Collected Stories (5 page)

The man who had had the room before, after having slept the sleep of the just for hours on end, oblivious to the worries and unrest of the recent early morning, awoke when the day was well advanced and the sounds of the city completely invaded the air of the half-opened room. He must have thought – since no other state of mind occupied him – about the thick preoccupation
of death, about his full, round fear, about the piece of earth – clay of himself – that his brother must have had under his tongue. But the joyful sun that clarified the garden drew his attention toward another life, which was more ordinary, more earthly, and perhaps less true than his fearsome interior existence. Toward his life as an ordinary man, a daily animal, which made him remember
– without relying on his nervous system, his changeable liver – the irremediable impossibility of sleeping like a bourgeois. He thought – and there, surely, there was something of bourgeois mathematics in the tongue-twisting figures – of the financial riddles of the office.

Eight-twelve. I will certainly be late. He ran the tips of his fingers over his cheek. The harsh skin, sown with stumps,
passed the feeling of the hard hairs through his digital antennae. Then, with the palm of his half-opened hand, he felt his distracted face carefully, with the serene tranquillity of a surgeon who knows the nucleus of the tumor, and from the bland surface toward the inside the hard substance of a truth rose up, one that on occasion had turned him white with anguish. There, under his fingertips –
and after the fingertips,
bone against bone – his irrevocable anatomical condition held an order of compositions buried, a tight universe of weaves, of lesser worlds, which bore him along, raising his fleshy armor toward a height less enduring than the natural and final position of his bones.

Yes. Against the pillow, his head sunken in the soft material, his body falling into the repose of his
organs, life had a horizontal taste, a better accommodation to its own principles. He knew that with the minimum effort of closing his eyes, the long, fatiguing task awaiting him would begin to be resolved in a climate that was becoming uncomplicated, without compromises with either time or space: with no need, when he reached it, for the chemical adventure that made up his body to suffer the slightest
impairment. On the contrary, like that, with his eyes closed, there was a total economy of vital resources, an absolute absence of organic wear. His body, sunk in the water of dreams, could move, live, evolve toward other forms of existence where his real world would have, as its intimate necessity, an identical – if not greater – density of motion with which the necessity of living would
remain completely satisfied without any detriment to his physical integrity. Much easier – then – would be the chore of living with beings, things, acting, nevertheless, in exactly the same way as in the real world. The chores of shaving, taking the bus, solving equations at the office would be simple and uncomplicated in his dream and would produce in him the same inner satisfaction in the end.

Yes. It was better doing it in that artificial way, as he was already doing; looking in the lighted room for the direction of the mirror. As he would have kept on doing if at that instant a heavy machine, brutal and absurd, had not ruptured the lukewarm substance of his incipient dream. Returning now to the conventional world, the problem certainly took on greater characteristics of seriousness.
Nonetheless, the curious theory that had just inspired softness in him had turned him toward a region of understanding, and from within his man-body he felt the displacement of the mouth to the side in an expression
which must have been an involuntary smile. ‘Having to shave when I have to be over the books in twenty minutes. Bath eight minutes, five if I hurry, breakfast seven. Unpleasant old
sausages. Mabel’s shop: provisions, hardware, drugs, liquors; it’s like somebody’s box; I’ve forgotten the name. (The bus breaks down on Tuesdays, seven minutes late.) Pendora. No: Peldora. That’s not it. A half hour in all. There’s no time. I forgot the name, a word with everything in it. Pedora. It begins with
P
.’

With his bathrobe on, in front of the wash basin now, a sleepy face, hair uncombed
and no shave, he receives a bored look from the mirror. A quick shudder catches him with a cold thread as he discovers his own dead brother, newly arisen, in that image. The same tired face, the same look that was still not fully awake.

A new movement sent the mirror a quantity of light destined to bring out a pleasant expression, but the simultaneous return of that light brought back to him
– going against his plans – a grotesque grimace. Water. The hot flow has opened up torrential, exuberant, and the wave of white, thick steam is interposed between him and the glass. In that way – taking advantage of the interruption with a quick movement – he manages to make an adjustment with his own time and with the time inside the quicksilver.

He rose above the leather strop, filling the
mirror with pointed ears, cold metal; and the cloud – breaking up now – shows him the other face again, hazy with physical complications, mathematical laws with which geometry was attempting volume in a new way, a concrete formula for light. There, opposite him, was the face, with a pulse, with throbs of its own presence, transfigured into an expression which was simultaneously a smile and mocking
seriousness, appearing in the damp glass which the condensation of vapor had left clean.

He smiled. (It smiled.) He showed – to himself – his tongue. (It showed – to the real one – its tongue.) The one in the mirror had a pasty, yellow tongue: ‘Your stomach is upset,’ he
diagnosed (a wordless expression) with a grimace. He smiled again. (It smiled again.) But now he could see that there was something
stupid, artificial, and false in the smile that was returned to him. He smoothed his hair (it smoothed its hair) with his right hand (left hand), returning the bashful smile at once (and disappearing). He was surprised at his own behavior, standing in front of the mirror and making faces like an idiot. Nevertheless, he thought that everybody behaved the same way in front of a mirror and his
indignation was greater then with the certainty that since the world was idiotic, he was only rendering tribute to vulgarity. Eight-seventeen.

He knew that he would have to hurry if he didn’t want to be fired from the agency. From that agency that for some time now had been changed into the starting point of his singular daily funeral cortege.

The shaving cream, in contact with the brush, had
now raised a bluish whiteness that brought him back from his worries. It was the moment in which the suds came up through his body, through the network of arteries, and facilitated the functioning of his whole vital mechanism. … Thus, returning to normality, it seemed more comfortable to search his soaped-up brain for the word he wanted to compare Mabel’s shop with. Peldora. Mabel’s junk shop. Paldora.
Provisions or drugs. Or everything at the same time: Pendora.

There were enough suds in the mug. But he kept on rubbing the brush, almost with passion. The childish spectacle of the bubbles gave him the clear joy of a big child as it crept up into his heart, heavy and hard, like cheap liquor. A new effort in search of the syllable would have been sufficient then for the word to burst forth, ripe
and brutal; for it to come to the surface in that thick, murky water of his flighty memory. But that time, as on other occasions, the scattered, detached pieces of a single system would not adjust themselves exactly in order to gain organic totality, and he was ready to give up the word forever: Pendora!

And now it was time to desist in that useless search, because – they both raised their eyes,
which met – his twin
brother, with his frothy brush, had begun to cover his chin with blue-white coolness, letting his left hand move – he imitated him with the right – with smoothness and precision, until the delineated zone had been covered. He glanced away, and the geometry of the hands on the clock showed itself to him, intent on the solution of a new theorem of anguish: eight-eighteen. He
was moving too slowly. So that with the firm aim of finishing quickly, he gripped the razor as the horn handle obeyed the mobility of his little finger.

Calculating that in three minutes the task would be done, he raised his right arm (left arm) to the level of his right ear (left ear), making the observation along the way that nothing should turn out to be as difficult as shaving oneself the
way the image in the mirror was doing. From that he had derived a whole series of very complicated calculations with an aim to verifying the speed of the light which,
almost
simultaneously, was making the trip back and forth and reproducing that movement. But the aesthete in him, after a struggle approximately equal to the square root of the velocity he might have found, overcame the mathematician
and the artist’s thoughts went toward the movements of the blade that greenblue-whited with the various touches of the light. Rapidly – and the mathematician and the aesthete were at peace now – he brought the edge down along the right cheek (left cheek) to the meridian of the lip and observed with satisfaction that the left cheek on the image showed clean between its edges of lather.

He had
still not shaken the blade clean when a smokiness loaded with the bitter smell of roasting meat began to arrive from the kitchen. He felt the quiver under his tongue and the torrent of easy, thin saliva that filled his mouth with the energetic taste of hot fat. Fried kidneys. There was finally a change in Mabel’s damned store. Pendora. Not that either. The sound of the gland in the midst of the sauce
broke in his ear with a memory of hammering rain, which was, in effect, the same from the recent early dawn. Therefore he mustn’t forget his galoshes and his raincoat. Kidneys in gravy. No
doubt about it.

Of all his senses none deserved as much mistrust as smell. But even beyond his five senses and even when that feast was nothing more than a bit of optimism on the part of his pituitary, the
need to finish as soon as possible was at that moment the most urgent need of his five senses. With precision and deftness – the mathematician and the artist showed their teeth – he brought the razor backward (forward) and forward (backward) up to the corner of his mouth to the right (left), while with his left hand (right hand) he smoothed the skin, facilitating in that way the passage of the metal
edge, from front (back) to back (front), and up (up) and down, finishing – both panting – the simultaneous work.

But precisely upon finishing, when he was giving the last touches to his left cheek with his right hand, he managed to see his own elbow against the mirror. He saw it, large, strange, unknown, and observed with surprise that above the elbow, other eyes equally large and equally unknown
were searching wildly for the direction of the blade. Someone is trying to hang my brother. A powerful arm. Blood! The same thing always happens when I’m in a hurry.

On his face he sought the corresponding place; but his finger was clean and his touch showed no solution of continuity. He gave a start. There were no wounds on his skin, but there in the mirror the other one was bleeding slightly.
And inside him the annoyance that last night’s upset would be repeated became his truth again, a consciousness of unfolding. But there was the chin (round: identical faces). Those hairs on the mole needed the tip of the razor.

He thought he had observed a cloud of worry haze over the hasty expression of his image. Could it be possible, due to the great rapidity with which he was shaving – and
the mathematician took complete charge of the situation – that the velocity of light was unable to cover the distance in order to record all the movements? Could he, in his haste, have got ahead of the image in the mirror and finished the job one motion ahead of it? Or could it have been possible – and the artist, after a brief
struggle, managed to dislodge the mathematician – that the image had
taken on its own life and had resolved – by living in an uncomplicated time – to finish more slowly than its external subject?

Visibly preoccupied, he turned the hot-water faucet on and felt the rise of the warm, thick steam, while the splashing of his face in the fresh water filled his ears with a guttural sound. On his skin, the pleasant harshness of the freshly laundered towel made him breathe
in the deep satisfaction of a hygienic animal. Pandora! That’s the word: Pandora.

He looked at the towel with surprise and closed his eyes, disconcerted, while there in the mirror, a face just like his contemplated him with large, stupid eyes and the face was crossed by a crimson thread.

He opened his eyes and smiled (it smiled). Nothing mattered to him any more. Mabel’s store is a Pandora’s
box.

The hot smell of the kidneys in gravy honored his nostrils, with greater urgency now. And he felt satisfaction – positive satisfaction – that a large dog had begun to wag its tail inside his soul.

Then she looked at me. I thought that she was looking at me for the first time. But then, when she turned around behind the lamp and I kept feeling her slippery and oily look in back of me, over my shoulder, I understood that it was I who was looking at her for the first time. I lit a cigarette. I took a drag on the harsh, strong smoke, before spinning in the chair, balancing
on one of the rear legs. After that I saw her there, as if she’d been standing beside the lamp looking at me every night. For a few brief minutes that’s all we did: look at each other. I looked from the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. She stood, with a long and quiet hand on the lamp, looking at me. I saw her eyelids lighted up as on every night. It was then that I remembered the
usual thing, when I said to her: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ Without taking her hand off the lamp she said to me: ‘That. We’ll never forget that.’ She left the orbit, sighing: ‘Eyes of a blue dog. I’ve written it everywhere.’

I saw her walk over to the dressing table. I watched her appear in the circular glass of the mirror looking at me now at the end of a back and forth of mathematical light. I watched
her keep on looking at me with her great hot-coal eyes: looking at me while she opened the little box covered with pink mother of pearl. I saw her powder her nose. When she finished, she closed the box, stood up again, and walked over to the lamp once more, saying: ‘I’m afraid that someone is dreaming about this room and revealing my secrets.’ And over the flame she held the same long and tremulous
hand that she had been warming before sitting down at the mirror. And she
said: ‘You don’t feel the cold.’ And I said to her: ‘Sometimes.’ And she said to me: ‘You must feel it now.’ And then I understood why I couldn’t have been alone in the seat. It was the cold that had been giving me the certainty of my solitude. ‘Now I feel it,’ I said. ‘And it’s strange because the night is quiet. Maybe
the sheet fell off.’ She didn’t answer. Again she began to move toward the mirror and I turned again in the chair, keeping my back to her. Without seeing her, I knew what she was doing. I knew that she was sitting in front of the mirror again, seeing my back, which had had time to reach the depths of the mirror and be caught by her look, which had also had just enough time to reach the depths and
return – before the hand had time to start the second turn – until her lips were anointed now with crimson, from the first turn of her hand in front of the mirror. I saw, opposite me, the smooth wall, which was like another blind mirror in which I couldn’t see her – sitting behind me – but could imagine her where she probably was as if a mirror had been hung in place of the wall. ‘I see you,’ I told
her. And on the wall I saw what was as if she had raised her eyes and had seen me with my back turned toward her from the chair, in the depths of the mirror, my face turned toward the wall. Then I saw her lower her eyes again and remain with her eyes always on her brassiere, not talking. And I said to her again: ‘I see you.’ And she raised her eyes from her brassiere again. ‘That’s impossible,’
she said. I asked her why. And she, with her eyes quiet and on her brassiere again: ‘Because your face is turned toward the wall.’ Then I spun the chair around. I had the cigarette clenched in my mouth. When I stayed facing the mirror she was back by the lamp. Now she had her hands open over the flame, like the two wings of a hen, toasting herself, and with her face shaded by her own fingers. ‘I
think I’m going to catch cold,’ she said. ‘This must be a city of ice.’ She turned her face to profile and her skin, from copper to red, suddenly became sad. ‘Do something about it,’ she said. And she began to get undressed, item by item, starting at the top with the brassiere. I told her: ‘I’m going to turn back to the
wall.’ She said: ‘No. In any case, you’ll see me the way you did when your
back was turned.’ And no sooner had she said it than she was almost completely undressed, with the flame licking her long copper skin. ‘I’ve always wanted to see you like that, with the skin of your belly full of deep pits, as if you’d been beaten.’ And before I realized that my words had become clumsy at the sight of her nakedness, she became motionless, warming herself on the globe of the lamp,
and she said: ‘Sometimes I think I’m made of metal.’ She was silent for an instant. The position of her hands over the flame varied slightly. I said: ‘Sometimes, in other dreams, I’ve thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some museum. Maybe that’s why you’re cold.’ And she said: ‘Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate.
Then, when the blood beats inside me, it’s as if someone were calling by knocking on my stomach and I can feel my own copper sound in the bed. It’s like – what do you call it – laminated metal.’ She drew closer to the lamp. ‘I would have liked to hear you,’ I said. And she said: ‘If we find each other sometime, put your ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you’ll hear me echoing. I’ve
always wanted you to do it sometime.’ I heard her breathe heavily as she talked. And she said that for years she’d done nothing different. Her life had been dedicated to finding me in reality, through that identifying phrase: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ And she went along the street saying it aloud, as a way of telling the only person who could have understood her:

‘I’m the one who comes into your
dreams every night and tells you: “Eyes of a blue dog.” ’ And she said that she went into restaurants and before ordering said to the waiters: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ But the waiters bowed reverently, without remembering ever having said that in their dreams. Then she would write on the napkins and scratch on the varnish of the tables with a knife: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ And on the steamed-up windows
of hotels, stations, all public buildings, she would write with her forefinger: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ She said that once she went into a drugstore and noticed the same smell
that she had smelled in her room one night after having dreamed about me. ‘He must be near,’ she thought, seeing the clean, new tiles of the drugstore. Then she went over to the clerk and said to him: ‘I always dream about
a man who says to me: “Eyes of a blue dog.” ’ And she said the clerk had looked at her eyes and told her: ‘As a matter of fact, miss, you do have eyes like that.’ And she said to him: ‘I have to find the man who told me those very words in my dreams.’ And the clerk started to laugh and moved to the other end of the counter. She kept on seeing the clean tile and smelling the odor. And she opened her
purse and on the tiles, with her crimson lipstick, she wrote in red letters: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ The clerk came back from where he had been. He told her: ‘Madam, you have dirtied the tiles.’ He gave her a damp cloth, saying: ‘Clean it up.’ And she said, still by the lamp, that she had spent the whole afternoon on all fours, washing the tiles and saying: ‘Eyes of a blue dog,’ until people gathered
at the door and said she was crazy.

Now, when she finished speaking, I remained in the corner, sitting, rocking in the chair. ‘Every day I try to remember the phrase with which I am to find you,’ I said. ‘Now I don’t think I’ll forget it tomorrow. Still, I’ve always said the same thing and when I wake up I’ve always forgotten what the words I can find you with are.’ And she said: ‘You invented
them yourself on the first day.’ And I said to her: ‘I invented them because I saw your eyes of ash. But I never remember the next morning.’ And she, with clenched fists, beside the lamp, breathed deeply: ‘If you could at least remember now what city I’ve been writing it in.’

Her tightened teeth gleamed over the flame. ‘I’d like to touch you now,’ I said. She raised the face that had been looking
at the light; she raised her look, burning, roasting, too, just like her, like her hands, and I felt that she saw me, in the corner where I was sitting, rocking in the chair. ‘You’d never told me that,’ she said. ‘I tell you now and it’s the truth,’ I said. From the other side of the lamp she asked for a cigarette. The butt had disappeared between my fingers. I’d forgotten that I
was smoking.
She said: ‘I don’t know why I can’t remember where I wrote it.’ And I said to her: ‘For the same reason that tomorrow I won’t be able to remember the words.’ And she said sadly: ‘No. It’s just that sometimes I think that I’ve dreamed that too.’ I stood up and walked toward the lamp. She was a little beyond, and I kept on walking with the cigarettes and matches in my hand, which would not go beyond
the lamp. I held the cigarette out to her. She squeezed it between her lips and leaned over to reach the flame before I had time to light the match. ‘In some city in the world, on all the walls, those words have to appear in writing: “Eyes of a blue dog,” ’ I said. ‘If I remembered them tomorrow I could find you.’ She raised her head again and now the lighted coal was between her lips. ‘Eyes of a
blue dog,’ she sighed, remembered, with the cigarette drooping over her chin and one eye half closed. Then she sucked in the smoke with the cigarette between her fingers and exclaimed: ‘This is something else now. I’m warming up.’ And she said it with her voice a little lukewarm and fleeting, as if she hadn’t really said it, but as if she had written it on a piece of paper and had brought the paper
close to the flame while I read: ‘I’m warming,’ and she had continued with the paper between her thumb and forefinger, turning it around as it was being consumed and I had just read ‘… up,’ before the paper was completely consumed and dropped all wrinkled to the floor, diminished, converted into light ash dust. ‘That’s better,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it frightens me to see you that way. Trembling beside
a lamp.’

We had been seeing each other for several years. Sometimes, when we were already together, somebody would drop a spoon outside and we would wake up. Little by little we’d been coming to understand that our friendship was subordinated to things, to the simplest of happenings. Our meetings always ended that way, with the fall of a spoon early in the morning.

Now, next to the lamp, she
was looking at me. I remembered that she had also looked at me in that way in the past,
from that remote dream where I made the chair spin on its back legs and remained facing a strange woman with ashen eyes. It was in that dream that I asked her for the first time: ‘Who are you?’ And she said to me: ‘I don’t remember.’ I said to her: ‘But I think we’ve seen each other before.’ And she said, indifferently:
‘I think I dreamed about you once, about this same room.’ And I told her: ‘That’s it. I’m beginning to remember now.’ And she said: ‘How strange. It’s certain that we’ve met in other dreams.’

She took two drags on the cigarette. I was still standing, facing the lamp, when suddenly I kept looking at her. I looked her up and down and she was still copper; no longer hard and cold metal, but yellow,
soft, malleable copper. ‘I’d like to touch you,’ I said again. And she said: ‘You’ll ruin everything.’ I said: ‘It doesn’t matter now. All we have to do is turn the pillow over in order to meet again.’ And I held my hand out over the lamp. She didn’t move. ‘You’ll ruin everything,’ she said again before I could touch her. ‘Maybe, if you come around behind the lamp, we’d wake up frightened in who
knows what part of the world.’ But I insisted: ‘It doesn’t matter.’ And she said: ‘If we turned over the pillow, we’d meet again. But when you wake up you’ll have forgotten.’ I began to move toward the corner. She stayed behind, warming her hands over the flame. And I still wasn’t beside the chair when I heard her say behind me: ‘When I wake up at midnight, I keep turning in bed, with the fringe
of the pillow burning my knee, and repeating until dawn: “Eyes of a blue dog.” ’

Then I remained with my face toward the wall. ‘It’s already dawning,’ I said without looking at her. ‘When it struck two I was awake and that was a long time back.’ I went to the door. When I had the knob in my hand, I heard her voice again, the same, invariable. ‘Don’t open that door,’ she said. ‘The hallway is
full of difficult dreams.’ And I asked her: ‘How do you know?’ And she told me: ‘Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart.’ I had the door half opened. I moved it a little and a cold, thin breeze brought me the fresh smell of vegetable
earth, damp fields. She spoke again. I gave the turn, still moving the door, mounted on silent hinges,
and I told her: ‘I don’t think there’s any hallway outside here. I’m getting the smell of country.’ And she, a little distant, told me: ‘I know that better than you. What’s happening is that there’s a woman outside dreaming about the country.’ She crossed her arms over the flame. She continued speaking: ‘It’s that woman who always wanted to have a house in the country and was never able to leave
the city.’ I remembered having seen the woman in some previous dream, but I knew, with the door ajar now, that within half an hour I would have to go down for breakfast. And I said: ‘In any case, I have to leave here in order to wake up.’

Outside the wind fluttered for an instant, then remained quiet, and the breathing of someone sleeping who had just turned over in bed could be heard. The wind
from the fields had ceased. There were no more smells. ‘Tomorrow I’ll recognize you from that,’ I said. ‘I’ll recognize you when on the street I see a woman writing “Eyes of a blue dog” on the walls.’ And she, with a sad smile – which was already a smile of surrender to the impossible, the unreachable – said: ‘Yet you won’t remember anything during the day.’ And she put her hands back over the
lamp, her features darkened by a bitter cloud. ‘You’re the only man who doesn’t remember anything of what he’s dreamed after he wakes up.’