“What are you talking about? Why should I give a shit about any of that? My life is on the line here! Don’t you understand? No, of course you don’t: you’re stuck in childhood; you know nothing about real life.”
The cartoonist seized the opportunity to change the subject, and said with a stutter that came (like his earlier cry) from the souclass="underline"
“The ch-child is fa-father to the m-man.”
“Don’t I know it, jerk! I used to read this comic book when I was a kid; I bought it when it came out, at the stand on the corner of Lavalleja and Bulnes, where the tenement is. I used to wait for them to come out every week. I wasn’t some stupid snobby collector; I bought it because it was the only way I could escape from the dismal reality of my life: we were poor, my father was in prison, and my mother had tuberculosis. And this comic, this one”—he shook it savagely, engrossed in the past—“I read it very carefully, I’m telling you. That’s why I spotted it straightaway among the thousands of others, the tons of old paper you’ve piled up.”
The cartoonist, who should have been comforted by the revelation of this common ground, this comic they had both read, because it was something he shared with a being who until then had seemed entirely other, jumped instead to a higher level of fear and alienation. Apart from fellow members of the trade, who had an artistic or professional investment in the medium, he wasn’t used to dealing with people who actually read comics. People who read them for their content. He knew they existed, of course. But he had shut them out of his consciousness. And to find himself suddenly in the hands of such a person, literally in his hands and at his mercy, paralyzed him with terror. To make things worse, the terror was irrational, without a reason that he could identify and articulate. What happened next deepened the strangeness. Up until then, the criminal had been tight-lipped, but something must have pressed his talk button:
“Yes, I remembered it clearly, panel by panel, drawings and text, every line, every word. Even though I read it when I was. . I don’t know, ten or twelve, and I hadn’t reread it until today. I remembered it so well because I didn’t actually have to remember. It wasn’t just another comic for me, like it is for you, with your thousands; for you, they’re just a fetish, or at best a source of ‘inspiration.’ ” When he put the quotation marks into his speech, a slow music began to play in the distance, a melody made of detached notes, deep in pitch, plucked on some string instrument, distant but curiously loud. “For me it had real importance. I don’t know why God and the Devil set it up like that, or why I read it just at the point in my psychophysical development when it was bound to have the biggest effect on me. And what an effect! That comic strip has been my life, right up to this day. Each one of its panels has become reality: each crime, each flight, each abyss. My features have even come to resemble those of the protagonist, and now no one could deny it’s me. .”
The cartoonist: “Sorry, but it’s not true that this was just ‘another comic’ for me.” (His use of spoken quotation marks made the music stop.) “I don’t know how you can say that, because if you really meant it you wouldn’t be here. That comic is my masterpiece, at least in the eyes of the public; it’s the one that made me rich and famous.”
“Come on, stop fooling yourself. They’re all the same to you. Evil, Cruelty, Blood, and Horror are just the morbid hooks you use to make it sell, and if your marketing consultants told you the fashion was over and something else was cool, you’d be onto it.”
“I don’t have marketing consultants.”
“You do it yourself, I know. You’ve got a fantastic nose for it.”
“Artistic intuition is my only guide.”
“Ha!” The blade pressed harder.
“But in that case,” groaned the cartoonist, who hadn’t lost the thread of the argument, in spite of the knife at his throat, “it’s got nothing to do with me. I’m innocent! My only sin is having debased my art for commercial gain; you’re responsible for the course your life has taken — you or the impressionable child you were.”
“Don’t lie. You know very well you’re responsible. . not for the way my life turned out, true, but for the tip-off, the prison sentence. .” The thought of prison made his rage boil over, and he shouted: “You’re going to pay! Right now!”
“Wait! Maybe we’re misunderstanding each other, or I’m the one who doesn’t understand. Didn’t you say the comic predicted every detail of your life as an outlaw, and this was when I was in primary school and hadn’t even dreamed of becoming a cartoonist? So what are you accusing me of?”
“Of denouncing me, what do you think?”
“But how could I, if it was all denounced already, a priori?”
“That’s how you’re going to die, ‘a priori.’”
Music again, exactly as before: the same deep, resonant notes, very far apart, making up a superhuman melody.
“Hold on, explain. If I’m going to die”—it was the first time he’d acknowledged this, but no doubt just as a way to buy time—“at least I want to know why.”
“There’s nothing to explain.”
The comic book was quivering; the criminal was still holding it in front of the cartoonist’s face, although he’d clearly made his point. The rectangle of paper was yellowish, almost brown with age, but it stood out clearly in the steadily deepening dimness. The scene took on a posthumous, terminal air. The cartoonist felt this, and his heart, which had been clenched all along, contracted further still, becoming an iron ball. He was unable to stifle a sob:
“It was you, you and the comic. . not me. . It was the comic and you. .”
“But nobody knew.”
The oral underlining of these words added an unrelated, subterranean tom-tom beat to the musical notes that had been playing since the last quotation marks.
Although his brain was clouded by anxiety, the cartoonist realized the utter irrefutability of the sentence he had just heard. He felt defeated and overwhelmed by the defeat, and yet he knew that irrefutability had been the norm, not the exception, throughout the dialogue. So there was still some hope, like a faraway light: maybe there would be another irrefutable argument, on his side. But then the criminal would produce another one in turn. . There would be no end to it. Only a difference of speed in coming up with these arguments could tell in favor of one or the other, and he had the impression that his killer was quicker. It wasn’t just an impression, either; clearly the killer was always the first to come up with an irrefutable argument. There was a reason for this: his wits had been sharpened by a lifetime of dodging the long arm of the law, while the cartoonist, perpetually bent over his drawing board, in the peace and quiet of his studio, had not undergone that training. In the comics he drew there were conflicts and miraculous last-minute escapes, but they were subject to corrections and revisions; sometimes it took him weeks to come up with a reply or work out an ending.
On this occasion, with the knife blade at his throat, he felt he’d never be able to find a reply, even in an eternity of searching. And to tell the truth (his truth, anyway), every second he spent in that forced, uncomfortable position felt like an eternity. Which must have been why he came out with the answer immediately:
“I didn’t know either! How could I have known? You said it yourself: ‘no one’ knew.”
The quotation marks, indicated orally, put a stop to the deep musical notes that had been playing since the last set; but the tom-tom beats continued, on their own now.