We were at the edge of a fortress with thick, high walls. Before the entrance, a massive gable, curved like a shield. We saw every detail of those walls and the colors of the morning that found us at the gates — the dimension, the form, and the color of the stones, the rattling of the cumbersome green metal gates, the road that carried us up its serpentine curves. I heard the words as if they were my own: the oblong hole that remained in the wall closely resembled a crocodile. And indeed, over time, the hole had shaped itself oddly, almost like a prank, into a long animal with short, barely visible paws and a wide, snarling snout. The decayed stones had grown jagged, like the greedy creature’s zigzagged teeth. “He” spoke haltingly, and “I” heard his words in myself, near every curve of the hole that seemed specially designed to embody the ferocious reptile’s shape.
I and myself circled the fortress for several hours. Then we wandered the hills. We were setting out for the Big City in a few days. We listened to the undulations of our thoughts and saw the heavy green gate and the curious hole in the fortress wall once more. It was necessary to interrupt him, to interrupt myself, to contradict myself, to contradict him. The wall wasn’t curved like a shield, but straight and sloped: the frustum of a square pyramid. It wasn’t made of stone, but of brick worn by rain. The images had blurred. The memories: uncontrollable. I understood then that it had been a necessary occurrence: we could no longer unite in one being. We needed to remain separate though inseparable, halves. It would never be possible to be near him, and even less in him. Something definitive in me — forgetfulness — accomplished the wonder of our doubling.
The hole in the wall had not existed: it was a chimera, or so I thought. I had turned pale and listened to him describing the details: horrified, he gradually convinced himself that what I had seen was a spot of whitewash left by a brush. Bent over his back, suddenly hunched with age, I felt that he needed some verification. He wanted to return to that place. And, in truth, we really would return there later, but after many years, after uncertainty had already torn us apart. We gazed at the walls of the former fortress. Above the green gates rose the frustum of a truncated pyramid made of brick. He looked at the spot of whitewash on the wall. The hairs of the brush had created a crocodile. Our hands extended. Cold, clammy palms slapped our foreheads. If there hadn’t been a hubbub of voices nearby, he might have collapsed. He didn’t have the strength to turn in their direction. Panic had made him faint. He was devastated, pale as death. His unraveled mind let any kind of mental aberration through its serpentine coils. He was terrified by how easy it was to fall prey to imagined mishaps, and so was I.
A group of young tourists stood close by. They shed stray bits of information about the history of the fortress. Someone said that the restoration of the fortress had taken place several months ago. “He” turned, then, rushed toward the speaker, snagged him by the collar, and asked if the wall hadn’t originally been made of stone and curved.
— Yes, it seems. .
The young man wasn’t sure: he hadn’t had the leisure to recover. He was no longer sure what he had meant to say — the wall seemed to have been brick and straight, however, and “he” would go on believing this from now on: he was afraid to go back — everything escaped him so quickly. We kept forgetting in order to be free, in other places and at other times, without roots and duration: moving slowly, like a mobile point on a straight line rotated outward from a fixed pole, following spirals that tangled into a ball — the ash of closed serpentine spirals, rotations in a dark self, preliminary corridors. The third personand the second person gradually impeded access; the charred spirals deepened into a narrow remnant, contracted spaces, small, heavy steps on wires thin as humid trails of smoke, onetime slopes, stairs, spirals, and serpentine coils, scattered in a distant, black fog.
We would have to remain together, therefore, myself and I, as friends, opposite halves allied by necessity, unreconciled individuals, each struggling to inhabit me by himself. We were like a couple that might have seemed in agreement, but hadn’t agreed on anything except indifference and the struggle for the life and death of the other, for whom existing at the same time and in the same place was impossible, unless this conflicted state was just a way for us to march in step and passively endure our own peaceful absence. The week of yesterday, the Friday of yesterday, and the year of yesterday would have to be forgotten. I would have to begin anew, as Father had taught us, for Eva’s and Dona’s smoke to rise, for us to be free, for Captain Zubcu to burn, for us to forget all those half-games in exchange for halves of each other. We should forget whom and what and why we forgive, and in this way it would be possible to organize the pantomime of the Saturday tomorrow and the day after that.
The walls of the Big City had therefore enclosed us. The alarm clocks shrieked at dawn. . damp, uniform mornings. . the shirt like a cold lash, hurried convoys climbing the same street, bowing tensely under the factory windows, heads lower than the porter’s cap. Noises, drawers, voices, telephones, cigarettes, the pink ozalid paper, the industrial ovens in transverse and longitudinal sections, funnels, platforms, bunkers, circuits, cyclone collectors. I watched my other self, who knew my own laziness. I kept heeding the rheumatic pain that climbed slowly down the thin pipes to my knee, to my ankle.
The machines for beating time throb in the back of the neck, but tomorrow is a holiday, Saturday. It’s worth gathering our strength for another “have to” and “a bit more,” again, today, another hour, tomorrow is Sunday, the seventh day: we are born again, it will be a holiday, we’re finishing school — like a grand finale, the youthful brow will be encircled by the ultimate wreath, the gates will spring aside before heads crowned with laurels. We will drag the triumphal car through the flattened crowd; tomorrow we are free to choose anything at all. Tomorrow is Saturday, the last year of the week, the great orchestra of typewriters will cadence the victory march, thousands of telephones will ring out like sirens saluting the backs bent over their work. We are a single philosopher: every year of the week we were an absent philosopher, every day we thought of the past and the future, and behold, it’s Saturday afternoon: Father has come to congratulate his eminent offspring.
— You should take up philosophy. Your abilities would be of the greatest use to our comrades. That’s their belief, too.
— The top of my class are going to the Polytechnic Institute or into medicine. It would mean finding myself among the bottom of the class, but you’re right. I’ll take into account the place where my abilities could best serve the comrades.
He should have been startled by the all too natural tone of my agreement. I could do anything with myself. My arrogance was boundless, ready to set out on the most capricious byways, just to see what would happen to me. Therefore, later, one Saturday afternoon when the graduates of the Polytechnic had gathered around the lists of relocation assignments, they asked me what factory I had chosen for myself. “Not one,” I lied, but I wasn’t lying when I confessed that my dream had always been to become a ticket seller at a cinema in Africa. The formulation had come spontaneously, and I had offered it several days ago to my former classmate, Caba, who was also graduating from one of the faculties at the Polytechnic.
And he revealed his future plans to me as well.
— I’m getting married. We have to do it now, chop-chop. Otherwise who knows what little coquettes we’ll wind up wasting time with. My lady, Gaby, is finishing medical school, and I’ve got to make sure she’ll be posted to the capital. I know I’ve come up with a real showstopper by choosing a job at the Zarea Champagne factory, but it looks like it could offer useful social relations all over the place.