Juan José Saer: Scars

THERE’S THIS FILTHY, EVIL JUNE LIGHT COMINGthrough the window. I’m leaning over the table, sliding the cue, ready to shoot. The red and the white balls are across the table, near the corner. I have the spot ball. I have to hit it softly so it hits the red ball first, then the white, then the back rail between the red ball and the white ball. The red ball should hit the side rail before mine hits the back rail, which it should make for at an angle after it’s hit the white ball. Like so: mine will just kiss the red — which will then hit the side rail — and ricochet toward the white as the red comes back toward the white ball, in a straight line, from the side rail. My ball will trace an imaginary triangle. The red will travel the base of this triangle, from one point to the other. If the vector isn’t perfect, the red won’t have time to travel far enough toward the white. It will need to have crossed enough of the table — coming from the side rail — before mine hits the back rail and comes back again, slowly, at an angle.

That cold, filthy light coming through the window. It’s colder than who knows what. And what we need is a sun that’s like the people, not this watery light. All it’s good for is showing how the cigarette he just threw on the tiles is still lit. A thin, disintegrating, blue smoke column that rises and disappears. And with everything so slow it always looks like the same thin column and always the same disintegrating trail, not a continuous trail of smoke rising and disintegrating into an imaginary block of light. No, not a block. That filthy light couldn’t be a block. Who knows what rancid sun it came from. It shouldn’t be here, there’s no use for it. It should make for some other bar on some other planet, some godforsaken, misbegotten planet somewhere else. It shouldn’t be here. We need something different, a hot, dry, blinding light. Because it’s cold. It’s fucking cold. Cold as the blessed mistress. The polar icecap is probably a sauna compared to this. It’s nuts. In Antarctica you could be walking around butt naked, and here you hock up a ball of phlegm and an ice cube hits the sidewalk. Everyone goes around coughing up ice. Just the other day some guy walking down San Martín opened his mouth to say Hi to his friend on the opposite sidewalk and couldn’t close it again because it filled up with frost. They had to take a soldering iron to his mouth because the cold was pouring in and freezing his blood. If this keeps up, the first chance I get I’m jumping in bed with like ninety blankets and not coming out till January.

Since flicking away that cigarette he hasn’t done a thing. He’s standing there, stock still, with the cue in his hand. Watching how I slide the cue, aiming, slowly. He doesn’t seem to see. Thinking of something else, for sure. Who knows what. Maybe he’s thinking about a pair of tits, because he’s one of those guys whose brains are all at the back, pressed against their spine by a big pair of tits that takes up at least eighty percent of their skull. Some guys, all they have in there is a pair of tits — a pair of tits and nothing else. Some guys you can even see the nipples coming out through their eyes. Those are the guys with purple pupils. You can tell right away by looking at the color of their pupils — they’re purple. Maybe he’s not thinking about that. Maybe he’s thinking about the week ahead, one night, sitting down under the desk lamp and in one go writing something that changes the world. Tons of guys pass the time thinking one week to the next, pow , they’ll rock the world with a single uppercut. All they have to do is raise their hand (condescend to raise their hand, as they see it) and like that they’ve covered the surface of the earth with the holy word. Maybe he’s also thinking that the cigarette burned his mouth, that he should roll his tongue and collect some saliva to cool it off, then spit, or that now he’ll take his right hand from the cue and put it in his right pants pocket. Or maybe nothing. Maybe even the tits are gone and now there’s nothing in there, nothing but surface, not the pale cone of light or the dim field of sound echoing around the pool table, the cone of light that contains just the three balls, the cues, the table, and the two of us — and him just barely — nothing but the dry green-black walls, corroded by the built-up rust of old thoughts and memories, dark all throughout. Watching, motionless, hunched, as I slide the cue, slow, aiming. He looks, but I don’t know if he sees. Who could swear he does? Not me. If someone wants to swear he sees, go ahead and swear. I won’t. All I know is that after flicking the cigarette he turned his head toward where I’m bent over the table sliding the cue, that an exhausted, absolutely evil June light is coming in through the bar window, and that my task holds back every external thing that’s flooding in toward the table. My task is to make my ball run slowly toward the red, hit it, then ricochet toward the white, connect again, then rebound off the back rail, returning at an angle, in the opposite direction, giving the red enough time — after it hits the side rail — to return in a straight line toward the white and reunite in a way that leaves my ball, which passed behind the red, in a good spot for the next carom.

— Six, I say. But it still wasn’t the sixth: the ball was rolling close to the rail, after softly hitting the white ball, which belonged to Tomatis, on a straight line back toward the red. When they hit, I was moving toward the other end of the table and Tomatis was still standing there, leaning against his cue, which was pressed into the tile floor, his outline contrasting sharply against the yellow rectangle of light crashing through the bar window. The contrast covers his thick body with shadows, but a kind of luminous haze surrounds the outline. When the spot ball stopped, after hitting the red, I bent over it again and aimed the cue. Even though I was concentrating on my shot, I knew Tomatis wasn’t paying any attention, standing there, holding the cue against the floor with both hands, looking at the tiles, or the tips of his shoes, surrounded by the haze, the sheen.

— Experience doesn’t come with maturity, I don’t think, he says. Or should I say maturity doesn’t come with experience?

I aim and take a bank shot. After hitting the red ball and the rail, my ball makes for the white ball.

— Seven, I say.

— They’re adding up, Tomatis says, not even looking at the table.

The spot ball hits the white and makes its peculiar sound in the large hall full of clatter, murmurs, shouts. The cone of light that falls on the green table isolates us like the walls of a tent. There are several cones of light across the hall. Each so isolated from the others, and hanging so perfectly apart, that they look like planets with a fixed place in a system, in orbit, each ignorant of the others’ existence. Tomatis is standing at the very edge of that tent of light, with that amazing sheen behind him formed by the light coming in from the nearby window.

I get ready to shoot the eighth. I bend over the table, prop the side of my right hand on the felt, then three fingers, place the cue on a kind of bridge I make with my thumb and index, and with my left hand slide the cue from the base. My gaze alternates from the spot on my ball that the tip of the cue has to hit to the spot on the red ball where my ball will hit, to where the white ball — or my opponent’s, Tomatis, in this case — sits.

— Well aimed, Tomatis says, not even looking. He’s not paying any attention at all to the game — I’ve made thirty-six caroms, and he’s only made two. The two he made were completely by accident, and when he shoots it seems like he wants his turn to end as quickly as possible, so he can return to standing next to the table and running his mouth. The impression you get is that the more caroms his opponent makes the happier he is, since that will allow him more time to stretch out his speech. He’s not clumsy, just careless. I would even say he handles the cue really well — you can tell by how he holds it — compared to lots of people who play straight rail. But, bearing in mind that he can handle the cue, that he’s always the one suggesting a game, and that everyone he invites — Horacio Barco, for example — plays more than he does, I’ve decided that Tomatis uses the game of straight rail as an opportunity to be the only one to talk, and about whatever he wants.