Scars - Juan José Saer

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the trees. The door opened and I turned around suddenly.

      —I was waiting, Ernesto said.

      I shook my head.

      —It’s raining, I said.

      We went upstairs and straight into his study. Ernesto opened the shades covering a large window and then poured two whiskies. On the desk were the Oscar Wilde book, the dictionary, and the composition notebook with the fucking translation manuscript. I leaned over the desk and examined the handwriting: it was so small and tight that it was impossible to tell the vowels apart. Ernesto handed me the glass.

      —It’s indecipherable, he said.

      —So it seems, I muttered, looking again. Where are you?

      Ernesto recited:

      —Yes, Harry, I know what you are going to say. Something dreadful about marriage. Don’t say it. Don’t ever say things of that kind to me again. Two days ago I asked Sibyl to marry me. I’m not going to break my word to her. She is to be my wife. I’ve just gotten to wife.

      I drank my whole glass at once, feeling Ernesto’s eyes on my face. Then I went to the window. The lake shone over the trees in the park, their leaves glowing green in the darkness. It was crazy looking.

      —I like your house, I said. It’s comfortable.

      —It is, yes, he said. It’s comfortable.

      He was staring at me.

      —You should come more often, he said.

      —I do what I can, I said, and crossed the room to pour myself more whiskey.

      I felt just like one of those toys they sell on the street, which the barker controls with an invisible string, a dark string that he hides and no one else sees: Sit down, Pedrito, and Pedrito plops his cardboard ass on the pavement. His gaze was the string, and I felt cornered in his field of vision, in those square meters illuminated by the warm lamps of the study, and walking toward the bar or the window, it felt like the tension of his gaze would reach its limit any second and I would suddenly find myself stopped with my back to him, up against the end of it. But Ernesto spoke softly, and tried honestly not to hide what he was thinking. Or maybe that’s just me, and it wasn’t honest. We set up all these rules in advance to tell the good from the bad. Even if Ernesto knew he was capable of doing something I called bad didn’t mean that he was honest, and he may have been hiding something even worse behind the thing they call bad. But I think this now and didn’t then, the night of May first, because the night of May first I thought that Ernesto was honest because he was capable of recognizing the bad thing in him.

      Then we went to the dining room, and just as we were sitting down (it was eleven), the telephone rang. Ernesto’s servant told him the guard at the courthouse was on the phone. Ernesto put his whiskey down on the table (we were still standing, talking) and disappeared into the study, closing the door. I couldn’t hear a thing. For several minutes it was perfectly silent in the house, so when Ernesto opened the door to his study, on his way back to the dining room, the sound rang out not only at the moment it was produced, but kept echoing the entire time it took Ernesto to cross the long, dark corridor that separates the study from the dining room. It dissipated when Ernesto’s figure reappeared in the entrance to the dining room. He had a stony expression and looked pale. We sat down at the table and ate the first course in silence. Despite being more or less pudgy, Ernesto ate little, in almost insubstantial mouthfuls. I, on the other hand, devoured what the woman served me. During the second course—a chicken that was insanely good—Ernesto finally opened his mouth for something other than the tiny mouthfuls that would have starved a sparrow.

      He had barely looked at me during the meal, and now he raised his eyes and whispered:

      —A man shot his wife to death with a shotgun earlier today, in Barrio Roma, he said. They want me to take his statement tonight, because they don’t have space for him at the station. I told them to wait until tomorrow afternoon.

      —Why did he kill her?

      —I don’t know anything, said Ernesto. I know he shot her to death with a shotgun, outside a bar.

      —Are you going to take his statement tomorrow? I asked.

      —In the afternoon, probably. I have other appointments in the morning, said Ernesto.

      —Can I come? I asked.

      —We’ll see, said Ernesto.

      Then we went back to the study and Ernesto put on the record player. He poured whiskeys, and we sat down to listen to his favorite record, Shönberg’s Violin Concerto (Opus 36). We didn’t say a word while the concerto was playing. I thought about a lot of things. I thought about a girl I was in love with for a full year two years ago. Her name was Perla Pampiglioni. The first time I saw her she was standing at the bus stop near the suspension bridge, on the train station side, to be exact. I went crazy the moment I saw her: we were two meters apart, both standing at the curb, looking sidelong at each other. She had on a yellow dress that showed her arms and neck and her suntanned legs. Her hair was like polished sheets of copper. We took the same bus, and by chance there was only one double seat open, so I sat next to her, giving her the window. She was pretending to look out the window, but every once in a while she glanced at me. I did the same. In the bus’s rear view mirror I could see her knees. We went more than twenty blocks together, and at one point her arm brushed up against mine. Then, in the city center, she got up and left. I thought about getting off at the same corner and talking to her on the street, but I got the feeling that she was watching me the whole trip, so I decided to get off a block later. When I got back to the corner where she got off, she was gone. For three days I wandered around the train station, hoping to see her again, but didn’t find a single trace. I saw her a week later. I was at the bar in the arcade, drinking a cup of coffee with a college friend who had been in medical school in Córdoba for six months, and I see her coming up the corridor toward the bar, again in that yellow dress, the copper sheets of hair bouncing on her shoulders. I liked her perky little tits and realized that she had seen me because she started looking bored. She went up to a toy store window. And then Arnoldo Pampiglioni gets up, walks over to her, gives her a kiss, and they start talking. They were five meters away and the fucking son of a bitch couldn’t invite her to the table for coffee and instead left me waiting fifteen minutes. Then she turned—not before throwing a sidelong glance at me—and went back down the corridor toward the street, shaking the roundest, tightest—the word is perfect—ass I’ve seen in my life. Arnoldo sits down again and says, Perlita only gets a pass because we’re cousins. I exhaled and asked who she was. She’s Perlita Pampiglioni, Arnoldo said. She got her masters this year. He told me where she lived and everything. Then he went back to Córdoba. The next day I launched the operation. Based on the address that Arnoldo gave me, I looked for her number in the phone book and found what I was looking for. Her father was José Pampiglioni, and he lived in Guadalupe. There was also a José Pampiglioni downtown, under the heading Home Furnishings. So I posted myself a whole afternoon in front of the shop on San Martín until I saw all the workers leave, and finally, half an hour after the shop closed, a fifty-year-old man locked the door, leaving the shop lights on.

      The next day, around eleven, I went in and asked the price of a vacuum cleaner, if I could buy it on credit, and if the credit could be in my name, because I was under age and wanted to surprise my mother. The salesman asked if I worked and I said yes, and on top of that I regularly got a two-hundred-dollar-a-month allowance from my mother’s brother, a Mister Philip Marlowe, from Los Angeles, California. The salesman told me it might be possible, but in any case I would need an older person, someone with property, to guarantee the loan. Just then I felt something strange behind me; I turned, and she came in: she had on these super tight white pants and a white shirt. She trailed a soft perfume as she passed toward the back of the shop and entered the offices, disappearing inside. Unfortunately we were at the end of the conversation, and it was obvious that the salesman was trying to put me off until I came back with more security. I asked if he could get me a credit application, and if it wasn’t convenient I could make my case to the owner, but the salesman took me to the register

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