The One Before. Juan José Saer
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carefully lined up on the bookshelf, gathering dust while their owner spent the summer in Europe.
It was, in fact, Tomatis’s apartment, to which Barco had given him the keys two days earlier. Barco had found Leto in his kitchen, on another rainy morning, and had given him the keys, neither put out nor surprised even though it had been nearly eight years since the last time he had seen him. And, as Leto thought that very night, in bed, as he flipped through Tomatis’s originals with pleasure and credulity, smoking a cigarette by lamplight against the monotonous background of the June rain that enveloped the night like a cocoon, if Barco didn’t yet know exactly what he was up to in the city, within two or three days, if he read the papers, he would be sure to figure it out.
And now Leto, in his second morning at Tomatis’s place, walked to the living room from the kitchen, through the dark hall, with the white cup on the white saucer balanced on the palm of his hand. He sat down, placing the cup carefully on the table, and set about reading one of Tomatis’s manuscripts held in a green folder upon which Tomatis had printed, in red ink, a word Leto didn’t know: PARANATELLON. On the first page inside the folder there were three words printed all in capital letters, one after the other, separated by several spaces, in the following order:
PARANATELLON
PARANATELLERS
OR
PARNASUS
And farther down an inscription in lowercase:
An annotated anthology of the coast
A bit later, when the last sip of coffee at the bottom of the cup had gone cold, Leto lifted his eyes from the typed pages, and, leaning the nape of his neck on the backrest of the chair and contemplating the ceiling, he began to think of the man he was going to kill. The man who had been the object of his every action these past several months could not hold his attention for long, because his thoughts soon wandered to considering death in general. His first thought was that, for all that he might riddle this man’s body with bullets, as he fully intended to do, he would never manage to completely rid the world of him. The man deserved to die: he was a union leader who had betrayed his class and whom Leto’s group held responsible for several assassinations. But, thought Leto, as if his ideas emanated from the grayish emptiness that extended between the lamp and the ceiling, killing him would only take him out of immediate action, not out of reality.
And Leto remembered when he was eighteen and a friend of his age had died after an operation. Now that he was thirty-three, it seemed that, after fifteen years, time had lost its fearsome character and his dead friend remained as present in the world as he himself, independent from his memories and authority. What comes into the world, Leto thought, can never go out again. The infinitude of stars would remain, whether they liked it or not, wandering around with us inside them. And, like a bird that eats its own eggs, time went on erasing events as they unfolded, leaving nothing to human life but its indeterminate presence, a kind of clot of solidarity that kept reducing and encrusting itself in some imprecise point in the infinite, and from which every individual, as a just consequence of his mortal condition, formed a part. This clot, thought Leto, was of a singular quality: it could never be erased. Its presence had produced an irreversible alteration, redeeming the universe from pure ostentation; after its appearance, nothing would continue as before, and death—the death of his friend, the death of the man he was going to kill, his own death—was an insignificant accident.
No one can be killed, Leto thought, except one’s friends, but one cannot even kill them, because it is impossible to kill what is immortal.
The riverbanks sparkle, slowly, like signals: they ripple. The ocean is one and the same, always. Only its borders move, in place, and when one edge advances, it is the entire ocean advancing. We stand before the sea so that it can contemplate us. But we are always on one side of the river as it passes us without regard, disdainful. Its beaches are an immobile caravan of umbrellas—red ones, blue, orange with white stripes, green, spotted. The yellow sand splays out before the caramel-colored water in a weak semicircle. Burned bodies pass by, running along the border of the water, and on the shore they form the tri-colored fringe of a most unusual rainbow: the yellow border of the sand, the tawny water, and the transparent strip, between the two, of water kicked up by the constant drum of feet that convulse the shore. Gazing after the running feet, not considering their prior upheavals that have already been erased, always keeping your eyes locked on the feet hitting the water, you can perceive the transparent, whitish fringe, like an imaginary dotted line, between the sand and the river. If this description seems overwrought, just remember that more stable fringes, so to speak, like the white and red fringes of umbrellas are also, if you will, in essence, imaginary and interrupted borders.
Now we have returned from the beach and it is two-thirty in the afternoon. We are sprawled out on the bed, in a cool white room protected by dark curtains; there is another body, also naked, next to our own. To that empty cavern comes no more than the memory, and that only for a moment, of overlapping shores, of immobile paths, white and deserted. Now we see trees with leaves covered in a white powder that resembles volcanic ash. Now we see nothing. We feel that the other body is hot, thick, and burnt. We imagine that our own must be, too. We weave together in an intermittent struggle, interspersed with moments of complete immobility, in which we see our shaggy hair, our knees, our genitals, which fit together, which complement each other, our feet which lie placid, gnarled, isolated at the far end of the bed; we compare the burnt parts of our bodies with the white ones, in the places where we usually wear our bathing suits. Afterward we tangle ourselves into the final battle. We had touched the furthest point, the muddy bottom of the river, passed the riverbed and arrived in a translucent zone beyond the convulsed, blinding bottom, a point full of light like the very center of a diamond. That light was so intense that nothing could be seen, not even the light itself. In that struggle we came back up, dense and spinning, like the body of a drowned man, toward the confused darkness of the bottom where we engaged in combat. Further up the surface of the world remains, with the beaches, the pathways, the crowds, the city, the dark room where our bodies, now, are sprawled out immobile on the bed, looking at the ceiling. At noon we had stopped on the shore, trying to hear the multiple murmurs of the water, the polyrhythm and polyphony at the heart of it’s enduring monotony. We could make out nothing in that murmur except that it sounded a bit unsettling to us because we could make out nothing in it. At the same moment, on the other side of the border, a stingray, clotted with nerves and cartilage, stretching out to enjoy the heat of the shallower water close to shore, believes all of a sudden it feels, in the great confusion of its subcutaneous sensations, a monotonous murmur emanating from the beach, a murmur which it does not realize is composed of many voices: the song of the world.
Don’t be fooled: the news that came out in the paper last week, in the police blotter, which says very clearly that the owner of a bar, named Gandia, was arrested, gives a false impression of the person in question. It’s true that, as it appears, he played cards for money behind the bar, and that in the rooms out back a girl from the neighborhood, one of the poorest in the city, received her clientele, from which Gandia made a small commission. But don’t be fooled, don’t be put off: It’s not Gandia that news is about, it’s someone else, someone I’ve met.
That they would have put him in jail makes me smile. What’s more, it’s not the first time this has happened. In this slum, Gandia’s bar is the hub of perdition, the vicinity of vice. It is an obligatory stop for any backsliding prole. And its owner, Gandia, son of a laborer or a farmer—I don’t really know—has rough, callused hands, weighs over 200 pounds and is always dirty and poorly shaven. He is one of those men whose sullenness is too childish to be offensive, frightening, or even convincing. One can see from afar that Gandia is tangled up in himself, perpetually absorbed in internal discord, for reasons surely even he doesn’t know, and what appears to others is the harshness radiating from that derangement, like that man whom one sometimes encounters