“That’s all?” she said.
He thought with bitterness but said with optimism that it wasn’t bad for the first time. And they hadn’t advertised enough.
“No,” she said, “I think it’s the hall, it’s very small.”
“Well, of course,” he said. “You’re right about that.”
“What should we do?” she said. “We have to do something to help those poor children.”
“Well,” he said, “the important thing is that we’ve made a start.”
“Yes,” she said, “but the main thing is to go on. We have to prepare something more serious.”
“I believe that if we can count on your help…” he said.
“Yes, if we can get a theater just see how I’ll recite but it has to be a big theater because if not you see what happens you work hard preparing things and then you don’t get anything anyway I’ll talk to my husband he’s always pushing me to recite it’s my greatest joy did you see how the people want to hear poetry if you could’ve seen what I felt when a woman who doesn’t even know me said she liked it very much I think that a poetry recital would be a success what do you say?” she said.
“Certainly,” he said, “people like it a lot.”
“Look, I’m worried,” she said, “about how little we took in today. What if I give you a hundred pesos so it won’t be so bad? I really want to help. I think little by little we’ll do all right.”
He said certainly, that little by little they would do all right.
THE ECLIPSE
When Brother Bartolomé Arrazola felt that he was lost, he accepted the fact that now nothing could save him. The powerful jungle of Guatemala, implacable and final, had overwhelmed him. In the face of his topographical ignorance he sat down calmly to wait for death. He wanted to die there, without hope, alone, his thoughts fixed on distant Spain, particularly on the Convent of Los Abrojos, where Charles V had once condescended to come down from his eminence to tell him that he trusted in the religious zeal of his work of redemption.
When he awoke he found himself surrounded by a group of Indians with impassive faces who were preparing to sacrifice him before an altar, an altar that seemed to Bartolomé the bed on which he would finally rest from his fears, from his destiny, from himself.
Three years in the country had given him a passing knowledge of the native languages. He tried something. He spoke a few words that were understood.
Then there blossomed in him an idea which he considered worthy of his talent and his broad education and his profound knowledge of Aristotle. He remembered that a total eclipse of the sun was to take place that day. And he decided, in the deepest part of his being, to use that knowledge to deceive his oppressors and save his life.
“If you kill me,” he said, “I can make the sun darken on high.”
The Indians stared at him and Bartolomé caught the disbelief in their eyes. He saw them consult with one another and he waited confidently, not without a certain contempt.
Two hours later the heart of Brother Bartolomé Arrazola spurted out its passionsate blood on the sacrificing stone (brilliant in the opaque light of the eclipsed sun) while one of the Indians recited tonelessly, slowly, one by one, the infinite list of dates when solar and lunar eclipses would take place, which the astronomers of the Mayan community had predicted and registered in their codices without the estimable help of Aristotle.
DIOGENES TOO
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle
than nurse unacted desires.
As for time, as for distance, what is called the material fact of transporting oneself from one place to another through space, it was certainly very easy for P. (as the Headmaster called him when, strong knuckles and trembling mustache, he reprimanded him) to reach his house. And yet, how difficult! And no, it was not that he was weak or sick. Aside from an imperceptible, hardly bothersome cranial deformation, he was a child like any other.
It was the atmosphere in his house that he disliked, the appearance — I will not call it gloomy, but neither was it pleasant — of the two rooms: their darkness and the fine dust that invaded everything, even his nostrils, making him conscious of his breathing, an indefinable, constant bad smell that floated through every corner, all of this accompanied by his mother’s monotonous repetitions: “You should study your lessons, you should study, you should.” Reason enough for the simple task of going home to be difficult and hateful.
He noted by way of contrast the joy, the pleasure of his classmates — eight, nine, eleven years old — when, the sun still high, the moment arrived for them to leave the big old house with its narrow classrooms full of teachers — so distant, now, so unreal — whose names he was forgetting or had forgotten as easily as the precise location of colored seas and impossible rivers.
My house — as I think I’ve already mentioned — was a few blocks, perhaps four and a few steps more, from the school. Maybe five. I can’t stay for certain; there’s no point in my trying to recall a single time when I took the direct route home. What I used to do, what I always did, what I needed to do, was to make a great detour, like the one that gets you out of the opening paragraphs of this story.
When I left school I generally walked to the markets where I would go into ecstasies when I saw the yellow and red fruit and heard (and learned) the fruit vendors’ rough talk, or to the riverbank where you can hear strange, mysterious noises just at sunset, or sometimes to the churches where there were saints (some of them mutilated — I never found out if that is how they were in life or if those defects were due to the effects of time on the material they were made of) and female saints who inspired a raw terror in me that I still feel.
I measured time’s passage by waiting until the sun was completely hidden before I approached my house. The door was always open; my mother would open it early — perhaps she never locked it — so I would not interrupt her crocheting when I rang. At the time I didn’t know that the hour of sunset changes from day to day. Which was why in June, when the days grow long and it seems they will never end, I would arrive so late that sometimes my mother, worried at what could have happened to me, was waiting at the door. Then she would slap me in a fury and dig her nails into my arms while she scolded me. But despite the blows and the reprimands, I never understood that the sun could move so slowly, and I continued to come home late, sometimes with feet covered in mud and soaked by the lashing rains of summer that in my country is called winter.
It was during a vacation — longed for all year and soon unbearable — that I became fully aware that things were not going very well in my house.
My father was away. I remembered, then I confirmed the fact, he went away frequently. And I had the feeling that although she seemed calmer when he wasn’t there, my mother — impossible, impossible! — was lying when she assured me he was working in one city or another in the interior, working so he could bring home lots of gold coins, and — I say this not meaning any criticism — as far as I could see we really needed them. Then I would ask when that would happen, and she would stop talking or change the subject or tell me to study or (with the obvious intention of making me think about something else) scold me for something I had done or failed to do a long time before.
I’m sure I shouldn’t say this: The fact is, my father was a bum, what they call a real bum. He was proud of it and enjoyed making his bad reputation even worse; otherwise the neighbors wouldn’t try to avoid him anymore.