Juan José Saer - Scars

I knew I liked the game. Two days later I asked where they played for larger sums, and I learned that at a club downtown I could play monte at one time, baccarat at another, and dice at a third. I chose the dice game. I took out five thousand-peso bills, ate something at a bar, and went to the club. A mass of people were crowded around a craps table. Craps is an incredibly simple game: the player throws two dice from a shaker and combines the numbers that come up; if the first roll is a six, he tries for a six in the next roll; if a seven comes up before the six, he loses. But if a seven or eleven come up in the first roll, then it’s a natural and he wins without having to throw again; if he throws a two, three, or twelve, then he’s crapped out and can’t roll again. A guy standing next to the table, not playing, explained the game to me. When the shaker got to me, I gave two thousand pesos to the banker; I rolled a seven and two thousand pesos became four. I rolled again and came up with a seven again. On the third roll, an eleven; on the fourth, eleven again; on the fifth, eleven again; on the sixth, a seven. I put down the shaker, took 128,000 pesos from the banker, minus the house take, and went home. On the way I realized that craps wasn’t my game, that it was ruled by chaos, and that those dice rolling around in the shaker and then over the green felt were too dependent on chance. I wanted a game with some order, a game where the odds had already been fixed beforehand, whether I knew them or not. I needed a game with a predetermined past.

I found that predetermined past in baccarat. The next night I took twenty from the hundred-thousand-some pesos I had won at dice and went to play baccarat. This time it was a long table, with people sitting around it. Cards were dealt from a dealer’s shoe, two to the player, two to the banker. Face cards and the tens were worth zero. Whoever got closest to nine won.

I ended up with eighty thousand pesos, but it wasn’t as easy as in dice. It took a lot of work to win. I was never losing, but for more than an hour I wasn’t able to win more than four or five thousand pesos, until the shoe came around to me and I was playing the banker. I dealt nine hands, all of nines. All I had to do was think, I’m going to deal a nine , and I would. It was easy. All I had to do was want it, and believe in what I wanted. By the second lucky night at the game, I had already made a bundle.

I didn’t tell my wife, but I told my grandfather. Son, he said, easy come, easy go; it’s a perspetive . (My grandfather would say perspetive , not perspective, swallowing the c , and he’d say it often). I don’t deny that it’s a perspetive . But the only sure way to win is to cheat.

Soon after that I realized he had a point. The two hundred thousand pesos I had won disappeared from one week to the next. But I was hooked. I had to go home at dawn, just to sleep. Little by little I abandoned my work, and little by little I lost the fortune that my grandfather had made from the desk in his general store, from which he would order his carriage prepared before going out to the moqoit reservations.

Two years later I had nothing except the house and a pile of debts. Luckily, it turned out my wife was infertile, so there were no children to support. My wife never approved of my playing, and what happened in June of 1960 is proof. She didn’t approve at all, as will become apparent.

I had been playing poker all night, around the corner from the house. We’d sat down at eleven to play for an hour, and it was three in the afternoon the next day. Someone knocked at the door. The owner answers and comes back. Sergio, it’s your grandfather, he says. I call him in. He was very old, and a little senile, and he looked outlandish with his missing eye and his tobacco-stained beard — he chewed the whole blessed day. He leaned in close to me and says, Son, your wife says if you don’t come home in half an hour she’ll poison herself. Tell her to poison herself, I said. My grandfather leaves and comes back thirty-five minutes later. He leans in close again and says, Son, she poisoned herself. So I asked permission to leave the table early and I went home and found her dead. She’d changed her mind after taking the poison and had come out to the top of the stairs, calling to my grandfather. But it was already too late, and he was a little bit deaf. I found her at the foot of the stairs.

A year later, my grandfather died. He hocked up his last brown glob and departed for the other world. In the end, he couldn’t even run a simple errand. I would take him a pack of Toscanos every once in a while. He’d cut the cigars in two or three pieces, with scissors, and chew them. He’d sit on the stoop and spit onto the sidewalk. Once he accidentally spit on the pants of a guy who was passing the house and I had to come out and defend him. Another time some city workers came out to tell us that we needed to keep the sidewalk more hygienic. So he moved to the kitchen door, which led to the back courtyard, and eventually the floor was covered with dark stains that were impossible to erase. He died in the afternoon, sitting in his chair, looking at the fig tree in the back. If they come for you tonight, saying there’s someone very sick, don’t open the door, he said. And then he died. When the funeral people came, around nine o’clock that night, they asked for a five thousand peso down payment. I didn’t have it, and I told them to wait till two in the morning. I actually didn’t have a penny. I went to a casino and waited for someone to throw me a chip. No one did. So I leaned close to a guy who was winning thousands. I asked him to put me in for a thousand on his bet. That meant that on his bet of ten thousand, I was in for a thousand. If I lost, I had to pay him the thousand. If he won, he’d give me a thousand. Supposedly I had a thousand somewhere, in case the banker won. It was an impulsive move, because guys who are winning aren’t usually in the mood for jokes. It was impulsive, but it paid off. After that it was as easy as riding a sled. Ten minutes later I had the money for the funeral service. I wouldn’t have been at all interested in having my dead grandfather sitting at the kitchen door for months and months.

From then on, I was alone in the house. There was no rent to pay, because I owned the place, and the utilities and taxes were negligible. Once in a while I ate. Except for reading and playing, I didn’t do anything. Eventually I started writing my essays.

I think the title for the collection was the hardest thing to come up with. First I called them Essays on Contemporary Society , then Keys to Understanding Our Era , and later Fundamental Moments of Modern Realism . I chose the last one, not totally satisfied with it. It seemed like the words fundamental, moment , and modern didn’t mean anything. Whenever you wanted to fill out a conversation or turn a phrase to make it sound deep, you could use any one of these words, or others like dynamic, concrete , or structure . But all that was fine. The hard thing was the word realism . The word had a meaning: the attitude characterized by a disposition toward reality. I was sure about that. What I was missing was knowing what reality was. Or what it was like , at last.

It got harder with each of the six essays, because I came up with them after different readings. Each one was inspired by the principal themes or the central characters of the texts I was reading. I gave myself completely to the reading, trying to find hidden connections in the things I read. The first one was the best, I think, because it came to me unexpectedly one afternoon and I wrote it in one sitting. And the title, Batman and Robin: Confusion of Feelings , despite being taken in part from a Stefan Zweig novel, sums up, I think, the crux of the argument.