The ducks would disapprove of Nansen’s trip to the South Pole. Ducks — I don’t know why — always seem to be fighting with some aunt over a cursed inheritance. We don’t know if the ducks descend from immigrants from the South or from some imaginary French consul, married to a Paraguayan woman and settled in Lima, where he died in 1832 or 1905. Rabbits have long ears, as we all know, but they are good fellows. Very little is known about them; they are, it is true, always well dressed, but they live in caves. One additional fact: they read Pitigrilli. We might say they are middle-class, meddlesome busybodies, know-it-alls with bastards in their family history. Soon they will acquire a late-model Ford limousine and a second-hand pianola. The girls are lovely. There will be weekly receptions. Where does the money come from? From nothing honorable, undoubtedly. Their fortune was gotten in a bad way, according to vox populi. The rabbits’ friendship is very sought after by everyone. But if the rabbits are not decent people, absolutely decent, friendships will be revoked. Rabbits wink their alcoholic eyes, reddish in the sun, and hide their Semitic mouths. The geese are wealthy country gentlemen, always just passing through. They have a suspicious look in their eyes; their accent is from the mountains; their bellies are full; their families are back at the hacienda. They never give alms. He and she. Exemplary spouses. Both of them obese. Sometimes a goat — bad head, bad head, bad head. he staggers like a sleepwalker. He is photophobic, like a good nocturnal bird. His age?. Doesn’t have one. Twenty years old. Fifty years old. These madcaps don’t have an age, but rather a character; not a personality, but rather a vice. or many vices. A face between that of Mephistopheles and Uncle Sam. He could have had a job in the government, but he doesn’t, that devil of a goat. He is a cuckold without even having been married. He spouts bitter philosophies about matrimony. There is nothing as wonderful as having no commitments. Long live idleness, the good life! The goat gets bored; the goat gets bored; the goat gets bored. Guinea pigs, all of them, male and female, are female. They are the servants of the turkey and the turkey hen. Their faces are small and swarthy; their eyes are small and shiny; they are short and bent; their step is small and lively. They are all that remain of the colonial warehouse Castile dismantled. The young turkeys call them “mommies.” The horses prepare the traditional local dishes; they have suckled from the turkey mother, blown the turkey father’s nose, they know all the family secrets, are disdainful of the ducks, and they never go out because they don’t have enough money to buy new capes. They look like little old ladies: spouting proverbs — devout, ill-tempered gossipmongers. The pigeons are the scandal of the barnyard. The pigeons speak French, are indecorously sentimental, go everywhere alone, and are more than a little coquettish. Their Yankee partiality for couplets make them abstain when they get to the tenth floor, prompting the male pigeons to dress all in white and neglect their children.
The countryside — bloody with green blood. The cheeks and lips of some of the whimsical figurines are also green. The field’s fat face has one gray eye of a puddle that laughs like an idiot. The other eye — the right one — is the sun, in the flesh and without a pupil. This landscape has spent five months in a mental hospital jumping up and down on one foot and tearing itself to pieces with ten black clawed fingers. This hysterical, masochist landscape with a history of syphilis. This battered, rugged landscape. This one-eyed and sexless landscape. On its bare belly, the bruises from tilling. On its gray forehead, the boils of a clearing. On its chest, like a scapular, a strange fetish, the obsession of the church. The rain quiets the crazed landscape. Its visions are now tame, sane, almost true — the black, bovine afternoon is beaten on its opaque flanks, its rough haunches, with the heavy tail of the sun’s rays: straight, yellow. And a cow, more real than anything, behind a mud wall, weaves moos through the tattered grass.
~ ~ ~
I dream of an iconography of Ramón that would allow me to remember him, so plastic, so spatial, plastically, spatially. All that remains for me of Ramón is the serious bitterness of having known him and his permission to leaf through his intimate diary in Miss Muler’s silly little alcove; a trail of cigarette butts along the city’s longest street and a way of thinking and seeing that makes it possible for me to live in the midst of this amorphous collection of houses, these un-caustic streets, these naive trees, this somewhat pesky, somewhat lagunalike sea, on this plane that suddenly acquires three dimensions and ten thousand inhabitants. Oh, the sea! Only the sea has not ceased to be, those long black waves, pencil lines meticulously equidistant from the thousands of curves along the beach. The sierra cannot be seen from the side, only from above, the high mountains in contoured lines; the hills hewn with an axe. The obsessive precision of canvases and projections, scales and numbers. May God bless Ramón, that madman who taught me to see the water in the sea, the leaves on the trees, the houses on the streets, the sex of women. Around here Ramón has become lines, lights, secrets, faces, ornaments, details, blades of grass, the ringing of bells. No, no. An iconography, an album in black and sepia through whose pages he would pass, with his melancholy mouth, his illusory glasses, and his terrible insignificance, on his way anywhere. Or standing in front of rusty old sheds, or under green streetlights, or against yellow twilights. Or judiciously sitting at a parochial school desk or on the drunken benches along the esplanade, or on the slippery chairs of the electric streetcar. Or chasing girls (made of gelatin and organdy), or fat shadows, or lit windows, or unsociable dogs. With one leg outstretched or with both legs pressed tightly together. Inapprehensible, but indubitable, unmistakable. On difficult afternoons of light and tedium, I might open the album and ask Ramón: “What should I do now, my friend?” And he might answer as he used to during the happy days of his life in the sierra: “Whatever you want.” And I would do what I wanted: walk through the streets that smell, at that hour, of honey and kitchen mops. Under the convex sky, a lemon peel turned inside out, sounds grow until they become visible, the trees sharpen their branches like cypresses, and an old man walking by pounding the cobblestones with his iron cane drags his shapeless shadow along the ground like a cloak. An automobile drives past at fifty miles per hour — a speed definitely prohibited — through a street traversed only by donkeys loaded with sandbags. The mayor is by now merely that gentleman with a pointed beard whom everyone should obey. Yesterday, the sun rose ten minutes after it should have risen. Something else: it penetrated the only place it should not have penetrated: between the ears of the only baker’s ass we have left in the city. The cold has long white muscles like one of those emaciated athletes who sometimes carry off the trophy at a championship game, runts three feet tall and with the hands of a typist. The air rubs against the sky and scratches it the way a diamond scratches glass. I do whatever I want. A dove has carried away my last good thought. Now I am as I truly am: clean, Asiatic, refined, bad. Now I have a round rubber neck. Now I jump over an old woman on the street who stops to examine her shoe, poor old blind woman. Ramón loved the cooks who gave themselves to their bosses’ sons in the barnyard, in the haystacks and brick piles where the birds brood. The bells of Saint Francis hum a light melody — the prior doesn’t hear them. A section of the sky collapses over a cornet of the sea, on this side of the island. A closed, double window — the gesture of a decent house, the wink of a pharmacist’s spectacles. In it will appear at night when nothing can be seen, a face that is pretty, pretty, pretty.