Juan José Saer - Scars

In this respect, all the bets in baccarat are bets of desperation. Hope is an edifying but useless accessory.

The extent of experience is not brought to bear. Every flash of evidence is separated from every other flash of evidence by an abyss, and the relationship between them exists outside the reach of our comprehension. I don’t mean to say that there isn’t a relationship — simply that we can’t know it. Every bet is desperate because we gamble for one single motive: to see. We leave everything we have at that place where the spectacle is manifest because, although it’s no longer useful, we are curious to know, to see what was concealed at the moment we bet. If reality overlaps with our imagination, we’re awarded a pile of excrement: money. It’s perfectly natural to walk away from a cesspool with our uniforms covered in shit.

On March first I called Delicia to the study. I told her I was going to pay her monthly salary. She didn’t say anything to me. She just picked the bills off the desk and went back to the kitchen. She couldn’t have been more than two months over fifteen. These days she was having to wear shirts with a bit more room in the front, and her skirt bulged out in the back. I stayed at my desk the rest of the day, writing my seventh essay: Doctor Sivana and Modern Science: Pure Knowledge or Compromised Thoughts? At dusk I went out to the kitchen.

It was hot. Delicia had finished cleaning and was looking out at the rear courtyard through the screen door. She asked me if I wanted to eat something, and I said it was still too early. Then I asked her if she had an idea what she was going to spend her salary on. Nothing, she said. Delicia, I said, Would you do me a favor and loan me those three thousand pesos until tomorrow? She didn’t say a word; she went to her room on the second floor, an attic, and came back with a tea tin. She stood next to the stove and opened it.

There was a pile of thousand-peso bills inside. She counted them, one by one, stretching them out, because some were rolled up and others balled up. She piled them up in a stack and then counted them, wetting her index and thumb with the tip of her tongue beforehand. It was fifty-four thousand pesos. She had worked for eighteen months without spending a cent. She’d been wearing my wife’s old clothes, which had been left in her bureau since the day she died, without me touching them. I supposed she had on her bra and underwear too.

She held out the pile of thousand-peso bills and told me to use what I needed. I asked her how she had managed to live for two years without spending even ten cents, and she said that wasn’t true, that she had brought seven hundred pesos with her from her last job. Then I thought back and remembered that in those eighteen months she hadn’t gotten sick, she hadn’t gone anywhere but the corner store to buy groceries, hadn’t talked to anyone but me, unless they were the butcher or the baker, and hadn’t listened to the radio or read a magazine (she didn’t know how) or done anything outside of cleaning the house during the day or staring out at the courtyard through the kitchen window in the afternoon. I asked if she didn’t need the money, and she said no. So I told her ten thousand should cover me and I gave back the rest. She handed me the tin with all the money and told me to keep it in the desk and go on putting her three thousand in there every month.

Then she made dinner. We didn’t exchange a word during the meal. When I got up, I passed by her and rubbed her head. The most beautiful creature in the world lives in this house, I said, and went to play.

I lost the ten thousand, and ten thousand more that I promised to pay back the next day. I got up at two in the afternoon and went straight to my desk, read a full Captain Marvel comic, marked up the most important frames, and then sat down to write. It was even hotter than the day before. My eyelids felt heavy, and my shirt was sopping wet and stuck to my back. I fell asleep at my desk. When I woke up it was getting dark. I took a shower and went out to the kitchen. Delicia was sitting in front of the screen door. She was looking at the dark stains in the tiles of the passageway, the stains that even she hadn’t been able to erase, the everlasting remains of the my grandfather’s brown spit stains.

Delicia, I said. I’ve decided to teach you how to read and write. Every day at this time, we’ll have a class on reading and writing. Does that sound good? She said it sounded good. Alright, Delicia, I said. Let’s get to it, then. I went to the desk, brought back a notebook and some pencils, and put them down in front of her. I had to show her how to hold a pencil. With large, neat netters, I drew more than wrote the full alphabet. Delicia watched the traces I left on the lined paper. Then I drew a separation line below, and, skipping a line, wrote the letter A. This is the letter A, I said. Fill two lines with the letter A. While I’m doing that, said Delicia, go and shave.

It had been three days since I had shaved. I went up and shaved. When I got back, Delicia had filled two lines with the letter A. Some were unrecognizable. Nobody would have said they were the letter A. They didn’t seem like a letter of any kind. Then I drew the letter B. This is the letter B, I told Delicia. Now fill two lines with this letter. Delicia leaned over the notebook and started writing, with great application and extreme care, the letter B. There have been times that I’ve bet fifty thousand on a card, when it was my last fifty thousand. And I never wanted my card to come as much as, at that moment, I wanted Delicia to be able to draw the letter B. She stuck out her tongue and bit on it, and she was bent so far over the notebook that I thought that from one moment to the next she going to crush her face against the scribble-covered page. Finally she drew the first one. It must have taken her at least a minute to do it. A minute or more. But finally she wrote it. And then she started filling two lines with the letter B. I figured I had time to take a walk to the other end of the city, and when I came back the next day I would find her there still filling out the two lines with the letter B.

Then I told her that was enough for one day and to make dinner. During the meal she asked me if I wasn’t going to give her homework, so when we finished I drew the letter C, left two blank lines and then drew the letter D. I told her to fill two lines with each for tomorrow.

I went to the desk, took out the forty-four thousand pesos that were left, and went to play. I paid the ten thousand I owed and lost the other thirty-four thousand. That night I didn’t get credit, so I left early and went to bed. Early the next day I went downtown and negotiated a mortgage on the house. When I left the estate agency, I ran into Carlos Tomatis outside the Banco Provincial. He was talking with a lottery vendor. He shook my hand and asked if I played the lottery, and I said I didn’t bet against the Lord.

You’re looking thinner every day, Sergio, he said.

I told him that could be his subjective opinion, because he looked fatter to me every day.

He said it was possible. Then he said that God had nothing to do with luck, that the New Testament said that God could see every hair on every last person. And not one at a time, he said, but all at once, and at the same time, one at a time. I told him that was frankly terrifying, that I couldn’t imagine God looking at him so closely. But that in any case God had the disadvantage of not being able to play the lottery. I’ve been chasing two forty-five for over a year, he said then.

I told him that for my part I was tapped out. And that I had just mortgaged my house.

All the better to put the arm on you, said Tomatis.

Then we went to a café for a bite. Tomatis insisted on going to the bar at the arcade, so we walked there. We turned north up San Martín. The province of chance is the devil’s kingdom, Sergio, you have to understand that, Tomatis said as we walked.