Juan José Saer: Scars

I saw her five more times, always on foot. Even with all the long stakeouts I did around her house, I only managed to see her there once. She came out, crossed the street running, and went into a house on the opposite side. She was wearing the white pants and white shirt. I waited three hours for her to come out, but she never did. Over the three hours it got dark. I saw so many whitish blurs passing quickly in the darkness, between the black trees, that the millionth time I thought I saw her I decided that I was playing the fool and went home to sleep. The second time was at the movies: I walked into the darkness and sat down, and when the lights came up I realized that she was sitting next to me. She had on a leather jacket and her skin was whiter, because it was the middle of winter. I thought I saw her blush when she realized who the guy sitting next to her was. Then the lights went out again, and we spent the whole movie rubbing elbows on the armrest; if on the way out someone had asked me how the movie was or even what it was called, I would have been dumb as a stone. Ten minutes before the end of the movie she got up and left. The third time was at the bar in the arcade. We walked up to the register at the same time, her from the courtyard, me from the street, and I let her order first, even though I had reached the register a few seconds earlier. She ordered an Orange Crush and a hot dog. She took them to her table, and I drank my coffee at the bar, looking at her every once in a while, but she had her back to me and didn’t see me. When I turned to look at her for the last time, she was gone. The fourth time I saw her I was on the bus and she was standing on the corner. I watched her from the rear window until she disappeared. A month later I was the one standing on the corner while she passed on the bus. Then I didn’t see her for several months, and finally I forgot about her.

When the violin concerto finished I stopped thinking about Perla Pampiglioni and walked over to the window. Ernesto switched off the record player.

— It’s so quiet, he said.

We were standing in an illuminated block. Outside there was rain, the black trees, and the lake in the park. I had a momentary feeling that the block of light was covered with a dry clarity, floating in empty space, in a slow drift, not spilling a single ray of icy light into the blackness. Ernesto sat down.

— What have you been doing all this time? he said.

I turned back from the window and sat down in front of him.

— Nothing, I said.

— Read anything? asked Ernesto.

— Yes, I said.

— Sleep with anyone? asked Ernesto.

— Yes, I said.

— Meanwhile all I’ve done is try to translate this goddamned book, said Ernesto.

— And sent several men to prison, too, I suppose, I said.

— No one recently, said Ernesto.

Then we were silent again for about ten minutes. During that time Ernesto didn’t take his eyes off me once. He was sunk so low in his chair that it looked like he would never be able to get up again. That he would break in half and die sitting right there. I observed him with a sort of disbelief. His eyes were half shut, and he held his whiskey in one hand. Suddenly he shifted slightly and the ice clinked against the sides of the glass. That clinking terrified me — I didn’t know why, but I started to panic and wanted to talk, to say something so that the clinking would be lost in the sound of my words. Ernesto listened, but he seemed absent.

— I’ve had a bad summer, I said. Really bad. I’ve spent whole nights in the courtyard, looking at the stars, and I’ve seen strange things in the sky. I’ve seen signs in the sky that scared me. I haven’t told anyone yet. This is the first time. I’ve seen the stars moving, and one night I saw the moon fill up with tigers and panthers tearing each other to pieces and staining the sky all around the moon with blood. Then I saw a carriage diving to hell, full of people I knew who still hadn’t died.

I hadn’t seen any of that, but had hoped to. The only thing I had seen was a million glowing-blue naked women floating in the blackness.

— There are worse things to see, and not just in the sky, said Ernesto, sitting up slightly and taking a drink of the whiskey.

I spent another hour at his house and then went home to sleep. It was still raining. I crossed a dead, black city, and when I passed the Plaza de Mayo I saw the courthouse again, transformed into a dark mass with glowing shades of gray. My shoes filled up with a pink mud, and I had to dry my face and hair and feet when I laid down between the icy sheets. I shivered for a half an hour, not able to sleep, and I masturbated to warm myself up. I only succeeded in staining the sheets, because I was still cold after. Not only were there no panthers or tigers in the moon, but no naked women radiating a blue iridescence into the blackness either. There was only the frozen darkness, and the only thing I could locate in its center — if in fact there was a center — was the illuminated block, drifting, with Ernesto sitting in a chair, and the muted clinking of the ice against the sides of the glass. I turned on the light, looked around the room, then turned it off so it would be dark again.

But I didn’t know that would happen when I left the courthouse the day before, around noon. I would have to go through an afternoon, a night, and a whole other day and part of a night before drying my hair in my room and then getting in bed between the cold sheets with the image of the illuminated block drifting in the black, empty space of my head. The whole plaza was saturated with the gray sheen of the rain, and several men, blurry, hunched over, crossed it slowly. I went to the paper and found Tomatis drinking coffee with the head printer, a tall guy with glasses who I couldn’t stand. Tomatis gets along with everyone because he doesn’t care at all about anyone. With cigar smokers he smokes cigars; if they take their coffee with cream, so does he; if they don’t like salt, he doesn’t either. But he isn’t easygoing or anything, however much he seems to be. You actually get the impression that there’s nothing in the world that could interest him in the least. I don’t think anything at all interests him. And because of this, he can do whatever he wants. It’s crazy.

When he leaves the printer’s office, Tomatis comes up to me and says:

— I challenge you to a game of straight rail after lunch.

— Done, I say.

At the billiard hall, Tomatis takes the white and gives me the spot ball, botches the break, and leaves me to make all the caroms so he can run his mouth all he wants. He stands next to a little table, turning his coffee cup endlessly. The enormous hall is full of cones of light that make the green felt glow and wash the balls with reflections as they move and collide, making that peculiar sound. I count the tents of light — six — then lean over and aim the first carom.

— Hey! Tomatis shouts. I turn around, startled. He had called to the lottery vendor, a gray-haired man who was missing a leg, and whose crutch clicks on the tiles as he moves around.

— Do you have the results? says Tomatis.

— The first ten games only, says the lottery vendor.

— Did two forty-five come up? says Tomatis.

The man takes a list of numbers from his pocket and gives it to Tomatis, who studies it a second.

— Nothing, he says, returning the table.

The man leaves. I take the first shot and set up for the second. Tomatis looks through the window at the street.

— It’s going to rain all year, he says.

I finish the game with five strings: one of twelve, one of fourteen, one of nine, one of seven, and one of eight caroms. I make the one of fourteen because Tomatis had left the balls together in a corner — deliberately I think — and I don’t let them separate until the fourteenth carom. When I’m shooting the fifteenth the cue slips for lack of chalk, and I miss. Tomatis’s cue slips immediately, and I make nine more. I don’t think Tomatis saw a single one of the caroms I made, and at least one wouldn’t have counted, easily called out in any international competition. Tomatis’s gaze passed from the window and slid slowly across the large hall full of sounds and echoes.