Nevertheless, the incident obeyed an average story’s most humdrum causality. He was always making repairs or improvements on his house — whether out of inherent perfectionism or as an occupational hazard, he simply couldn’t resist the temptation. In this case, he had discovered that the gutter on the kitchen roof wasn’t draining properly, that is, at the speed necessary to cope with end-of-summer downpours, and he decided to increase its slope. He hired a bricklayer from his team to do the job, and since it was a very small job (three bricks), he could make do with “Mr. Phophsene.” This man was actually a former bricklayer, who had worked with my friend on many projects before retiring, which he did when he was already in his eighties. He’d never risen higher than an assistant bricklayer; he was no whiz, maybe even below average, and he was as tall as a dwarf, without being a real dwarf. My friend continued to hire him for small jobs around his house and garden, and he appreciated him for his optimism and honesty. He’d been given his nickname years before by his fellow workers to mock his faith in a remedy he’d been prescribed once in the Hospital, and that he kept taking and recommending to others for years, something like “phosphene,” which in the cheerful ignorance of the town’s bricklayers became “phophsene,” and it stuck. Anyway, after he’d laid the bricks on the roof and was on a ladder plastering the side that was visible (the house had a very high roof), Mr. Phophsene fell and landed on the sage. Amazingly enough, he wasn’t injured. For a few minutes, he was a little stunned, but then he brushed the dust off his clothes and was soon climbing back up the ladder to finish the job. Mother, who’d recently broken a rib after slipping and falling on the sidewalk, expressed her gratitude to Providence, though I knew that inside she was ruing the fact that “the old goat” hadn’t died. My friend finished off the story with general words of praise for Mr. Phophsene’s character. He would wake up in the morning to the sounds of him singing in the garden, and when he asked him where he found so much joy, Mr. Phophsene answered: “Sometimes I wake up feeling bad, my soul sorrowful and my body aching, and I get up, get dressed, and walk to the Cemetery, there and back, and it all goes away, because walking releases endorphins.” Quite a role model, and at his age. The fact that the destination of this therapeutic stroll was the Cemetery had no special meaning: the three long walks near town were to the Cemetery, the Station, and La Virgen (a sanctuary), and all three were about half a mile from downtown. However, the most traditional one was to the Cemetery.
In my family, we always drove to the Cemetery, except once when we walked, like poor people do. It must have been a Sunday my father was away. In general, Pringlesians don’t walk very much, they drive everywhere, that’s why that half mile seemed so long. For about half the way, there were eucalyptus trees lining the paved road, but the final stretch passed through open country, past empty fields. I always thought I’d planted one of those eucalyptus trees, but this could have been a false memory; I know that it’s a vague, confused one. One year, shortly after I’d started school, the students celebrated Arbor Day by planting trees, and they took us to the Cemetery road. As the top student in my class, I got to plant one, and I assume they placed me, maybe with a couple of classmates, in front of a hole that had already been dug, and I stuck in the little tree… It’s all blurry, but there’s one detail that is very clear, so clear that I wonder if it was the only thing that really happened and that I invented the rest to fill out the story. They made us learn a poem by heart to recite during the event. The poem was in a book, and I remember a two-line passage from that poem perfectly (more than remember, I can see it, see how high it was on the page):
I plant a seed
in this lil’ole*
There was a little “superscript” asterisk on the last word, which referred to a footnote at the bottom of the page where there was another asterisk and the words: “little hole.” Because of the meter, and maybe to make it more natural for a child to recite, the author had written the words as they were pronounced colloquially. But because it was a school book and the correct form had to be indicated, they used a footnote. In any case, trees aren’t planted from seeds but rather as “saplings,” or whatever they’re called. Fifty years later, the eucalyptus trees on the road to the Cemetery were enormous and old, and I would never know which, if any, was “mine.”
To return to my friend and the picturesque events of his life: the story of Mr. Phophsene had its equivalent in a display case. It was a tiny automaton, a wall with peeling paint on top of which sat an egg with legs (crossed), little arms, a face (it was all face), and a feathered hat. Its owner wound it up and set it in motion. The drama was enacted to the rhythm of incoherent music: the egg rocked violently then fell, slipping along a rail hidden in the walclass="underline" it fell on its head, or rather on its hat, because it was all head, and when it touched the ground, it “broke” into several pieces; it didn’t really break but rather opened, simulating breakage, along zigzagging lines that had been invisible until that moment. At that point discordant notes played, notes of doom. With the last turn of the cog, the egg closed up, a spring made it jump back up onto the wall, and there it sat where it had begun. As opposed to the previous toy, this one acted out the well-known story of Humpty Dumpty. The original had been made by Fabergé for the children of the Czar. My friend’s was a tin replica made in Argentina around 1950 to promote a children’s magazine supposedly run by a very nice journalist egg, our national version of Humpty Dumpty, who was called Pepín Cascarón. The toy’s use as publicity was spelled out in the verses written on the open pages of the miniature tin magazine leaning against the bottom of the walclass="underline"
Pepín Cascarón sat on a wall.
Pepín Cascarón had a great fall.
All the kings horses, and all the king’s men,
couldn’t put Pepín Cascarón together again.
Along came an Argentine with special skill,
and fixed up that egg out of simple goodwill.
Pepín again whole, gives girls and boys
this wonderful magazine for all to enjoy.
On the page facing the poem was an illustration that showed Pepín Cascarón at the moment he falls.
I noticed that my mother, who appreciated this toy even less than the previous one, was impatient to leave, so I pointed to the gallery door that led into the living room, and we turned in that direction. But my friend guided us through the living room toward the large dark dining room (we’d eaten in a more intimate one, at the other end of the house) and turned on a lamp in the corner, shaped like a large duck and made of translucent white plastic; its glow, very dim, did not manage to penetrate the cavernous depths of the room, but there was enough light to see that this dining room was never used. It was much too full of furniture and objects. The wood paneling was dark, and it was lined, all the way around the perimeter, with display cabinets, coat stands, bookcases, paintings, statues. A large sideboard occupied most of the lateral wall; we saw ourselves reflected in its mirror as small figures lost among the furniture. We had to walk all the way around the table, which was very large and piled high with boxes and antique optical instruments and machines. Hanging from the walls, high up, were puppets on strings. The dining room was huge, and the numerous objects filling it were very small. The collections my friend had amassed throughout his life tended naturally toward the miniature, even though there were almost no miniatures per se. Toys, automatons, dolls, puppets, dioramas, puzzles, kaleidoscopes: everything tended toward reproduction, and the reproduction tended toward a diminution of scale. However, at that stage of the evening, there was a turn toward gigantism. With a complicit smile, my friend opened a small door and invited me to take a look inside. What I saw looked more like an illustration from a children’s book than anything else I’d seen so far. This door opened onto a tiny room, surely meant to service the dining room; it was entirely filled with one doll, which barely fit (the first thing I wondered was how they’d managed to get it in there). It was enormous; standing, it must have been thirteen-feet tall. It was sitting on the ground with its head touching the ceiling, leaning against the wall, its legs bent, and its knees touching the opposite wall. It looked like a seven-year-old blond girl wearing an enormous chiffon dress with red tulle, her eyes wide open in her large head. My mother peaked in between us and then immediately withdrew, her face expressing disgust bordering on terror. Just moments before, I’d followed her gaze, which kept returning, uneasily, to an atlas on the table. It was a Larousse atlas from the nineteenth century. I thought that finally she’d found something that would interest her; she was keen on maps and atlases, and she had more than one at home to consult when she did crossword puzzles. I leaned over the table and opened it in the middle, with considerable difficulty. But she refused to look at it up close; on the contrary, she turned away, mumbling: “But why is it so big?” It really was; it must have been more than three-feet high and two-and-a-half-feet wide, and since the paper the maps were printed on was so thin, it was quite awkward to turn the pages. I felt a current of frightened bewilderment emanating from my mother, and in a way I understood her, and even shared it. The atlas’s inordinate size was a little scary. My friend, busy looking for something, hadn’t seen or heard our brief exchange when his search led him to the small door, he remembered the gigantic doll that he wanted to show us, opened the door, and called us over.