Scars. Juan José Saer
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and the room was faintly lit by a candle.
—So we’ve gotten naked and gotten in bed, said Pupé, what’s the point of this?
I went out to the courtyard. It was cloudy again and cold, but it wasn’t raining. When I came back in I tried not making noise and stopped next to the door to listen.
—You should try everything, Tomatis was saying, how could you not like it?
—I just don’t, Pupé said.
I was pressed against the wall, listening, and suddenly I looked up and saw Gloria studying me from the other end of the hall, her arms folded and shaking her head. I walked toward her and went back into the room with her.
—He can’t convince her, I said.
—I can imagine, Gloria said.
Then Pupé and Tomatis reappeared, and when I was about to leave Tomatis said I could sleep there if I wanted. Gloria and Pupé left, and Tomatis showed them out. He told me to sleep on the sofa, that he was going to his room. I got undressed and got in bed. Before leaving, Gloria gave me a kiss on the cheek. I whispered in her ear that she should stay and she started laughing, didn’t say a word, and left. I told Tomatis that I wanted to talk to him before going to sleep, but I didn’t hear him come back. When I opened my eyes again it was ten in the morning and Tomatis was sitting at the desk, writing. A gray light, opaque and uneasy, was coming in through the windows facing the street.
I looked at Tomatis a long time without him realizing that I was awake. The room was spotlessly clean and put together, and Tomatis had on a gray sweater, from which the collar of a white shirt showed through, and wool pants. He looked perfectly clean and calm. He would look out through the gray window frame, his eyes wide open, without seeing anything, then he would lean over and start writing again. I kept my eyes half shut so he wouldn’t catch me looking at him if he turned around. The whole time I was watching him he probably only wrote twenty words. Then I spoke and he startled.
He turned around suddenly. His beard had grown a little overnight, setting off his facial features.
—I didn’t realize you were up, he said.
—I just woke up, I said.
—There’s coffee in the kitchen, he said.
I got dressed. Tomatis turned toward the window again. Then he leaned over and wrote another two or three words. I left the room and heard Tomatis close the door behind me. I went to the bathroom and sat a while reading an old newspaper that was on the toilet. I looked for the weather report and found the headline: No Change in Sight. Then I looked at the date—March fifteenth. Then I washed up and combed my hair and went to the kitchen.
The coffee was cold, so I had to wait around while it heated up. I poured myself a cup and drank it. Then I poured myself another. In a black tin in a cabinet I found some pastries that I dipped in the coffee and which came apart as soon as they touched my tongue. I ate all the pastries, and when I dipped the last one in the coffee cup it came out dry because the cup was empty. I went back to the front room and stopped a second in front of the closed door, hesitating. Then I went in. Tomatis didn’t even turn around; he was looking at the gray window frame, his eyes narrowed and his mouth open. I don’t know what he saw there that was so interesting. I went to the table to get a cigarette.
—Don’t touch it! he shouted.
I jumped back, and Tomatis laughed.
—Sorry, he said. I was distracted.
He sat looking at me without saying anything else. I lit a cigarette, bit the tip, and exhaled a mouthful of smoke.
—I’m almost finished, said Tomatis. Half an hour more and I’m done.
I walked out and closed the door. I went to the courtyard to finish the cigarette. It was a gray day, and the fresh, cold, and gentle breeze made me flush. The sky was covered with a dense, gray sheet. After the cigarette I went back to the kitchen and drank more coffee. There was nothing but black sediment left in the coffee pot, and after the last swallow I had to spit out a mouthful of grounds. Then I got up and opened the door to Tomatis’s bedroom. Gloria was lying in the bed, her face flattened against the pillow. She had undone her ponytail and her hair fell in black clumps over the blankets. The black pants and gray sweater she was wearing the night before were folded over a chair. On the floor, at the foot of the bed, were her little black shoes. I tiptoed close to the headboard. Her mouth was open, and next to it, on the pillowcase, a damp stain had formed. I stepped on something soft and looked down; it was a pair of tiny black panties. They must have belonged to her, unless Pupé had forgotten hers the night before.
I shrugged and went back to the kitchen, closing the bedroom door behind me. Just as I was sitting down at the table, Tomatis appeared. He was euphoric, the same kind of euphoria I had noticed at the paper the morning before. He washed the coffee pot and put more water on. He asked if I had slept well.
—Perfectly, I said.
—How did you like the party? he asked.
—Oh, so fun. A dead body was the only thing missing, I said.
—And how did you like the girls? said Tomatis.
—La Negra was appealing, but I’m worried that she’s an ape, I said. I didn’t really notice the others.
Tomatis brought a finger to his lips and gestured toward the bedroom.
—Gloria’s still here, he said.
—I didn’t realize, I said.
Tomatis prepared the coffee and offered me a cup.
—I’ve had enough coffee, I said.
I put my hand in my pocket and felt the pack of cigarettes I took from the desk drawer the night before. It was still sealed shut and had flattened out. I squeezed it hard. Tomatis sat down with a cup of coffee and started sipping it.
—For a week I’ve been trying to tell you about something that’s been happening to me, and I can’t get you to listen, I said.
—You can’t really count on people for much, he said. Besides, it’s not my fault that you asked Gloria to stay and she didn’t want to. She decides if she stays or not and who she stays with, don’t you think?
So she’d told him. I was blinded for a minute. I could hear Tomatis’s voice but didn’t understand a thing. I felt a shudder in my stomach, and then I asked Tomatis for a cigarette, just to say something, because he was quiet again, and if there’s something I can’t stand when I’m with someone else it’s silence. Tomatis went to his bedroom and came back with two packs of North American cigarettes. He threw one on the table.
—Keep it, he said.
Then he offered me a cigarette from his pack.
I lit the cigarette and told him the situation with my mother.
—In my opinion she’s not being fair with me, I said. I’m the reasonable one. I’ll let her dress however she wants, but she can’t answer the door naked. It doesn’t matter that she’s my mother or whatever. It’s not right. I don’t think the milkman, for example, is at all comfortable with her answering the door in a bikini when she exchanges the bottles. And then there’s the thing with the gin. She knew it was mine all along, and there was no reason to pretend it was hers and I was the one in the wrong. And even if the bottle had been hers, it’s still willful ignorance because she knows full well that she steals piles of cigarettes and cash from me and I act like nothing’s happening. And another thing: How does she have the right to keep telling me that my brain is going to rot from so much reading, when all she does is read romance novels and a pile of gossip rags? In any case, it’s not my fault she turned on the light and saw me with a hard-on. I didn’t call her. I’m not in the habit of calling my mother to come see every hard-on I get. Ever since my father got sick I’ve turned a blind eye each time she went off on one of her nocturnal excursions to God knows where, so it doesn’t seem like asking too much to expect her to respect my