It was not a loose air, one did not swim through this air. We forgot about the limit of its color, until it seemed like an indivisible sand which breath let pass laboriously. It rained, it rained again, and between rain and rain was imposed a damp air, an isolating air, that entangled us among the columns or that stopped us to watch those same men that passed us by on many days and in many different bodies. There was a pause, which Luis Keeler took advantage of to head towards the school. Despite the hurry in his step, he stopped to contemplate how some water, running very slowly down the letters of a sign heralding a jeweler’s, had curved back towards the last letter, seeming like it was stopping there; then it took on a tonality of tired green; it withdrew, it turned fearfully, not wanting to reach the outermost contours of the sign, where it would have to wait for the breeze to drive it—it could also take another course—directly onto the sign, whose forgetful letters now emerged with force before the leveling imposed by the breeze and by the rains. At last the drop, after running over the blurring walls and deserts of the sign, leapt, disappearing.
Armando Sotomayor had also taken advantage of the pause between the rains to approach the school, which wore a dull appearance, as though the voices of the professors had been forming a damp scab that separated the wall from their gazes. The memory of the rain and the sickly water which leapt from the houses to the saffron-colored ground, where it went erasing, as if the soles of shoes wiped away the unlikely faces recorded on the soft asphalt. It was as though an idea drove itself straight to divine its facing object, and when it encountered the green, yellow-flecked walls of the school, it leapt into the sea to wash itself away.
Luis and Armando looked at one another. Armando observed that just as he was beginning to feel the water’s dampness evaporating from his jacket—dark blue with white stripes, gray from far away—he also saw how new colors were appearing, which dried slowly, as though after thinking it over for a while, leaving chickenscratch marks and old, almost crumbling faces on the dizzy walls. Armando was no longer looking at the walls; they were damp and dizzy as though the rain had been amusing itself by covering them in the stretched skin of a fallow deer, tracing a blurry sidereal cartography. Armando’s eyes turned slowly, and he let them fall on the arriving Luis. Without greeting him he said: Don’t go in. The waves are furious on the malecón, I want to see them.
Luis, younger, happy from Armando’s first word, first greeted him with an unnoticed happiness, and then hastily responded: Let’s go.
The damp was persistent. It was most noticeable in their soaked shoes, in the sweat on Luis’s face. The last drop hung around on the jeweler’s sign, until at last it fell so quickly that its absorption in the earth gave a shout. Luis seemed focused on the danger of the next rain, on the apology that he would have to make at home if his parents discovered their unplanned walk. Even though Armando’s questions were so rapid, he didn’t look at his face, like one who basks in the presence of a steamed mirror or imagines the atmosphere of the moon to be very thick or slows the passage of a mass of purée along the tongue. The excitement of skipping school was too important to direct his gaze towards Armando’s face, though it’s almost certain he would have looked him in the eyes. However, each word of his was a gaze, almost to the point where we could think that he spoke to find the overflowing of his words in Luis’s eyes, greater than the necessary response.
We should do no more, he thought, than go to school in the morning, all the rest is excess. It’s true that mornings are almost always humid, they soften things, they render words useless. When I watch my aunt arrive, oleaginous whiteness and humidity of the morning, with punctured eyes, with her clothes abruptly thrown over her immobile body, it seems like I see her coming mounted on a cow and descending very slowly—as if we were to remove sweaty drapes of wool from a plaster statue—from the globe of the morning. Contemplating the morning coffee with milk produces a divided voluptuosity, which is made trivial when the young men enter the academy. A thick taste penetrates each of the pores that resist it, a dove dies on impact with the column of smoke from a cigarette, the algeous waters raise the corpse of a blind sailor that lets his hands fall heavily, holding in tattooed nostrils the strength to want to survive in those waters thickened by saliva and wet papers.
They had arrived at the awaited place, the waves came into their sight, and then a desperate hollow was produced, rapidly filled by clouds. The landscape debuted a different appearance before the styles or different manners of their gazes. The steely waves leapt around the fist made for them by a ferrous and algal skeleton. An excessive crowd formed, as always does in , yawning at fires, lighting kerosene lamps in a flood. Luis and Armando arrived somewhat forgetful before the waves. This didn’t seem to be their purpose. It had served for the moment, but now they were being struck by a more evasive secret. Skipping school is the interior shout of a crisis, of something that we abandon, of a skin that no longer forgives us. They had lost an afternoon at school, now they let their hands fall, they tilted their heads a little, everyone fled and Luis let his shoes get wet without raising his gaze from the next wave. He understood that the day was gray, that they had run away from school, and that Armando was at his side occupying a marvelous space, a doubly closed, rhythmic space, and once in a while he raised his hand to his hair to force it to maintain an unreal, fragile posture. His locks disobeyed him, they fled, as if this were not an acceptable site for their dream, refusing the dominion of the hand they didn’t recognize as their own. Luis realized that a few drops were nothing to his shoes. He hadn’t heard the screams, the tiny, very white papers which, fleeing, threw him to the wave, who came back politely later to forget and gather them back up again. The curvature of the waves, the crude assimilation of one wave to another wave produced a surge of vapors without memory. It was like the clouds were extending themselves and turning the runaway children into damp archipelagos. A boat hits them smoothly and looks gently rejected by the hands of a watch. They changed direction, the purpose that had united them was lost, invisibly. The two of them withdrew into themselves, ignoring one another. They distanced themselves from the waves, believing that, tired of thinning the coastline, they might get lost in a more binding adventure. More than seeing the waves, they had predicted their entrance into the aqueous atmosphere they were displacing. A faraway sound reached them, one wave pushed another, propelling curved sounds that narrowed themselves to come into the cottony bays of their ears. They had already decided to move on. The first incitement had become the bearable tedium of having to do so. Armando focused on one of the buttons that stood out from the blue and white stripes of Luis’s suit. Invariably, one of them would seem different, until the new pleasure began of discovering that the two were in fact the same. He no longer waited for the next wave, but for the changing attractions of the bluish buttons: the same, not the same, they appeared, they were submerged. The wave that extended itself: after the persistence of one of the buttons, the other was so improbable. The dampened gaze elongated paved fish. It was as though a crane, that soft bird, were absorbed by the demanding asphalt so that it could show off its new mark of paved crane. All so diluted that one couldn’t say the crane’s crest was over the asphalt, like the one which delayed the last drop on the jeweler’s sign. Luis shuddered, as if he had collided with a cloud or woken up. He felt terrorized, like when we realize that, exquisite as the parrotfish is, only its intestines are digestible. Luis felt the invisible humidity on his walk with Armando. No fixed point could bind him, any illuminating line was so long it would die in the electrified water. Green of a marsh moon, foretelling greenness of moonlit reeds. Carlos had appeared—the obligation with the name, the slavery to the line and the point—older than Armando, saying to him, imperiously, this was the word that Luis didn’t say, but that he felt, but that he heard breaking him open: Weren’t we going to the movies? We could still go. Armando, dryly, without looking at Luis, who had become an insignificant figure, said: I’m going, bye. Dryly, without the decisive glance, without trying one last time to determine the color of the buttons on his blue jacket with white stripes. New snowcapped birds let their beaks fall on the mandolins that pronounced numbered elegies. The dream thickened in the memory of that last wave which definitively marbleized. The wave is the monster that searches for the alabaster bowl when two traveling hands decide to disembark at the same time.
He followed the curve of the seawalls with his gaze, which seemed useless, as the forgetful waves stopped at a prefixed point, traced on the vertex of the wave and the seagull. He saw also how his arm turned, was lost, until, fallen asleep, it slowly curved, obliged by the spinning of the gulls that traced circles that were invisible, or not so invisible, for when wanting to extend his arm he felt the pricks of the weever fish, and when raising his eyes he saw the gull hide itself in a geometric point, or enter into a globe of blown glass like an albino arrow. He could no longer isolate the memory of the weever fish, nor the slowly curved arm of the docile compassion of the gulls. He could not isolate the phosphorus of the needles in their little box of chromium nickel. Nor the book of questions of honeysuckle answers, of the groups of corals, of the most putrid anemones. The clouds opened rapidly, revealing a bleeding castle. The detested clouds made the mother-of-pearl of that agony a little more pink. Following the turns of the gulls, a dozen adolescents appeared, hiding their creamy flutes in the sand, leaving their buried ears in memory. In the center of the fishtank could be seen, minute and floating, another dozen roman soldiers.
He sat on the seawall, the water no longer ricocheting up from the rocks. It reached his ears with secret steps, ricocheting against the castle, with no bell or sighthound to part the humidity, to arouse the opportunity of that secret swell. He saw how the marine uniformity opened up onto a drowsy whirl, he made out a tired green algae, a gray pearl, a congealed riddle, a secret that flows. A little wave arrived, built by the woven reeds, guided only by the sound that fish make when pinching their necks to swerve; it seemed like the algae, now alerted, began to hear its indistinct name, and was going to embed itself in the rock. Dissatisfied moment and differentiated algae, a little dizzy, began to occupy the same place. Luis Keeler felt the fixedness of the algae, and he also felt its invisible course towards the mossy seawall. The algae remaining like so, like a crown that descends to the roots of the castle that bleeds out over the river. The algae clamoring for the monarchy of interminable sleep. Between the quail’s steps and the roots of the castle, the photograph taken at the shadow of humid sound and delicacy could guarantee the emergence of the differentiated algae.
When the water ricocheted from the softened rock for the last time, Luis Keeler sunk into sleep. It was soft sleep, surrounded by algae, cotton, hands gently touching a sack of sand and nails. Persian missives, the quails of domestic services, fishbowls spilled in the wake of a crime. In its eagerness to find the last word and the level of the dream the quail threw cries from its lips. In paradise the water runs again and the sky is built. The line of the sea wall lengthened, and he was also stretching out, becoming thinner. He felt thought escaped him just as he’d felt the steps of the quail, occupying the center of that named algae, different, that could flaunt its pride and its leisurely strolls. The unsatisfying touch could no longer prolong itself in the gaze or in that last fragment of its lips. Thick sleep, like that of one who can speak with their mouth full of water. Absolutist algae separating the crystal of the digression of memory and the clouds.
A marine line was pierced, which had been traced by the reeds before they became hummingbirds. It extended through the body of Luis Keeler, who remained sleeping in the arborescence of his nerves. One of his eyes, piercing the porcelain globe that had been brought together with the garnet drill, was fixed on the fingertip of an agile bandit. He triumphed, a small noise traversing the distance that separated his gaze from the ashen object.
Afterwards, the other eye was fixed on the decoration left by the carapace of the burning waters, of the lavas and little daggers. As he stood, all of the algae fled, and the edge of the sea wall was erased; the night soaked into his entrails, growing like a tree that shakes ink from its branches. It would have been decorous to cry out, but in that moment the cage of the theaters opened up and from the clamoring life of the algae had emerged a system of absolute illumination. To cry out, he would have had to lose a foot, or to divine the last nods of the algae, or how blood circulates within the garnets.
Translated by Jack Rockwell
Originally published in Spanish in La cantidad hechizada (1970)
Published with the permission of the Agencia Literaria Latinoamericana
© Agencia Literaria Latinoamericana
