Scarecrow & Other Anomalies Read online

  To appreciate ham, isn’t it indispensable to be a pig? Can he who has not transformed himself into a horse know the simple pleasure of ruminating in a pasture or fully grasp what it means to “horse around?”

  Possessing a virgin is very different from experiencing the sensations of a virgin while she is being possessed, and it’s one thing to look at the ocean while standing on the shore, another to see it through the eyes of a crab.

  This is why I love to thrust myself into foreign existences, to live out their hopes and dreams, their moods and humors, fair or foul, their bodily secretions.This is why I love to graze on the pampas at twilight in the person of a cow, feeling the gravity and the foliage with a brain the size of a walnut or chestnut, or to squat in an open meadow singing to the stars with the voice of a toad.

  Ah, the enchantment of having been a camel, an apple, or a carrot, and the satisfaction of fathoming the indolence of still waters... and of chameleons!

  To think that, during their entire existence, the majority of men have never even once been a woman! How is it possible for them not to be bored with their appetites, their spasms, and not long to experience, from time to time, those of cockroaches... or of the honeysuckle vine?

  Though I have put myself, many times, in the brain of an imbecile, I have never understood how anyone could live, perpetually, with the same skeleton and the same sex.

  When life is exclusively human—all too human—can the workings of the mind result in anything except an infirmity more grandiose and tedious than any other?

  I, for one, am certain that I wouldn’t have been able to stand such a life without this aptitude for evasion that permits me to transfer myself to wherever I am not: to be an ant, a giraffe, to lay an egg and, what’s still more important, to bump into myself at the very moment I have forgotten, almost completely, my own existence.

  SEVENTEEN: THE SUCCUBUS

  SHE WAS squishing me between her flattened arms and adhering to my body with the violent viscosity of a mollusk. A sticky secretion began to envelop me, little by little, until it succeeded in immobilizing me. From each of her pores oozed a sort of claw that perforated my skin. Her breasts began to boil. A phosphorescent exudation illuminated her neck, her hips, until even her sex—full of spines and tentacles—encrusted my own sex and precipitated me into a series of exasperating spasms.

  It was useless spitting on her eyelids or into the cavities of her nose. It was useless screaming my hate and contempt. Until the last drop of sperm slid away from my nape, boring through my spine like a globule of melted sealing wax, her gums continued to slurp at my desperation; and before abandoning me she left her millions of claws embedded in my flesh, and I had no other recourse than to spend the night pulling them out with a pair of pincers and splashing a drop of iodine in each of the wounds...

  Some party, being a sleeper who is the private hunting preserve for the sport of a succubus!

  EIGHTEEN: WEEPING

  WEEP LIVING TEARS! Weep gushers! Weep your guts out! Weep dreams! Weep before portals and at ports of entry! Weep in fellowship! Weep in yellow!

  Open the locks and canals of tears! Let us soak our shirts, our souls! Inundate the sidewalks and the boulevards, and bear us along safely on the flood!

  Assist in anthropology courses, weeping! Celebrate relatives’ birthdays, weeping! Walk across Africa, weeping!

  Weep like a caiman, like a crocodile... especially if it’s true that caimans and crocodiles have no real tears in them.

  Weep anything, but weep well! Weep with your nose, with your knees! Weep through your navel, through your mouth!

  Weep of love, of hate, of happiness! Weep in your frock, from flatus, from frailty! Weep impromptu, weep from memory! Weep throughout the insomniac night and throughout the livelong day!

  NINETEEN: GRATITUDE

  SO WHAT IF pulleys have eaten up thousands and thousands of little fingers, and still are not satisfied? So what if sewing machines threaten to stitch up our slightest gaps and fissures? So what if the depravity of globes should lead to the degradation of geometry?

  It’s disturbing enough—without a doubt—to consider that there exists not a hectare of the earth’s surface that doesn’t conceal four dozen cadavers; but a big jump to think of oneself as no more than a carcass of microbes... and to have no other aspiration than to receive the title of skull...

  Our daily routine might be regarded as a modest manifestation of pure absurdity, through which God—reincarnated as some low-grade molar puller—obligates us to place all our faith in toothpicks, but life, for all that, will never stop being a genuine miracle.

  What do we care if cadavers decompose faster than automobiles? What do we care if entire families—full of young ladies!—succumb from their excessive fondness for wild mushrooms?

  Doesn’t the mere fact that we have a liver and two kidneys offer ample justification for spending our days applauding ourselves and our lives? Do we have to do anything but open our eyes to be convinced that reality is, in reality, the most authentic of miracles?

  For those whose senses are properly attuned, the most insignificant events—a woman who delays, a dog who sniffs at a wall—result in something so ineffable... it’s as if a hidden universe of accumulated coincidences and circumstances had ordained it—so that even in the presence of so slight a spectacle as that of two flies alighting and performing the act of reproduction on a bald head, one would have to have the impermeability of a crocodile not to experience a veritable paroxysm of admiration.

  Hence that love, that tremendous gratitude for life that I feel, those constant cravings to lap it up, those impulses to prostrate myself before everything... before equestrian statues, before garbage cans...

  Hence that bouncing-ball optimism that makes me laugh till I scream at the skeletons of bicycles, at the lemons attacking my liver; hence that happiness that incites me to rebound from every wall, from every idea, to go running—naked!—through the outskirts of town to tickle the gasometers... the gravestones...

  Days, entire weeks, go by in which nothing disturbs me, not even the suspicion that women might be born with taxi-cab meters between their breasts.

  Moments of such fervor, of such enthusiasm, that I find God everywhere, as I turn a corner, in the drawers of my nightstand, between the pages of books; moments in which, despite all efforts to control myself, I kneel in the middle of the street and shout in a voice virginal and ancient:

  “Long live sperm... though I perish!”

  TWENTY: A CATASTROPHIC MAN

  OFTEN I GO to visit a relative who lives outside of town. While passing through one of the stations—it certainly did not happen by chance!—the train jumped over the platform, demolished the baggage, wiped out the ticket office and the snack shop. The cars stacked up one on top of the other. The boxcar coupled onto the locomotive. There were arms and legs everywhere: under the seats, along the tracks, up in the nets for the luggage.

  Of my compartment all that remains is a splinter from the door. I shove to one side the cadavers that surround me. I straighten my tie and step outside, as cheerful as you please, without a wrinkle in my trousers or in my smile.

  Although I foresee everything that will happen, I have embarked on more than one such journey in the hope that my premonitions will prove mistaken...

  The passengers were the same as always. There was the adulterous husband with his pious, patronizing smile. There was the young lady whose charms are priced in direct proportion to your distance from the coast. There was the seal woman, the tuna woman; the manufacturer of rubber goods leaning on the guard rail and contemplating the immensity of the ocean, which seems to inspire him only with the thought of spitting on it.

  On the third day of the voyage there was heard—in the middle of the night!—a metallic, intestinal screech.

  Half‑naked women! Men in their nightshirts! Tears! Prayers! Screams! As the passengers strangled one another clawing their way to the lifeboats, I managed to reach an in
flatable raft, dove under its tarpaulin cover and, already in the sea, surveyed—with the impassiveness of a cork—the unfolding spectacle.

  It was a horrible sight! The ship pitched, shuddered, nosed under at the prow and slipped beneath the waves.

  Did I have to convince myself one more time that I was the only survivor?

  So as to be sure, I inspected the site of the shipwreck. Here was a lifesaver, a wicker chair... there a school of sharks, a bobbing cadaver...

  I calculated the distance, set a course and, after beating all world records, entered, on the eighth day, the port of disembarkation.

  My friends, those who knew how many similar debacles I had been spared before, surmised at first that what had happened was a simple accident, but, having to admit that these accidents happened so often, to the point of seeming routine, finally had to treat it as a case of authentic predestination.

  Just as there are men whose presence exerts an unerring abortive efficacy, my special faculty is for provoking accidents at every turn, for helping along unforeseen calamity and upsetting the unstable equilibrium on which all existence depends.

  With what anguish, with what anxiety did I confront, in those first days, this propensity for cataclysm!... Life gets complicated when it trips over wreckage at every step!... But the force of habit is invincible... Without noticing, one eventually becomes accustomed to living among disintegrating cadavers andshattered glass, even to the point of discovering the enchantments of floods, the delights of structural collapses, and soon one feels that life acquires color only in the midst of desolation and disaster.

  Note that our mere appearance on the scene is enough to cause caryatids to weary of holding up public edifices and thus to cause the downfall—among their crumbling columns of figures, among their portfolios—of hundreds of moneylenders, who feed on the body politic... and on garbanzo beans!

  Learn to relish—as if they were delicious plates of boiled maize—the temblors that fill us with awe, earthquakes in which bathtubs sprinkle from the eighth floor while dozens of salesgirls are trapped and perish in the elevators, and though blonde are still called Esther!

  Who can deny that before the magnificence of such spectacles mountain landscapes lose all their appeal, even if they are better shaped than the buttocks of the Venus de Milo?

  The exoticism of moths or mastodons, the rites of masonry or mastication—at least as far as I’m concerned—hold not the slightest interest. I need pulverized skeletons, railroad decapitations, unidentifiable corpses drawn-and-quartered, and so great is my love for the spectacular that the day on which it doesn’t produce in me a short circuit, I will expire from sheer disillusionment.

  Under such conditions, my company would be as uncertain as uncertain can be.

  Am I to blame if I prefer conflagrations to third-grade schoolgirls?

  Although most men satisfy themselves with musing on their dreams and waking with the submissiveness of a cuckold, he who has pernoctated among vagabond cadavers will comprehend that the rest seems so much molasses, nothing but molasses.

  I am—and what can I do?—a catastrophic man, and I cannot sleep unless I can hear the rumblings above my bed of the bodies and the belongings of those living on the floors above, and I’m not interested in any woman, if I haven’t already made this clear, unless, as she lies outstretched in my arms, she sets herself on fire in a blazing conflagration in which she is carbonized to ash... poor thing!

  TWENTY-ONE: CURSES

  MAY NOISES bore into your teeth like a dentist’s drill, and may memory fill you with rust, broken words and the stench of decay.

  May a spider’s foot sprout from each of your pores, may you find nourishment only in packs of worn cards and may sleep reduce you, like a steam roller, to the thickness of your photograph.

  When you step into the street, may even the lampposts dog your heels, may an irresistible fanaticism oblige you to prostrate yourself before every garbage pail and may all the inhabitants of the city mistake you for a urinal.

  When you want to say “My love”, may you say “fried fish”; may your own hands try to strangle you at every turn, and every time you go to flick away a cigarette, may it be you who is hurled into the spittoon.

  May your wife deceive you even with the mailboxes; when she snuggles next to you, may she metamorphose into a bloodsucking leech and, after giving birth to a crow, may she bring forth a monkey wrench.

  May your family amuse itself deforming your bone structure, so that mirrors, looking at you, commit suicide out of sheer repugnance; may your only entertainment consist of installing yourself in the waiting rooms of dentists, disguised as a crocodile, and may you fall so passionately in love with a toolbox that you can’t desist, even for an instant, from licking its clasp.

  TWENTY-TWO: DEFENSES AGAINST WOMEN

  WOMEN VAMPIRES are less dangerous than women with a prehensile sex.

  For centuries, we have known various methods for protecting ourselves against the former.

  It is known, for example, that a rubdown with turpentine after a bath will, in the majority of cases, immunize us; this is because the only thing women vampires like about us is the maritime taste of our blood—that remnant that perdures in us from the epochs when we were sharks or crabs.

  The impossibility of their being able to sink their lancet into us in silence reduces, however, the risk of an unforeseen attack. As soon as we hear them coming we play dead because, after sniffing us and confirming that we are not moving, they hover for a moment and leave us alone.

  Against women with a prehensile sex, on the other hand, almost all forms of defense prove ineffective. No doubt prickly underpants and certain other preventatives can offer their advantages, but the violence of the sling with which their sex lashes out at us rarely gives us time to use them; before we notice their presence, they hurl us into a roller-coaster ride of interminable spasms, and our only remedy is to resign ourselves to months of immobility, if we hope to recover the kilos we have lost in an instant.

  Nevertheless, among the creations of sexuality’s inventory, those already mentioned are the least dreadful. Much greater dangers, indisputably, proceed from electric women, for one simple reason: electric women operate at a distance. Undetectably, across time and space, they charge us up like a battery, until suddenly we enter into such intimate contact with them that we find ourselves sharing the same currents and hosting the same parasites.

  It’s useless to isolate ourselves like hermits or pianos. Asbestos pants and testicular lightning rods afford zero protection. Our flesh, little by little, acquires magnetic properties. The thumbtacks, pins and bottle caps that perforate our epidermis make us kin with those African fetishes pierced with pieces of rusted iron. Progressively, the high-tension discharges putting our nerves to the test galvanize us from the tops of our skulls to the tips of our toes. Hundreds of sparks escape from our pores every instant, obliging us to live in nakedness. All the way up to that little-contemplated day, when the woman who has been electrifying us intensifies her sexual discharges to such a degree that she ends up electrocuting us in a spluttering spasm of disruptions, disconnections and fizzling short circuits.

  TWENTY-THREE: SOLIDARITY

  ONE CAN CONTEST my ornithologic erudition and the efficacy of my chess openings. It never fails that some dolt will deny the astronomical accuracy of my horoscopes. But no one—and that’s a fact!—will ever take it into his head to doubt, even for an instant, my perfect, my absolute solidarity.

  A colony of microbes has lodged itself in some young lady’s lungs? I am in solidarity with the microbes, the lungs and the young lady. It occurs to a student to wait for a streetcar inside a married woman’s clothes closet? I am in solidarity with the closet, the woman, the streetcar, the student and the wait.

  At all hours of the night, on national holidays, on the anniversary of the discovery of America, I am disposed to solidarize with whatever may be, a victim of my universal solidarity.

 
; It is useless, completely useless, for me to resist. Solidarity is already a reflex in me, something as unconscious as the dilation of my pupils. If, for a hundredth of a second, I came to desolidarize myself from my solidarity, in the hundredth of a second that followed I would succumb to a veritable maelstrom of solidarity.

  I am in solidarity with the waves without sails... without hope. In solidarity with the shipwreck of whale-calf señoras, with the sharks in tuxedos who gobble up their bellies and their handbags. In solidarity with the handbags, the whale calves and the tuxedos.

  In solidarity with the servants and the rats that move through the subsoil, along with abortions and wilted flowers.

  In solidarity with automobiles, with decomposing cadavers, with telephonic communications cut short at the same time as pearl chokers and hangmen’s nooses.

  In solidarity with the skeletons that multiply almost as fast as personal files, with stomachs that ingest tons of sardines and bicarbonate of soda, swollen like glutted reservoirs and warehouses groaning with lost objects.

  In solidarity with postal workers, wet nurses, colonels, pedicurists and contrabandists.

  I am in solidarity by dint of predestination and by dutiful vocation. In solidarity by virtue of atavism, by virtue of convention. In solidarity in perpetuity. In solidarity with the insolidarious and in solidarity with my own solidarity.

  TWENTY-FOUR: THE INESCAPABLE

  ON THE 31st of February, at 9:15 p.m., all the inhabitants of the city became convinced that death was inescapable.

  This evidence, having become the focal point of everyone’s attention, took on the life of a spider in the folds of our circumvolutions, weaving its web in every consciousness, boring into our brains until it soaked them up like a sponge.