Juan José Saer: Scars

Tomatis came back the morning of the thirtieth, euphoric, smoking North American cigarettes. He walked into the office with energetic steps and sat down in front of the typewriter. He looked freshly washed and shaved. I told him I had problems with my mother and wanted to talk to him.

— Come have dinner at my house tonight. Bring wine, he said, and started working.

Then I left for the courthouse. A light rain was falling, so that day I sent the same weather report to the print shop as the day before. The gray courthouse seemed more gray in the rain, but a shining gray. The wide, marble stairs in the lobby were dirty with wet mud. They had scattered sawdust on the floor of the entryway, which was full of people. I passed through the law school and then saw Chino Ramírez, from the press office. Ramírez poured me a coffee that looked like it was brewed from the mud in the lobby. Instead of teeth Ramírez had two tiny, brown sierras. I don’t know what disease could have rotted them so badly. He stopped himself laughing to hide them.

— Your judge friend wants to see you, he said. He asked for you.

— I haven’t killed anyone, I said.

— You never know, said Ramírez.

— I guess that’s true, I said. I gestured toward the coffee and, standing up, said:

— Keep an eye on your staff, Ramírez. They’re confused and are serving us the prisoners’ coffee.

He would have laughed more, had his teeth allowed. He gave me the papers he had prepared, and I left the office. Ernesto was working on his fucking Wilde translation. He took it everywhere. When he saw me come in, he closed the dictionary and marked a page in The Picture of Dorian Gray with his red pen.

— Lose my number? he asked.

Something in his face made him look like Stan Laurel, only slightly fatter.

— I haven’t been able to call you because I’ve had a mess of problems with my family, I said. Then I pointed to the Wilde book.

— How’s the translation coming?

— Good, he said, smiling. No one else would think to translate something that’s been translated a million times already.

A report lay on his desk. I managed to read the word homicide .

— Have you sent many people to prison? I asked.

He squinted his eyes before responding and collapsed in his chair.

— Lots, he said.

— Have you ever been to prison? I asked.

— Visiting, a few times, he said.

He guessed what I was thinking.

— It’s the same, he said, inside and outside. Everything is completely the same. Alive, dead, everything is exactly the same.

— I disagree, I said.

— Well it’s a free country, he said, laughing.

— Ramírez said you were looking for me, I said.

— I wanted to see how you were and if you’re free tomorrow night, he said.

— Tomorrow night? I asked. What’s tomorrow?

— I can forgive the youth anything, he said, except coyness. Tomorrow is the first of May.

I must have blushed.

— Yes, I said. I’m free.

— Do you want to have dinner at my house? he asked, standing up.

I said yes, and so the next night I went to his house. It started raining about nine, after a bracing, cold day. I was walking from Tomatis’s house, at the other end of the city, in the north, so I ended up walking through the whole city center to the southern end. The center was deserted, and it was exactly nine when I passed the Banco Provincial building, I could tell by the round clock mounted in the wall over the entrance. In the arcade I drank a cognac and then kept going. Now it was raining. Out on San Martín I walked, whistling, down a few dark blocks where the weak streetlights shone at the intersections. I passed the courthouse, crossed the Plaza de Mayo at a diagonal in front of the government buildings, then back onto San Martín, which at that point became a curved, dead-end street with a single sidewalk and the tree-lined edge of the Parque Sur bordering the opposite side in the darkness. After ringing the bell I turned and briefly saw the lake water glow between the trees. The door opened and I turned around suddenly.

— I was waiting, Ernesto said.

I shook my head.

— It’s raining, I said.

We went upstairs and straight into his study. Ernesto opened the shades covering a large window and then poured two whiskies. On the desk were the Oscar Wilde book, the dictionary, and the composition notebook with the fucking translation manuscript. I leaned over the desk and examined the handwriting: it was so small and tight that it was impossible to tell the vowels apart. Ernesto handed me the glass.

— It’s indecipherable, he said.

— So it seems, I muttered, looking again. Where are you?

Ernesto recited:

— Yes, Harry, I know what you are going to say. Something dreadful about marriage. Don’t say it. Don’t ever say things of that kind to me again. Two days ago I asked Sibyl to marry me. I’m not going to break my word to her. She is to be my wife . I’ve just gotten to wife .

I drank my whole glass at once, feeling Ernesto’s eyes on my face. Then I went to the window. The lake shone over the trees in the park, their leaves glowing green in the darkness. It was crazy looking.

— I like your house, I said. It’s comfortable.

— It is, yes, he said. It’s comfortable.

He was staring at me.

— You should come more often, he said.

— I do what I can, I said, and crossed the room to pour myself more whiskey.

I felt just like one of those toys they sell on the street, which the barker controls with an invisible string, a dark string that he hides and no one else sees: Sit down, Pedrito , and Pedrito plops his cardboard ass on the pavement. His gaze was the string, and I felt cornered in his field of vision, in those square meters illuminated by the warm lamps of the study, and walking toward the bar or the window, it felt like the tension of his gaze would reach its limit any second and I would suddenly find myself stopped with my back to him, up against the end of it. But Ernesto spoke softly, and tried honestly not to hide what he was thinking. Or maybe that’s just me, and it wasn’t honest. We set up all these rules in advance to tell the good from the bad. Even if Ernesto knew he was capable of doing something I called bad didn’t mean that he was honest, and he may have been hiding something even worse behind the thing they call bad. But I think this now and didn’t then, the night of May first, because the night of May first I thought that Ernesto was honest because he was capable of recognizing the bad thing in him.

Then we went to the dining room, and just as we were sitting down (it was eleven), the telephone rang. Ernesto’s servant told him the guard at the courthouse was on the phone. Ernesto put his whiskey down on the table (we were still standing, talking) and disappeared into the study, closing the door. I couldn’t hear a thing. For several minutes it was perfectly silent in the house, so when Ernesto opened the door to his study, on his way back to the dining room, the sound rang out not only at the moment it was produced, but kept echoing the entire time it took Ernesto to cross the long, dark corridor that separates the study from the dining room. It dissipated when Ernesto’s figure reappeared in the entrance to the dining room. He had a stony expression and looked pale. We sat down at the table and ate the first course in silence. Despite being more or less pudgy, Ernesto ate little, in almost insubstantial mouthfuls. I, on the other hand, devoured what the woman served me. During the second course — a chicken that was insanely good — Ernesto finally opened his mouth for something other than the tiny mouthfuls that would have starved a sparrow.