Las Babas del diablo
Julio Cortázar
No one will ever know how this happened. In first person, or second? Or build words that will end up disappearing by using what the third person calls a plural shell? And if it were to say, "I see the moon rising with the eyes of all beings," or, "We have strangulated my eyes," and especially if it were to say, "You, the blonde woman, was a cloud that overwhelmed us from between you and Me, His. - Oh, what a ghost.
If you have to say so, there is no better situation than entering the corner to drink a glass of white and leave the machine alone (I'm knocking on a machine). That's not true. Yes, perfect. Because of the "empty hole" that has to be told, it is a machine (another, a Contai time 1.1.2), which, perhaps, knows the spirit of another machine better than me, you, her - the blonde and the fluent cloud. But my folly is only blessed. I am well aware that if I leave, this Remington will be petrified on the table with a double silence - that is the kind of meditation that is characteristic of motion when it hangs. So I have to write. One of us must write if all of this is to be told. So let me, then, be mine, who is less bound than the rest of you. Me, who is free from the clouds, and without eyes, is silent, and has no part in mind, and has no part in writing. We, the dead, (who are still alive, and do not intend to deceive them) and when it comes to them, it will become clear to me that I will find a broken wall, and We have chosen it, the end of this story, and the source of this time, when man will tell it, it will be the beginning, the sharpest of all.
I asked myself why it had to be told. But if a man asks himself why he has done all that he has to do, if he merely asks himself why he has promised a dinner (at this point, a dove has crossed and is like a sparrow), or why, when someone tells us a wonderful story, he rises up in his belly, and he makes a fuss until he enters the next office and repeats his story, and only then will he be satisfied and able to return to his work. As far as I know, no one has explained this. So the best way is to throw away all the shame and tell it. Because, in the end, no one can be ashamed of breathing or wearing shoes; we do, we do. And when it comes, and when we find a spider in our shoes, or when we breathe, we feel a fragrance, then we must tell what happened, to our colleagues in the office, or to the doctors.
Well, doctor, every breath... has to say it, and it's gotta calm down that annoying noise in the stomach.
If you're going to talk, let's set up some order. Let us go down the stairs of this house to Sunday, 7 November, exactly a month ago. And on the next five steps, he set foot on that Sunday, bathing in a sun almost unforeseeed of Paris in November, filled with a desire to wander around, to see and to hunt for images. (For we were, and I was, a man of light). I know that the greatest difficulty will be to find a way to speak, and I will not be afraid to repeat it. It is hard, because no one knows that what is really being told is me, or what has already happened, or what I see at this moment, or I am merely telling a truth that belongs only to me, and that truth, for my stomach, and for my desire to flee and to end it in some way, will not be true, no matter what.
Let us talk slowly about what will happen on the way to writing. If anyone replaces me, if I have nothing to say, if the clouds are scattered and something else emerges (because it can't be seen forever, occasionally, a pigeon) if all of this... What should I continue after the word "if" and how should I draw an impeccable end to that phrase? But as soon as I begin to ask the questions, I will have nothing to do; rather than tell, the story itself may be an answer, at least for someone who will read it.
Roberto Michel, French-Chilean, interpreter, leisure photographer, walked out of the door at the 11th Street of Mr. Prince on Sunday, 7 November. And now, two smaller ones, with silver on their sides, passing through. He has spent three weeks in translation into French of a monograph by José Norberto Allende, Professor at the University of Santiago, Chile, on legal recusal and appeal. There is a wind in Paris, it's rare, and it's not the kind of wind that whirls around the corner, whips old wood blinds, and behind the windows, the frightened husbands are bound to speak in all sorts of words about the increasingly erratic weather of recent years. But the sun is also there, and it holds the wind and is friends with the cat, so there is nothing to prevent me from travelling to the pier of the Sena River, hunting for the ancient prison and the Holy Chapel. It was only ten o'clock, and I thought that, at 11 o'clock, the light should be right and the best I could do in the autumn; in order to wipe out the light, I drifted to St. Louis and walked along the streets of the Anzú River, standing for a moment, staring at the Lozan Palace, and recited for myself a few verses of Apoliner's poems, which, whenever I walked through the Lozan Palace, would have swung into my head (though I should have remembered another poet, Michel was so stubborn). Then, when the storm ceases, and the sun swells at least twice as steeply (I mean, warmer, but not different in nature), I dwell upon the walls, and in the early morning of that Sunday I feel a terrible, unparalleled joy.
Photography is one of the highest in the countless doors of the law that fight the void. It is taught early in childhood because it requires discipline, aesthetic education, sharp eyes and steady fingers.
This is an unusual reporter who has been obfuscating lies and capturing the foolishness of someone who came out of 10 Downing Street. In any case, once the camera is with it, it is as if it were a responsibility, a duty to be alert at all times, not to lose the sun on an old stone, the flashy and sweet echo, or a girl with a long plume, with a bread or a bottle of cow's milk, the running arc. Michelle knew that the cameraman's operation was always a replacement: the insidious way of viewing him with a camera, in exchange for the way he saw the world personally (at this point, a cloud that was almost black passed). But he did not doubt that he knew that simply going out with a Contair camera would be enough to regain the careless tone, the unbridled vision, the light without a radiant circle, with no one-250-second window. At this very moment (at this moment), I could have sat on the walls of the river, watched those black and red barges flow, with no picture in my head, simply handing myself over to the flow of things and running with time and still. And the wind has ceased.
Then We proceeded along the streets of the banks of the Bourbon, to the far end of the island, a small secret square, which I love and deep in love, because of its smallness and not because of its shadows, and because it lays its whole chest on rivers and the dome. There was only one pair of men and women, and of course there were pigeons; perhaps a few of them were flying in the sight of themselves at the moment. I jumped to the wall and let the sun wrap me up and bind me and deliver my face, my ears and my hands to it (I have put my gloves in my pocket). I didn't have the desire to take a picture, and I lit a cigarette to comfort myself; I thought I saw the boy for the first time just as soon as I brought a match.
We thought that we were a couple, more like a boy and his mother, and we knew that he was not with his mother; they were a couple, the kind of "one pair" we gave to those who relied on the walls or were attached to each other in the square bench. I had a lot of time to think about it because I didn't do anything. Why was the boy so nervous, like a pony, or a rabbit, to insert his hand into a bag, to pull out one, to pull out the other, to brush his hair with his fingertips, to change his attitude, especially for fear? Yes, fear is evident in each of his gestures, a fear suffocated by shame, an impulse to retreat, which appeared on his body as if he had been on the brink of flight, but had been forced by the last pitiful piety.
All this is so clear - five metres away, at the tip of the island, we are the only ones left alone - that initially the fear of the boy prevented me from seeing the blonde. And now, in retrospect, I think that at that very first moment, I saw her face more clearly (she turned around like a copper windmark), her eyes, her...
And when I realized something might be happening to the boy, I told myself that it was worth staying and looking at it. I believe I know how to gaze if I really know something. And all the gaze permeates the false, because it throws us the farthest away from ourselves, without any guarantees. It's the smell, or (but Michel is a man who is extremely detached from each other and can't sing as he pleases). In any case, it would be possible to look at that obscurity in advance; perhaps it would be necessary to make the right choice between "observing" and "obscured things" and to strip everything of that stacked coat. However, all this has been difficult.
As for the boy, what I remember is his image before his true body, which I will see later. And the woman, I am sure now that what I remember is her body, far better than her image. The two terms were not fair enough. She was covered with a coat of fur near to the darkness, near to the earth, near to the beauty. And the wind of the morning, which was not cold at this hour, pierced her blond hair, which cut out her pale and dark face - two unfair words - and left the whole world alone, alone and in a state of horror, in front of her black eyes. The eyes, like two eagles, fall over everything, like two empty leaps, like two green muds. I'm not painting, I'd rather understand. And I said, two pieces of green mud.
To be fair, the boy was dressed properly and wearing a pair of yellow gloves that I dare say belonged to his brother, who was probably a law or sociology student; it was ridiculous to look at his fingertips coming out of his jacket pocket. For a long time, I have not seen its face, but there is only one shadow that is not foolish - a freckled bird, an angel in the painting of Brother Filippo, a bowl of milk and rice cloth, and the back of a young man eager to practice judo, who played one or two fights for an idea or a sister. From his 14th or perhaps 15th year of age, it can be assumed that he was fed by his parents, dressed and in his pocket without a name and had to consult his peers for a long time before he could decide whether to have a cup of coffee, a cup of tea or a pack of cigarettes. He should be the kind of girl who wanders around in the streets, thinking about a movie, how wonderful it is to see the latest movie, or buy a few novels, ties, or bottles of wine with green and white labels. In his home (the house, which should be decent, the lunch starts at 12 o'clock, the walls are marked with romantic landscapes, the doors are covered with dark doors and parasols made of vines), the time will fall slowly and rain, the time to study, the time to be desired by the mother, the time to become like the father, the time to write to the aunt of Avignon. That is why so many streets and streets, the whole river flowed for him (unnamed), and the 15-year-old Mystic City, along with the symbols on its door, its creepy cat, thirty francs of French fries, empty pockets of four sex magazines, empty pockets, happy encounters, and passion for so many things that are incomprehensible, are gleamed by a complete love, a wind, open as a street.
It's a boy's biography. It's a boy's biography. But this one before me became unique because of her presence. And she was murmuring at him, and we were tired of repeating it, and there were two longer, broken clouds. I guess I didn't expect to go to heaven in that morning, because when I realized what was happening between boys and women, I could only gaze at them, wait, look at them, and then...)
All in all, the boy was distraught and needed no effort to guess what had happened a few minutes ago, at most half an hour ago. The boy reached the tip of the island, saw the woman and dumped her. And the woman is waiting for this, because she's there, waiting for this. Perhaps it was the boy who arrived first, and she looked at him from a balcony or a car, and then went up and hit him, convinced from the very beginning that he would be afraid, that he would want to flee, and that he would naturally stay, that she would stand up to his chest, that she would wear a color and that she would disguise the joy of sophistication and adventure. And the rest of it is easy, because it is five metres away from me, and anyone can measure every stage of this game, this ridiculous sword; its greatest charm lies not in its present, but in the omens of its end. In the end, the boy will excuse a date, an obligation whatever it may be, and then leave in a state of confusion and in a state of confusion, eager to walk and perform, and will be exposed naked to the mocking eyes that follow him all the way. Alternatively, he would stay, be fascinated, or simply be unable to take the initiative, and then the woman would start touching his face, messing with his hair, saying nothing, and then suddenly lift his arm and take him away. Unless, with an irritation that may have begun to dye with desire and risk, he muster the courage to put his arm around her waist and kiss her. This could have happened, but it has not yet happened. And Michelle, sitting above the walls with an evil sense of pleasure, almost unconsciously lifted the camera and was about to take a picture of the landscape: the corner of the island, a pair of unusual men and women talking and looking.
What is strange is that the scene (which is nothing, almost nothing: two people are there, and the age difference is so great) carries a disturbing light. And We thought that it was from Us, and that if We took a picture of Us, We would return everything to the truth of ignorance. I would have liked to know what the man sitting on the docks leading to the bridge, behind the parked car steering wheel and wearing the grey hat was thinking, whether he was reading the newspaper or taking a nap. I had just found him, because the people in the parked car almost disappeared and were lost in that poor, private cage, which deprived him of sport and danger and lost his beauty. However, the vehicle, which has been there all along, forms (or distorts) part of the island. One car: like a street light, a park bench. But never the wind, never the sun, not the matter that is born of the skin and eyes, never the boy and the woman, the two who were placed here to change the island and show me the island in another way. But perhaps the man who read the newspaper is watching what happened, and, like me, feeling the joy of evil that he was waiting for. At this moment, the woman turned softly and placed the boy between her and her.
Between the walls, I can almost see their shadows. He was taller than her, but not taller, but she covered him, as if a cloud had circled over him, and crushed him only by her presence, by her smile, and by her hand, which she had cut in the air. Why wait? With 16 radiums, with a frame that prevents the ugly black car from entering, but allows for the tree, which is necessary to break a dark space...
I lifted up the camera and put it on the lookout for a focus that didn't include them, and then I lurked and was sure I'd catch it. The gesture of a dragon, the expression of everything, the act of life, destroyed by rigid images at the time of the break-up, unless we can choose the invisible, essential brake. I don't need to wait. The woman is pushing forward her tender project to bind the boy, stripping him of his last remaining freedom in a slow and sweet torture.
I imagined the end of that possibility, when a small, bubble-like cloud appeared, almost alone in the sky, and I saw them arriving in that house (which should be the bottom floor, where she would fill it with cats on countless mats), and I predicted the panic of the boy, and his desire to disguise, to leave it at his mercy, and to pretend that everything was not new to him and that he was desperate. And We closed my eyes, and if I had closed my eyes, We would have rehearsed the whole scene in my heart: the mocking kiss, and the woman pushed away her hand as softly as in a novel, and placed him on a bed covered in fragrance, and then forced him to take off her clothes for him, like a true mother and child, under a white glass of light. Then it'll all end as usual, perhaps. But perhaps everything will be another way, and the young man's enlightenment will not pass, and will be blocked, and after that long foreplay, the clumsy, the frenzied caresses, the running of the hands will eventually emancipate from who knows what, the separate pleasures of being self-sufficient, or the arrogant rejection that mixes the grinding of the innocent art. This may be the case, most likely; that woman, who did not seek a lover on the boy, at the same time took possession of him for a purpose that could not have been understood had she not imagined it to be a cruel game, a desire for no desire, an excitement for another - who could never have been the other.
Michelle is a sinner of literature and a fabricist. His favorite is to imagine the exceptions, the individuals outside the species, the monsters that are not always disgusting. But this woman, herself, is inviting fiction, and perhaps giving sufficient clues to the truth.
Before she left, and before my mind filled my mind with many days and nights ahead, I decided not to dazzle. We put everything into the frame of the view, with the tree, the wall, and the sun at eleven o'clock, and then We pressed the gate. It happened in time to understand that both of them knew and were looking at me. The boy, with consternation and inquiry, while she was filled with anger and an unending hostility, her...
Both the body and the face are well aware of their theft and shamelessly imprisoned in a small chemical image.
I can describe it in detail, but it has no value. The woman said that no one had the right to take photographs without permission and asked me to hand over the film. All of this is said with a dry and clear voice, with a pure Parisian accent, which rises with every word. And for Us, there is nothing to be said about giving and not sharing that film, but anyone who knows me knows, and asks me for something in a gentle way. As a result, I will confine myself to stating my view that photography is not prohibited in public places, but enjoys the strongest official and civil support. And when I say it, I'm wearing a sense of humor about the boy's retreat and how he's left behind - just by doing nothing. Then he turned away, and ran away. The poor man thought that he was just walking, but he was running, running over the car, like a silk of the Virgin Mary, and scattered in the morning air.
But the Holy Virgin's silk is also called the saliva of the devil, and Michelle has had to endure the trifling accusations, listening to himself as an indecency and an idiot, and he has made a deliberate effort to smile, shaking his head with a few simple gestures, one by one, one by one, and how cheap to push. When it started to bore me, I heard the door of a car being bowed. The man in the gray hat was there, staring at us. It was only at that moment that I realized that he was a part of this comedy.
He started coming to us, holding the newspaper he pretended to be reading. I remember most clearly the strange thing that twisted his mouth, and it covered his face with wrinkles, and there was a thing that had moved on his face, and it had changed, and his lips were shaking, and it was like an independent and living thing, which was not controlled by will, and wandered around his lips. And the rest is solid, a white-faced clown, or a man without blood, with dark, dry skin, deep eyes, and a black hole in his nostrils, visible, blacker than his eyebrows, hair, or that black tie.
He walked carefully as if the pavement would sting his feet, and I saw his varnished shoes, whose soles were so thin that they could sense every rough spot on the street. I do not know why I have come down from the fence, nor do I know exactly why I decided not to hand over the photo, why I refused the request that I could sense fear and cowardice. The clown and the woman exchanged their eyes in silence: we were a perfect triangle that could not bear, something that had to be broken with a snap. I laughed at their faces and turned away, and I guess it was slower than the boy. We looked back at them as we reached the first row of houses near the iron bridge. They did not move, but the man threw away the newspaper; and I felt the woman, with her back against the wall, rubbing her hands on a stone, with a classic and absurd gesture that the besieged sought to exit.
The next thing that happened was here, almost right now, in a room on the fifth floor. Michelle did not wash the picture of that Sunday until a few days later; he took the ancient prison and the Holy Chapel, as it should be. He found two or three forgotten auditions, a poor attempt to capture a cat that lives astonished on the roof of a street piss stand, and a picture of a blonde woman and a teenager. The negative was amazing, he washed a magnification sample; the magnification was surprising, and he made a bigger, almost a poster. He did not think (at this point, he asked himself) why only photographs of ancient prisons were worthy of such care. In all the photographs, only the snapshot at the top of the island made him enjoy it; he would crucify it on the wall of the room, and on the first day he would just gaze at it, remember it, and do that kind of "remember" compared to the "defunct reality", a sad operation; it was petrochemical memories, like all the photographs, that lacked nothing, or even, especially, the "nap" - a true condensant. Women are there, boys are standing on the trees above their heads, the dome is as solid as a wall-guarded stone, clouds and stones are confused in an indivisible substance (as a cloud with sharp edges is running through, as in the head of a storm). In the first two days, I accepted all that I had done, from the photo itself to the magnification on the wall, and I did not even ask myself why the translation of José Norberto Allende's monograph had to be interrupted in time to meet the woman's face, the dark stain on the wall. The first big surprise was stupid; I never thought that when we were looking at a picture, our eyes were exactly the place and the perspective of the lens; we all took it for granted and no one would think about it. I looked at the picture three metres away from my chair, across the typewriter, and I realized that I had just put myself on the star of the lens. It's good; no doubt it's the most perfect way to appreciate a picture, even though it may have its charm and even its discovery. Every few minutes, for example, when I cannot find the right French to express what José Alberto Allende has expressed in such a fine Spanish language, I look up and look at that picture; sometimes the woman attracts me, sometimes the boy, sometimes the sidewalk, and a dry leaf falls there, adding value to a corner of the picture in a wonderful way. And then I'll take a moment from my work, and I'll be happy to re-introduce into that immersion of the morning, with a little sarcasm, and remember the angry face of the woman when she asked me to hand over the photograph, the boy's absurd and pathetic escape and the white man's arrival. Deep down, I am satisfied with myself; I am not proud to leave, because if the French were given the gift of a swift response, I cannot really see why I chose to leave without giving them a full display of privileges, immunities and civil rights. What's really important is that I helped the boy escape in time.
My theories are correct, and this has not been fully confirmed, and the escape itself seems to have proved everything. I gave him an opportunity to use his fears to do useful things, purely out of indecency; at this moment he will regret, feel small and feel less than man. But it was better to be accompanied by a woman who could look at him with the look of the island; Michelle was occasionally a puritan and he believed that people should not be corrupted by violence. After all, that picture is a good deed.
And I look at it, not because it is a good deed, between paragraphs and paragraphs of my work. And at that moment We know not why We look at it, and why We crucify it against a wall; perhaps all things are destined to be so, and that is its condition. I believe that it was the almost undetectable tremor of the leaves that did not alert me, and I believe that I began to say a word and then ended it satisfactorily. Custom, like a huge collection of plant specimens. At the end of the day, an 80-by-60 magnifying photograph, like a screen projecting a movie, at the end of the island, a woman and a boy were talking and a tree was shaking dry leaves over their heads.
But those hands are too much. I've just written: Donc, la seconde réside dans la nature intrinsèque des difficultés que les socialétés... (so the second key is inherent to social distress...) -- I saw the woman's hand, and it's starting to snap, one finger and one finger. There is nothing in me but a French sentence that can never be completed, a typewriter that falls to the ground, a squeaky, shaking chair and a fog. The boy fell down like a boxer who could no longer fight and waited for a fatal blow; he had a collar with a coat, which looked more like a prisoner than ever before, a perfect victim of disaster. Now the woman whispers in his ear, and the hand opens up again, touching his cheeks, caressing, caressing, burning him without a single urge. The boy was more of a guard than a panic, and once or twice he looked in that direction across the woman ' s shoulder, and she continued to say, explaining what, which forced him to look to Michelle in the direction of a car that was parked, to the direction of the grey hat, which was carefully removed from the picture and fell into the eyes of the boy, (how can it be suspected now?) in the woman ' s words, in the woman ' s hand, in the woman ' s representative. When I saw the man coming, standing near them, staring at them, putting his hands in his arms, carrying a tired and harsh spirit, like a master who was ready to whistle after waiting in the square for his dog to play, I understood that, if it could be called knowing what was about to happen, what was supposed to happen, what was to happen at that moment, between those people, it would have happened, after I had broken into, naively disrupted an order, an order that had not yet happened but was about to happen, and that was about to be tested. And what I imagined was far worse than reality. The woman did not come for herself, nor did she caress her pleasure, abet, abet, abet, and take away the unfavoured angel, and play with his fear and his desire for grace. The real master, waiting...
With a happy smile, he was sure that his plan had been successful; he was not the first to send a woman as a pioneer to bring him prisoners tied with flowers. The rest will be so simple, the car, whatever house, the wine, the exciting pictures, the late tears and the waking up in hell. And I, for once, have absolutely no power. Our strength was a photograph there, in which they were vengeful to me and showed me what was about to come. The picture is taken, and time has passed; and we are so far apart from each other that it will surely be completed, and the tears will surely run out, and the rest will be only speculation and grief. And I, on this side, a prisoner at different times, a prisoner in a five-storey room, who does not know who the woman, the man and the child are, can only be a lens of my camera, some kind of rigid thing, and cannot intervene. They threw the most terrible mockery into my face, that is, they had the power of "decision" in the face of my inability to do so; that is, the boy once again looked to the white-faced clown, and I understood that he would accept that the offer contained money or deception, and that I would not be able to cry to him and flee, or simply use a new photograph, a small and humble intervention, to destroy the scaffold made of spit and perfume. Everything will be at this moment, at that...
In a moment, it was resolved; there was a great silence, which had nothing to do with the silence of physics. And it stretches and is built. I believe I shouted, and I screamed, and on that same second I felt like I was getting close, 10 centimetres, one step, one step, and the tree twirled with grace in the horizon, and a stain slipped out of the wall, and the woman's face turned to me, with shock and growing, and I turned a little, and I said that the camera turned a little, and he started to look at me in the eyes of a black hole, and he looked at me with shock and anger and wanted to wash me into the air. And it was at that moment that We saw a giant, decorated bird, and it flew across the whole picture with a single wing. I leaned on my wall, and I was happy because the boy had just fled, and I saw him running, again with a clear focus, flying in the wind with a full head, and he finally learned to fly on the island, to the bridge and to return to the city. The second time he slipped away from them, and the second time We helped him escape, and I sent him back to his precarious paradise. Breathing, I face them; there's no need to move on, the game is over. A woman, with only one shoulder and a thread of her hair, was cut in a rough frame; while a man, facing me, had his mouth sprawled and saw a black tongue shaking, he raised his hands slowly and reached his horizons, and in that moment, still had a perfect focus. Then he turned into a blur, erased the island, erased the trees. I close my eyes and don't want to see it again. I covered my face and cried like a fool.
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