Trafalgar (3 page)

“It’s not crap. I, who was in no state to be thinking in subtleties, charged in with everything, although I felt like I was screwing a nutcase.”

“Was she chaste?”

“What do you think? Maybe she was enlightened, but chaste she was not. She knew them all. And between the little screams and the pirouettes, she kept calling me Mandrake.”

“And you called her Narda.”

“What did I care? She was pretty, believe me, and she was tireless and tempting. Whenever I eased up a bit and dozed, holding her, she ran her fingers and her tongue over me and she laughed at me, poking her nose into my throat, and she nibbled at me and I got back to work and, knotted together, we rolled across the golden bed. Until at some point in one of those somersaults, she wised up to the fact that the machine was shut off. She sat up on the bed and gave a howl and I thought, why such a fuss? It’s as if you start howling because the water heater shut down.”

“But that wasn’t a water heater, I’m just saying, right?”

“No, it wasn’t. I wanted to go on with the party and I tried to grab her so she would lie back down but she yelled louder and shouted questions at me, what was I doing there? I said to her, what a terrible memory you have, my dear, and she kept on yelling who was I and what was I doing in her room and I should leave immediately and she tried to cover herself with something.”

“Nutcase barely says it,” I commented.

“Ah, that’s what I thought, but it turned out that no, the poor thing was partly right.”

He was quiet for a while and then he remembered I was there. “Did I tell you I had undressed in record time? Well, I dressed even more quickly, I don’t know how, because although I didn’t understand what was happening, I had the impression that the matter was becoming uglier than I had supposed. And while I grabbed my shirt and held up my pants and stuffed the bowtie into my pocket all at the same time, I thought it would really have been handy to be Mandrake, so as to, with that magnetic sweep of my hand, appear fully dressed. And right then, I knew I was Mandrake.”

“But, really!”

“Don’t you get it?” he said, a little put out, as if anyone could get anything in all that jumble. “I was dressed like Mandrake and I have, I had, a mustache and black hair, a little slicked down. And The Thousand had confiscated the comic books.”

“And Lapis Lazuli had read them and she had fallen in love with Mandrake, I understand that. But why was she yelling if she thought you were Mandrake?”

“Wait, wait.”

“Because what more did she want, given the way your little evening was going?”

“Wait, I’m telling you, a person can’t tell you anything.”

The ashtray was full of unfiltered cigarette butts. I gave up smoking eighteen years ago, and at that moment, I regretted it.

“I finished getting dressed and ran out of there with the cape and the top hat in my hand and without the walking stick or the gloves while the blonde wrapped up in a silk sheet—a golden silk sheet, believe it or not—and threatened me with torture and death by dismemberment. I don’t know how I didn’t get lost in all that marble. Her screams could be heard all the way to the front door. On the street, not a single taxi. I ran two or three blocks, in the dark, through a silent neighborhood in which surely five or six of The Thousand lived, because each house occupied at least a block. After an avenue wider than that one in Buenos Aires, when the slum began, I found a taxi. The driver was a sallow old man who wanted to talk. Not I. Maybe I would have become sallow, I’m not saying no, but I didn’t want to chat. I climbed the stairs three at a time—there was no elevator in that filthy hotel—I went into the room, I took off the tailcoat, I shaved off my mustache, I put on a blond wig—I already told you that on my trips, my luggage has everything—and glasses and a cap and a checked jacket and brown pants and I started putting things into my suitcase. And right in the midst of that the skinny guy, who had taken a special interest in my affairs not thanks to my overpowering personality, but thanks to the possibilities of my billfold, showed up and found me flinging around underwear.”

“Tell me, Traf, why were you running away from a handful of women who were stunning and also layable from what I can see, or from what I hear?”

He was midway through the sixth coffee and we were alone in the Burgundy. It was getting late but I didn’t even look at the clock, because I didn’t plan on leaving until I had heard the end. Leticia knows that occasionally, occasionally, I get home very late, and she doesn’t mind, so long as it remains only occasionally.

“You were never on Veroboar,” Trafalgar said, “nor did the Governor holler at you, nor did you meet the hungry, fearful skinny guy or the guy they shot for two dozen comic books, an asthmatic mechanic who had purulent conjunctivitis and was missing two fingers on his left hand and wanted to earn a few extra bucks so as to go two days without working at the port. Nor did you see Lapis Lazuli’s house. Misery, grime, and mud and stench of sickness and rot everywhere. That’s Veroboar. That and a thousand frighteningly rich and powerful women who do whatever they want with everybody else.”

“You can’t trust women,” I said.

I have four daughters: if one of them heard me, she’d strangle me. Especially the third one, who is also a lawyer, God help us. But Trafalgar cut me off at the pass: “From a few things I’ve seen, you can’t trust men, either.”

I had to agree and I haven’t traveled as much as Trafalgar Medrano. Mexico, the United States, Europe and that, and summers in Punta del Este. But I’ve never been on Seskundrea or on Anandaha-A.

“It may seem to you that I was, shall we say, too cautious, but you will see I was right. I realized that if the blonde from the Central Government caught me, she’d dismember me for sure.”

He finished the coffee and opened another packet of unfiltered black cigarettes.

“The skinny guy gave me a few details when I told him I was in a mess, although I didn’t clarify what kind of mess. The position of The Thousand is not hereditary, they aren’t daughters of notable families. They come from the people. Any girl who’s pretty, but really pretty, and manages (which is no easy feat or even close) to pull together a certain sum before she starts to get wrinkly, can aspire to be one of The Thousand. If she manages, she repudiates family, past, and class. The others educate her, they polish her, and afterward they set her loose. And the only thing she has to do from there on out is enjoy herself, become richer all the time, because everyone works for her, and govern Veroboar. They don’t have sons. Or daughters. They’re supposed to be virgins and immortals. People suspect, nevertheless, that they are not immortal. I know they’re not virgins.”

“Yours wasn’t.”

“Nor the others, I’d bet my life. They don’t have children, but they do make love.”

“With who? With The Thousand Males?”

“There are no Thousand Males. I suppose, in secret, among themselves. But officially, once a year, all planned in the Secretariat of Private Communication. They make an application and while they wait for an answer, the rest congratulate them and send them little gifts and have parties. At the Secretariat they always tell them yes, of course, and then they go to their houses, dismiss the servants, set the stage, connect the machine, and lie down. With the machine. The one I turned off. The machine gives them two things: one, hallucinations—visual, tactile, auditory, and everything—which follow the model they’ve selected and which is already programmed into the apparatus. The model may exist or not, it can be the doorman of the ministry or a creature imagined by them or, in my case, a character from a story in one of the damned comic books that I myself sold to the mechanic. And two, all of the sensations of orgasm. That’s why Lapis Lazuli was in seventh heaven with what she believed were the effects of the machine and she thought, I imagine, that the illusion of going to bed with Mandrake was perfect. How could it not be perfect, poor girl, since I had arrived just in time. The electronic romance lasts a few days, the skinny guy didn’t know how many, and afterward they return, smug as can be, to govern and to live like kings. Like queens.”

“The skinny guy told you all that?”

“Yes. Not as I’m telling you but instead full of mythological flourishes and fabulous explanations. While I put my things in the suitcase. He even helped me. I closed it and ran out because I knew the potatoes were about to burn and I knew why, and the skinny guy ran after me. So much courage had already caught my attention. But while we descended the three floors he started telling me, gasping, that he had a daughter prettier and blonder than Ver.”

“Ver?”

“The sun. And that he was saving so that one day she could become one of The Thousand. I stopped short on the second floor and I told him he was crazy, that if he loved her he should marry her to the fried-cakes seller or the cobbler and sit down to wait for her to give him grandchildren. But he was crazy and he didn’t hear me, and if he did hear me, he didn’t pay any attention: he asked if I was rich. Like I tell you, you can’t trust men, either.”

“You gave him the money.”

“I kept on going down the stairs by leaps and the skinny guy found me a taxi.”

“You gave him the money.”

“Let’s not talk about the matter. I got into the taxi and I told the driver, who I don’t know if he was old or if he was sallow or if he was both things or neither, that I would pay him double if he would take me to the port at top speed. He flew and I paid him double. I was looking
behind the whole time to see if Lapis Lazuli had set the dogs on me.”

“She hadn’t set anything on you.”

“Are you kidding? I beat them by a hair. I turned on the motors but I was still touching the ground when they arrived with sirens and searchlights and machine guns. They started to shoot and that’s when I lifted off. They must have shot all of them for letting me escape. Or maybe they dismembered them in my place.”

“What an escape.”

He drank his coffee and grabbed his billfold.

“Leave it,” I said, “my treat. To celebrate your return.”

“I was in no shape to celebrate,” he hesitated before putting his billfold away. “I detoured a little and went to Naijale II. You can sell anything there. And buy for a song a plant from which the chemists of Oen derive a perfume that cannot be compared to any other from any other place. Imagine the state I was in that I didn’t unload the merchandise and I didn’t buy anything. I went to a hotel like a decent person and I spent a week eating well and sleeping as well as I could. Apart from that, the only thing I did was go to the beach and watch television. I did not drink alcohol, I did not look at women, and I did not read comic books. And I assure you that on Naijale II all three are of the first quality. Afterwards, I came home. I had an awful journey, sleeping jumpily, mistaking my route every moment, making calculations that probably aren’t worth anything because I don’t know how long a pregnancy lasts on Veroboar. I didn’t ask the skinny guy and if I had asked him he would have told me about the pregnancy of his wife, who must be an old lady, more scrawny than he, and how do I know if The Thousand have the same physiology as the common women? How do I know they aren’t altered? How do I know if they can or can’t get pregnant? And if they can, how do I know if Lapis Lazuli got pregnant that night? By Mandrake? How do I know if The Thousand aren’t machines too and if they haven’t executed (or worse) the skinny guy’s daughter just like all those who aspired to be like them, a matter of keeping the money while they keep on making love with other machines?”

“You were in bed with her, Traf. Was she a woman?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Too bad,” I said. “If they were machines, you would have no reason to return to Veroboar.”

I paid, we stood up, and we left. When we went out, it had stopped raining.