16
SILVIA BALERO, WHO unbeknownst to the gamblers carried a child in her belly (if they’d known, they would have bet him too), was left in the legal possession of Chiquito, although unaware of it herself, being profoundly asleep. At some point in the night the faucets in the bathroom of her hotel room opened automatically, and the tub began to fill with boiling red water, which spun and eddied and gave off steam that was also red, boiling, and sulphurous.
When Chiquito rose from the gambling table, at which he had been the only winner, and made a tour of the hotel (which had also become his property) with lurching steps — not because of the drinking, which never affected him, or the many hours of immobility, which his profession had already accustomed him to, but purely for the pleasure of lurching, for the brutish coquetry of it. It was all his; and to this he was also accustomed, because he always won. He was the luckiest gambler in the universe, and a legend had been woven around him, a legend and a great enigma — what did he keep working for? For years the gamblers of Pringles had had their sights fixed on him, each of them proposing, on his own, to beat him at a game of cards; they knew that only one would manage it, only once, and that event, if it came, would be a great triumph over luck. He didn’t know this, and it wouldn’t have worried him in the least if he had. On the contrary, he would have laughed his head off.
He crossed the dark lobby, looking around with cloudy eyes. It was all his, as it had been so many times, as always. And there was nothing that wasn’t his, because there were no travelers checked in. . Wait a minute: yes, there was someone, a beautiful stranger. . who was also his, because he’d won her from the masked man. He set off looking for her, without stumbling. He opened the doors of all the rooms, all of them empty, until finally he came upon Silvia Balero’s. She was deeply asleep in the midst of a reddish fog. He stood looking at her for a moment. . Then he went to the bathroom, and stood looking at the red water boiling in the tub. Finally he stripped and submerged himself. No one could have withstood that temperature, but it did nothing to him. His heart nearly stopped beating, his eyes closed halfway, and his mouth opened in a stupid grimace.
The next step was to violate the sleeping woman. He didn’t notice she was pregnant; he thought she was only big-bellied, like so many women in the south of Argentina. Consequently, inside, a few pale blue little fingers grasped his member like a handle, and when he withdrew, puzzled, he dragged out a hairy phosphorescent fetus, ugly and deformed like a demon, who woke Silvia Balero with its shrieking and obliged them both to flee, leaving it master of the scene.
That was how the Monster came into the world.
17
IDLE DAYS IN Patagonia. .
Tourist days in Paris. .
Life carries people to all kinds of distant places, and generally takes them to the most far flung, to the extremes, since there’s no reason to slow its momentum before it’s done. Further, always further. . until there is no further anymore, and men rebound, and lie exposed to a climate, to a light. . A memory is a luminous miniature, like the hologram of the princess, in that movie, that the faithful robot carried in his circuits from galaxy to galaxy. The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting. All movement, the great horizon, the journey, is a spasm of forgetting, which bends in the bubble of memory. Memory is always portable, it is always in the hands of a wandering automaton.
The world, life, love, work: winds. Great crystalline trains that whistle through the sky. The world is wrapped in winds that come and go. . But it’s not so simple, so symmetrical. The actual winds, the air masses displaced between differences in pressure, always go toward the same place in the end, and they come together in the Argentinian skies; big winds and little winds, the cosmopolitan oceanic winds as much as the diminutive backyard breezes: a funnel of stars gathers them all together, adorned with their velocities and orientations like ribbons in their hair, and brings them to rest in that privileged region of the atmosphere called Patagonia. That’s why the clouds there are ephemera par excellence, as Leibniz said of objects (“objects are momentary minds”: a chair is exactly like a man who lives for a single instant). The Patagonian clouds welcome and accommodate all transformations within a single instant, every transformation without exception. That’s why the instant, which in any other place is as dry and fixed as a click, is fluid and mysterious in Patagonia, fantastic. Darwin called it: Evolution. Hudson: Attention.
I’m not talking in patriotic metaphors. This is real.
Traveling is real. Opening the door to all fears is real, even if what comes before and what comes after, the motives and the consequences, are not. To tell the truth I can’t figure out how it is that people can make the decision to travel. Maybe it would be helpful to study the work of those Japanese poets who trekked from landscape to landscape finding subjects for their somewhat incoherent compositions. Maybe the explanation lies there. “The next morning the sky was very clear, and just when the sun shone brightest, we rowed out into the bay.” (Bashō)
The skies of Patagonia are always clean. The winds meet there for a great carnival of invisible transformations. It’s as if to say that everything happens there, and the rest of the world dissolves in the distance, useless — China, Poland, Egypt. . Paris, the luminous miniature. Everything. All that remains is that radiant space, Argentina, beautiful as paradise.
How to travel? How to live in another place? Wouldn’t it be lunacy, self-annihilation? To not be Argentinian is to drop into nothingness, and no one likes that.
And in full transparency. . I want to make note of an idea, although it has nothing to do with all this, before I forget: might it be that the Chinese ideograms were originally conceived to be written on glass, so they could be read from the other side? Maybe that’s the source of the whole misunderstanding.
And in full transparency, I was saying. . a wedding dress. A cloud? No. A white dress, without the form of a dress, of course, or rather: without the form of a human, which it takes when placed on its owner or a mannequin, but instead its authentic form, the pure form of a dress, which no one ever has occasion to see, because it’s not simply a question of seeing it as a mountain of fabric thrown over a table or chair. That is formlessness. The form of a dress is a continuous transformation, limitless.
And it was the most beautiful and complicated wedding dress ever made, an unfolding of all the white folds, a soft model of a universe of whites. Flying at thirty thousand feet with what appeared to be majestic slowness, even though it must have been going very fast (there was no point of reference in the blue abyss of daylight), and changing shape ceaselessly, endlessly, giant swan, forever opening new wings, its tail forty-two feet long, hyperfoam, exquisite corpse, flag of my country.