CANDIES

 

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.