Читать книгу Selected Writings of César Vallejo - César Vallejo - Страница 19

FROM Scales

NORTHWESTERN WALL

Penumbra.

The only cell mate left now sits down to eat in front of the horizontal window of our dungeon, a barred little opening in the upper half of the cell door, where he takes refuge in the orange anguish of evening’s full bloom.

I turn toward him.

“Shall we?”

“Let’s. Please be served,” he replies with a smile.

While looking at his bullish profile thrown against the folded bright red leaf of the open window, my gaze locks onto an almost aerial spider, seemingly made of smoke, emerging in absolute stillness on the wood, a half meter above the man’s head. The westerly wind wafts an ocher glitter upon the tranquil weaver, as if to bring her into focus. She has undoubtedly felt the warm solar breeze, as she stretches out some of her limbs with drowsy lackadaisical languor, and then she starts taking fitful downward steps, until stopping flush with the man’s beard so that, while he chews, it appears as if he were gobbling up the tiny beast.

And as he finally finishes eating, the animal flanks out in a sprint for the door hinges, just as the man swings the door shut. Something has happened. I go up and reopen the door, examine the hinges, and find the body of the poor wanderer, mashed and transformed into scattered filaments.

“You’ve killed a spider,” I say to him with evident enthusiasm.

“Have I?” he asks with indifference. “All the better: this place is roach motel anyway.”

And as if nothing had happened, he begins to pace the length of the cell, picking food from his teeth and spitting it out profusely.

Justice! This idea comes to mind.

I know that this man has just harmed an anonymous, yet existing and real being. And the spider, on the other hand, has inadvertently pushed the poor innocent man to the point of murder. Don’t both, then, deserve to be judged for their actions? Or is such a means of justice foreign to the human spirit? When is man the judge of man?

He who’s unaware of the temperature, the sufficiency with which he finishes one thing or begins another; who’s unaware of the nuance by which what’s white is white and the degree to which it’s white; who is and will be unaware of the moment when we begin to live, the moment when we begin to die, when we cry, when we laugh, when sound limits with form the lips that say: I … he won’t figure out, nor can he, the degree of truth to which a fact qualified as criminal IS criminal. He who’s unaware of the instant when 1 stops being 1 and starts being 2, who even within mathematical exactitude lacks wisdom’s unconquerable plenitude—how could he ever manage to establish the fundamental and criminal moment of any action, through the warp of fate’s whims, within the great powered gears that move beings and things in front of things and beings?

Justice is not a human function. Nor can it be. Justice operates tacitly, deeper inside than all insides, in the courts and the prisoners. Justice—listen up, men of all latitudes!—is carried out in subterranean harmony, on the flipside of the senses and in the cerebral swings of street fairs. Hone down your hearts! Justice passes beneath every surface, behind everyone’s backs. Lend subtler an ear to its fatal drumroll, and you will hear its only vigrant cymbal that, by the power of love, is smashed in two—its cymbal as vague and uncertain as the traces of the crime itself or of what is generally called crime.

Only in this way is justice infallible: when it’s not seen through the tinted enticements of the judges, when it’s not written in the codes, when there’s no longer a need for jails or guards.

Therefore, justice is not, cannot be, carried out by men, not even before the eyes of men.

No one is ever a criminal. Or we all are always criminals.

[JM]

________________

ANTARCTIC WALL

Desire magnetizes us.

She, at my side, in the bedchamber, charges and charges the mysterious circuit with volts by the thousand per second. There’s an unimaginable drop that drips and pools and burns wherever I turn, trying to escape; a drop that’s nowhere and trembles, sings, cries, wails through all five senses and my heart, and then finally flows like electrical current to the tips …

I quickly sit up, leap toward the fallen woman, who kindly confided in me her warm welcome, and then … a warm drop that splashes on my skin, separates me from my sister, who stays back in the environs of the dream that I wake up from overwhelmed.

Gasping for breath, confused, bullish my temples, it pierces my heart with pain.

Two … Three … Foooooouuuuur! … Only the angry guards’ voices reach the dungeon’s sepulchral gloom. The cathedral clock tolls two in the morning.

Why with my sister? Why with her, who now must surely be sleeping in a mild innocent calm? Why did it have to be her?

I roll over in bed. Strange perspectives resume their movements in the darkness, fuzzy specters. I hear the rain begin to fall.

Why with my sister? I think I’m running a fever. I’m suffering.

And now I hear my own breathing rise, fall, collide, and graze the pillow. Is it my breathing? Some cartilaginous breath of an invisible death appears to mix with mine, descending perhaps from a pulmonary system of Suns and then, with its sweaty self, permeating the first of the earth’s pores. And that old-timer who suddenly stops yelling? What’s he going to do? Ah! He turns toward a young Franciscan who rises up from his imperial dawn-ward genuflection, as if facing a crumbling altar. The old man walks up to him and, with an angry expression, tears off the wide-cut sacred habit that the priest was wearing … I turn my head. Ah, immense palpitating cone of darkness, at whose distant nebulous vortex, at whose final frontier, a naked woman in the living flesh is glowing! …

Oh woman! Let us love each other to the nth degree. Let us be scorched by every crucible. Let us be cleansed by all the storms. Let us unite in body and soul. Let us love each other absolutely, through every death.

Oh flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone! Do you recall those budding passions, those bandaged anxieties of our eight years? Remember that spring morning warmed by the sierra’s spontaneous sun, when, having played so late the night before, we, in our shared bed sleeping late, awoke in each other’s arms and, after realizing that we were alone, shared a nude kiss on our virgin lips. Remember that your flesh and mine were magnetized, our friction course and blind; and also remember that we were thenceforth still good and pure and that ours was the impalpable pureness of animals …

Oneself the end of our departure; oneself the alvine equator of our mischief, you in the front, I behind. We have loved each other—don’t you recall?—when the minute had yet to become a lifetime. In the world we’ve come to see ourselves through lovers’ eyes after the bleakness of an absence.

Oh, Lady Supreme! Wipe from your bona fide eyes the blinding dust kicked up on winding roads and tergiversate your concrete climb. And rise higher even still! Be the complete woman, the entire chord! Oh flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone! … Oh my sister, my wife, my mother!

And I break down into tears until dawn.

“Good morning, Mr. Mayor …”

[JM]

________________

EAST WALL

Wait. I can’t figure out how to get this going. Wait. Now.

Aim here, right where the tip of my left hand’s longest finger is touching. Don’t back down, don’t be afraid. Just aim here. Now!

Vrrrooommm …

So, now a projectile bathes in the waters of the four pumps that have just combusted in my chest. The recoil sears and burns. Thirst ominously saharangues my throat and devours my gut …

Yet I hear three lonely sounds bombard and completely dominate two ports and their three-boned piers that, oh, are always just a hair shy of sinking. I perceive those tragic and thricey sounds quite distinctively, almost one by one.

The first comes from one errant strand of hair still mincing upon the thick tongue of night.

The second sound is a bud, an eternal self-revelation, an endless announcement. It’s a herald. It constantly circles a tender ovoid waist like a hand carved from a shell. Thus it always appears and can never blow past the last wind. So it’s ever-beginning, the sound of all humanity.

The final sound. The one final sound watches over with precision, pedestyled in the clearing of those communicating vessels. In this final blow of harmony, thirst dissipates (one of threat’s little windows slams shut) and acquires a different sensation, becomes what it was not, until it reaches the counter key.

And the projectile in the blood of my stranded heart

used to sing

to make plumes

in vain has forced its way in order to put me to death.

“And so?”

“This is the one I’ve got to sign twice, Mr. Scribe. Is it in duplicate?”

[SJL/JM]

________________

DOUBLEWIDE WALL

On this swelter of a night, one of my inmates tells me the story of his trial. He finishes the abstruse narration, stretches out on his soiled cot, and hums a yaraví.

I now possess the truth of his conduct.

This man is a criminal. His mask of innocence transparent, the criminal has been arrested. Through the course of his prattle, my soul has followed him, step-by-step, through his unlawful act. Between us we’ve festered through days and nights of idleness, garnished with arrogant alcohol, chuckling dentures, aching guitar strings, razor blades on guard, drunken bouts of sweat and disgust. We’ve disputed with the defenseless companion who cries for her man to quit drinking, to work and earn some dough for the kids, so that God sees … And then, with our dried-out guts thriving on booze, each dawn we’d take the brutal plunge into the street, slamming the door on the groaning offspring’s own fat lips.

I’ve suffered with him the fleeting calls to dignity and regeneration; I’ve confronted both sides of the coin; I’ve doubted and even felt the crunching of the heel that insinuated a one-eighty. One morning this barfly, in great pain, thought about going on the straight and narrow, left to look for a job, then ran into an old friend and took a turn for the worse. In the end, he stole out of necessity. And now, given what his legal representative is saying, his sentence isn’t far off.

This man is a thief.

But he’s also a killer.

One night, during the most boisterous of benders, he strolls through bloody intersections of the ghetto, while at the same time, an old-timer who, then holding down an honest job, is on his way home from work. Walking up next to him, the drinker takes him by the arm, invites him in, gets him to share in his adventure, and the upright man accepts, though much to his regret.

Fording the earth ten elbows deep, they return after midnight through dark allies. The irreproachable man with alarming diphthongs brings the drinker to a halt; he takes him by the side, stands him up, and berates the shameless scum, “Come on! This is what you like. You don’t have a choice anymore.”

And suddenly a sentence bursts forth in flames and emerges from the darkness: “Hold it right there! …”

An assault of anonymous knives. Botched, the target of the attack, the blade doesn’t pierce the flesh of the drunkard but mistakenly and fatally punctures the good worker.

Therefore, this man is also a killer. But the courts, naturally, do not suspect, nor will they ever, the third hand of the thief.

Meanwhile, he keeps doing pushups on that suspicious cot of his, while humming his sad yaraví.

[JM]

________________

WINDOWSILL

I’m pasty. While I comb my hair, in the mirror I notice that the bags under my eyes have grown even blacker and bluer and that the hue of my shaved face’s angular copper has scathingly jaundiced.

I’m old. I wipe my brow with the towel, and a horizontal stripe highlighted by abundant pleats is highlighted therein like a cue of an implacable funeral march … I’m dead.

My cell mate has gotten up early and is making the dark tea that we customarily take in the morning, with the stale bread of a new hopeless sun.

We sit down afterward at the bare table, where the melancholic breakfast steams, within two teacups that have no saucers. And these cups afoot, white as ever and so clean, this bread still warm on the small rolled tablecloth from Damascus, all this domestic morning-time aroma reminds me of my family’s house, my childhood in Santiago de Chuco, those breakfasts of eight to ten siblings from the oldest to youngest, like the reeds of an antara,⁵⁶ among them me, the last of all, glued to the side of the dining room table, with the flowing hair that one of my younger sisters has just endeavored to comb, in my left hand a whole piece of sweet roll—it had to be whole!—and with my right hand’s rosy fingers, crouching down to hide the sugar granule by granule …

Ah! The little boy that took the sugar from his good mother, who, after finding our hideout, sat down to snuggle with us, putting in timeout the couple of fleabags up to no good.

“My poor little son. Some day he won’t have anyone to hide the sugar from, when he’s all grown up, and his mother has died.”

And the first meal of the day was coming to an end, while mother’s two blazing tears were soaking her Nazarene braids.

[JM]

________________

BEYOND LIFE AND DEATH

Hackneyed rockrose of July; wind belted around each of the great grain’s one-armed petioles that gravitate inside it; dead lust upon omphaloid hillsides of the summertime sierra. Wait. This can’t be. Let’s sing again. Oh, how sweet a dream!

My horse trotted that away. After being out of town for eleven years, that day I finally drew near to Santiago, where I was born. The poor irrational thing pushed on, and from all my being to my tired fingers that held onto the reins, through the attentive ears of the quadruped and returning though the trotting of the hooves that mimicked a stationary jig, in the mysterious score-keeping trial of the road and the unknown, I wept for my mother who, dead for two years now, would no longer be waiting the return of her wandering wayward son. The whole region, its mild climate, the color of harvest in the lime afternoon, and also a farmhouse around here that recognized my soul, stirred up in me a nostalgic filial ecstasy, and my lips grew almost completely chapped from suckling the eternal nipple, the ever lactating nipple of my mother; yes, ever lactating, even beyond death.

As a boy I had surely passed by there with her. Yes. For sure. But, no. It wasn’t with me that she’d crossed those fields. Back then I was too young. It was with my father—how long ago must that have been! Ah … It was also in July, with the Saint James festival not far off. Father and mother rode atop their mules; he in the lead. The royal path. Perhaps my father who had just dodged a crash with a wandering maguey:

“Señora … Watch out! …”

My poor mother didn’t have enough time and was thrown from her saddle onto the stones of the path. They took her back to town on a stretcher. I cried a lot for my mother, and they didn’t tell me what had happened. She recovered. The night before the festival, she was cheerful and smiling, no longer in bed, and everything was fine. I didn’t even cry for my mother.

But now I was crying more, remembering her as she was sick, laid out, when she loved me more and showed me more affection and also gave me more sweetbread from underneath her cushions and from the nightstand drawer. Now I was crying more, drawing near to Santiago, where I’d only find her dead, buried beneath the ripe fragrant mustard plants of a poor cemetery.

My mother had passed away two years earlier. The news of her death first reached me in Lima, where I also learned that my father and siblings had set out on a trip to a faraway plantation owned by an uncle of ours, to ease the pain, as best one can, of such a terrible loss. The country estate was located in the most remote region on the mountain, on the far side of the Río Marañón. From Santiago I’d head that way, devouring unending trails of precipitous puna and unknown blistering jungles.

My animal suddenly started huffing. Fine dust kicked up abundantly with a gentle breeze, blinding me nearly. A pile of barley. And then, Santiago came into view, on its jagged plateau, with its dark brown rooftops facing the already horizontal sun. And still, toward the east, on the ledge of a brazil-yellow promontory stood the pantheon carved at that hour by the 6:00 p.m. tincture; and I couldn’t go any farther, as an atrocious sorrow had seized me.

I reached the town just as night did. I made the last turn, and as I entered the street that my house was on, I saw someone sitting alone on the bench in front of the door. He was alone. Very alone. So much so that, choking on my soul’s mystical grief, I was frightened by him. It must’ve also been due to the almost inert peace with which, stuck by the penumbra’s half strength, his silhouette was leaning against the whitewashed face of the wall. A particular bluster of nerves dried my tears. I moved on. From the bench jumped my older brother, Ángel, and he gave me a helpless hug. He’d come from the plantation on business only a few days earlier.

That night, after a frugal meal, we stayed up until dawn. I walked through the rooms, hallways, and patios of the house; even while making a visible effort to skirt that desire of mine to go through our dear ole house, Ángel also seemed to take pleasure in the torture of someone who ventures through the phantasmal domain of life’s only past.

During his few days in Santiago, Ángel did not leave home, where, according to him, everything lay just as it was left after Mom’s death. He also told me about the state of her health during the days preceding the fatal pain and what her agony was like. Oh, the brotherly embrace scratched at our guts and suctioned out new tears of frozen tenderness and mourning!

“Ah, this bread box, where I used to ask Mom for bread, with big crocodile tears!” And I opened a little door with plain dilapidated panels.

As in all rustic constructions of the Peruvian sierra, where each doorway is almost always accompanied by a bench, alongside the threshold I’d just crossed, there sat the same one from my boyhood, without a doubt, repaired and shined countless times. With the rickety door open, we each took a seat on the bench, and there we lit the sad-eyed lantern that we were carrying. Its firelight went in full gallop onto Ángel’s face, which grew more tired from one moment to the next, while night ran its course and we pressed on the wound some more, until it almost seemed transparent. As I noticed his state, I hugged him and, with kisses, covered his severe bearded cheeks that once again got soaked in tears.

A flash in the sky, without any thunder, the kind that comes from far away, during the highland summer, emptied the guts of night. I kept wiping Ángel’s eyelids. And neither he nor the lantern, nor the bench, nor anything else was there. I couldn’t hear. I felt like I was in a tomb.

Then I could see again: my brother, the lantern, the bench. But I thought I saw in Ángel a refreshed complexion now, mild and perhaps I was mistaken—let’s say he looked as though he’d overcome his previous affliction and gauntness. Perhaps, I repeat, this was a visual error on my part, since such a change is inconceivable.

“I feel like I still see her,” I continued weeping, “without the poor thing knowing what to do about that gift, she keeps scolding me, ‘I caught you, you little liar; you pretend you’re crying when you’re secretly laughing!’ And she kissed me more than all of you, since I was the youngest!”

After the vigil, Ángel again seemed broken up and, as before the flash of light, shockingly emaciated. I’d surely suffered a momentary loss of sight, brought on by the strike of the meteor’s light, when I found in his physiognomy relief and freshness that, naturally, couldn’t have been there.

The dawn had yet to crack the following day when I mounted up and left for the plantation, bidding farewell to Ángel, who’d stay a few days more for the matters that had motivated his arrival to Santiago.

With the first leg of the journey behind me, an inexplicable event took place. At an inn I was leaning back, resting on a bench, when from the hut an old woman suddenly stared at me with an alarmed expression.

“What happened to your face?” she asked out of pity. “Good God! It’s covered in blood …”

I jumped up from the bench and, in the mirror, confirmed that my face was speckled with dried bloodstains. A giant shudder gripped me, and I wanted to run from myself. Blood? From where? I had touched my face to Ángel’s, who was crying … But … No. No. Where was that blood from? One will understand the terror and shock that knotted my chest with a thousand thoughts. Nothing is comparable with that jolt of my heart. There are no words to express it now, nor will there ever be. And today, in the solitary room where I write, there’s that aged blood and my face smeared with it and the old woman from the wayside inn and the journey and my brother who cries and whom I don’t kiss and my dead mother and …

… After tracing the lines on my face, I fled onto the balcony, panting in a cold sweat. So frightening and overwhelming is the memory of that scarlet mystery …

Oh nightmarish night in that unforgettable shack, where the image of my mother, between struggles of strange endless threads that later snapped just from being seen, became the image of Ángel, who wept glowing rubies, for ever and never!⁵⁷

I kept to the road, and, finally, after a week on horseback through the high peaks, temperate mountain terrain, and crossing the Marañón, one morning I reached the outskirts of the plantation. The overcast space intermittently reverberated with claps of thunder and fleeting sun showers.

I dismounted alongside the post of the gate to the house near the driveway. Some dogs barked in the mild sad calm of the sooty mountain. After so long I now returned to that solitary mansion, buried deep in the ravines of the jungle!

Between the garrulous alarm of riled up domesticated birds, a voice that called and contained the mastiffs inside seemed to be strangely whiffed by the weary trembling soliped who several times sneezed, perked his ears forward almost horizontally, and by bucking tried to get the reins out of my hands in an attempt to escape. The enormous door was locked. I knocked on it mechanically. Yet the voice kept trilling from inside the walls, and, as the gigantic doors opened with a frightening creak, that oral doorbell rose over all sixteen of my years and handed me Eternity blade first. Both doors had swung open.

Meditate briefly on this incredible event that breaks the laws of life and death and surpasses all possibility; word of hope and faith between absurdity and infinity, undeniable nebulous disconnect of time and space that brings on tears of unknowable inharmonious harmonies!

My mother appeared and wrapped me in her arms!

“My son,” she exclaimed in astonishment. “You’re alive? You’ve come to life? What’s this I see before me, Lord Almighty?”

My mother! My mother in body and soul. Alive! And with so much life that today I think I felt in her presence two desolate hailstones of decrepitude suddenly emerge in my nostrils and then fall and weigh on my heart until making me hunch over in senility, as if, by dint of a fantastic trick of fate, my mother had just been born and I, on the other hand, had come from times so remote that I experienced a paternal feeling toward her. Yes. My mother was there. Dressed in unanimous black. Alive. No longer dead. Could it be? No. Impossible. There’s no way. That woman wasn’t my mother. She couldn’t be. And what did she say when she saw me? She thought I was dead …?

“Oh my son!” my mother said, bursting into tears, and she ran to pull me close to her breasts, in that frenzy and with those tears of joy that she would always use to protect me during my arrivals and departures.

I had turned to stone. I saw her wrap her lovely arms around my neck, kiss me avidly, as though she wanted to devour me, and weep her affection that will never again rain down in my guts. She then coarsely took my impassive face between her hands, looked at me head on, asking question after question. A few seconds later, I started to cry too, but without changing my expression or attitude: my tears were pure water that poured from a statue’s two pupils.

I finally focused all the diffused lights of my spirit. I took a few steps back and stood before—oh my God!—that maternity that my heart didn’t want to receive, that it didn’t know, that it feared; I made them appear before the mysterious holiest of whens, till then unbeknown to me, and I let out a mute double-edged scream in her presence, with the same beat of the hammer that comes close and then withdraws from the anvil, the same that the child lets out with his first groan, when he’s pulled from his mother’s womb, indicating to her that he’s going to live in the world and, at once, that he’s giving her a signal by which they can recognize each other for centuries on end. And I groaned beside myself.

“Never! Never! My mother died long ago. This can’t be …”

She sat up, startled by my words, as if she doubted whether it was me. She pulled me in again between her arms, and we both continued to cry tears that no living being has ever cried or will ever cry again.

“Yes,” I repeated to her. My mother already died. My brother Ángel knows this too.”

And here the bloodstains she’d noticed on my face passed through my mind as signs of another world.

“But my dear son!” she whispered almost effortlessly. “Are you my dead son that I myself saw in the casket? Yes! It’s you! I believe in God! Come to my arms! But, what? … Can’t you see that I’m your mother? Look at me! Look at me! Touch me, my son! What, don’t you think it’s me?”

I beheld her again, touched her adorable salt-and-pepper head, but nothing. I didn’t believe her one bit.

“Yes, I see you,” I replied. “I’m touching you, but I don’t believe it. Such impossibilities just can’t happen.”

And I laughed with all my strength!

[JM]

________________

THE RELEASE

Yesterday I was at the Panopticon print shops to correct a set of page proofs.

The shop manager is a convict, a good guy, like all the criminals of the world. Young, smart, very polite, Solís, that’s his name, he’s whipped together excellent intelligence and told me his story, revealed his complaints, unveiled his pain.

“Out of the five hundred prisoners here,” he says, “only as many as a third deserve to be punished like this. The others don’t; the others are as or more moral than the judges who sentenced them.”

His eyes scope out⁵⁸ the trim of who knows what invisible bitter plate. Eternal injustice! One of the workers comes up to me. Tall, broad-shouldered, he walks up jubilantly.

“Good afternoon,” he says. “How are you?” And he shakes my hand with lively effusion.

I don’t recognize him, so I ask him his name.

“You don’t remember me? I’m Lozano. We did time together in the Trujillo penitentiary. I was so glad to hear that the court acquitted you.”

Just like that. I remember him. Poor guy. He was sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiring in a murder.

The thoughtful man walks away.

“What!” Solís inquires with surprise. “You were in prison too?”

“I was,” I reply. “Indeed I was, my friend.”

And I in turn explain the circumstances of my imprisonment in Trujillo, charged with frustrated arson, robbery, and sedition …

“If you’ve done time in Trujillo,” he says smilingly, “then you ought to have met Jesús Palomino, who’s from that department. He drained away twelve years in this prison.”

I remember.

“There you go,” he adds. “That man was an innocent victim of the poor organization of the justice system.” He falls silent for a few moments and, after looking me in the face with a piercing gaze, decisively breaks out, “I’m going to tell you off the cuff what happened to Palomino here.”

The afternoon is gray and rainy. Metallic machinery and linotypes painfully hang clanging in the damp, dark air. I turn my eyes and in the distance notice the chubby face of a prisoner who smiles kindly among the black steel bits in movement. He’s my worker, the one who’s paginating my book. This bastard won’t stop smiling. It’s as though he’s lost the true feeling of his misfortune or has become an idiot.

Solís coughs and, with a toilsome inflection, begins his tale: “Palomino was a good man. It turns out that he was swindled in a cynical, insulting way by a hardened criminal never convicted by the courts, since he was from an upper-class family. Verging on misery, as Palomino was, and as a result of a violent altercation between these two, the unforeseeable occurred: a gunshot, a dead body, the Panopticon. After being locked up in here, the poor man endured sinister nightmares. It was horrendous. Even those of us who used to watch him were forced to suffer his hellish contagion! It was awful! Death would’ve been better. Yes, indeed. Death would’ve been better! …”

The tranquil narrator wants to weep. He noticeably relives his past with clarity, since his eyes moisten and he has to pause in silence for a moment, so as not to show in his voice that he’s started to sob in his soul.

“When I think about it,” he adds, “I don’t know how Palomino resisted so much. His was a torment beyond words. I don’t know through which channels he was informed that someone was plotting to poison him inside the prison and had been doing so even prior to his incarceration. The family of the man he killed prosecuted him far beyond his misfortune. They weren’t satisfied with his fifteen-year sentence or with the way it dragged his family into clamorous ruin: they carried their thirst for revenge even lower. And then they would hide behind the cellar doorjambs and between one spore and the next of the lichens that grow on incarcerated fingers, in search of the most secret passageways of the prison; and so they would move around here, with more freedom than before in the light of day for this unjust sentence, and they would flutter their infamous ambushy eyelashes in the air that the prisoner had no choice but to breathe. Being notified of that, Palomino, as you’ll imagine, suffered a terrible shock; he knew it and could do nothing from then on to make it disappear. A man of good stature, like him, feared such a death, not for himself, of course, but for her and for them, the innocent offspring skewered with stigma and orphanhood. Hence, the minute-by-minute anxiety and fright in the everyday fight for his life. Ten years had passed like this when I saw him for the first time. In his soul there awoke that tormented, not pity and compassion, but religious and almost inexplicable beatific transformation. He didn’t evoke pity. His heart was filled with something perhaps milder and calmer and nearly sweet. When I looked at him, I no longer felt compelled to unlock his shackles or dress the blackish-green wounds that were open at the end of all his ends. I wouldn’t have done any of that. In the face of such a plea, such a superhuman attitude of dread, I always wanted to leave him as he was, to march out step-by-step, startled, with pauses, line-by-line, toward the fatal crossroads, toward death under oath, so much has time revealed. Back then Palomino no longer sought help. He only filled his heart with something more vague and ideal, more serene and sweet; and it was pleasant, a merciful pleasure, to let him climb his hill, to let him walk through the hallways in the dark, entering and exiting the cold cells, in his horrendous game of shaky trapezes, agonizingly flying toward fate, with no fixed point for him to catch. With his fleecy red beard and eyes polar algae green, tattered uniform, skittish, abashed, he always seemed to see everything. An obstinate gesture of disbelief bounced off his dreadful just man lips, his vermilion hair, his mended pants and even his handicapped fingers that sought, in the full extent of his prisoner chapel, a safe place to lean and rest, without ever being able to find one. How many times I saw him at death’s door! During work one day, he came to the print shop. Silent, pensive, taciturn, Palomino was cleaning some black rubber belts in a corner of the shop, and from time to time, he’d shoot a most watchful glance at his surroundings, making his eyeballs furtively roll, with the visionary air of a nocturnal bird that catches sight of dreadful ghosts. He suddenly jerked back. On repeated occasions I had caught one of his coworkers casting, from one landmark to the next, noticeable expressions and uttering strange words of subtle aversion, perhaps without a reason, on the other side of the shop. Since their intention couldn’t have been pleasing to my friend, given the background story I’ve already mentioned, such behavior caused him to experience an awkward jolt and a sharp stinging sensation that frayed his every nerve. The gratuitous hater, in turn, was surprised when he noticed this and, serenity now lost, poured out a few drops from a glass carafe with rather meaningful clumsiness and alarm; the color and density of the liquid was almost completely enveloped and veiled by a winged spiral of smoke coming from over by the motors. I don’t know how to describe where those long mysterious tears ending up falling, but the man who shed them continued rifling through his work tools, each time with more visible alarm until he couldn’t possibly have been aware of what he was doing. Palomino observed him without moving, overwhelmed by thought, with his eyes fixed, hanging on that maneuver that caused in him intense expectation and distressing anxiety. Then the worker’s hands proceeded to assemble a lead ingot between other bars resting on the workbench. Palomino took his eyes off him and, dumbfounded, absorbed, downcast, he superimposed circles on the wounded fantasy of suspicion, released affinities, discovered more knots, reharnessed fatal intentions and summited sinister staircases … Another day a mysterious guest came in off the street. She went up to the typesetter and spoke to him at length: their words were indecipherable with all the noise of the shop. Palomino jumped up, stared at her carefully, studying her from head to toe, pale with fear … ‘Look, Palomino!’ I consoled him. ‘Just forget about it; there’s no way.’ And he, in every response, rested his forehead on his hands, stained from being shut in and abandoned, defeated, powerless. Only a few months after they brought me here, he was the closest, most loyal and righteous friend I had.”

Solís becomes visibly emotional and so do I.

“Are you cold?” he asks with sudden tenderness.

For a while the large room has been filled with a dense fog that turns blue in strange veils around the hourglasses of red light. Through the high-reaching windows one can see that it’s still raining. It really is quite cold.

Notes dispersed from distant sight-singing, as if from between compacted cotton impregnated by swarfs of ice. It’s the penitentiary band rehearsing the Peruvian national anthem. Those notes resound, and in my spirit they exert an unexpected suggestion, to the extent that I almost feel the very lyrics of the song, syllable after syllable, set in, nailed with gigantic spikes into each of the wayward sounds. The notes crisscross, iterate, stamp, squeal, reiterate, and destroy timid bevels.

“Ah, what torture that man endured!” the prisoner exclaims with rising pity. And he continues narrating between ongoing silences, during which he undoubtedly tries to ensnare terrible memories:

“His was an indestructible obsession to keep from falling, consolidated by God knows who. Many people said, ‘Palomino is mad.’ Mad! Is it possible for someone to be mad who, under normal circumstances, is concerned for his endangered existence? And is it possible for someone to be mad who, suffering the claws of hate, even with the very complicity of the justice system, takes steps to avoid that danger and to try to put an end to it with all his exacerbated might of a man who deems everything possible, based on his own painful experience? Mad? No! Too sane perhaps! With that formidable persuasion over such unquestionably possible consequences, who gave him such an idea? Although Palomino had often exposed the hidden grim wires that, according to him, could inwardly vibrate to the very threat of his existence, it was hard for me to clearly see that danger. ‘Because you don’t know those wicked men,” Palomino grumbled undaunted. After arguing with him all I could, I fell silent. ‘They write to me at my house,’ he said to me another day, ‘and they make me see it all over again; while my release could come soon, they’d pay any sum to keep me from getting out. Yes. Today more than ever, danger is at my side, my friend …’ And his final words choked me with thrashing sobs. The truth is that, facing Palomino’s constant despair, I ended up suffering, at times, and especially as of late, sudden and profound crises of concern for his life, admitting the possibility of some form of even the darkest treachery, and I even verified for myself, arguing with the rest of the inmates, thereby testing, with who knows what kind of unexpected grounds of decisive weight, the sensibility with which Palomino was reasoning. But that’s not all. Occasions also arose when it wasn’t doubt I was feeling, but an indisputable certainty of the danger, and I myself left him and went to the meeting with new suspicions and vehement warnings of my own, about the horror of what could transpire, and this is exactly what he did when he was calmly standing in some visionary oblivion. I loved him very much, it’s true; his situation was of great interest to me, always scared stiff from head to toe; and I tacitly helped him search for the carabids⁵⁹ of his nightmare. In the end, I actually investigated the concealed pockets and minor actions of countless inmates and officers at the establishment, in search of the hidden hair of his imminent tragedy … all this is true. However, given what I’ve said, you’ll also see that by taking so much interest in Palomino, I slowly became his torturer, one of his own executioners. ‘You be careful!’ I’d say to him with foreboding anguish. Palomino would jump in place and, trembling, turn in every direction, wanting to escape and not knowing where to go. And then we both felt terrible despair, fenced in by the invulnerable, implacable, absolute, eternal stone walls. Of course, Palomino barely ate. How could he be expected to? He barely drank too. He might not have breathed. In each morsel he saw latent deadly poison. In each drop of water, each atom of the atmosphere, his tenacious scrupulousness nuanced to the brink of hyperesthesia made the most trivial movements of other people seem related to nutrition. One morning, someone at his side was eating a roll. Palomino saw him lifting the piece of stale bread to his lips, and in an energetic expression of repulsion, he spat in his face repeatedly. ‘You better always be careful!’ I’d repeat more often each day. Two, three, four times a day this alarm would sound between us. I’d let it out, knowing that this way Palomino would take better care of himself and thereby stay further away from the danger. It seemed to me that when I hadn’t recently reminded him of the fateful disquiet, he just might forget it and then—woe betide him! … Where was Palomino? … Thrust forward by my vigilante fraternity, in a snap I made my way to him and whispered in his ear these garbled words, ‘You better be careful!’ Thus I felt more at ease, since I could be sure that for the next few hours nothing would happen to my friend. One day I repeated this more times than I ever had before. Palomino heard me, and after the ensuing commotion, he surely was thanking me in his mind and heart. But, I must remind you once more: on this road I crossed the limits of love and goodness for Palomino and I turned into his principle torturer—his personal henchman. I started realizing the double meaning of my behavior. ‘But,’ I said to myself in my conscience, ‘be that as it may, an irrevocable command of my soul has invested in me the power to be his guardian, caretaker of his security, and I shall never turn back for anything.’ My alarming voice would forever beat alongside his, on his angst-filled nights, as an alarm clock, as a shield, as a defense. Yes. I wouldn’t turn back, not for anything. Once, late into the night, I awoke in a sweat, as a result of having felt a mysterious vibrant shock in the middle of a dream. Perhaps an open valve of strife was throwing a bucket of cold water on my chest. I woke up, possessed by immense joy, a winged joy, as though an exhausting weight had suddenly been lifted, or as if a gallows had jumped out of my neck, all busted up. It was a diaphanous, pure, blind joy, I don’t know why, and in the darkness it stretched out and fluttered in my heart. I fully woke up, regained consciousness, and my joy reached its end: I’d dreamed that Palomino had been poisoned. By the following day, that dream had overwhelmed me, with increasing palpitations at the crossroads: Death—Life. In reality I felt utterly seized by him. Harsh winds of unnerving fever charged my wrists, temples, and chest. I must’ve looked sick, no doubt, since my temples and head were heavier than ever and my soul mourned its grave sorrows. In the evening, it fell to Palomino and me to work together at the press. As they do now, the black steel bits were clanging, smacking into one another as if in an argument, scraping against one another. Hell-bent on saving themselves, they were spinning madly and faster than ever. Throughout the entire morning and into the afternoon, that stubborn irreducible dream stayed with me. And, yet, for some reason, I didn’t shy away from him. I felt him at my side, laughing and crying in turn, showing me, impulsively, one of his hands, the left one black, the other one white, extremely white, and both always coming together with strange isochronism, at an impeccable terrifying crossroads: Death—Life! Life—Death! Throughout the day (and here I also forget why) not once did the vigilant alert from before reach my lips. Not once. My prior dream seemed to seal my mouth shut to keep from spilling such a word, with its right whitening luminous hand of fleeting, limitless, blue luminosity. Suddenly, Palomino whispered in my ears with a contained explosion of pity and impotence: ‘I’m thirsty.’ Immediately, driven by my constant obliging fraternity with him, I filled a reddish clay pitcher and brought it for him to drink. He thanked me fondly, clutching the handle of the mug, and he quenched his thirst until he could drink no more … And at twilight, when this life of prickly carefulness became more unbearable, when Palomino had drilled holes in his head, on the brink of a breakdown, when a febrile yellowness of an old bone aged yellow placated his astronomically restless face, when even the doctor had declared that our martyr had nothing more than fatigue brought on by an upset stomach, when that excessively peccary uniform was torn to shreds in corrosive agony, even when Palomino had formed his tall ephemeral smile—oh harmony of the Heavens!—with the wrinkles on his forehead, which didn’t manage to jump down to his cheeks or to the human sadness of his shoulders; and when, like today, it was raining and foggy in the unreachable open spaces, and a causeless, labored, surly omen worsened down here, at twilight, he approached me and said, with bloody splinters of voice, ‘Solís … Solís! Now … Now they’ve killed me! … Solís …’ When I saw his two hands holding his stomach, writhing in pain, I felt the blow strike me at the bottom of my heart, the feeling of a roaring fire devouring my innermost recesses. His complaints, barely articulated, as if they didn’t want to be perceived by anyone else but me, were floating toward my inside, like flared-up tongues of a flame long contained between the two of us, in the shape of invisible tablets. So surely and with such lively certainty had we mutually awaited that outcome! Yet after feeling as if the asp had filtered through the veins of my own body, a sudden, mysterious satisfaction came over me. A mysterious satisfaction! Yes, indeed!”

At that moment, Solís made a face of enigmatic obfuscation mixed with such deaf intoxication in his gaze that it sent me wobbling in my chair, as during a furious stoning.

“And Palomino didn’t wake up the following day,” he mysteriously added afterward, hoarse, without provocation, bearing many tons. “So had he been poisoned? And perhaps with the water I gave him to drink? Or had that only been a nervous breakdown? I don’t know. They only say that the next day, while I felt obliged to stay in bed during the early hours, due to the overbearing distress from the night before, one of his sons came to inform his father that his pardon had been handed down, but he was nowhere to be found. The administration had replied to him, ‘Indeed. The pardon of your father, handed down, he’s been released this morning.’”

The narrator had in this a poorly contained expression of torment that drove me to say to him, with thoughtful consternation, “No … No … Don’t start crying!” And, making a subtle parenthesis, Solís again asked me with tenderness as deep as before, “Are you cold?”

“And then?” I interrupt him.

“And then … nothing.”

After that, Solís falls dead silent. Then, as an afterthought, full of love and bitterness at once, he adds, “But Palomino has always been a good man and my best friend, the most loyal, the kindest. I’ve loved him so much, taken such great interest in his situation, helped to examine his endangered future. I even ended up investigating the contents of the pockets and deeds of other people. Palomino hasn’t come back here, doesn’t even remember me. That ungrateful bastard! Can you imagine?”

Again come the sounds of the penitentiary band playing the Peruvian national anthem. Now they are no longer sight-singing. The chorus of the song is played by the entire band in symphony. The notes of that anthem echo, and the prisoner still silent, sunken in deep deliberation, suddenly flicks his eyelids in a lively flutter and cries out with a stunned expression,

“It’s the anthem that they’re playing! Do you hear it! It’s the anthem. But of course! It seems to be making out a phrase: Weee-aaare-frrreee …”

And as he hums these notes, he smiles and finally laughs with gleeful absurdity.

Then to the nearby fence he turns his astonished eyes that glow with burning tears. He jumps from his chair and, stretching out his arms, exclaims with jubilation that sends a shiver down to my spine:

“Hi Palomino! …”

Someone approaches us through the silent, unmoving, locked gate.

[JM]

________________

WAX

That night we couldn’t smoke. All the bodegas in Lima were closed. My friend, who led me through the taciturn mazes of the renowned yellow mansion on Calle Hoyos, where numerous smokers converge, said good-bye to me and, with soul and pituitaries porcelained,⁶⁰ he jumped the first streetcar he saw and fled through midnight.

I still felt somewhat woozy from our last drinks. Oh, my bohemia of yore, bronzemongery⁶¹ ever cornered by uneven scales, withdrawn into the shell of dry palates, the circle of my costly human freedom on two sidewalks of reality that lead to three temples of impossible! But you must excuse this venting that still emits a bellicose odor of buckshot smelted into wrinkles.

As I was saying, once I was all alone I still felt drunk, aimlessly traipsing through Chinatown. So much was clearing up in my spirit. Then I realized what was happening to me. Unrest emerged in my left nipple. A carpenter’s brace made of a strand of black shiny hair from the head of my long-lost girlfriend. The unrest itched, smarted, shot inside and through me in all directions. So I couldn’t sleep. No way around it. I suffered the pain of my stunted joy, its glimmers now engraved on irremediable ironclad sadness were latent in my soul’s deepest brackets, as if to tell me ironically, that tomorrow, sure, you got it, another time, swell.

So I craved a smoke. I needed relief from my nervous breakdown. I walked toward Chale’s bodega, which happened to be nearby.

With the caution warranted by such a situation, I reached the door, put my ear up to it, nothing. After waiting a moment, I got ready to leave, when I heard someone jump out of bed, scampering barefoot inside. I tried to catch a glimpse, to see if anyone was there. Through the keyhole I managed to discern Chale lighting the room, sitting noticeably disturbed in front of the oil lamp, its pathogenic greenness in a mossy halftone welded to El Chino’s layer of face, harangued by visible ire. No one else was there.

Chale’s impenetrable appearance made him seem to have just woken up, perhaps from a terrifying nightmare, and I considered my presence importune, deciding to leave, when the Asian man opened one of the desk drawers, captained by some inexorable voice of authority. With a decisive hand he removed a laconic coffer of polished cedar, opened it, and fondled a couple of white objects with his disgusting fingernails. He put them on the edge of the desk. They were two pieces of marble.

Curiosity got the better of me. Two pieces—were they really marble? They were. I don’t know why those pieces, at the outset and without my having touched them or clearly seen them up close, traveled though the space and barraged my fingertips, instilling in me the most certain sensation of marble.

El Chino picked them up again, angling egregious, flitting observations so that they wouldn’t unscrew certain presumptions about the motive of his watchfulness. He handled and examined them at length in the light. Two pieces of marble.

Then, with his elbows on the table and the pieces still in hand, between his teeth he let out one hell of a monosyllable that barely entered his beady eyes, where El Chino’s soul welled up in tears with a mixture of ambition and impotence. Again he opened the box perhaps out of an old determination that he now relived for the hundredth time, taking out several steel pieces, and with these he began to work on his cabalist marble pieces.

Certain presumptions, I was saying, jumped out in front of me. Indeed. I had met Chale two years prior. The Mongol was a gambler. And as a gambler he was famous in Lima; a loser of millions when he was at the table, a winner of treasures when he speaking with peers. So what was the meaning of that tormenting all-nighter, that furious episode of nocturnal artifice? And those two stone fragments? Why two and not one, three or more? Eureka! Two dice! Two dice in the making.

El Chino was working, working from the very vertex of night. His face, in the meantime, also was working out an infinite succession of lines. There were moments when Chale went into a frenzy and tried to break those little objects that were to be rolled on a felt-covered table chasing each other, in search of a random or lucky win, with the sound of one person’s two closed fists pounding hard against each other until they emitted sparks.

As for me, I had taken considerable interest in that scene, which I could hardly think of leaving. It seemed to be an old endeavor of patient heroic production. I sharpened my wits, wondering what this ill-destined man was after. To engrave a set of dice. Could that be it?

This much is affirmed about digital maneuvers and secret deviations or willed amendments in the game’s shaker. Something similar, I said to myself, comes through this man for sure. And this, because of what he rolled in the end. But what intrigued me most, as one will understand, was the art of the medium and its preparation, which had seemed to demand Chale’s complete commitment. This is the correlation that must be preestablished, between the kind of dice and the dynamic possibilities of the hands. Since, if this bilateral type of element was not entirely necessary, then why would El Chino fashion his own dice? Any material kicking around would’ve worked. But no.

There’s no doubt that the dice are made of a specific material, under this weight, with that edgility,⁶² hexagonned⁶³ on this or that untouchable cliff to be bidden farewell by fingertips and then to be shined with that other dimple or almost immaterial coarseness between each frame of the points or between a polyhedral angle and the white exergue on one of the four corresponding faces. Therefore, it’s necessary to bear the flair of the random material so that—in this always improvised (and therefore triumphant) point—it is always obedient and docile to human vibrations of the hand that thinks and calculates even in the darkest and blindest of such avatars.

And if not, one simply had to observe the Asian man in his creative, tempestuous task, chisel in hand, picking away, scraping, removing, crumbling, opening up the conditions of harmony and jaggedness between unborn proportions of the die and the unknown powers of his fickle will. At times, he’d momentarily stop working to contemplate the marble, and his depraved face would smile syrup in the glowing light of the lamp. Later, with an easy deep breath, he’d tap it, swapping one tool for another, and give the monstrous dice a practice roll, tenaciously inspect the sides, and patiently ponder.

A few weeks after that night, there were people amid scruffy crowds and others with similar opinions, who spread stupefying unbelievable rumors about amazing events that had recently transpired in the great casinos of Lima. From one morning to the next, the fabulous legends would grow. One evening last winter, at the door to the Palais Concert, an exotic personage whose goatee seemed to be dripping⁶⁴ was speaking to a group of gents, who lent him all their ears:

“Chale had something up his sleeve, when he gambled those 10,000 soles. I don’t know what, but El Chino possesses a mysterious unverifiable ability to summon when he’s at the table. This can’t be denied. Remember,” that man stressed with sinister gravity, “that the dice El Chino plays with never appear in anyone else’s hands. I’m talking about unmistakable facts drawn from my own observations. Those dice have something to them. What it is, I don’t know.”

One night I was driven by my distress into the hole in the wall where Chale used to gamble. It was an affair for the most ostentatious of duelers at the table, and many people were standing around the table. The crowd’s attention, haltered by the ganglionic cloth covered with piles of money, told me that a low pressure system had set in that night. A few acquaintances led me through and encouraged me to place a bet.

There was Chale, at the head of the table, presiding over the session in his impassive, torturous, almighty appearance, two vertical straps around his neck, from the stumpy parietal bones of a bare hide to the livid bars of his clavicles, his mouth deceitfully forged in two taut pieces of greed that would never open in laughter out of fear of being stripped bare naked, his heroic shirt rolled up to his elbows. The pulse of life beat in him over and over, searching for the doors of the hands to escape from such a miserable body. Nauseating lividness on his predatory cheekbones.

He seemed to have lost the faculty of speech. Signs. Barely articulated adverbs. Arrested interjections. Oh, how the bronchial wheezing of the walking and living dead sometimes burns in each of us!

I decided to observe El Chino’s minutest psychological and mechanical ripples as discreetly and meticulously as I could.

The clock struck one in the morning.

Someone placed a bet of 1,000 soles in the hands of fate. The air popped like hot water pierced by the first bubble of the ebullition. And now if I wanted to describe the appearance of the surrounding faces in those seconds of scanning, I’d say that they all oozed out of themselves, scrubbed and squeezed along with Chale’s set of dice, lighting on fire and standing there in a line, until they needed and wanted to extract a miraculous ninth face on each die, as if it were the weary grin of Fate herself. Chale violently rolled the dice, like a pair of sparking embers, and he groaned a terrific hyenic obscenity that made its way across the room like dead flesh.

I touched my body as though I’d been looking for myself, and I realized that I was there, shaking in awe. What had El Chino felt? Why did he roll the dice like that, as if they had been burning or cutting his hands? Had the spirit of all those gamblers—naturally always against him—managed to do him harm, before a bet as lofty as this?

While the dice were released upon the emerald cloth, through my mind flashed the two pieces of marble I saw Chale engraving on that now distant night. These dice I saw before me certainly came from the nascent gems of yore, for I noticed they were of a whitened and translucent marble on the edges and of a firm almost metallic glow in the center. Beautiful cubes of God!