Trafalgar

End of the Interval





Mr. Chaos



“What do I know?” said Trafalgar. “I’ve been so many places, done so many things, I get confused. Ask Elvira, she has everything noted down.”

“Josefina was here the other day,” I said, “and we drank tea here in the garden and she sat in the same chair where you’re sitting and she said you had told her about Serprabel.”

“Don’t talk about it. It makes me sick to remember what they did to that poor girl.”

So he drank the coffee and, for a while, said nothing. And I asked no questions: one can hurry Trafalgar along, discreetly, in the middle of a story but never before a story begins because then he starts talking about any old thing, about tangos, let’s say, or he starts to make fun of himself and his adventures with women or in business and he goes on with the coffee and suddenly he leaves and one realizes one has been left without knowing what one wanted to know.

“That coffee must be cold,” he said.

“You’ve drunk three cups.”

“Go on, heat up what’s left, all right? And while you’re at it, make a little more.”

I left him alone for a while in the garden.

“But that was on the last trip,” he told me when I returned with the coffee pot. “On the other hand, nothing happened on this trip.”

“You lie like a moron.”

“Seriously. I made a lot of stops, all of them very short and in places I already knew from before except for two, so everything went very well and very quickly.”

“And in those two places you didn’t know from before, what happened?”

“Nothing,” he opened another pack of cigarettes. “That’s how I like coffee, good and hot. Although it’s a little weak; your husband doesn’t complain?”

“Don’t forget he had an ulcer and can’t drink strong coffee.”

“Poor Goro, how could he avoid having an ulcer after twenty-five years of marriage.”

“Go on, you defend bachelorhood. Some day you’re going to marry a harpy who sweet-talks you into it and you’re going to end up with ulcers, sciatica, and hives. You didn’t meet any candidates on this trip?”

“More or less as usual.”

“And on those two worlds that you hadn’t been to?”

“Nothing worthwhile. A very pretty little blonde, crazier than a goat, on Akimaréz, but I got rid of her as soon as I could.”

“What’s that about Akimaréz? I don’t remembering hearing you mention it.”

“I must have told you something, because I knew it existed and that one could buy graphite and kaolin there. Cheaply, both of them. It’s quite pretty, no great wonder, but it’s not bad. Very big, lots of water and seven continents like enormous islands in the middle of the oceans. The islands have water and vegetation only at the edges and that’s where they’ve planted their cities, which you can tell Goro are the dream of any urban planner: small cities, low buildings, never more than three stories, with gardens; little traffic, none of your noise or smoke or odor. They like music, too. And in the middle of the islands, of the continents, the landscape is fantastic, black and white, dry, impossible to fertilize. But what do they care? They sell the black graphite and the white kaolin and feldspar and granite and I don’t know what else and they’re sitting pretty, strumming their lutes.”

“Cushy life.”

“Yes, but boring. They have a good time, but I’d had enough after two days. I made my purchases and I left.”

“And the other one you didn’t know?”

“Aleiçarga. Almost the complete opposite: little sea and lots of green. Two itty-bitty seas at the poles and another larger one close to the equator. It rains a lot, the rest is fertile ground, and the cities are disgusting.”

“Big, dirty, with smoke and drugs and loudspeakers.”

“Not so fast. Small cities because they, and they’re not the only ones, seem to have figured out what we are just learning; very clean, without smoke, don’t even think about drugs, and a few loudspeakers but they’re not bothersome.”

“Then they’re quite nice. I don’t know why you say they’re disgusting.”

“They are too well organized.”

“So far as I know, that is not a defect.”

“You, being Madam Organization; but when a whole city and all of the cities and everything is like an enormous and efficient company presided over by a narrow gauge logic where the effects always follow the causes and the causes march along single file and the dodo birds don’t worry about anything nor are they surprised by anything and they slither along beside you faintly pleased, I—like any normal person—feel a great desire to kill someone or commit suicide.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t be offended,” he smiled at me a little. “On Akimaréz one gets bored but on Aleiçarga one has to be very careful so as not to fall into the trap and not to enter into the little game of being sensible. That’s what it is, they are sensible, so much so that either they infect you or you do something awful.”

“And what awful thing did you do?”

“Nothing. Didn’t I tell you nothing happened?”

“Nothing, nothing at all?”

“Nothing, are you ever stubborn. I did the same as always: sell, talk, eat, sleep, walk around to get to know the place a bit. And I discovered an interesting guy. I think the coffee is running out.”

“I’ll make you more if you tell me who the guy was and why he was interesting.”

“I don’t know who he was, I never learned his name. And he was interesting because he wasn’t sensible.”

“No?”

“No. He was crazy. And if there’s no more coffee, I’m leaving.”

“Blackmailer.”

“You started.”

I went to make the coffee and I thought it was a sure thing that Trafalgar had been lying when he said nothing had happened and he had done nothing.

“And?” I asked him from the kitchen doorway.

“And what?”

“And the crazy guy?”

“Look, there are so many crazies around, who cares about one more?”

“I care. Here comes the coffee.”

A hassle with the coffeepot. If I took it good and full, it would get cold; if I only took a little, I would have to make more. But as with Trafalgar one has to learn to resign oneself to the coffee, I took it half full.

“Let’s go, tell me.”

“But che, I already told you there’s nothing to tell. The Aleiçarganos are sensible, rational, efficient, measured, discreet, and this other one was just the opposite, so he was listed as crazy.”

“But listen, one can be just the opposite of efficient and discreet and sensible and not be crazy. Are you sure he was crazy?”

“No.”

“Ah-ha.”

“Have we begun?”

“We haven’t started anything,” I watched him swallow the coffee. “Couldn’t you be more or less efficient and sensible and for once start at the beginning?”

“Ugh, all right, I arrived on Aleiçarga on a spring day at nine fifteen in the morning, I got out, locked the clunker, went to the reception office, I was received very well by a short little guy and another fellow, a little taller and very fat, the port wasn’t very big but it was very complete, they gave me coffee, they arranged all the paperwork in a flash—it wasn’t much—they pointed me to a hotel and I went there, using very comfortable public transport, at the hotel I had breakfast and more coffee.”

“I am going to strangle you.”

“I went up to my room, I bathed, I changed, I didn’t shave because I had shaved prior to arrival, I left the hotel, took a taxi, went to the Center of Commerce, spoke to the secretary, a birdlike man who resembled a tero, I inquired whether they were interested in buying kaolin and graphite, he said yes, we went to lunch together.”

“Go. Out of my house. I don’t want to see you again in my life.”

“Wait, wait a little. At the beginning I thought everything was perfect and I didn’t like that because you know perfect things smell bad to me; if I have to choose a glass from Murano, I choose one that has a bubble. But as besides rolling along smoothly, everything benefited me, I let myself be fooled—sweet-talked, as you say. Hey, where’s the cat? I don’t see her.”

“She went out for a drink with the tomcat next door. Go on.”

“Of course, I’m not a total moron and it didn’t take long for me to wise up.”

“I would like Josefina to have heard that phrase.”

“Because?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“One’s used to the word perfect and we use it when something went well, end of story. But if something is perfect perfect, without fissures or mending, then it is very bad,” he smoked and drank coffee and maybe looked around for the cat. “Anything heavenly is necessarily hellish.”

And another threat of violent ejection must have floated in the air because he hurried on:

“On Aleiçarga, everyone has a placid face and smiles once in a while but no one guffaws, no one yells, no one runs to catch the bus and if they catch it they don’t fight with the driver and if they don’t catch it they don’t swear, no kid comes to blows with another or cries, begging for gum with trading cards.” He set the empty cup on the saucer. “Gum probably doesn’t come with trading cards.”

And he served himself more coffee and I waited because by now it seemed unlikely that he would cut short the story about how nothing, but absolutely nothing, had happened.

“I don’t know for certain,” he said, “because I’m not among the idiots who chew gum. In the evening I returned to the Center with the secretary; the possible buyers were already there. I asked for quite a bit. Well, I’ll tell you I asked for a lot, a matter of then coming down a bit. They smiled, they said no and they stood up to leave. I stood there with my mouth open. It was just unbelievable: they didn’t know how to haggle.”

“So what? I imagine there are people who don’t haggle.”

“I’m not saying there aren’t. But few, believe me, very few. Almost none. Some more, some less, but everybody argues over prices. And there are places where bargaining is a refined art, sublime, places where you have to go very well prepared, otherwise you’re toast. I am no master but I do have some experience. And there, with the guys about to get away from me, it occurred to me that I could invent a story for them and say I came from a place where bargaining is a form of commercial courtesy and give them the whole song and dance, but I realized the best thing to do would be to grab the bull by the horns and before they finished saying good-bye I showed them my cards. They were a little disoriented but they understood right away. Everyone understands everything right away on that lousy world. No, don’t take it away, it’s still drinkable. I sold everything I had in half a minute.”

“Don’t tell me at a ridiculously low price, because I won’t believe you.”

“Ridiculously low, no; sensible, that’s the problem, sensible, reasonable. It’s not that I didn’t earn anything, no, that’s not allowed on Aleiçarga precisely because it’s not reasonable or logical. I made a profit, but not so much as if they had let me hold forth like a silver-tongued huckster in the bazaar. And they took care of everything, the invoices, the permits, the seals, the unloading, everything. So one minute later I had nothing more to do and the next day I could leave.”

“And why didn’t you leave? Tell me that.”

“How do you know I didn’t leave?”

“The crazy guy, dear, I’m waiting for the crazy guy to appear.”

“I didn’t leave because I was ticked at them. I thought up a few dirty tricks, like for example mixing lower quality kaolin with the first-class stuff, cheating them on the weight, getting myself invited to the guys’ homes and seducing their wives and daughters.”

“Don’t puff yourself up.”

“I’m not puffing myself up. I was playing with my irritation, that’s all. And they weren’t so many. With a little time, who can say?”

And he smiled again, not at me but at the hypothetical daughters of the kaolin buyers.

“Instead of that. Understand me, I didn’t mix the merchandise nor did I fix the weight, because a person has scruples. Sometimes. And I didn’t try to meet the daughters because surely if the fathers don’t know how to haggle, the girls don’t know how to flirt before saying yes.”

“Or no. Instead of that, what did you do?”

“Or no, you’re right. Instead of that, I asked the secretary where there was a bookstore.”

“A bookstore.”

“Not on a whim. When you go to a place of which you know nothing and no one, you have to seek out three things: bookstores, temples, and brothels. There are others, of course, in case you don’t find any of the former: you can also go to the schools, the casinos, the hospitals, the barracks. But I had seen bookstores and I opted for the safe choice. I told the guy I wanted to buy something to read that night in the hotel and he sent me to a little bookstore that had everything, understand?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to understand, don’t make yourself mysterious.”

“That little is written on Aleiçarga, very little. A single monumental work of history with its corresponding compendium in one volume, laws, mathematics, medicine, physics, logic, not more than half a dozen novels, no poetry.”

“What brutes.”

“That’s what you think. And when you go to the bookstore, you have to buy two things: history and a novel. I bought the compendium and a novel called The Ragemca.”

“The what did you say?”

“It’s a surname. It was the story of a family. And I read both of them that same night and I almost died of boredom. I read the history first and I learned that nothing had ever happened. It is assumed that the first Aleiçarganos lived in the forests, naked, eating fruit and sleeping under the climbing vines, all very healthy. And that they had wooden instruments and when they died they weren’t buried but rather raised up to the highest branches and tied up there, probably to save them a leg of the journey, but that’s what I say, not the historians of Aleiçarga who don’t permit themselves such fantasies. Later they built houses out of wood, of course, and they planted, made fire, the wheel arrived and after that the alphabet and that’s it, the end.”

“That’s it how? They wrote a whole history book for that stupid little story?”

“That was the most interesting part. When they invented writing, and you can see the prehistoric ones walking around under the trees were more interesting than the modern folk if they thought up the wheel and the alphabet, with writing they started making chronicles of what happened, but the problem is nothing happened. According to the first writings, no one stole fire from the gods, the spirits of the forest never spoke to the people, perhaps because there were no spirits of the forest, the dead died and bye-bye, there was no hero who got lost searching for immortality, no woman cuckolded her husband with a demigod, and so on. So what remained was deadly dull: the harvests, the journeys, the plagues, a casual discovery or two, and nothing more.”

“Legends?” I asked. “Sagas? Cosmogonies? Mythologies? Dreams?”

“The Aleiçarganos? Come on, it’s so obvious you don’t know them. With the wheel, fire, writing, a little bit of empirical medicine, another bit of engineering and architecture, also empirical, and no birth control or natural catastrophes or dangerous animals, they expanded and from the beginning they had a single state, a single government, plenty of work, no religion or poetry or politics.”

“Wars,” I thought. “There will have been wars, invasions, dethroned kings, junior officers with imperial ambitions, assassinations for power, don’t tell me no.”

“I’m telling you no. Those who are most fit to govern, govern. Those who are most fit to operate are surgeons. Those who are most fit to drive a tractor.”

“Drive a tractor, thank you, I get it. But then without visionaries, without ambitions or schemers or prophets or delusionals, can you tell me how they moved forward?”

“Very slowly. They are very old and they had a lot of time.”

“They’re a bunch of dim bulbs.”

“Agreed. The most spectacular, the great inventions, what they set aside because they thought it was impossible, all that came to them from outside. They still had wooden plows and carts pulled by oxen tied at the neck and wood stoves when other people who already traveled among the stars reached them and taught them things. Then they started to advance for real, because they learn quickly, so long as the big ideas occur to others.”

“I don’t see how they didn’t just keep swinging from the trees. Tell me, and the novel?”

“Even more boring than the history text. Generations and generations of a family of industrious idiots, in which there were neither fights nor adultery nor fraudulent bankruptcies nor clashes between father and son; nor crazy aunts nor incest nor monsters nor geniuses, nothing, nothing, nothing. I fell asleep when I don’t know which son of I don’t know who and married to I don’t know who else was building a house I don’t know where and opening a factory of I don’t know what and had three sons and a daughter.”

“The next time, don’t sell them graphite, sell them the complete works of Shakespeare and Balzac and you’ll kill them all with a heart attack.”

“Not even that. To start, I’m not going back. And if I go and I sell them Shakespeare and Balzac, I’ll bet whatever you like that they read them, study them, and decide it’s all a bunch of nonsense.”

“I congratulate you. What an enjoyable trip.”

“I told you and you didn’t believe me.”

“Because a person knows you already.”

I almost stood up to go make more coffee but I remembered something and started to doubt again.

“Wait a sec. The crazy guy?”

“Well, of course, the crazy. Yes, the crazy. I met him the next day, at night. I couldn’t bring myself to leave and I was still wandering around there. I couldn’t believe, being used to, as you know, so many strange and absurd and stupid things not only here but on many other worlds, I couldn’t believe there existed people who were so reasonable, but I was becoming convinced and I was almost taken over by so much calm. I went for a walk, I left the city and followed the walking paths that run beside the roads and that from time to time open and take you to the fields or the forests. The guy was sitting on the ground, whistling. When I heard the whistle I thought, no, it can’t be. They don’t have poets, did I tell you? Or musicians, except for dancing at parties or accompanying physical activities. For that matter, no painters, either. Illustrators, yes, but no painters. So nobody whistles, doesn’t that seem reasonable to you? What for? No, of course, why would they whistle? And I was hearing a whistle, a little monotonous but the whistle of a person whistling because they feel like it, how’s that? I stopped short and asked myself if I might not be the one whistling. No, it wasn’t me. I left the path, set off toward the forest, and I found him.”

He was quiet. And the worst of it was, he didn’t even demand coffee.

“Trafalgar,” I said.

“Huh?”

“I imagine you’re not going to leave me hanging there.”

“No.”

“I’ll make you coffee.”

“Fine.”

I went, heated the water, made coffee, returned, Trafalgar served himself and drank half the cup.

“He was huge,” he said, “and blond and he had a beard and he whistled, seated on the ground. I said hello, good evening, and he answered that the cranes.”

“That the cranes what?”

“Nothing, that’s it, that the cranes.”

He drank the other half of the cup and served himself more.

“Right then, and note that I am not sentimental.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not. Right then I remembered a stupid game my cousins and I played when we were kids at the estate in Moreno and I came to the realization that it wasn’t a stupid game. Someone said a sentence and the others had to answer in turn, quickly, with sentences that had nothing to do with the previous ones. It seems easy until you try. You can’t think of anything beforehand, because you don’t know what those who go before you are going to say, so suddenly you have to say something and if you take too long or if what you say is related to what has already been said, you blew it. There were more times we had to pay a forfeit than that we got it right. Hello, good evening and immediately: that the cranes, sounded like that. Look, there’s the cat.”

“I’m going to turn on the light.”

“There you have it. We just did the same thing. There’s the cat, I’m going to turn on the light. Is it reasonable or not?”

“No, but we understand each other, so it’s fine.”

“We don’t understand each other, we comprehend each other and of course it’s fine. But the Aleiçarganos didn’t share that opinion and said the guy was crazy.”

I went to turn on the light and when I returned Trafalgar was serving himself more coffee.

“We had a very interesting conversation. I still didn’t know who he was nor what he was, but starting from the cranes and what I remembered from Moreno, I went forward. If I’d been playing with my cousins I’d have had to pay the forfeit because I was quiet for a while thinking about everything I told you before, but I laughed to myself, I forgot I was on Aleiçarga and I said, you know what?”

He didn’t expect me to answer, nor did he give me time to say no, how was I going to know?

“My cousin Alicia is married to a Japanese.”

In fact, poor Alicia Salles, who is very pretty but quite silly, is married to a nice, bald dermatologist from Salta.

“And then, magnificently, he answered that there was a lot to say about paper flowers so long as they were pink. And I told him my wristwatch was five minutes fast. Or slow, I don’t remember.”

“I don’t understand how you remember so many unconnected things.”

“I remember perfectly because they’re not unconnected.”

“Come on, old man, hello, the cranes, the watch, the retard Alicia, the paper flowers, the imaginary Japanese—come on.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Are you going to tell me my watch has never been five minutes slow and my cousin Alicia isn’t married and you don’t have paper flowers on that coat stand and there is no Japanese married to a woman named Alicia and there aren’t cranes somewhere?”

I wanted to protest but he didn’t let me.

“More than that. Are you going to tell me that at some moment a Japanese—just as much as Alicia and you and I and the crazy—hasn’t seen cranes or thought about cranes or about pink paper flowers and Alicia hasn’t had a wristwatch that ran fast and some crane won’t have flown by—well, I don’t know if cranes fly like storks or if they walk around pecking at worms like chickens—flown by over a tower that had a clock that ran fast and over a store where they sold paper flowers?”

“Yes, I get it,” I said.

And I got it. There in the dark garden everything was one great fresco moving with the wild and strict ballet of the cranes and the watches and the Alicias and the Japanese and the paper flowers and more, many more things and people and animals and plants and Trafalgar and I and the cat, the cats, the book covers, necklaces, salt, warriors, eyeglasses, hats, old photographs, chandeliers and trains, Giorgio Morandi’s bottles, gray moths, streetcar tickets, quill pens, emperors and sleeping pills, axes, incense and chocolate. And even more. Everything, to tell the truth.

Then Alicia isn’t a retard.

“Your cousin Alicia isn’t a retard,” I said, “at least no more than anyone else. Why don’t we always talk, all of us, like you and your cousins in Moreno or like the crazy guy on Aleiçarga?”

“Because we’re afraid, I think,” said Trafalgar. “And he wasn’t crazy, it was that Aleiçarga had finally acquired, like no other world in the universe—in the one I know—the true awareness of total order. For the moment all they can do is reject it, of course, that’s why they say he’s crazy, but I don’t think that will last long.”

As we were also spinning comfortably in the universe, in the one we know for now, we had forgotten about the coffee not because we were thinking about other things but because we were also aware of all of the coffee possible and it was there and I could make more at that moment or three hours or ten months or seven years later because time was there, too.

“In other places,” Trafalgar said, smoking, “right here, that awareness is fragmented and hidden. You would have to put together, for example, I don’t know, a goatherd, a mathematician, a sage, a child who doesn’t yet go to school, a schizophrenic, a woman giving birth, a teacher, a person dying, an I don’t know what, I don’t know how many more, and it could be that you would approach from a distance the true panorama. There they had everything in just two halves. On one side the sensible, logical, rational, efficient Aleiçarganos, incapable of a paradox, a vice, a sonata, an absurd joke, a haiku. And on the other, the crazy.”

“He wasn’t crazy.”

“No, of course he wasn’t crazy. They said he was because if they accepted him, it shook everything up for them. But I decided he wasn’t crazy. He was.”

“I’m going to make you more coffee,” I said.

“Go on.”

And he got up and went into the kitchen with me.

“He was primordial chaos,” he said while the water heated and I washed the coffee pot. “He saw the forms and so what he said seemed unformed; he lived all times and so he spoke without order; he was so complete that one couldn’t span him fully but saw him fragmented, and so normal that the Aleiçarganos said he was crazy. I think he was what we should have already become.”

Trafalgar picked up the coffee pot and we went back to the garden where the cat was lying in wait for gray moths that had come to the light. He drank a cup of coffee and took out cigarettes and he offered them to me but I don’t smoke the black ones.

“I don’t know how you can smoke that trash,” he said. “It rusts your lungs.”

“Oh, of course, the black ones don’t.”

“They do, too, but less.” He served himself more coffee.

“Was it the only time you saw him?”

“Who?”

“Him. Mr. Chaos.”

“Uh-huh. But so what? I saw him one time, two, twenty, a million times. And I was with him until dawn. An entire night talking and talking without stopping and without paying a forfeit for anything because we couldn’t be mistaken, ever; I went back to the hotel when the sun was high but as fresh as if I had slept for ten hours.”

“You came back that day?”

“That night. In the morning I looked for the secretary of the Center of Commerce and asked him directly who he was. The guy smiled. He smiled discreetly, with a smile so reasonable, so without indulgence, without embarrassment, without malice, without anything, so much a smile and nothing more than a smile, that I don’t know how I managed not to grab him by the suit and shake him until his brains were scrambled. He told me he was an unfortunate who had been born that way and he even explained why but I preferred to draw the curtain and I didn’t hear that part. He told me they had tried to cure him but without success and I thought, what luck, and he told me, this will kill you, that they had thought about eliminating him but that as he was harmless, they allowed him to live and the municipality was responsible for feeding and clothing him. And as I kept asking, he told me he lived in a house the municipality loaned him and they also paid people to keep it in reasonable condition. And that he, the crazy, at the beginning gave them a lot to do because every morning the house was disarranged, with the furniture in the patio or the mattress in the bathtub or the rug on the roof or the frying pans hanging from the latch or things like that until they had nailed everything, not the frying pans, to the floor or the walls and since then the guy went there seldom and preferred to live in the forest like the savages, that’s what he said, like the savages.”

“The savages.”

“Yes, but don’t think about Thoreau, think about the savages.”

“Of course.”

“But he told me something more.”

And he was quiet. I served him coffee and I waited for him; I waited for a long time.

“He told me they were thinking about reconsidering the benevolent attitude. Because it seemed that in his way Mr. Chaos had started courting the girls.”

“Those who didn’t know how to flirt before they said yes. The daughters of those who didn’t know how to bargain.”

“The same. I trust one of them will learn,” said Trafalgar, “before the Aleiçarganos have time to reconsider anything. What I rely on is that, as is the case everywhere, the women on Aleiçarga will be more curious, more audacious, wiser than the men; like mother Eve, they will quickly eat the apple while that wimpy Adam waffles. I don’t dare hope it will be many of them but one, one at least, I am confident that one will say yes.”

“And if they kill him?”

“It could be that they kill him. But I think that is no longer important.”

The cat was getting impatient.

“It must be late,” Trafalgar said.

“That’s not important either,” I answered. “I’m going to feed the cat.”

“It seems to me,” I heard him say from the kitchen, “that she tired of the gray moths and the pink paper flowers.”