I don’t think that it makes any sense to form a moral judgment in Gandia’s case. There’s a more pertinent explanation and I think I can supply it: Gandia cheats out of courtesy. Destined to lose, Gandia diminishes the effect of his deep-seated inclination by cheating. It’s a courtesy to himself in the first place, since cheating gives his existence, otherwise purely linear, like a pebble falling from a vacuum into an abyss, the illusion of decline; for the other players, too, ridding them, through his tricks, of their scruples; and lastly, a sublime courtesy for the world outside, so mute and so fine, to supply it with, at his expense, a dramatic depth.
But the news that they had taken him into custody last week makes me smile. Don’t get worked up about it.
White Hot
In this family, my brother would say whenever there was some kind of argument, the sane ones are traitors. He died last week in the mental hospital. He had spent the last twenty years of his life in there: I remember when I was little, we went to see him every Sunday with a package of sponge cake and oranges, and that sometimes he wouldn’t deign to receive us. Sometimes a male nurse would come to let us know that my brother was in no mood for visitors, and then we would head out along the dirt road toward the streetcar stop, more confused or humiliated than saddened, in the sunny hours of the Sunday siesta.
As I found out later from my mother, my brother’s illness had begun one very dry summer: the city, the surrounding countryside and the rivers were all baking slowly in the white January sun. You could barely step out onto the street or look in the direction of the sun. The city was practically empty; you could walk the streets for hours and not bump into anyone. The branches of the trees were gray and scorched, and the light beat down, bright, somewhat ashen, upon the patios.
One day that summer, my brother, who was eighteen then and about to go to work on the railway like my father, refused to come out of his room for two days, claiming that just outside there was a huge diamond burning out his sight. Quite affably, as if he were speaking with a child, he explained to my father from the far side of the bolted door how, on the street the day before, on Western Avenue, in front of the General Store, he had seen a long diagonal line that stretched from a man’s eyes to one of the facets of the diamond, his sight-line, burn in a instant from one end to the other like a fuse going off. He said that he had seen the man run off with his eyelashes singed. On the second day when my father and other family members decided at last to force the door open, they found my brother sitting calmly in bed, one leg bent and the other crossed over the knee of the first — a detail which, for whatever reason, made my mother smile every time she told me the story.
When they found him on the bed, my brother’s eyes were shut tight, and he never really opened them again. We had to bring him to doctors, to treatments, and eventually to a psychiatrist as if he were a blind man, guiding him through that darkness of his own making with which he protected the integrity of his sight. And when, after months, after years of being shut up in the insane asylum, he opened his eyes one day, he had the courtesy to explain to a doctor, who, in turn, explained to us, smirking ironically beneath his neatly trimmed mustache, that he would open his eyes metaphorically, in appearance only, that, during the years he had spent with his eyes closed, he had been constructing, just behind the eyes themselves, a fixed gaze, inalterable even in the face of fire, to confront that terrible light. In highly complex and scientific terminology, the doctor told us, my brother had explained his methods. The terms I emphasize here belong to his scientific lexicon: with his eyes closed he had been absorbing particles of light from the outside whose explosive shock would be diminished as they penetrated through the filter of his eyelids, and which accumulated behind his eyes and fortified his new visual apparatus. My brother had followed, according to his own expression, the laws of that rigorous science, homeopathy.
I leave it to the specialists among my readers to form their own opinion about my brother’s scientific and technological wherewithal. All I can say is that last week, hours after having passed on to the next world, his eyes were still open — he remained in that condition until one of my uncles, bothered perhaps by the scientific triumph that had overcome sight, decided to place a one peso coin on each eyelid to keep them shut.
A Change of Residence
A couple years ago I changed my residence and I changed my name. Politics had a hand in it — in Buenos Aires the police noticed me during a rally and since, despite my advanced ideas, I couldn’t muster any compelling evidence to prove I wasn’t part of some clandestine organization, I felt it was best to make a change of residence and disappear for a while. So I got on the bus and came to this city where everything bakes in the summer on the banks of the great river.
There’s nothing like travel to encourage introspection. In the bus’s mobile, noisy night, the traveler’s eye stays open, insomniac, or alert, more accurately, to the music of the world. It was on the bus, really, where the idea to supplant my simple act of self-defense with a radical change of identity first, unexpectedly, feverishly, occurred to me. I would start another life with another name, another profession, another appearance, another destiny. I would emerge, with five or six vigorous strokes, from the sea of my past onto a virgin shore. With no family, with no friends, with no job, with no Piccolo mondo antico whose womb I could pickle in, the future seemed smooth and luminous, and tender above all, like a newborn babe. I set up in a guesthouse, forged my documents, transformed myself physically and took a job as a door-to-door book salesman. The newspapers gave me up for dead. It was said that the secret police were after me. But the reigning terror let nothing appear on the surface except in the form of ambiguous allusions.
All of this happened about two years back. In the second or third month of my new existence, realizing that my habits hadn’t changed much, I decided to modify my tastes and customs systematically. I stopped smoking. I had always hated kidney beans and fatty meat, so I started eating them every day until they became my favorite foods. I decided to write with my left hand, and introduced major changes into my most deeply held convictions. In this way I utterly changed my personality within a year. I seemed to be, you might say, a different man.
I say “I seemed to be,” as you can see, and not “I was.” In retrospect I now realize that there was a sort of blockage in my life, of which I was barely conscious, inciting me to change: the sensation that I was going around in a circle, never moving forward, of being always a little too far from or close to things, of failing to fit into any definition, of never knowing for certain whether I was dreaming or awake, of not knowing how to choose between the well defined options which others presented to me. For years it had seemed to me that this ineptitude was mine alone, subjective, that my personal history had unfolded so as to imprison me within it, practically incapable of decision, and that others, whom I perceived from the outside, did not experience, in this world, the smallest inconvenience. Nevertheless, within two years my husky smoker’s voice disappeared, along with my Buenos Aires accent, but the ancient reservoir that lies low and sometimes trembles, heavy, down below, sending up signs of life, reminds me that, though I have chosen a convenient mask, we humans, whatever the color of our destiny, will never be adequate to our circumstances, or, frankly, to the world.