Juan José Saer - Scars

It came with a lot of water, but you couldn’t call it cold. It wasn’t cold until May. On the twenty-eighth I went to the estate agency to sign a bunch of papers, and the employee assured me that on the fifth I would have the check for half a million. When I got back home it was the afternoon, and I found Delicia in the kitchen eating some water crackers with minced meat. She scooped some on a cracker and offered it to me, but I said I wasn’t hungry, and I went to the study. After dark I went out to the kitchen. I asked Delicia if there was anything to eat, and she said no. Then I asked if she was hungry. She said she wasn’t. I thought for a while, and then I told her I was going to teach her something new. That for a few days we were going to do without the reading and writing lessons so we could learn something else (Delicia had learned quickly at first, but then she slowed down so much that I realized she had lost interest completely). I asked if that was alright, and she said yes. So I went to my desk, took out five French decks, and a few sheets of paper, and a pencil, and I went back to the kitchen.

She learned quickly. The hardest thing to teach her was how, after nine, the count fell back to zero and you started over. Everything else was simple. At first we kept track of our bets out loud, for low sums, but the amounts kept increasing and getting more complicated, so I started to keep track of them on sheet of paper. Delicia didn’t watch me write. She just waited for the next hand to come together, and she was fine with whatever I decided the bet would be. After the hand, I would write. I wouldn’t write down the partial amounts, one under the other, and then add them up. Instead, I would add them up mentally, cross out the previous number, and then write the new number below it, greater or less the amount of the bet Delicia or I had made, depending on whether we had won or lost. So there were two columns of crossed-out figures along a thin strip of the page that always ended in a legible figure. After every hand, this figure was crossed out, and a new amount would appear below it. We played so many hands the first night that Delicia and I filled up both sides of the page with columns of crossed-out numbers. After that we abandoned the betting and just guessed.

We would take turns guessing. If you guessed right, you kept going. When you guessed wrong, it was the other person’s turn. Delicia never guessed wrong. Seeing her predict every hand so naturally, predict even the sum that would win, and once even the suit of the card that would win the hand, and once the actual cards that would be dealt, I remembered Marcos and I decided that it was necessary to be outside the game in order to see it clearly and predict it. But the gambler couldn’t be outside. He couldn’t make bets that were both infallible and casual. He had to submit to a continuous exercise, from start to finish, without the possibility of finding distance through occasional dissociations. A distancing could work for an isolated hand, which in the larger game or over the course of the life of the gambler meant nothing. To always guess right you had to be always outside. But of course to always guess right meant always playing, and the person who always played couldn’t, because of the rhythm of the game, be outside. It was a circle, though the gambler would tend to think of it as a spiral. But no, not a chance. It’s not a spiral but a circle.

Finally it was April fifth. I got to the estate agency at eight in the morning and was signing papers until after eleven. The employee would offer me coffee every so often. I would say no. The agency’s office, on the fifth floor, looked out over the city, toward the river. Each time I finished signing a group of papers, I would approach the windows and look out at the city. Except for half a dozen buildings that were more than five stories tall, everything was squat. But there was a kind of harmony in all those red-shingled roofs, where the rain endlessly washed countless abandoned objects that had been ravaged by the weather, and between which, every so often, a tiny woman could be seen walking. Beyond these were the port, with its two parallel jetties, and then the river and all the interconnected streams that formed low islands between them. The rain erased the horizon.

At quarter of twelve they called me into the administrator’s office one last time and gave me the check. It had my name on it, and below that it said Five Hundred Thousand Pesos. The figure was also written in the upper right corner of the paper, but in numbers. I folded the check, tucked it into the pocket of my raincoat, said goodbye to the agents, and went out into the corridor. When I got out of the elevator on the first floor and began walking toward San Martín, I realized that the banks must have closed by then. I went home and put the check in the tea tin Delicia had given me. I shut myself in the study and didn’t come out until after dark. When Delicia brought me my mate , I was marking up frames in Blondie . Then I picked up a pencil and wrote, in slow, neat letters, They say that comedy is superficial because it shrouds the features of the tragedy. But in the thing itself there is no tragedy; there is only comedy, insofar as reality itself is superficial. Tragedy is an illusion . That sounded perfect at first, but when I read it again it’s meaning had disappeared. I opened the desk drawer and took out the tin. The check was still there. I spread it out over the page and looked at it for a while. I compared the writing on it to my own. Suddenly, I felt strange. That piece of paper was worth half a million pesos. The next day, I would go to the bank and they would take the check and give me a stack of papers of different colors, some resembling each other, that were also worth half a million pesos. That night I could exchange the paper from the bank for green rectangles and yellow ovals and red rectangles and silver-plated circles. All those geometric shapes would also be worth half a million pesos. But their sphere of influence would be limited. The chips only had value at the gaming table, the check at the Banco Provincial, and the money itself in the country. It’s necessary to believe in certain symbols for them to have value. And to believe in them you have to be inside their sphere of influence. You can’t believe in them from the outside. A bank teller would scoff and think I was crazy if I brought him the silver-plated circles and yellow ovals to exchange for cash. We imagine that those closed circles, as they trace the perimeter of their sphere of influence, could somehow intersect, but in reality they never touch. When I went out, I found Delicia in the kitchen. She said she had asked for credit from the grocer, in my name, and that they had given it to her. We ate steak and potatoes. Then we played baccarat until the next morning.

For four days, the check stayed in the tea tin, but on April ninth, around two in the afternoon, Tomatis showed up. He said he had come to hear my essay on Sivana. When I finished reading it he said it was good, but that I was poisoned by Trotskyism, and I said I couldn’t be poisoned by Trotskyism because I was a Peronist, not a Trotskyite, but then I realized that he had said that just to say something, that he hadn’t even been listening while I read the essay. I knew that he had been thinking about something else, and when he spoke I knew what.

He asked me if I had charged the mortgage, and I told him I had, and then he asked me to loan him twenty-five thousand pesos. I let out a dry laugh, opened the tea tin, and showed him the check. Tomatis looked at it, and his eyes got round like twenty-five peso coins. Then he whistled.

Besides that, I said, there’s not a cent in the house.

He shrugged.

You could have listened to the reading at least, I said.