Now everything is distorted, like in a badly
remembered dream. But while it was happening it followed logical rules, it had
a certain inner coherence, it was believable.
It began when we had been married only a few months. Back then we had so
little money that our only entertainment consisted of strolling along streets
and avenues, looking at shop windows. Irma endured the torture of not being
able to buy anything with admirable good humor. We invariably returned home
with the feeling that we had lost something along the way.
One afternoon, tired of tunics and sandals –but silently, because we had
nothing better to offer each other– we stopped in front of an old shop, with
dirty windows and poor lighting that nevertheless displayed a good number of
modern-design armchairs. There were armchairs upholstered in corduroy and
satin, leather ones, some with wooden frames, others in chrome, and a
wrought-iron set with red silk cushions. An enormous variety of armchairs
filled a space that any clever merchant would have turned into three separate
shops.
It struck us as odd that there were no salesmen in sight, but curiosity
got the better of us and we went in.
“Is anyone here?” I called out. Irma clutched my arm, uneasy.
“What’s the point of calling if we’re not going to buy anything?”
“I’ll ask a price and we’ll leave. I want to see the salesman’s face.”
“Let’s go now. This place frightens me.”
“If we leave without asking something we’ll look ridiculous.”
But two or three silent, motionless minutes passed, serving only to
increase our discomfort. Irma stared toward the street with wide eyes while I
tried to determine whether the shape lying on a blue divan at the back of the
room was the blessed salesman taking a nap. I gathered my courage –though I
knew the only thing to overcome was my shyness– and walked between the
armchairs, dragging Irma along.
I had taken no more than five steps when the salesman got up, rubbing
his eyes, and looked at us in confusion. He had been using a bag of candies as
a pillow, and the irregularities of the cellophane had marked his face like
scars.
“What do you want?”
“A set of armchairs,” I said. “In imitation leather, like those.” I
pointed to a pair of brown armchairs, vulgar and graceless. The salesman nodded
without looking at them and, after a pause, quoted a figure. It was a very high
figure, somewhat more than Irma and I earned combined.
“It’s very expensive,” Irma said. “We’ll think about it.”
“Yes, yes,” the salesman said. “Come back whenever you like.” It was
obvious he had realized we were not buyers even before interrupting his nap,
but he did not seem to resent it. He smiled halfheartedly and we could see he
was not much older than we were.
“Sorry to bother you,” I said, turning away, and taking Irma by the hand
we walked toward the street. “Good afternoon,” I murmured.
“Wait,” the salesman said. “Take some candies.” He grabbed the bag and
tore it open brusquely. “On the house.”
“Please don’t trouble yourself,” Irma said.
“We’re not fond of sweets,” I said distrustfully.
“Please,” the salesman insisted. There was something pleading in his
tone. I went back, put my hand into the bag, and took one candy.
“Thank you.”
“Take more.” Now his tone was firm. “You too… miss. Or wife?”
“Wife,” Irma said, extending her hand.
“Take some for the children,” the salesman said.
“We don’t have any,” I replied.
“You will. And there are always nephews, friends’ children… Don’t be
shy.”
We ended up taking a dozen candies. We ate several on the way home,
laughing at our own foolishness. That autumn we remembered the episode from
time to time, and it always served as an excuse to laugh and eat candies.
“We don’t have anywhere to put things,” Irma complained.
“Get rid of some old clothes,” I said distractedly. Irma looked at me
for a moment, as if justifying the shift from annoyance to sympathy.
“You know that’s not a bad idea.”
She went through the closet thoroughly. An hour later she had a pile
labeled “this might still be useful” and a small heap labeled “this is
completely useless”; she had wasted too much time considering possible
alterations without considering the years and the pounds that had passed.
“Do you remember this jacket? Around the corner they do alterations…”
“It’s out of fashion, Irma. You don’t expect me to go to the office
dressed like a tango extra.”
“They’re worn tighter now.”
“Do me a favor! Throw that relic in the trash.”
Irma shrugged resignedly. She held the jacket by the lapels, perhaps
imagining the fabric could be used to make shorts for one of the children.
Clothes are so expensive! Finally, she decided to accept my opinion, but after
placing the jacket on the “useless” pile she changed her mind.
“What are you doing?” I asked, peering over the newspaper.
“I’m checking the pockets. You have the habit of forgetting money
everywhere.”
“If you find anything it’s sure to be demonetized. Do you know how long
it’s been since I wore that jacket?”
“Years.” She frowned and took something oval from an inside pocket.
“What is it?”
“Do you remember these candies?”
“Yes. It’s one of the ones the furniture salesman gave us. I thought we
had eaten them all.”
“Apparently not. How funny. Do you want it?”
“Give it to the children.”
“One candy? So can they fight? Besides it’s old. You eat it–you have an
iron stomach.” Irma carefully unwrapped it and handed it to me. But I noticed
something on the paper that caught my attention.
“There’s something written here,” I said.
“It must be a little cartoon, like the ones in chewing gum.”
“But the others weren’t like this.” I read with difficulty; the print
was almost microscopic. “How strange. It’s an invitation to a country party.”
“What a pity! Then we missed it.”
“It’s for next Saturday,” I said in a somber tone.
“That was like five years ago. It must be wrong.”
“It’s printed clearly. Saturday, November 14. Unless it’s a mistake.”
“If it were a mistake, it wouldn’t say Saturday. Five years ago,
November 14 was a Sunday.” Irma spoke confidently about mathematical matters.
She was a high school teacher, and when it came to numbers she easily outdid
me. She had a perpetual calendar in her head and handled an abacus more
skillfully than I did a calculator.
“But the mistake could have been made the previous year.”
“You’re wrong. Six years ago, November 14 was Friday because leap years
skip a weekday due to February 29. The last time November 14 fell on a Saturday
was in 1970.”
I gave up. The little paper invited us to a country party to be held in
two days in a place in western Buenos Aires Province I had never heard of.
“Let’s go,” Irma said, against all logic.
“You’re crazy! We don’t know where it is, or who they are…”
“You went into the furniture shop out of pure curiosity. Here a very
precise meeting point is indicated, and now I’m the one who’s intrigued. It
would be interesting to see whether they keep their promise after so long. Come
on.”
It was absurd. And not even an amusing absurdity. But I had no arguments
strong enough to make her give up. When my wife gets something into her head,
it’s a matter of going along or facing the consequences.
“In any case, I think there won’t be anyone there,” she insisted,
justifying the whim.
“You’re capable of getting us up early on a Saturday–the only day we can
sleep without guilt–just to check whether a scrap of paper… Please!”
“It’s not that early. The paper says eleven o’clock, if we get up at
nine… We can make good use of the day… If the meeting turns out to be a joke we
can go to your union’s country house in La Reja… I’ll make empanadas.”
I gave in, all hope lost.
At least it wasn’t a joke. I had never seen the Pringles bridge so
crowded. It looked like a political demonstration, and the faces that seemed
familiar to me had already surpassed half a dozen. People from the
neighborhood, surely.
“Irma!” exclaimed an older woman I recognized by sight; a teacher from
the school, I thought.
“Raquel! What a surprise to find you here!” Irma was delighted. “How did
you hear about it?”
Raquel told a confused story: a cousin, a phone call… The children asked
me for candies, and I missed the rest of the explanation.
When I came back from the kiosk, Irma was talking with a woman we had
met the previous year while vacationing in Necochea. I began to suspect that
some large secret organization, perhaps a sordid religious sect, was behind the
whole affair.
“And the children?” Irma asked.
“I brought them. Look at them.”
There were two men with the appearance of union officials sitting on
folding chairs and leaning on a small table. They answered people’s questions
rudely, but they seemed to be the only ones who knew what was going on. I
approached them ready for confrontation.
“Are either of you a piper?”
“No,” said the heavier one, puzzled. “Why?”
“For no reason. And Hamelin, does that ring a bell?”
“Not at all,” said the other, short and bald. But the question must have
amused him, because he smiled.
That was the proof I needed. Until that moment I had felt like a poor
paranoid, an exaggerator making a fool of himself out of sheer lack of
imagination. But these were professionals. They knew how to handle us.
“There’s something fishy here,” I whispered to Irma, squeezing her arm.
“We’re not going.”
“You’re crazy! Almost all the teachers from the school have come…”
“And many neighbors from the block who have known me since I was a
child. Still, we’re not going. It’s a trap.”
“Please! I have the tickets.”
“You even paid?”
“They’re free tickets. What’s gotten into you?”
The children were running back and forth across the bridge. More people
kept arriving. At some point the short, bald man stood up, folded his chair,
and pointed to a rusty, ancient metal staircase that I swear I had never seen
there before. People began to go down, and Irma was among the first, so I had
no choice but to follow her.
We emerged onto a narrow, precarious platform made of planks laid over a
tubular structure. The human mass pushed in every direction, and despite my
efforts I found myself separated from Irma and the children. I regretted not
having at least one of them in my arms; I imagined them suffocated by the
crowd. Yet Irma seemed calm, constantly waving at me and smiling. I tried to
move against the current, but the bags of clothes and food complicated the
task. When I realized it would be impossible to reach her, I chose to shout
that we would meet on the train, that I would occupy the necessary seats with
the bags, that they shouldn’t rush, that they should let the rest of the people
board. At that very moment the train entered the “station.”
Wedged between the high walls and the cars, squeezed by the crowd, I
felt like a character in a Losey film. I am the other Mr. Klein, I thought. At
any moment the Gestapo will arrive and sew a Star of David onto my sleeve… This
train has an unusual itinerary in store for us: Moreno, Luján, Dachau,
Treblinka, Auschwitz.
That kind of self-pity did not seem the best way to lift my spirits.
Fortunately, the door of the carriage was near where I stood, and I was among
the first to get on. I took a triple seat and leaned out the window after
arranging the bags. It struck me how few people were boarding, but I attributed
it to the crowding and confusion. Five minutes later the carriage was still
almost empty, and the only passengers were solitary men, separated from their
families. We were as if cornered, in a precarious situation, shouting over a
sea of heads. We looked like confused recruits about to be sent to the front
without military training. Several times I tried to arrange alternative meeting
points with Irma, but she seemed farther away, and my words, mutilated by distance,
probably reached her broken and imprecise.
At last, I realized that we were indeed moving farther apart because the
train had silently begun to move. The rear carriages reached the end of the
improvised platform, and the station was left behind. I lost all sense of
caution and tried to throw myself off the train, but a series of factors as
simple as they were unforeseeable conspired to prevent it. I was in the middle
of the carriage and large piles of bags blocked the way in both directions.
When I managed to get past the obstacles, I found the doors on that side
jammed. And then it was too late: the train was moving at such speed that
jumping would have been suicide.
I dismissed the idea of abandoning the train and decided to wait for a
stop or the end of the journey to return home on the first available train
back. For the moment there seemed to be no better distraction than observing my
fellow sufferers. Almost all of them looked sallow, wilted. Yet, though
confused and discouraged, they did not differ from the kind of passengers who
travel by train to work. They had accepted the strangeness of the situation
with philosophical passivity, and as far as I could see none of them had tried
to jump. It seemed fair to admire them silently. They gazed at the landscape
through the windows with absolute detachment, as if instead of traveling into
the unknown they were strolling through a shopping arcade. Or as if those
parallel gray lines disappearing behind us were part of a daily routine. And
yes, I thought, why not; when I boarded there were several passengers already
seated who could very well have gotten on at the terminal, mistaking it for a
regular suburban train.
But the train did not stop at any station.
It’s an express, I thought, trying to encourage myself. There was no
point tormenting myself with negative ideas. The train would reach its
destination…
The landscape shifted: cardboard shantytowns, sheet-metal shantytowns;
residential areas, industrial zones, fields stretching to the horizon. It
distressed me to think that the farther that damned train carried me, the
longer it would take to reunite with Irma and the children.
Some of my companions read newspapers and others dozed off. I did not
dare address anyone. Finally, I decided to move to the next carriage; perhaps
there the people would not be so apathetic and someone would have an
explanation for what was happening to us.
In the next carriage there were women –not many– as if some logical but
unknown arrangement had separated the victims by sex. They had ordinary faces,
almost blurred, the kind that is difficult to remember once one closes one’s
eyes. Instead of people they might just as well have been the product of a nightmare.
And so, the idea that had been struggling to enter the circle of
consciousness finally imposed itself: I was dreaming. One of those vivid dreams
that seem real and can incorporate reflections on the nature of dreams had
taken hold of me. I was trapped in a nightmare capable of feeding itself and at
the same time destroying all my attempts to wake up.
“Excuse me,” I said to a middle-aged woman who seemed trustworthy. “Do
you understand this?”
“Yes?” She did not take her face from the window; she seemed hypnotized.
The high-tension wires undulated in parallel rhythm between the towers, forming
a pattern of rhythmic, inhuman isolation. I realized I would get nowhere with
her and approached another woman.
“Did they catch you with the candy trap too?” I asked stupidly.
“Hmmm?” The woman looked into my eyes and my eyelids fell; I noticed her
features had vanished. Or perhaps not, and my senses were beginning to betray
me. I saw planes intersecting at distant points outside the train, forming
blurred, unfinished angles.
When I managed to recover and was about to move to the next carriage, I
noticed that the train was slowing. I leaned out the window and saw that we
were entering a small-town station. From the travel time I deduced that we
could not be beyond Merlo, but the short, irregular platform did not correspond
to any place I knew. Perhaps, I told myself, we took a branch line; that must
be it.
I tried to read the sign that usually stands at the ends of platforms or
above the stationmaster’s office, but I saw nothing. An anonymous place. The
train had stopped on a single track that vanished into the horizon, and its
arrival must have been an important event because a crowd had gathered to
receive it. Men and women waved their arms joyfully and shouted names I could
not make out. My fellow passengers, on the other hand, seemed stunned. A few
had risen from their seats and stared outside in surprise, as if the situation
had nothing to do with them.
I grabbed the bags and got off the train.
I walked a few steps along the platform intending to ask at the ticket
office whether that or another train returned to Buenos Aires and when. Given
the long chain of unfortunate events that seemed to be pursuing me, I was
prepared to accept answers like “tomorrow,” “in a week,” or “that was the last
run”…
A young woman with long black hair detached herself from the crowd and
came straight toward me, interrupting my thoughts.
“Bela, at last!”
When she said Bela I felt a chill run down my spine. Could she be
referring to me? I looked around and saw that I was the only passenger who had
gotten off. But my name isn’t Bela. Until that moment I was certain my name was
something else, though I could not remember it. Bela sounded Hungarian to me, a
ridiculous name, like something out of fiction, perhaps suitable for a
horror-film actor, not for an ordinary person.
“My dear!” the woman exclaimed, embracing me fervently and kissing me on
the mouth. I felt her sharp tongue forcing its way between my teeth; she tasted
orange. “Aren’t you happy to be home again?”
“No. I don’t know,” I stammered.
“Bela, always the same fool. Come on, don’t just stand there like a
turkey.”
Laughing shamelessly, she tugged at my hand. She was a woman of wild,
aggressive beauty who in other circumstances might have attracted me
irresistibly instead of intimidating me. I simply followed her.
As we left the station I looked back and discovered I was the only one
who had got off the train. The crowd was dispersing silently, and the
celebration could be considered over. The train started moving. It was clear
that I had acted too hastily and was even more compromised than before.
The woman led me down the town’s only street to a sort of supermarket on
the corner, across from the station. We passed a pile of empty crates, and she
pushed open a glass swinging door. At the register stood an older man, about
sixty, who looked at us expressionlessly. We crossed the sales floor without
greeting anyone, almost at a run, and climbed a staircase hidden among cans of
quince paste. The staircase led to a mezzanine that bordered the entire store,
but that did not seem to be our destination. The woman stopped at another door
and opened it with a key she took from her jeans pocket.
“Come on,” she said, tugging at me again. It was a provocation. I knew
what would follow, but I still had not managed to organize my thoughts enough
to ask a coherent question.
She took me into a dim room, quite clean despite being crammed with
merchandise. I set the bags on a table and approached her. She guided my hands
to her breasts and prompted me to squeeze them. That behavior disconcerted me
so much that I moved clumsily and kicked a row of empty bottles. The bottles
rolled endlessly and fell to the ground floor, shattering with a great crash.
Contrary to what I expected, no one seemed concerned, and no one reprimanded
us; I even thought I heard amused laughter and suggestive comments, perhaps
referring to what we might be doing upstairs.
“You have no idea how much I missed you,” the woman said, pulling off
her wool sweater. As I had imagined, she was not wearing a bra. Her breasts
were teardrop-shaped, with tiny nipples and areolas.
“Do you think this is a good place to do it?” As I spoke, I felt a
tingling in my tongue. A portion of my mind was thinking something else,
perhaps an appropriate reply, something like: You couldn’t have missed me
because we don’t know each other.
From that moment on the entire scene unfolded on two parallel planes: I
said something different from what I thought, and to her it seemed the most
natural thing in the world. We had known each other for several years, we were
married, we lived upstairs in the supermarket–although during my absence our
room had been used for storage–she was the owner’s daughter and her name was
Mari.
“Did you make a lot of money in Buenos Aires?” Mari pressed her breasts
against my arm; I felt the hardness of her nipples, though I tried to suppress
my arousal so as not to lose my head. I still hoped to explain the truth of the
situation to her, that she was mistaken…
“Some. But you know that a kiosk selling cigarettes and candy isn’t the
kind of business that makes you rich quickly.”
“You didn’t write me a single letter.”
“I had the kiosk open day and night. I slept there.” I wanted to tell
her about Irma, about the children; to say that I worked in a real estate
office and that my name was Abel, not Bela. Now I no longer thought in terms of
nightmares, but of a long amnesia, a bifurcation somewhere along the way. Yet I
retained my past; I remembered my childhood years.
“Bad. You didn’t even bring me a candy.” That was the last straw. I
checked the pockets of my trousers and found the candies I had bought for the
children at the corner of Pringles bridge. I gave her one.
“How nice!” Mari said. “There’s a good-luck message on the wrapper.”
“I didn’t know candies came with messages,” I whispered. Mari finished
reading the paper and a shadow crossed her face.
“Idiot!” She threw the wrapper down and ran out, breasts bare, detached
from human dramas, happy. I picked up the paper and read the message: “This man
is cheating on you with a woman named Irma.”
I went downstairs trying not to attract attention. When I reached the
registers, I saw Mari talking to a young man I had not seen when I entered; the
man did not seem impressed or upset or excited by Mari’s bare torso. She did
not even look at me.
I went out into the street and saw that the sun was setting. There was
no point in returning to the train station, so I left the town cross-country.
In the distance I spotted a highway with cars and trucks passing by.
It was not difficult to get a ride with a vegetable truck driver heading
to Buenos Aires.
Were things finally falling back into place? I hoped Irma had not become
overly anxious when she saw me leave on the train, though I still did not
understand why she and the children had not boarded. I counted the minutes
separating me from home. Everything would be resolved.
The truck driver was very talkative and constantly interrupted my
thoughts. I tried to be polite, nodding and smiling occasionally. He talked
about vegetable prices, wholesale markets… Perhaps something he said, or my own
nerves, led me to a discovery. Bela is nothing but an anagram of Abel. And Mari
of Irma! Now the dream’s features have grown clearer. What meaning could there
be in finding oneself separated from one’s family because of a candy wrapper,
put on an irregular train, forced to make a senseless journey to a town that
does not appear on maps, dragged along by a madwoman who claims to be your
wife…?
He dropped me close to home. But I felt lost, as if I had been away from
the city for a long time, not just a few hours. I arrived home around nine. The
doorman was taking out the trash and did not even look at me. My heart pounded;
I was very anxious and it seemed to me that the elevator moved with exaggerated
slowness.
When at last I reached the apartment, I stopped listening. Apparently,
no one was there. They must all be at Irma’s mother’s house. I put the key in
the lock and turned it. I did not live there. I had never lived in that place.
An older woman approached me, terrified.
“You…?”
“Ma’am,” I managed with difficulty, “forgive me; I must have made a
mistake… I’m new in the building, you see? I don’t understand what happened. My
key opens your door… It’s a coincidence.” I held out the key, but the woman
withdrew her hand. The key fell silently onto the carpet.
Was the dream still going on, the nightmare? The woman backed away as if
I were an apparition. I turned and ran out.
I went down the stairs and hailed a taxi when I reached the sidewalk. I
would go to my mother-in-law’s house. It was the only logical place. I did not
want to think about what had just happened in the apartment. I would speak with
Irma, and everything would become clear.
But the feeling of anguish returned before the bronze knocker on my
mother-in-law’s door.
Now I knew what it was about. Something was irreparably out of sync in
the way events had unfolded, and an extra sense, a capacity I had not known I
possessed until then, was alerting me. I was beginning to decipher the
messages.
Fortunately, it was Irma who answered the pounding of the little bronze
hand.
“My dear!” I exclaimed, trembling. “At last!” Irma looked at me, first
with surprise, then with horror.
“You… who are you?”
“Irma! It’s me, Abel!”
“I don’t know you. What do you want?” Her tone was harsh. I could have
been a murderer, a drunk; anything but Abel.
“Listen,” I insisted. “I don’t know which side of the nightmare I’m on,
I don’t even know if it is a nightmare. But let me come in, let me tell you
what happened from the beginning.”
“No. I have nothing to talk to you about, and I’m not interested.” Irma
tried to close the door in my face. She hesitated.
“Give me a minute. Pretend I’m a stranger who stops you on the street…”
“No!” Irma repeated. She closed the door.
“I am…” I was nothing anymore. Would Irma believe a story because we had
met at a dance seven years earlier, that we had dated for three years, that at
first she had had difficulty getting pregnant…? The events of the day had more
consistency. Mari, the good-luck candy with that ridiculous message. I turned
around. I did not know whether I would get drunk, go see a psychologist, commit
suicide, or in what order I would do those things. Then the door opened and
Irma leaned out timidly.
“Wait.”
“Yes?”
“I remember a dream,” Irma said. “A train station and a lot of people.
The strange thing is that there was a man very much like you. He was calling to
me from the train, saying something, but I couldn’t understand him.”
I said nothing. I lowered my head and walked away. I was certain Irma
was struggling against the desire to call me back, to continue asking, perhaps
out of sheer compassion. She was no longer frightened. But all my proofs were
like mist, or worse, like stigmas.
I walked a block with my fists clenched in my pockets and thought of the
characters in literature, those who visit an impossible place and always manage
to bring back a witness object, proof that they were there. Not in my case. It
did not help to have my pockets full of candies, the candies the children had
never gotten to eat.
I seriously considered the possibility of returning to Mari’s town, but
I had no idea how to travel there. By crossing a mirror? By taking a ghost
train departing from the twentieth floor?
It is useless. The situation has no remedy. My fleeting existence will
have ended when the dreamer wakes up in the morning and forgets me between the
first sip of coffee and reading the newspaper.
