Scarecrow & Other Anomalies Page 4

  Whenever I think I am alone, the assembled host surrounds me, and my house looks like the consulting room of a fashionable astrologer. There are personalities everywhere: in the reception room, in the halls, in the kitchen, even in the W.C...

  It’s impossible to strike a truce, or find a moment’s rest! It’s impossible to know which one is the real me!

  Although I see myself forced to live in the most abject promiscuity with them, I am not convinced that they have anything to do with me.

  What connection can they possibly have—I ask myself—all these uninvited, unconfessed personalities, so bloodthirsty they could make a butcher blush with embarrassment? How can I allow myself to identify, for example, with this shrivelled-up pederast who didn’t even have the courage to act it out, or with this cretinoid whose smile could freeze a speeding locomotive?

  The fact that they inhabit my body is enough, however, to make me sick with indignation. Since I cannot ignore their existence, I want to make them hide in the inmost convolutions of my brain. For they have to do with a certain petulance... a certain selfishness... a certain absence of tact...

  Even the most insignificant personalities arrogate to themselves certain cosmopolitan airs. All of them, without exception, consider themselves entitled to display an Olympian disdain for the others, and naturally there are quarrels of all sorts, interminable disputes and disagreements. You’d think they might find some grounds for compromise, adopt some means of living together, but no, sir, each one claims the right to impose its will, without taking into account the opinions and tastes of the others. If one of them cracks a joke that makes me break out laughing, during the act another comes out to propose a little stroll through the cemetery. Nor is it good that the former wants me to go to bed with every woman in the city, while the latter attempts to show me the advantages of abstinence; and while one takes advantage of the night and does not let me sleep until dawn, the other wakes me at daybreak and insists that I get up with the chickens.

  My life thus becomes a breeding of possibilities that are never realized, an explosion of opposing forces that conflict and collide in a process of mutual destruction. The attempt to make the least decision causes me such a mass of difficulties, before undertaking the most insignificant act I must put such personalities in accord, so that, frankly, I prefer to give up everything and wait for them to get tired of arguing over what they have to do with my person, in order to have, at least, the satisfaction of consigning one and all to the shitcan.

  NINE: OUR SHADOW

  IS IT THAT sometimes we forget about our shadow, or that our shadow from time to time abandons us?

  We open the windows as always. We light the same lamps. We climb the stairs every night and, this notwithstanding, we pass hours, even weeks at a time, without noticing its presence.

  One afternoon, while crossing the plaza, we take a seat on some bench. On the cobbles of the road we describe, with the tip of our umbrella, half a circumference. Are we thinking of someone who isn’t here? Are we searching our memory for some long-lost recollection? In any case, our attention is focused everywhere and nowhere, until suddenly we discover a gentle trembling at our feet and, looking about in an attempt to ascertain its origins, we come face to face with our shadow.

  Is it possible that we have been living all this time alongside of it, without taking its existence into account? Were we separated, perhaps, while rounding a corner? Did it get lost in a crowd? Or did it give us the slip, so that it could go off and sniff at all the other shadows in the street?

  The tenderness that its presence instills in us cannot be overestimated, which is why we are so earnestly preoccupied with answering these questions.

  We want to hug it like a pet, we want to rock it in our arms until it falls asleep, and so great is the satisfaction that accompanies us when we return home that all the care, concern and caution we undertake on its behalf still seem insufficient.

  Before crossing the street, we wait until we are certain that no vehicles are moving about. Instead of going up the stairs, we take the elevator, to keep the steps from fracturing its spine. Moving from one room to another, we skirt the wounding edges of the furniture, and when bedtime arrives, we cover it as if it were a woman, so as to feel it nestling up close to us, to sleep all night by our side.

  TEN: SUBLIMATION

  WHICH WOULD BE more practical: to put on a warty hide or to assume the attitude of a rotten eyetooth?

  Although many years have passed, I remember it perfectly. I had just formulated this question when a streetcar whooshed past, whispering to me: “In life you have to sublimate everything... you can’t leave anything unsublimated!”

  It is difficult to recall a revelation that dazzled me with more force: it was as if I were the focal point, all at once, of every searchlight in the British fleet. Soon I was illuminated with bounteous wisdom and insight, once I started to sublimate, once everything had been sublimated, sublimated with the enthusiasm of an auctioneer... a sublime auctioneer, it goes without saying.

  Since then, life has taken on special meaning for me. That which before proved flimsy or grotesque, now seems sublime. That which, until the turning point, produced disgust or repugnance, now precipitates me into a swoon of bliss as I find the sublime in everything from toothpicks to postage stamps, from adultery to scurvy.

  Ah, the beatitude of living in full sublimity, and the contentment of experiencing oneself as a walking aphrodisiac, swelling with strength, vitality and seductive power; swelling with incandescent sentiments, swelling with everlasting sex organs, of all sizes, of all kinds; musical, without crashes, percussive! A featherless biped, but bearded with an inscrutable, electrocuting beard! A genius citizen—much more of a genius than a citizen!—with fixed ideas, machine-gun ideas, jingle-bell ideas; ideas that make use of all available means, from intuitionto stilts! A runt of a man giving free reign to his urge for devastation and reconstruction, capable of loving with infrared intensity, of welding together link fences with a single glance, of impregnating twelve dozen coeds—one gross—with his little finger!...

  To think that before I sublimated everything, I felt the urge to kill myself every time I stood in front of a mirror, and that it sufficed for me only to face things in the sublime in order to see myself the master of thousands of ethereal women who whirled around and perched above some cornice, proposing to give me dozens and dozens of sons, all fourteen meters in height, huge babies hale and rubicund, with a larger number of ribs than the rule, despite having twin aphrodisiacal sisters!...

  If other people want to act like doormats, so what? If it diverts them, who cares if others look at things with varnished stares and smiles like hacksaws?

  I have opted, definitively, for the sublime, and I know from my own experience that in life there is no greater solution than to sublimate, than to regard and resolve all things from the sublime point of view.

  ELEVEN: AFTER SUICIDE

  IF I’D HAD the slightest inkling of what I was going to hear after death, I would never have committed suicide.

  Scarcely has the bit of music that spoils our final moments begun to fade and we close our eyes to sleep for all eternity than the arguments and family scenes begin.

  What disregard for good form! What absolute lack of composure! What ignorance of what it means to die well!

  A tenement house full of ill-wed Calabrians in full conjugal catastrophe couldn’t give even an approximate notion of the hurly-burly produced every moment.

  While some neighbor kicks around inside his casket, those next door trade insults like truck drivers, and at the same time that something moves and clatters, peals of laughter emerge from those who inhabit the tomb in front.

  Some cadaver considers it his right to make known at the top of his lungs desires that he had successfully repressed during his entire existence as a citizen, and, not content with informing us of his every meanness and infamy, within five minutes of our being installed in our niche he makes us
privy to the thoughts and opinions that all the other inhabitants of the cemetery have about us.

  It is useless to plug up your ears. The comments, the sarcastic snickers, the rubble that falls from who knows where so torment us at every moment of the day and insomniac night that it’s enough to make us want to commit suicide all over again.Although it may be hard to believe—these humiliations—this continual clatter proves to be a thousand times more preferable to the moments of silence and calm.

  Usually they occur with the suddenness of a swoon. All at once, without the slightest warning, we tumble into the void. It’s impossible to latch onto anything, to find anything rough or protruding to grab. The fall has no end. Silence lets its amplitude sound. The atmosphere gets more rarefied moment by moment, and the least noise—a fingernail, a bit of sloughed cartilage, a phalange that comes loose from a finger—resounds, is amplified, bumps and rebounds as it encounters obstacles on its way, and is amalgamated with all the other persisting echoes; and when it seems that finally it is going to fade out, and we close our eyes gently to avoid hearing the friction of our eyelids, there arises a new noise to scare us out of our sleep forever.

  Ah, if only I’d known that death is a country where no one can live!

  TWELVE: THEY CONJUGATE

  They admire, they desire, they gravitate

  they caress, they undress, they osculate

  they pant, they sniff, they penetrate

  they weld, they meld, they conjugate

  they sleep, they wake, they illuminate

  they covet, they touch, they fascinate

  they chew, they taste, they salivate

  they tangle, they twine, they segregate

  they languish, they lapse, they reintegrate

  they wriggle, they squirm, they infundibulate

  they fumble, they fondle, they perfricate

  they swoon, they twitch, they resuscitate

  they sulk, they pout, they contemplate

  they ignite, they inflame, they incinerate

  they erupt, they explode, they detonate

  they nab, they grab, they dislocate

  they clinch, they clutch, they concatenate

  they solder, they dissolve, they calcinate

  they paw, they claw, they assassinate

  they choke, they shudder, they embrocate

  they redden, they madden, they federate

  they repose, they loll, they oscitate

  they splice, they smolder, they colligate

  they abate, they alate and they transubstantiate.

  THIRTEEN: A KICK

  THERE ARE DAYS when I am nothing more than a kick, purely and simply a kick. Is there a motor scooter speeding past? Goal!... in through a fifth-floor window. Is there a baldy hanging around? There he goes, sailing through the air until he’s impaled on some lightning rod. An automobile slams on its brakes to pull up at the curb? With one good kick it’s installed in some garret.

  To hell with pharmacists’ flasks, electrical lights and such, numbers on the doors in the street!

  When I begin to kick, it’s useless to try to restrain me. I need to tear down the cornices, the pool halls, the streetcars. I need to get in—by kicks—the shop windows and take out—by kicks—all the mannequins into the street. I can’t rest, or be happy, until I have thoroughly demolished those monuments to sanitation, the public urinals. Nothing contents me so much as the crash, induced by a kick, of gasometers, of electric arcs. I would rather die than renounce the act of making street lamps describe trajectories like skyrockets and plummet, legs upmost, into the outstretched arms of the trees in the municipal park.

  A swift kick to firemen, to artificial flowers, to bicarbonate of soda. A swift kick to water reservoirs, to pregnant women, to test tubes.

  Families dissolved by a single kick; consumer cooperatives; shoe factories; people who couldn’t get insurance, who couldn’t be bothered to change the water for the olives... or for the tiny goldfish...

  FOURTEEN: GRANDMOTHER’S ADVICE

  MY GRANDMOTHER—who wasn’t one-eyed—used to tell me:

  “Women give you too much trouble or they’re not worth the effort. People your dreams with those you like, and they’ll be yours while you sleep!

  “Don’t floss your teeth with pubic hair. Shun, as much as possible, venereal diseases, but if you must choose between a prize for virtue or one for syphilis, don’t hesitate an instant: mercury isn’t half as heavy as abstinence!

  “When somebody’s buttocks are smiling at you, keep it under your hat. Remember that you’ll never find a better place to put your tongue than in your very own pocket, and that a cock in hand is worth two in the bush.”

  But my grandmother was fond of contradicting herself and, after asking me to help her find the eyeglasses that were propped on her wrinkled forehead, she would add in her daguerreotype voice:

  “Life—and I say this from experience—is one long imbrutishment. This much must be already obvious from the state and the style in which you find your poor grandmother. I don’t know how I’d go on if it weren’t for the hope of seeing things a little better after death!

  “Habit encrusts us daily, plastering spider webs over our eyes. Little by little, syntax and the dictionary begin to confine us, and though mosquitoes blow their horns as they fly about, it’s a bit of a stretch to call them archangels. When an aunt takes us on a visit, we greet the whole world, but we’re ashamed toextend our hand to mister cat and, later on, should we feel the urge to travel, we buy tickets at a steamship agency, rather than metamorphose an armchair into a transatlantic liner.

  “By that—though at this point you probably think me a senile old bat—I mean to say, and I will never tire of repeating, that you must not renounce anything, including your right to renunciation. An aching molar, urban statistics, the proper use of sawdust, wood chips and other discards can afford us an unsuspected pleasure. Open your arms and don’t look down on the clarinet or faulty handwriting. Confect a new virginity every five minutes and follow these counsels as if they were engraved in stone, yet, though experience is a sickness offering little danger of contagion, you must not expose yourself to the influence of others, and that includes your own shadow.

  “Imitation has prostituted everything, right down to the pin in your cravat!”

  FIFTEEN: THE PROPHET

  HE COMMANDED his slaves to spit on his forehead and, dangling from the feet of a stork, abandoned his customs and sandalwood coffers.

  But how could he have known that perfume can leave a bitter taste on the tongue? How could he have known that the solitude of asceticism is filled with naked women, and that all knowledge is humbled before the physiomechanics of a mosquito?

  During his seclusion in the desert, his navel succeeded in representing the better part of the universe. There even the spiders carry crosses on their back to preserve themselves from foraging succubi. There he became intimate with phantoms who dash about on stilts through all eternity and with cacti exhibiting the quirks of scarecrows, but despite holding consultations with the Devil and with the Lord he could not discover a single new virtue or a single new vice.

  Did his fasting and abstinence from all concupiscence permit him to savor the feverish adulation that is everywhere accompanied by a miasma of submission and grief?

  Preceded by a breeze that cuts a swath through the filth of the roadway, he passed before the astonished populace, laden with boredom and parasites.

  His presence ripened the grain and brought the harvest to fruition. The mere touch of his hands revived virility and his glance instilled in prostitutes the rustic tenderness of quails.

  How many times his words fell on the multitude with the mildness of rain calming the ocean!

  With a phosphorescent splendor shining around his bald pate and with thousands of bees lodged in the hair of his chest, he appeared simultaneously in different places, each time with a disdain ever more conscious of the pointlessness of all that exists.

  His
perfection became as repugnant to him as taking a bath or swallowing caviar. He no longer found voluptuous pleasure in taking his siesta or in savoring the backwaters incarnated as a caiman. He derived not the slightest comfort from the fact that lepers waited for him so as to embrace his shadow, nor that the stars stopped twinkling when confronted by the size of his tenderness and his beard.

  One afternoon, at a bend in some road, he decided to stop moving for all eternity.

  In vain the pilgrims flock from everywhere to his sermons and oblations. In vain they persist, in the face of his indifference, in performing the rites of the cabala and in acts of mortification. Neither their self-abasements nor their ticklings succeed in drawing from him so much as a yawn, and the scare intensifies as a spreading green scum covers his extremities and his modesty, and his body is transformed, little by little, into one of those clods that embeds itself into the road so as to hatch worms and slime.

  SIXTEEN: TRANSMIGRATION

  SOME HAVE a taste for mountain climbing. Others like to play dominoes. For me, nothing compares with transmigration.

  While others spend their lives pulling a rope or pounding a tabletop, I spend my time transmigrating from one body to another, and I never tire of the process.

  Up at the crack of day, I install myself in a eucalyptus tree to inhale the morning breeze. I take a mineral siesta inside the first boulder I happen across, and before going to bed I’m thinking of the night and its chimneys with the spirit of a cat.

  How delicious it is to metamorphose into a bumblebee, so as to sniff up the pollen of the roses! What voluptuousness to be one with the soil, so as to feel the penetrations of the tubercles and roots, and the percolations of a latent life that fecundate... and tickle us.