Scars. Juan José Saer
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for the next carom.
—Six, I say. But it still wasn’t the sixth: the ball was rolling close to the rail, after softly hitting the white ball, which belonged to Tomatis, on a straight line back toward the red. When they hit, I was moving toward the other end of the table and Tomatis was still standing there, leaning against his cue, which was pressed into the tile floor, his outline contrasting sharply against the yellow rectangle of light crashing through the bar window. The contrast covers his thick body with shadows, but a kind of luminous haze surrounds the outline. When the spot ball stopped, after hitting the red, I bent over it again and aimed the cue. Even though I was concentrating on my shot, I knew Tomatis wasn’t paying any attention, standing there, holding the cue against the floor with both hands, looking at the tiles, or the tips of his shoes, surrounded by the haze, the sheen.
—Experience doesn’t come with maturity, I don’t think, he says. Or should I say maturity doesn’t come with experience?
I aim and take a bank shot. After hitting the red ball and the rail, my ball makes for the white ball.
—Seven, I say.
—They’re adding up, Tomatis says, not even looking at the table.
The spot ball hits the white and makes its peculiar sound in the large hall full of clatter, murmurs, shouts. The cone of light that falls on the green table isolates us like the walls of a tent. There are several cones of light across the hall. Each so isolated from the others, and hanging so perfectly apart, that they look like planets with a fixed place in a system, in orbit, each ignorant of the others’ existence. Tomatis is standing at the very edge of that tent of light, with that amazing sheen behind him formed by the light coming in from the nearby window.
I get ready to shoot the eighth. I bend over the table, prop the side of my right hand on the felt, then three fingers, place the cue on a kind of bridge I make with my thumb and index, and with my left hand slide the cue from the base. My gaze alternates from the spot on my ball that the tip of the cue has to hit to the spot on the red ball where my ball will hit, to where the white ball—or my opponent’s, Tomatis, in this case—sits.
—Well aimed, Tomatis says, not even looking. He’s not paying any attention at all to the game—I’ve made thirty-six caroms, and he’s only made two. The two he made were completely by accident, and when he shoots it seems like he wants his turn to end as quickly as possible, so he can return to standing next to the table and running his mouth. The impression you get is that the more caroms his opponent makes the happier he is, since that will allow him more time to stretch out his speech. He’s not clumsy, just careless. I would even say he handles the cue really well—you can tell by how he holds it—compared to lots of people who play straight rail. But, bearing in mind that he can handle the cue, that he’s always the one suggesting a game, and that everyone he invites—Horacio Barco, for example—plays more than he does, I’ve decided that Tomatis uses the game of straight rail as an opportunity to be the only one to talk, and about whatever he wants.
Then he adds:
—Unless you’re an exceptional specimen, but those don’t count as people.
I raise my head before I shoot and say:
—There’s a democrat among us.
—I’ve developed a reputation for wiping my ass with any shit-eating brat who tries to put the screws to me, says Tomatis, laughing.
And so on in that fashion. I started working at the newspaper on February seventh, thanks to him, and they gave me the courthouse section and the weather report. He did general reporting and edited the Sunday literary page. My relationship with Tomatis went back a year. I had just read one of his books, and one day I saw him on the street and followed him until I caught up. He was smoking a cigarette and didn’t realize I was next to him until he stopped at a lottery kiosk and started examining the results.
—You’re Carlos Tomatis, aren’t you? I said.
—So they say, he said.
—I wanted to talk to you because I really enjoyed your book, I said.
—Which one? said Tomatis. Because I have more than three thousand.
—No, I said. One you wrote. The last one.
—Ah, said Tomatis. But it’s not the last one. Only the second. I’m planning to write more.
Then he turned to the results, chewing his cigarette.
—Two forty-five, two forty-five, two forty-five, he muttered, looking at the list of numbers. Not once, two forty-five.
He said goodbye and left. But later we saw each other a few times, and even though we were never able to talk about his second book, I went to see if he could find work for me when my father died and I was left alone with my mother. I knew other people I could ask for work, much more connected than him, but I wanted to ask him. I wanted him to give me something. And he did, because somehow on February seventh at ten in the morning I was with Campo, the old man who had been in charge of the section for ages, and who was about to retire, going up and down the dark corridors between the courtrooms, up and down the polished marble stairs, in and out of desolate, high-ceilinged offices overflowing with filing cabinets.
—This, Campo was saying, wrinkling his old monkey nose, is the Second District Civil Court, that’s the secretary. There’s the law school. Go to the press office on the second floor if you have any questions and ask for the manager, a Mister Agustín Ramírez, he will help you with anything you need.
He labored over several words: “District,” “legal holiday,” “press,” “Ramírez,” waiting for me to write them down. I wasn’t even listening. While Campo’s old monkey face (a tame, sweet monkey, stranger to the civilized world) gestured with every one of its folds, I passed my distracted gaze along the dark corridors where the blurry outlines of litigators and staff came and went, the tall filing cabinets that easily called up the word Kafka, the marble staircases that ascended to the first floor with a wide, anachronistic curve, and the February sun penetrating the lobby through the large entrance.
With the weather report my role was pretty much God’s. Every day around three I had to go to the terrace of the newspaper building and take notes from the meteorological equipment, which I never understood. And when I went to ask Tomatis, who had also started out doing the weather, he told me he hadn’t ever understood them either and as far as he could tell the most rational choices were either duplication or fabrication. I used both methods. For twenty days, in the month of February, I sent the same information about the weather to the print shop, copied letter-for-letter from what had appeared the day before I started at the newspaper. For twenty days, according to the observational devices of the newspaper La Región, the meteorological conditions in the city were the following: at eight in the morning, atmospheric pressure 756.80, temperature 24.2 degrees Celsius, relative humidity 64 percent. With Tomatis’s help I came up with a genius headline for the section: No Change in Sight. On the twenty-seventh of February, a piece of shit rain destroyed the project. Unfortunately I had already handed in the report, because I left early, so when I got to the publisher’s office it had already rained fifteen centimeters since noon the day before, and it was only eleven in the morning. The publisher had a stack of the February editions on his desk, and the weather report section on each copy was marked with a furious red circle.
—We’re not going to fire you, said the publisher. We’re going to suspend you for five days. Not out of charity. We don’t want problems with the union. But the day I happen to feel like it’s cooler than usual and a breeze is in the air, even if it’s only because I woke up in a good mood and the sun is slightly farther from the earth, and that sensation isn’t registered in detail in the weather report, you won’t be walking out of here on your own legs.
So I switched to fabrication. At first I was guided by the opinions of the copywriters, and I guessed numbers based on their predictions. For the first week I took it to the publisher for him to look over, then I stopped after I had regained his trust, or maybe after I realized that he just glanced at them quickly and checked them off with the red pencil, completely