Scars - Juan José Saer

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knows who. I don’t think she heard a strange noise and turned on the light suddenly to scare a burglar or something like that. No: her idea was to surprise me in flagrante in who knows what imaginary crime she assumes I commit every night. Another question: How can she hit me for saying that the bottle of gin she had in her room, and which she’d drank two-thirds of, was in fact mine and not hers? She knew full well the bottle was mine. She shouldn’t have gotten up from the bed and slapped me. I got angry and hit her back. Then she slaps me twice again and I couldn’t take any more; I took off my belt and start whipping and punching her until she surrenders and curls up on the bed crying and all and doesn’t look up or say a word when I pour myself a gin and take it back to my room.

      —So you gave your mother a beating, says Tomatis.

      —Exactly, I say.

      Because Tomatis doesn’t say anything, I add: She was making life impossible for me. It seemed like the best way to get her to leave me alone.

      —I suspect you didn’t come to the decision as calmly as you’d now like to make me believe, says Tomatis.

      —I probably wasn’t thinking ahead when I hit her, I said.

      —Yes, said Tomatis. That’s the impression I get.

      —And what about her? I asked. Does it seem normal to you to get so enraged that it completely changes our relationship because she saw me in the courtyard with a hard-on?

      —How old is your mother? asked Tomatis.

      —Thirty-six, I think.

      —You should be more careful around the house, said Tomatis.

      Then Gloria walked in, and Tomatis told her to make breakfast. Gloria looked at me and smiled weakly, but it seemed like she hadn’t woken up completely. She had the pale skin and puffy eyes of someone who’s just gotten out of bed, and she couldn’t focus her gaze on anything. Tomatis shook his head and gestured for me to follow him to the front room, but I had already forgotten the thing with my mother and would rather have stayed in the kitchen checking out Gloria’s ass while she got the food ready. Clearly Tomatis was trying to show interest in my problems after making me wait more than twenty-four hours, but when we got to the front room I didn’t feel like talking anymore and went to the window to look at the street. No one was out, and the shrubs bordering the sidewalk were frostbitten. Across the street, the sky’s tense gray color seemed even more tense and more gray over the skeletal frame of a house under construction.

      Tomatis waited for me to say something, and when he understood that I preferred to stand there the whole time looking through the window with my hands in my pockets, he said: I’m not going to give you advice, Angelito. It’s not something I do. But I suppose you want to find some explanation for what’s happening. If we analyze the facts, maybe we can come up with something.

      —She’s a slutty old bag, I said.

      —First off, she’s not old, said Tomatis.

      —I hope you’re not talking about me, said Gloria, coming in just then.

      —Not the old part, I said.

      —Give me a cigarette, Carlos, said Gloria.

      Tomatis handed her a cigarette and lit it. I had an unopened packet in each pocket, and I squeezed them both.

      —Come in and eat, if you want, said Gloria, and walked out.

      We stood there in silence for a moment, and I could hear Gloria’s footsteps moving down the corridor toward the kitchen. She looked like she’d woken up completely, and her thin, freckled face, with the mole on the cheek and the lips curved slightly upward, had regained the soft shape of the night before. When we were walking to the kitchen and I started to smell fried onions, I worried that we were going to have to eat that revolting canned soup again, but Gloria had changed out the peas for some pieces of beef liver that must have gone rotten while the cow was still alive. If she’d fried it in jet fuel it might not have been so terrible. And she and Tomatis swallowed it so easily and with so much appetite it was like they were eating rose-flavored milkshakes. It seemed like Gloria didn’t know how to do a thing, apart from letting herself get fondled all night by one guy and then jump in bed naked with another one. I couldn’t get the image of her out of my head—her face flattened against the pillow, her mouth open, and the little saliva stain forming on the white pillowcase. But she was able to do more than spread her legs all night, the tramp. She played poker a thousand times better than Carlitos and me, and she won more than a thousand pesos from each of us in less than an hour, when we went to the front room to play a game after breakfast. And after winning she said that something must be open despite it being May first, and she went out and bought a kilo of cream puffs to eat with tea. Then she started reading some poems aloud in English, from an anthology Tomatis had just bought in Buenos Aires. The book had a strange odor, which I can’t recall without shuddering. When she grabbed it the first time and brought it to her nose and smelled it with her eyes closed, I thought it was a put on, plain and simple. But then she handed it to me so I could smell it, and I realized the smell was something madman. Then she read a section of Robert Browning’s “Pompilia,” then “The Chambered Nautilus,” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, “This Bread I Break,” by Dylan Thomas, “To Waken an Old Lady,” by William Carlos Williams, Yeats’s “Vacillation,” Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” Pound’s “A Study in Aesthetics,” and half a million others. It was obvious she knew everything and had perfect taste, the bimbo. That made me even angrier, and I told her not to read any more in English because I couldn’t understand a thing (even though I had studied English for four years and could read it easily) and Tomatis cracked up laughing.

      —He’s mad because you told me he’d asked you to stay last night, he said.

      They barely survived that, and only because I wasn’t carrying a .45 pistol and a handful of hollow-points. She started laughing and put down the book and walked over and kissed me on the cheek and told me I was a cute kid. Then she put her hands in her back pockets and went to look at the gray sky through the window. Tomatis was lying in the bed, propped up against the wall with his legs hanging over the edge, and I was standing there like an asshole next to the table, squeezing the cigarette packs in my pockets. To punish Tomatis I told him his theory that the novel was the literary genre par excellence was nonsense (although when he said it, it sounded right) and that actually everything was theater, that theater was the only real genre, and that Discourse on the Method was a long monologue by someone who was playing the role of a philosopher and who spoke in a way that had nothing to do with how he talked in real life, that talking like that he imagined himself a philosopher and was hoping to pass it off on everyone else. But this didn’t bother Tomatis at all, and it actually sounded interesting to him, and he came over and slapped me on the back and told me I was an intelligent guy and I was going places. Then I told him I hadn’t read Discourse on the Method, and he said it didn’t matter, that he had read it and that it was accurate more or less the way I had put it. He finally convinced me. Then Gloria went to make tea, and by the time she brought it steaming to the front room, I wasn’t angry any more.

      It got dark and we turned on the lights. The sky was like a metal sheet. The room was full of smoke, but it wasn’t dirty or anything because Gloria kept cleaning the glasses and ashtrays as they got dirty. We sat there a half hour looking at each other, and I got the impression that they wanted me to scram, but since I wasn’t sure I stayed till around eight. I realized that they didn’t have any problem with me staying when Tomatis said I could sleep there again if I wanted, but I told him I would rather go home. Then Tomatis said he was going to lay down a while and Gloria followed him out. For about fifteen minutes I listened to their voices and stifled laughter, and then everything was quiet. I took out the pack I had grabbed the night before and put it back in the desk drawer. Then I shouted from the corridor that I was leaving. Gloria responded that one of these days we’d see each other again, and I left.

      I walked something like thirty blocks. It took me ten minutes to get to the avenue, then I turned onto 25 de Mayo, and when I reached the intersection with the Banco Provincial, whose clock read exactly nine, I turned onto San Martín. I drank a cognac in

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