It took a few seconds for Morini to react, but then he leaped to his feet, let out a cry of terror, and disappeared down a corridor. Such a spectacular response was the last thing Rousselot had been expecting. He remained seated, lit a cigarette (the ash dropped progressively onto the carpet), and thought sadly of Simone and her son, and a café in Paris that served the best croissants he had ever tasted in his life. Then he stood up and started calling Morini. Guy, he called, rather hesitantly, Guy, Guy, Guy.
Rousselot found him in an attic where the hotel’s cleaning equipment was piled. Morini had opened the window and seemed to be hypnotized by the garden that surrounded the building, and by the neighboring garden, which belonged to a private residence, and was visible, in part, through dark lattice-work. Rousselot walked over and patted him on the back. Morini seemed smaller and more fragile than before. For a while they both stood there looking at one garden, then the other. Then Rousselot wrote the address of his hotel in Paris and the address of the hotel where he was currently staying on a piece of paper and slipped it into the director’s trouser pocket. He felt he had committed a reprehensible act, executed a reprehensible gesture, but then, as he was walking back to Arromanches, everything he had done in Paris, every gesture and action, seemed reprehensible, futile, senseless, and even ridiculous. I should kill myself, he thought as he walked along the seashore.
Back in Arromanches, he did what any sensible man would have done as soon as he realized that his money had run out. He rang Simone, explained the situation, and asked her for a loan. The first thing Simone said was that she didn’t want a pimp, to which Rousselot replied that he was asking for a loan, and that he was planning to repay it with thirty-percent interest, but then they both started laughing and Simone told him not to do anything, just stay put in the hotel, and in a few hours, as soon as she could borrow a car from one of her friends, she’d come and get him. She also called him chéri a few times, to which he responded by using the word chérie, which had never seemed so tender. For the rest of the day Rousselot felt that he really was an Argentine writer, something he had begun to doubt over the previous days, or perhaps the previous years, partly because he was unsure of himself, but also because he was unsure about the possibility of an Argentine literature.
Two Catholic Tales
I. The Vocation
1. I was seventeen years old and my days, and I mean all of them, were a continual shuddering. I had no distractions; nothing could dissipate the anxiety that kept building up inside me. I was living like an interloping extra in scenes from the passion of St. Vincent. St. Vincent — deacon to Bishop Valero, tortured by the governor Dacian in the year 304—have pity on me!
2. Sometimes I talked with Juanito. Not just sometimes. Often. We sat in armchairs at his place and talked about movies. Juanito liked Gary Cooper. Elegance, temperance, integrity, courage, he used to say. Temperance? Courage? I knew what lay behind his certitudes, and would have liked to spit them back in his face, but instead I dug my fingernails into the armrests and bit my lip when he wasn’t looking and even closed my eyes and pretended to be meditating on his words. But I wasn’t meditating. Not at alclass="underline" images of the martyrdom of St. Vincent were flashing in my mind like magic lantern slides. 3. First he is tied to an X-shaped wooden cross and they tear at his flesh with hooks and dislocate his limbs. Then he is subjected to torture by fire, roasted on a grill over hot coals. And then he’s a captive in a dungeon where the ground is covered with shards of glass and pottery. And then a crow keeps watch over the martyr’s corpse, abandoned in a wasteland, and fends off a ravening wolf. And then the saint’s body is cast into the sea from a boat, a millstone tied around his neck. And then the waves wash the body up on the coast, and there it is piously buried by a matron and other Christians. 4. Sometimes I used to feel dizzy. Nauseous. Juanito would talk about the last film we had seen and I would nod and realize that I was drowning, as if the armchairs were at the bottom of a very deep lake. I could remember the movie theater, I could remember buying the tickets, but I simply couldn’t remember the scenes that my friend (my one and only friend!) was talking about, as if the lake-floor darkness had infiltrated everything. If I open my mouth, water will come in. If I breathe, water will come in. If I stay alive, water will come in and flood my lungs forever and ever. 5. Sometimes Juanito’s mother would come into the room and ask me personal questions. How my studies were going, what book I was reading, if I’d been to the circus that had just set up on the outskirts of the city. Juanito’s mother was always very elegantly dressed, and, like us, she was addicted to the movies. 6. Once I dreamed of her, once I opened the door of her bedroom, and instead of seeing a bed, a dresser and a closet, I saw an empty room with a red brick floor, and that was just the antechamber of a very, very long corridor, like the highway tunnel that goes through the mountains and then on toward France, except that in this case the tunnel wasn’t on a mountain highway but in the bedroom of my best friend’s mother. I have to keep reminding myself: Juanito’s my best friend. And, as opposed to a normal tunnel, this one seemed to be suspended in a very fragile kind of silence, like the silence of the second half of January or the first half of February. 7. Unspeakable acts, fateful nights. I recited the formula to Juanito. Unspeakable acts? Fateful nights? Is the act unspeakable because the night is fateful, or is the night fateful because the act is unspeakable? What sort of question is that? I asked, on the brink of tears. You’re crazy. You don’t understand anything, I said, looking out of the window. 8. Juanito’s father isn’t tall but he cuts a dashing figure. He was in the army and during the war he was wounded a number of times. His medals are displayed on the wall of his study, in a glass-fronted case. He didn’t know anyone when he first came to the city, Juanito says, and people were either afraid of him or jealous. After a few months here, he met my mother, Juanito says. They were engaged for five years. Then my father tied the knot. Sometimes my aunt talks about Juanito’s father. According to her, he was a good, honest police chief. That’s what people said, at least. If a maid was caught stealing from her employers, Juanito’s father locked her up for three days without so much as a crust of bread. On the fourth day he would question her personally, and the maid would be quick to confess her sin, giving him the precise location of the jewels or the name of the laborer who had stolen them. Then the guards would arrest the man and lock him up, and Juanito’s father would put the maid on a train and advise her not to come back. 9. The whole village applauded this procedure, as if it were a sign of the police chief’s intellectual distinction. 10. When Juanito’s father first arrived, the only people he knew socially were the regulars at the casino. Juanito’s mother was seventeen years old and she was very blonde, to judge from a number of photos hanging unobtrusively around the house, much blonder than she is now, and she had been educated at the Heart of Mary, a school run by nuns in the northern part of the old fort. Juanito’s father must have been about thirty. He still goes to the casino every afternoon, although he’s retired now, and drinks a glass of cognac or coffee with a shot, and usually plays dice with the regulars. New regulars, not the regulars from the old days, but it’s not so different, because of course they’re all in awe of him. Juanito’s older brother lives in Madrid, where he’s a well-known lawyer. Juanito’s sister is married and she lives in Madrid too. I’m the only one left in this damn house, Juanito says. And me! And me!