Juan José Saer: Scars

— Yes, he said.

— Then why did you leave? I asked.

— He pays me a salary to write for the paper, not to hear him give toasts, he said.

So he wasn’t doing it out of distraction. We left Campo’s wake and went to a café.

— Are you writing? I asked.

— No, he says.

— Translating? I asked.

— No, he says.

He was looking at something behind me, above my head. I turned. There was only a blank wall, painted gray.

— What are you thinking about? I asked.

— Campo, he said. Didn’t the old man seem to be laughing at us? I don’t mean that figuratively. I’m not referring to the corpse. I mean last night, at the dinner. He shouldn’t have gone to the party. He should have killed himself before. He made us all look ridiculous. He was always a piece of shit.

I told him he always seemed like more or less a good person to me.

But he wasn’t listening anymore. He was looking over my head at the gray wall.

— I think he killed himself to spite us all, he said eventually.

During the five days of the suspension, I didn’t leave the house once. Only on the fifth of March did I shave and walk out. I spent the five days lying in bed, reading, sitting in a wicker chair on the porch, in the afternoons, or in the mornings walking a hundred laps around the bitterwood in the courtyard. At night I would sit in the middle of the courtyard looking at the stars, in the dark, with a coil lit to keep off the mosquitos. At two or three in the morning sometimes, my mother came home. I would see her open the front door, her outline appearing for a moment against the doorway, and then disappear into the darkness and move quietly toward her bedroom. I would hear the slow, cautious creak of the door opening and closing and then nothing else. She thought I was sleeping. I wouldn’t breathe normally again until I was sure that she was completely asleep. Then I would light a cigarette, fill a glass with ice and gin in the kitchen, take it to the courtyard, get naked, and sit down to smoke and drink the gin in slow sips. I would stay that way until I saw the first glow of the morning light. Sometimes I masturbated. The night of March fourth, when my mother hadn’t gone out, I was out there with my gin in one hand and the cigarette in the other and suddenly the porch light came on, and I saw my mother looking at me from the door to the bedroom. She looked surprised. I had drank more than half a bottle. I jumped up.

— Salud! I said, lifting the glass in her direction and bringing it back for a drink.

She stood there blinking for a few seconds, stock still, looking me up and down. Then, without turning out the light, she went back in her bedroom and slammed the door. Only after she was gone did I realize that I was completely naked, and I had a hard-on.

At that point things started getting bad between us. It was nothing at first, but when we were together we soured. My mother was about thirty-six at that time, and kept herself up very nicely. She was tall and trim and dressed fashionably. Maybe she didn’t have great taste, because she preferred tight clothes. A general idea of her look at that time: once I was with a guy I went to high school with and my mother passed us on the opposite sidewalk, called my name, and blew me a kiss, and when I turned back the guy said he knew that woman, that he had seen her do a strip tease in a cabaret in Córdoba the year before. I told him it was my mother and that he must have been confused because my mother hadn’t been to Córdoba in at least seven years, I was sure of it. Before I could finish the sentence, the guy had disappeared. I think my mother would have been much more attractive if she had left her hair dark instead of dyeing it the month after my father died. Blonde didn’t suit her. My father, while he was bedridden with cancer, could talk to her about how much she went out, and I saw him outright angry when she told him she wanted to dye her hair. My father said he wouldn’t allow it while he was alive. My mother replied that, in any case, the time when she could decide for herself wasn’t far off.

So I was out of the house a lot, especially if there had been a fight for some reason. I was out mostly during the day, because at night was when she wasn’t home. After leaving the paper I would walk around downtown or would go watch the river, and if I didn’t have money to eat something, I would go back to the house around ten thirty — when my mother was sure not to be there — and make whatever I found in the fridge. Then I would take a shower and sit down to read. During the five-day suspension, when I didn’t leave the house, I read The Magic Mountain , which I liked a lot; Light in August , excellent; this little green book called Lolita , a real piece of shit; The Long Goodbye , a seriously genius book; and two idiotic Ian Fleming novels. I read very quickly, and I think I remember pretty well. After my mother found me in the courtyard naked with a hard-on, it wasn’t as easy to move freely around the house, and so at night, when she wasn’t home, was better. Sometimes I would have a beer with Tomatis, until ten, and if I came close to the house and saw a light on, I would wait at a neighborhood bar until I was sure to find the house empty.

March and April were hell. My mother had turned into a panther. At first I decided not to let on, to face it only if it looked like things might get worse, but that wasn’t always possible. And in the end she forced me into a corner. If, for example, I hung my shirt over her bathrobe — a bathrobe anyone with the slightest hygienic tendency wouldn’t touch with a cane — she would show up in my room, standing in the doorway with her legs wide, muttering furiously:

— I told you a thousand times not to put your filthy shirts on my things.

I would get up, walk to the bathroom, take my shirt from the hanger, and throw it in the hamper. She followed me the whole way. When I finished throwing the shirt in the hamper and was walking back to the room, she was blocking my way at the bathroom door, saying:

— Don’t bunch up your clothes; I’m not your maid and don’t need to be taking care of it. You’re old enough to know how to treat your clothes.

I wouldn’t say a thing and walked back to my room. She glared at me the whole way until I sat down, picked up the book, and started reading again. She went back to her room and less than half an hour later she was back.

— Are you going to sit in there all day? she would say. All that garbage you have in your head.

— Garbage? Head? I would ask, confused, looking up at her from the book, not understanding a thing.

She would look back furiously, the cigarette hanging from her lips.

— Do whatever you want, just don’t play stupid with me, she would say.

Then she would disappear again. One afternoon she hit me for saying, as gently as possible, that I didn’t like her answering for the milkman in her bra. She walked straight up and slapped me. I grabbed her arm so hard, to stop her from hitting me twice, that I cut her with a fingernail and she bled — it left a black mark for like a month. When I saw the blood stain on her round, white arm, I let go and let her hit me until she got tired. She went at it until she had enough and then shut herself in her room crying and didn’t come out until that night. All day I felt fine, and around ten she brought me a plate of bread and cheese and a glass of wine and then disappeared. She was dressed to go out, in a yellow dress that fit her like crazy. She didn’t even look twice when she saw that I was using my white shirt as a towel to dry my sweat off.

Fall came at the end of March, though on the twenty-first I made a small comment in the weather report about the change in temperature, the odor of fluttering mothballs, the golden leaves falling from the trees and forming a crinkling carpet on the ground. When he read it, Tomatis cracked up laughing and asked if I had been reading the modernistas again. In the fall the nights under the stars and the glass of gin in the courtyard stopped, and instead I sat in my room, in an armchair, under a lamp, until the morning. My mother came in at dawn, clicking her high heel shoes on the tiles in the corridor. And it didn’t matter if I heard her come in — she actually seemed to have some interest in me hearing her. Sometimes she even looked in my room and said, with some hostility: Oh, you’re still reading , or, It’s obvious he’s not the one who pays the electric bill , and then disappeared. I knew when my mother was about to get home; first I would hear the sound of a car stop and then start up and drive off. Then the sound of the door to the street and then the high heels clicking. Only once did she come in my room after having been in the bathroom then gone to her room and even turned off the light. I was sure she was in bed, and I was completely absorbed in reading The Long Goodbye , which I was reading for the third time in a little over a month, when suddenly the door opened and my mother appeared, in a nightgown, barefoot. The expression on her face was a mix of resignation and distress. She looked at me a second, and just to say something she muttered, Don’t read so much, you’ll get sick in the head . Then she closed the door and left. I had jumped up, startled. Luckily, I was fully dressed.