Trafalgar (9 page)

“You should have stayed and continued tangling things up, at least to be sure everything was going to be completely different.”

“You think so? I don’t. In the first place, even if I had wanted to stay, which I did not, it would have taken half a lifetime at least, and I wouldn’t have been able to, either.”

“Thanks to the little priest.”

“You have no imagination, but you hide it. Thanks to the little priest. And in the second place, tangling things too much would have done nothing other than eliminate the hope that within five hundred years there might be, there, another Trafalgar Medrano who is probably inquisitive and comes here and sticks his foot in it and changes the course of history which, given how it’s going up to now, wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.”

My heart was about to fail me, too. A woman with the same name as me, would she have a sewer cat with the airs of a princess? Would she sit down in five centuries in her kitchen to listen to the account of a journey that a man named Trafalgar Medrano had made to a green and blue world in a system of nine surrounding a star on the other side of an infinite universe, symmetrical and terrifying?

“I’m going to drink a little coffee, too,” I said.

The cat jumped to the ground. And would that woman ask herself if five centuries before there had been a woman who?

“Give her something to eat, she’s hungry,” said Trafalgar.

“Be quiet,” I answered. “Let me think.”

I gave some ground beef to the cat and I gave Trafalgar his coffee and I took mine, which was too hot.

“I was there two months,” he said. “Time enough so that between us, my flying carriage and I could begin to colonize an entire continent. Autumn was coming to Castile and Aragon and it was spring here, I mean there, you understand me, when on a morning a little like this one but more miserable, upon leaving my rooms, I encountered the little priest. I realized he had been waiting for me and it smelled bad. Not the little priest but what was coming at me. The little priest was one of the few immaculate types to be found at court. His habit or cassock or whatever that’s called was very worn and shiny at the elbows and even mended, but it didn’t knock you over with the smell. It didn’t have a smell. Nor did Doña Francisca María Juana de Soler y Torrelles Abramonte: and like her there were a few that didn’t smell. Not that they washed; it would be a question of glands, I imagine.

“Fine, but the little priest?”

“I already told you he didn’t smell.”

“Don’t be difficult. What did he want?”

“That I go, what else would he want? The little priest had his aspirations. He had favored the Admiral’s plans not because he thought it was possible to reach Cipango from the west, and it goes without saying he didn’t even dream there was another continent in the west, but rather just in case. That jerk could get to be a good player of sintu, combative style. What he wanted was power, and hidden power, which is as satisfactory as the other kind and much less dangerous.”

“But if he already had it, why didn’t he just stay calm?”

“Power, not only in Castile and Aragon, but in all possible worlds. Behold the height of humility and disinterest. And there, I disturbed him. Because he had limited himself to embroidering intrigues, but I had done important and visible things. I had not only favored the expansion of the realm, and a heck of an expansion, but had acted with supernatural efficiency. Small-minded, unconvinced little souls, like his, feel very poorly when they have to look head on at the supernatural.”

“I will never understand the thirst for power.”

“You’re a little dull, there’s nothing to be done. There in the corridor he spoke to me for the first time. He had a little voice just like the cassock: old and mended. He wished me good morning, although it was no longer the hour for good morning, and he asked if I did not believe true wisdom consisted in using the strength of the adversary to one’s own benefit. I was not ready for roundtables at that hour, without breakfast and after a rather agitated night, but I had to know what he had up his sleeve and I said yes, in certain cases that could be a correct attitude. He smiled and he told me that observing my schemes, that’s how he said it, observing my schemes, he had done precisely that. I began to walk toward where I knew there was something to eat, and he at my side. And then he told me that he had to warn me he no longer needed me. As I did not answer him, he let fly this: ‘The moment has arrived for you to go back where you came from, Señor de Medrano.’ I stopped right there and told him I would decide that. ‘Ah, no, no, no,’ he said, and he explained that if I did not leave immediately, he would denounce as an adulteress Doña Francisca María Juana de Soler y Torrelles Abramonte, an adulteress who maintained carnal relations with a subject of Satan. I realized the guy held all the aces and that I had had it, because if he could demonstrate that, and he could, everything we had done would collapse, but I tried to fight a little more. Useless. The little priest may have worn a mended habit but for my part, I think he had money hidden in his mattress: he had bought my servants and a few of those who had sailed with me on the voyages. I not only went to bed with a married woman but I drank strange black potions and breathed fire from mouth and nose when I was alone. With those witnesses, and a few others he could always obtain with a little money or a lot of fear of hell, the Inquisition was going to be satisfied. I surrendered and asked what he wanted. He wanted me to go, that was all. If I returned that very day to the infernos from whence I had come, he would not move a finger to ruin me nor to bring down the conquest, I mean, the colonization, because that was not in his interest. ‘And she?’ I asked him. He didn’t care a bit about her. As I told you, it wasn’t the first time she frolicked with another, and for the little priest, who knew all about it, morals and right living interested him much less than pulling the strings behind the throne. So I left.”

“Too bad.”

“I don’t know. It was a good moment to disappear. The Admiral was no longer going to die poor and abandoned but instead covered with glory and honors and gold. No one was going to kill or get himself killed looking for Eldorado, and all of America was going to speak Spanish some day.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, of course not, but I can give myself the luxury of believing so. So I invented at top speed an expedition to Australia to see what could be done in those parts, I thought seriously about putting Doña Francisca María Juana de Soler y Torrelles Abramonte into the clunker as contraband and decided not to, I said so long to everyone and expect me back at teatime and bye-bye sweetie and I left. The one who wanted at all costs to go to Australia with me was Yáñez, but as he was in charge of a government in the new world, I made him see that his part was much more important and he stayed. And she will have cried until she found my replacement and I will have passed into legend as the hero swallowed by the unknown and the little priest will secretly sit on the throne that governs a whole continent.”

We were quiet, Trafalgar and I. Afterward I went to see if it was still raining and, yes, it was still raining, but it was starting to clear up to the south. The cat went out to the garden, investigated the climate question, and came back in with wet paws and I protested. Trafalgar remained seated at the kitchen table in front of an empty cup.

“On the trip, I had time to think a lot of nonsense,” he said while I searched the refrigerator. “I hope the little priest has gotten what he wanted and doesn’t pick on her. And that the old fart has died of black plague. And that Yáñez is Viceroy of North America. And that someday, well, you know.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “What do you prefer? Kidneys in white wine with rice, or noodles in browned butter and a liver steak with parsley?”

A decision for five hundred years from now is no joke:

“Kidneys,” he said.

Trafalgar sighed an indignant
it is and it isn’t
and set a packet of unfiltered cigarettes on the table.

“What were you reading at the library?” I asked.

He took a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and read: “Mulnö,
Tres Ensayos sobre el Tiempo. Times Time,
by Woods. And
Realité et Irréalite du Temps,
L’Ho.”

“Don’t tell me. What did you make of all that?”

“That nobody knows a damn thing about time.”

Marcos came over and left the cups, a big one for Trafalgar and a small one for me, on the table. And two glasses of cold water. I drank half my water because I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the prospect of the coffee.

“I don’t know what you want to go investigating time for. It seems to me the best one can do with time is fill it up and let it pass.”

“Yes, but what if time were a thing and not a dimension? And if in fact it didn’t pass?”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Me, neither.”

“So resign yourself and go to the public library to read the Greek lyrics, like Francisco. Anyway, doctors don’t understand why people get sick or why they get well and electricians don’t understand electricity and mathematicians don’t understand zero. Also, why do you want to understand time?”

“Just curiosity,” and he fell quiet but he didn’t fool me.

The Burgundy is a quiet place, thank goodness. And Trafalgar is a quiet guy. Through the door’s twelve beveled glass rectangles one could see people pass by and one wondered why they didn’t remain still. Marcos came over with another double coffee because Trafalgar had drunk the first in one swallow, hot as it was and bitter, the way he likes it.

“Marcos,” I said, “some day I am going to write a story with you and the Burgundy in it.”

“Please, ma’am, no. What if the bar gets fashionable on me and fills up with people?”

“Unlikely. At most, my friends and my aunts will start coming.”

“All right then, but, just in case, don’t publish it,” and he left.

“You could,” said Trafalgar, “write a story with each one of my trips.”

“Not even if I was crazy,” I answered. “In the first place, stories proposed by other people never work: stories choose one, one does not choose stories. And in the second place, your stories are always the same: a bunch of strange things happen to you, you throw yourself, generally successfully, at the prettiest one around there, you earn piles of dough, and what do you spend it on? On bitter coffee and black cigarettes and Pugliese records. Why don’t you buy yourself the latest model Mercedes or go to Europe to live large?”

“A remise taxi is more comfortable and you don’t have to pay for insurance or a garage. And I go to Europe from time to time. But it doesn’t interest me much.”

“Of course. Between Freiburg and Anandaha-A, you pick.”

“Freiburg,” he jumped in. “But if you ever get to see the cathedrals, they’re not exactly cathedrals, but anyway, made out of paper that isn’t exactly paper, on Tippanerwade III, the Gothic will seem like a caricature to you. And beside the builders of mausoleums.”

“Which are not exactly mausoleums.”

“They are. Beside the mausoleum builders of Edamsonallve-Dor, the Egyptians were a herd of subnormals, believe me.”

“Is that where you’ve been now?”

“No. It’s been three months or so since I’ve traveled. I came back from Karperp and I spent all this time being lazy.”

“What you might have sold on Karperp, I don’t even want to consider.”

“Musical instruments. Strings, no winds or percussion. And I bought tons of wood from them.”

“Poor Karperpianos.”

“They’re not called Karperianos. They’re called Neyiomdav-ianos.”

I thought he was pulling my leg, but he said, “It’s a system of thirteen around a star called Neyiomdav, see? Each one of the thirteen has a different name, they’re not called Neyiomdav I, Neyiomdav II, and so on, but rather like here, each world has its name, but those who live there go by the name of the star.”

“Those of the thirteen worlds?”

“Only two are inhabited. Karperp, where I had an order for violins, lutes, guitars and zithers and violas and all that, and Uunu, which I didn’t know was inhabited.”

“How did you not know?”

“No one had told me anything. But after delivering the instruments and while loading the wood—remind me to give you a box made of estoa wood that will hold cigarettes or buttons or those things you women like to keep in boxes. Very fine, like a spider’s web, but you can’t break it even with an axe. And it doesn’t burn, either.”

“It won’t be wood, then. And thank you, I will certainly remind you.”

“It’s wood. You’re welcome. While loading the wood I spent a few days at the home of a friend who lives on the shores of a river in which one can swim, sail, and fish.”

“You neither swim nor sail nor fish.”

“I don’t dislike swimming. Fishing and sailing don’t interest me. But now and again, I do like to stretch out in the sun and do nothing. He was the one who mentioned Uunu, in passing. And I was intrigued because he didn’t seem to want to offer much explanation. He only told me that they didn’t go there because it was hard to recover afterwards. I asked him if it was insalubrious, and he told me that on the contrary, it was a very pleasant place, with a splendid climate, nice people, landscapes
a piacere
and comfortable lodging. I didn’t insist because discretion is a virtue everywhere and I assumed Karperp was no different.”