother, who had never once been sick, was serving soup at the table and said she was going back to the kitchen to get a spoon; that was the last time we saw her alive. Because she was taking a long time, I went to look for her and found her dead. She’d had time to open the drawer but not to take out a spoon, because she didn’t have one in her hand, nor was there any trace of a spoon in the utensil drawer or anywhere else in the kitchen.

I was twenty-three at the time, and I was left alone with my grandfather. In 1952 I graduated law school, and in 1955 I was married. Five years later I was widowed. I had started playing sometime around 1956, when I got out of prison. I was married on September 16, 1955. I had just finished saying I do to the judge and was walking out with my wife to take some pictures with her and the witnesses in front of the building, when Negro Lencina walks up and tells me that the CGT is holding a rally. I ask him if there’s time to take some pictures, and he says no. So I leave the ceremony and go to the CGT.

We came in through the roof and went down to the yellow-tiled courtyard. It was ten in the morning. Three or four shots were fired, at most, and no one was injured except for a guy who tripped on the curb when he came out shooting and fell to the ground and cracked his head open. Then the army arrived and we were all captured.

They let me go nine months later. My wife was waiting for me in the same dress she’d worn to the courthouse the morning of the wedding, and all the witnesses were there, some other relatives, and my grandfather. I invited Negro Lencina and Fiore, from the millers union, who had been with me in the south for nine months. They’d spent the whole time telling me that we were getting out in nine months and that I was going to get home the day my first kid was born. I would tell them there hadn’t been time for that.

I started playing a month later, at a cookout put on by the union to celebrate the release of five rail workers. After the cookout we sat down to play siete y medio . It’s a simple game, played with a Spanish deck. Face cards are worth half a point; numbered cards, one through seven, are worth their value. Seven and a half is the highest score. The banker deals out one card to each player, face down. You ask for cards up to seven and a half points and run the risk of going over. When you’re dealt a face card, worth half a point, you turn it over and ask for another. If it’s a five or higher you generally stand; if it’s less than five, you hit. Sometimes you even hit with six and a half, because the banker determines the value of the cards and always has a half-point advantage, so if the banker has seven, he only pays out players with seven and a half. Anyone with less than seven and a half pays the banker. If you go over seven and a half it’s called a bust, and you pay the banker. A two and a six make eight, for example. If a player holds a two, hits, and gets a six, he pays the banker.

I won sixty pesos. It was nothing, but what got my attention was that I could predict the cards I got. All I had to do was really want them and they’d come. If I was dealt a face card and then a two I would concentrate, thinking, now I need a five , and it would come. I even ended up hitting on six and a half — where a player usually stands — because I was sure I would get the ace. And the ace would come.