Scars - Juan José Saer

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the courthouse stood, hazy and dark like a dense, black mass glued to the black sky. I stayed at Ernesto’s house until well after midnight, and then I went home to sleep.

      It was raining the morning of May second, and I stayed in bed late, in a kind of daze, thinking about the double. Since the night of the gin incident with Mamá, I hadn’t thought about him. I had forgotten him completely the last ten days. I first saw him on March fifth, after not having left the house for five days. I got on the bus at around nine in the morning, and when it turned at an intersection with San Martín, I saw someone with a very familiar face coming out of an optician. The face was so familiar. When the bus reached the opposite corner, I jumped up and got off. I had realized it was me.

      When I got to the corner there was no sign of him. I went in the optician and stood by the register, waiting for one of the workers to recognize me. One of them came up and asked if I needed anything, but he didn’t seem to recognize me. I said I was picking up some glasses that had been brought in for a new lens, under the name Philip Marlowe, and the guy looked through a pile of envelopes filled with glasses, with the names of the owners on the back, but he didn’t find the one I had asked for. I told him I must have gotten the wrong shop and I left. I walked around the block twice but didn’t see him again. Then I went to the paper.

      I saw him a second time two days later, coming out of the courthouse. I was walking down the marble steps at the entrance and I saw a guy in shirtsleeves waiting next to a taxi for someone who just then was paying the driver. The guy in shirtsleeves had his back to me, but there was something familiar about him. I didn’t associate him with the person I had seen coming out of the optician two days before, and when the passenger got out and the guy got in the car, I was looking up at the sky because I still hadn’t done the weather report, and it was crazy hot out. When I looked back down the taxi was accelerating, and I saw the side of the guys face in the back seat, saying something to the driver. It was me. I started shouting, running down the steps, but the only thing that came out was the word taxi. The driver, without slowing down or anything, stuck his head out the window and shouted, Can’t you see I’m occupied, numbnuts? The guy in the back seat gave me a sidelong look (there was something malignant in it), and then I couldn’t see his face, because the car accelerated, turned the corner, and disappeared. I ran to the corner, but when I got there the car was already gone. I stood there, stiff as a board, for like half an hour, staring off in the direction the car had vanished. I don’t know how I kept from passing out. For the weather report that day I entered 46 degrees in the shade, and I wasn’t far off, because the report they gave on the radio had it at 44.8. Then I went back to the paper and found Tomatis on the phone. Do me one favor, he was saying to the guy on the other end of the line. Look at the results and tell me if two forty-five came up. When he hung up he turned toward me, and I must have looked strange because he asked me what was wrong.

      —I saw myself in the street, twice, I said.

      —Don’t go egomaniacal, Ángel, said Tomatis, uninterested. Then he started typing.

      The third time he didn’t see me, and I was able to follow him for two blocks. It was during Carnival. A million people were lined up watching the murgas and the masquerades, and the guy was standing on the edge of the sidewalk, trying to cross the street. I was moving through the crowd, looking to write a fluff piece about the parade, for some extra cash, and I saw him from the opposite sidewalk, just as he started crossing toward me. I was blown away seeing him there, a cigarette pressed between his teeth, his head lifted, his eyes narrowed to keep the smoke from bothering him. My heart started pounding—he was walking straight at me. But he didn’t stop, and he didn’t seem to see me, but he passed so close that his shoulder rubbed against mine. I froze up when he touched me. Something turned over in my stomach. He looked so much like me—he had on a discolored blue shirt and white pants, exactly like the ones I was wearing—that on his right arm, exposed through his short-sleeved shirt, I even saw a white scar that was identical to mine, a long, whitish stain that the summer sun hadn’t been able to tan. I followed him. It was easy, at first, because he was walking against the wall and everyone else was pressed up to the edge of the sidewalk to get a better view of the parade, leaving a path open between the wall and the crowd. Less than ten meters separated us. He stopped suddenly because a water balloon flew past, exploded against a shop window, and splashed him. Instinctively, I brought my hand to my face to wipe off the drops. The guy took a handkerchief from his back pocket and dried his face and part of his head, then put the handkerchief away. I watched him and started following again when he walked on. Just above the right back pocket of his pants I could see two dark stains and realized they were ink stains I had made, a few months back, putting a pen away in the back right pocket of the pants I was wearing. He crossed the street and I followed him. On the next block I decided to speed up so I could talk to him—I had no idea what to say, but I wanted to talk to him—and I had already cut in half the distance between us when suddenly something blinded me. I felt a torrent of water—like a million liters—hitting me in the face. For half a minute I didn’t know if I was on San Martín or at the bottom of the Pacific, and when I opened my eyes I saw this shitty little brat looking at me from a doorway with an empty bucket in his hands, and when he saw my face—Mr. Hyde probably would have looked like Shirley Temple next to me just then—he took off into the house. When I dried my face off and looked up, the guy was gone.

      I took a mental note of the address of the house, thinking the Vampire of Düsseldorf might want to pay a visit, and then I went home. I saw my double again in mid-April, but I couldn’t follow him because, just as I was catching up to him, crossing the street, a truck almost ran me over. And, in any case, I was sure I wouldn’t catch him.

      On May second, before getting up, I thought about all of this. I wondered if seeing my double several times in the street, and once wearing the double of my discolored blue shirt and the double of my white pants with two ink stains on the back right pocket, wasn’t some feverish hallucination caused by the insane February sun roasting my skull. Because it had been a crazy summer. House roofs were cracking, and the walls had to be mopped up to dry the water pouring in. Millions of mosquitos were devouring anyone who went down to the riverbank to play sports—they lined all the jocks up along a wall and opened up the machine gun on them—and the pavement had turned black with the beetles that crashed against the streetlights and fell to the street with their wings broken. By January, the trees were surrounded by piles of charred leaves, and anyone who spent more than an hour in the sun would spontaneously combust. But I was sure it was real, because he had bumped into me the night of the parade. I was sure he existed. So I pictured him existing in a small world, like mine. Our worlds never overlapped, except through some unlikely accident that occurred three times. His world and mine, limited as they were, ran together if they approached each other, and his realm of experience was unknown to me, but familiar. I knew that the things that could happen to him in his world could be different from what happened to me in mine, but they were still similar. And if they seemed identical—if he looked at the back of his hand on April seventh at ten thirty-five in the morning, for example, at exactly the same moment as I was doing exactly that—they were, nevertheless, different things. Maybe he was following me in his world, along a duplicate and inverted path that I had mistakenly wandered onto the same night of carnival, when I was following him in my world. Or maybe we lived different lives. One thing I was sure of: our spheres—our worlds—were closed and only touched by accident. It could also be that everything has a double: Tomatis, Gloria, my mother, my notebook, my weather report, the La Región newspaper, Ernesto’s illuminated block where Shönberg’s Violin Concerto plays. If that was true, something different had to happen in the other world, because an exact replica seemed absurd and deranged to me, especially because it threatened to multiply indefinitely. There couldn’t be an identical bed repeated to infinity in which a guy like me, also repeated to infinity, thought about the possibility of the bed and the guy being repeated to infinity. That kind of thing was crazy. But when I got up I thought that it was just as crazy for there to be only one bed and one guy, and that the only horrifying thing about the double was the possibility that he was living a life I couldn’t. So I took a hot shower and went to the courthouse.

      Ramírez said all the rain was caused by sun spots, which in turn had been caused by the atomic bombs. I said that the sun spots and the

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