Collected Stories Read online

  With his bathrobe on, in front of the wash basin now, a sleepy face, hair uncombed and no shave, he receives a bored look from the mirror. A quick shudder catches him with a cold thread as he discovers his own dead brother, newly arisen, in that image. The same tired face, the same look that was still not fully awake.

  A new movement sent the mirror a quantity of light destined to bring out a pleasant expression, but the simultaneous return of that light brought back to him – going against his plans – a grotesque grimace. Water. The hot flow has opened up torrential, exuberant, and the wave of white, thick steam is interposed between him and the glass. In that way – taking advantage of the interruption with a quick movement – he manages to make an adjustment with his own time and with the time inside the quicksilver.

  He rose above the leather strop, filling the mirror with pointed ears, cold metal; and the cloud – breaking up now – shows him the other face again, hazy with physical complications, mathematical laws with which geometry was attempting volume in a new way, a concrete formula for light. There, opposite him, was the face, with a pulse, with throbs of its own presence, transfigured into an expression which was simultaneously a smile and mocking seriousness, appearing in the damp glass which the condensation of vapor had left clean.

  He smiled. (It smiled.) He showed – to himself – his tongue. (It showed – to the real one – its tongue.) The one in the mirror had a pasty, yellow tongue: ‘Your stomach is upset,’ he diagnosed (a wordless expression) with a grimace. He smiled again. (It smiled again.) But now he could see that there was something stupid, artificial, and false in the smile that was returned to him. He smoothed his hair (it smoothed its hair) with his right hand (left hand), returning the bashful smile at once (and disappearing). He was surprised at his own behavior, standing in front of the mirror and making faces like an idiot. Nevertheless, he thought that everybody behaved the same way in front of a mirror and his indignation was greater then with the certainty that since the world was idiotic, he was only rendering tribute to vulgarity. Eight-seventeen.

  He knew that he would have to hurry if he didn’t want to be fired from the agency. From that agency that for some time now had been changed into the starting point of his singular daily funeral cortege.

  The shaving cream, in contact with the brush, had now raised a bluish whiteness that brought him back from his worries. It was the moment in which the suds came up through his body, through the network of arteries, and facilitated the functioning of his whole vital mechanism. … Thus, returning to normality, it seemed more comfortable to search his soaped-up brain for the word he wanted to compare Mabel’s shop with. Peldora. Mabel’s junk shop. Paldora. Provisions or drugs. Or everything at the same time: Pendora.

  There were enough suds in the mug. But he kept on rubbing the brush, almost with passion. The childish spectacle of the bubbles gave him the clear joy of a big child as it crept up into his heart, heavy and hard, like cheap liquor. A new effort in search of the syllable would have been sufficient then for the word to burst forth, ripe and brutal; for it to come to the surface in that thick, murky water of his flighty memory. But that time, as on other occasions, the scattered, detached pieces of a single system would not adjust themselves exactly in order to gain organic totality, and he was ready to give up the word forever: Pendora!

  And now it was time to desist in that useless search, because – they both raised their eyes, which met – his twin brother, with his frothy brush, had begun to cover his chin with blue-white coolness, letting his left hand move – he imitated him with the right – with smoothness and precision, until the delineated zone had been covered. He glanced away, and the geometry of the hands on the clock showed itself to him, intent on the solution of a new theorem of anguish: eight-eighteen. He was moving too slowly. So that with the firm aim of finishing quickly, he gripped the razor as the horn handle obeyed the mobility of his little finger.

  Calculating that in three minutes the task would be done, he raised his right arm (left arm) to the level of his right ear (left ear), making the observation along the way that nothing should turn out to be as difficult as shaving oneself the way the image in the mirror was doing. From that he had derived a whole series of very complicated calculations with an aim to verifying the speed of the light which, almost simultaneously, was making the trip back and forth and reproducing that movement. But the aesthete in him, after a struggle approximately equal to the square root of the velocity he might have found, overcame the mathematician and the artist’s thoughts went toward the movements of the blade that greenblue-whited with the various touches of the light. Rapidly – and the mathematician and the aesthete were at peace now – he brought the edge down along the right cheek (left cheek) to the meridian of the lip and observed with satisfaction that the left cheek on the image showed clean between its edges of lather.

  He had still not shaken the blade clean when a smokiness loaded with the bitter smell of roasting meat began to arrive from the kitchen. He felt the quiver under his tongue and the torrent of easy, thin saliva that filled his mouth with the energetic taste of hot fat. Fried kidneys. There was finally a change in Mabel’s damned store. Pendora. Not that either. The sound of the gland in the midst of the sauce broke in his ear with a memory of hammering rain, which was, in effect, the same from the recent early dawn. Therefore he mustn’t forget his galoshes and his raincoat. Kidneys in gravy. No doubt about it.

  Of all his senses none deserved as much mistrust as smell. But even beyond his five senses and even when that feast was nothing more than a bit of optimism on the part of his pituitary, the need to finish as soon as possible was at that moment the most urgent need of his five senses. With precision and deftness – the mathematician and the artist showed their teeth – he brought the razor backward (forward) and forward (backward) up to the corner of his mouth to the right (left), while with his left hand (right hand) he smoothed the skin, facilitating in that way the passage of the metal edge, from front (back) to back (front), and up (up) and down, finishing – both panting – the simultaneous work.

  But precisely upon finishing, when he was giving the last touches to his left cheek with his right hand, he managed to see his own elbow against the mirror. He saw it, large, strange, unknown, and observed with surprise that above the elbow, other eyes equally large and equally unknown were searching wildly for the direction of the blade. Someone is trying to hang my brother. A powerful arm. Blood! The same thing always happens when I’m in a hurry.

  On his face he sought the corresponding place; but his finger was clean and his touch showed no solution of continuity. He gave a start. There were no wounds on his skin, but there in the mirror the other one was bleeding slightly. And inside him the annoyance that last night’s upset would be repeated became his truth again, a consciousness of unfolding. But there was the chin (round: identical faces). Those hairs on the mole needed the tip of the razor.

  He thought he had observed a cloud of worry haze over the hasty expression of his image. Could it be possible, due to the great rapidity with which he was shaving – and the mathematician took complete charge of the situation – that the velocity of light was unable to cover the distance in order to record all the movements? Could he, in his haste, have got ahead of the image in the mirror and finished the job one motion ahead of it? Or could it have been possible – and the artist, after a brief struggle, managed to dislodge the mathematician – that the image had taken on its own life and had resolved – by living in an uncomplicated time – to finish more slowly than its external subject?

  Visibly preoccupied, he turned the hot-water faucet on and felt the rise of the warm, thick steam, while the splashing of his face in the fresh water filled his ears with a guttural sound. On his skin, the pleasant harshness of the freshly laundered towel made him breathe in the deep satisfaction of a hygienic animal. Pandora! That’s the word: Pandora.

  He looked at the towel with surprise and closed his eyes, disconcerted, while the
re in the mirror, a face just like his contemplated him with large, stupid eyes and the face was crossed by a crimson thread.

  He opened his eyes and smiled (it smiled). Nothing mattered to him any more. Mabel’s store is a Pandora’s box.

  The hot smell of the kidneys in gravy honored his nostrils, with greater urgency now. And he felt satisfaction – positive satisfaction – that a large dog had begun to wag its tail inside his soul.

  Eyes of a Blue Dog

  Then she looked at me. I thought that she was looking at me for the first time. But then, when she turned around behind the lamp and I kept feeling her slippery and oily look in back of me, over my shoulder, I understood that it was I who was looking at her for the first time. I lit a cigarette. I took a drag on the harsh, strong smoke, before spinning in the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. After that I saw her there, as if she’d been standing beside the lamp looking at me every night. For a few brief minutes that’s all we did: look at each other. I looked from the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. She stood, with a long and quiet hand on the lamp, looking at me. I saw her eyelids lighted up as on every night. It was then that I remembered the usual thing, when I said to her: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ Without taking her hand off the lamp she said to me: ‘That. We’ll never forget that.’ She left the orbit, sighing: ‘Eyes of a blue dog. I’ve written it everywhere.’

  I saw her walk over to the dressing table. I watched her appear in the circular glass of the mirror looking at me now at the end of a back and forth of mathematical light. I watched her keep on looking at me with her great hot-coal eyes: looking at me while she opened the little box covered with pink mother of pearl. I saw her powder her nose. When she finished, she closed the box, stood up again, and walked over to the lamp once more, saying: ‘I’m afraid that someone is dreaming about this room and revealing my secrets.’ And over the flame she held the same long and tremulous hand that she had been warming before sitting down at the mirror. And she said: ‘You don’t feel the cold.’ And I said to her: ‘Sometimes.’ And she said to me: ‘You must feel it now.’ And then I understood why I couldn’t have been alone in the seat. It was the cold that had been giving me the certainty of my solitude. ‘Now I feel it,’ I said. ‘And it’s strange because the night is quiet. Maybe the sheet fell off.’ She didn’t answer. Again she began to move toward the mirror and I turned again in the chair, keeping my back to her. Without seeing her, I knew what she was doing. I knew that she was sitting in front of the mirror again, seeing my back, which had had time to reach the depths of the mirror and be caught by her look, which had also had just enough time to reach the depths and return – before the hand had time to start the second turn – until her lips were anointed now with crimson, from the first turn of her hand in front of the mirror. I saw, opposite me, the smooth wall, which was like another blind mirror in which I couldn’t see her – sitting behind me – but could imagine her where she probably was as if a mirror had been hung in place of the wall. ‘I see you,’ I told her. And on the wall I saw what was as if she had raised her eyes and had seen me with my back turned toward her from the chair, in the depths of the mirror, my face turned toward the wall. Then I saw her lower her eyes again and remain with her eyes always on her brassiere, not talking. And I said to her again: ‘I see you.’ And she raised her eyes from her brassiere again. ‘That’s impossible,’ she said. I asked her why. And she, with her eyes quiet and on her brassiere again: ‘Because your face is turned toward the wall.’ Then I spun the chair around. I had the cigarette clenched in my mouth. When I stayed facing the mirror she was back by the lamp. Now she had her hands open over the flame, like the two wings of a hen, toasting herself, and with her face shaded by her own fingers. ‘I think I’m going to catch cold,’ she said. ‘This must be a city of ice.’ She turned her face to profile and her skin, from copper to red, suddenly became sad. ‘Do something about it,’ she said. And she began to get undressed, item by item, starting at the top with the brassiere. I told her: ‘I’m going to turn back to the wall.’ She said: ‘No. In any case, you’ll see me the way you did when your back was turned.’ And no sooner had she said it than she was almost completely undressed, with the flame licking her long copper skin. ‘I’ve always wanted to see you like that, with the skin of your belly full of deep pits, as if you’d been beaten.’ And before I realized that my words had become clumsy at the sight of her nakedness, she became motionless, warming herself on the globe of the lamp, and she said: ‘Sometimes I think I’m made of metal.’ She was silent for an instant. The position of her hands over the flame varied slightly. I said: ‘Sometimes, in other dreams, I’ve thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some museum. Maybe that’s why you’re cold.’ And she said: ‘Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate. Then, when the blood beats inside me, it’s as if someone were calling by knocking on my stomach and I can feel my own copper sound in the bed. It’s like – what do you call it – laminated metal.’ She drew closer to the lamp. ‘I would have liked to hear you,’ I said. And she said: ‘If we find each other sometime, put your ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you’ll hear me echoing. I’ve always wanted you to do it sometime.’ I heard her breathe heavily as she talked. And she said that for years she’d done nothing different. Her life had been dedicated to finding me in reality, through that identifying phrase: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ And she went along the street saying it aloud, as a way of telling the only person who could have understood her:

  ‘I’m the one who comes into your dreams every night and tells you: “Eyes of a blue dog.” ’ And she said that she went into restaurants and before ordering said to the waiters: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ But the waiters bowed reverently, without remembering ever having said that in their dreams. Then she would write on the napkins and scratch on the varnish of the tables with a knife: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ And on the steamed-up windows of hotels, stations, all public buildings, she would write with her forefinger: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ She said that once she went into a drugstore and noticed the same smell that she had smelled in her room one night after having dreamed about me. ‘He must be near,’ she thought, seeing the clean, new tiles of the drugstore. Then she went over to the clerk and said to him: ‘I always dream about a man who says to me: “Eyes of a blue dog.” ’ And she said the clerk had looked at her eyes and told her: ‘As a matter of fact, miss, you do have eyes like that.’ And she said to him: ‘I have to find the man who told me those very words in my dreams.’ And the clerk started to laugh and moved to the other end of the counter. She kept on seeing the clean tile and smelling the odor. And she opened her purse and on the tiles, with her crimson lipstick, she wrote in red letters: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ The clerk came back from where he had been. He told her: ‘Madam, you have dirtied the tiles.’ He gave her a damp cloth, saying: ‘Clean it up.’ And she said, still by the lamp, that she had spent the whole afternoon on all fours, washing the tiles and saying: ‘Eyes of a blue dog,’ until people gathered at the door and said she was crazy.

  Now, when she finished speaking, I remained in the corner, sitting, rocking in the chair. ‘Every day I try to remember the phrase with which I am to find you,’ I said. ‘Now I don’t think I’ll forget it tomorrow. Still, I’ve always said the same thing and when I wake up I’ve always forgotten what the words I can find you with are.’ And she said: ‘You invented them yourself on the first day.’ And I said to her: ‘I invented them because I saw your eyes of ash. But I never remember the next morning.’ And she, with clenched fists, beside the lamp, breathed deeply: ‘If you could at least remember now what city I’ve been writing it in.’

  Her tightened teeth gleamed over the flame. ‘I’d like to touch you now,’ I said. She raised the face that had been looking at the light; she raised her look, burning, roasting, too, just like her, like her hands, and I felt that she saw me, in the corner where I was sitting, rocking in t
he chair. ‘You’d never told me that,’ she said. ‘I tell you now and it’s the truth,’ I said. From the other side of the lamp she asked for a cigarette. The butt had disappeared between my fingers. I’d forgotten that I was smoking. She said: ‘I don’t know why I can’t remember where I wrote it.’ And I said to her: ‘For the same reason that tomorrow I won’t be able to remember the words.’ And she said sadly: ‘No. It’s just that sometimes I think that I’ve dreamed that too.’ I stood up and walked toward the lamp. She was a little beyond, and I kept on walking with the cigarettes and matches in my hand, which would not go beyond the lamp. I held the cigarette out to her. She squeezed it between her lips and leaned over to reach the flame before I had time to light the match. ‘In some city in the world, on all the walls, those words have to appear in writing: “Eyes of a blue dog,” ’ I said. ‘If I remembered them tomorrow I could find you.’ She raised her head again and now the lighted coal was between her lips. ‘Eyes of a blue dog,’ she sighed, remembered, with the cigarette drooping over her chin and one eye half closed. Then she sucked in the smoke with the cigarette between her fingers and exclaimed: ‘This is something else now. I’m warming up.’ And she said it with her voice a little lukewarm and fleeting, as if she hadn’t really said it, but as if she had written it on a piece of paper and had brought the paper close to the flame while I read: ‘I’m warming,’ and she had continued with the paper between her thumb and forefinger, turning it around as it was being consumed and I had just read ‘… up,’ before the paper was completely consumed and dropped all wrinkled to the floor, diminished, converted into light ash dust. ‘That’s better,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it frightens me to see you that way. Trembling beside a lamp.’