Blow-Up (5 page)

“All right,” Morand admitted, lighting another cigarette, “but I’d be happy if you could explain to me why you’re so sure that … okay, that you’ve gotten to the bottom of it.”

“Explain?… don’t you see it?”

He stretched out his hand once more toward a castle in the air, to a corner of the loft; it described an arc which included the roof and the statuette set on its thin column of marble, enveloped in the brilliant cone of light from the reflector. Incongruously enough, Morand remembered that Teresa had crossed the frontier, carrying the statuette hidden in the toy chest Marcos had made in a basement in Plaka.

“It couldn’t be that it wasn’t going to happen,” Somoza said almost childishly. “I was getting a little bit closer every replica I made. The form was becoming familiar to me. I want to say that … Ah, it would take days to explain it to you … and the absurd thing is that there everything comes in one … But when it’s this …”

His hand waved about, came and went, marking out the
that
and the
this
.

“The truth of the matter is that you’ve managed to become a sculptor,” Morand said, hearing himself speak and it sounding stupid. “The last two replicas are perfect. Whenever you get around to letting me keep the statue, I’ll never know if you’ve given me the original or not.”

“I’ll never give her to you,” Somoza said simply. “And don’t think that I’ve forgotten that she belongs to both of us. But I’ll never give her to you. The only thing I would
have wished is that Teresa and you had stayed with me, had matched me. Yes, I would have liked it had you been with me the evening it came.”

It was the first time in almost two years that Morand had heard him mention Teresa, as if until that moment she had been somehow dead for him, but his manner of naming Teresa was hopelessly antique, it was Greece that morning when they’d gone down to the beach. Poor Somoza. Still. Poor madman. But even more strange was to ask oneself why, at the last minute, before getting into the car after Somoza’s telephone call, he had felt it necessary to call Teresa at her office to ask her to meet them later at the studio. He would have to ask her about it later, to know what Teresa had been thinking while she listened to his instructions on how to get to the solitary summerhouse on the hill. He’d have Teresa repeat exactly, word for word, what she’d heard him say. Silently Morand damned this mania for systems which made him reconstitute life as though he were restoring a Greek vase for the museum, glueing the tiniest particles with minute care, and Somoza’s voice there, mixed with the coming and going gestures of his hands which also seemed to want to glue pieces of air, putting together a transparent vase, his hands which pointed out the statuette, obliging Morand to look once more against his will at that white lunar body, a kind of insect antedating all history, worked under inconceivable circumstances by someone inconceivably remote, thousands of years ago, even further back, the dizzying distances of the animal, of the leap, vegetal rites alternating with tides and syzygies and seasons of rut and humdrum ceremonies of propitiation, the expressionless face where only the line of the nose broke its blind mirror of insupportable tension, the breasts hardly visible, the triangle of the sex and the arms crossed over the belly, embracing it, the idol of beginnings, the primeval terror
under the rites from time immemorial, the hachet of stone from the immolations on the altars high on the hills. It was enough to make him believe that he also was turning into an imbecile, as if being an archaeologist were not sufficient.

“Please,” said Morand, “couldn’t you make some effort to explain to me even though you believe that none of it can be explained? The only thing I’m definitely sure of is that you’ve spent these months carving replicas, and that two nights ago …”

“It’s so simple, Somoza said, “I’ve always felt that the flesh was still in contact with the other. But I had to retrace five thousand years of wrong roads. Curious that they themselves, the descendants of the Aegeans, were guilty of that mistake. But nothing’s important now.
Look, it goes like this
.”

Close to the idol, he raised one hand and laid it gently over the breasts and the belly. The other caressed the neck, went up to the statue’s absent mouth, and Morand heard Somoza speaking in a stifled and opaque voice, a little as if it were his hands or perhaps that nonexistent mouth, they that were speaking of the hunt in the caverns of smoke, of the number of deer in the pen, of the name which had to be spoken only afterwards, of the circle of blue grease, of the swing of the double rivers, of Pohk’s childhood, of the procession to the eastern steps and the high ones in the accursed shadows. He wondered if, in one of Somoza’s lapses of attention, he could manage to telephone and reach Teresa and warn her to bring Dr. Vernet with her. But Teresa would already have started and be on the way, and at the edge of the rocks where The Many was roaring, the master of the greens struck off the left horn of the handsomest buck and was handing it to the master of those who guarded the salt, to renew the pact with Haghesa.

“Listen, let me breathe,” Morand said, rising and taking a step forward. “It’s fabulous, and furthermore I have a terrible thirst. Let’s drink something, I can go out and get a …”

“The whiskey is there,” said Somoza, slowly removing his hands from the statue. “I shall not drink, I must fast before the sacrifice.”

“Pity,” Morand said, looking for the bottle. “I hate to drink alone. What sacrifice?”

He poured a whiskey up to the brim of the glass.

“That of the union, to use your words. Don’t you hear them? The double flute, like the one on the statuette we saw in the Athens Museum. The sound of life on the left, and that of discord on the right. Discord is also life for Haghesa, but when the sacrifice is completed, the flutists cease to blow into the pipe on the right and one will hear only the piping of the new life that drinks the spilt blood. And the flutists will fill their mouths with blood and blow on the left pipe, and I shall anoint her face with blood, you see, like this, and the eyes shall appear and the mouth beneath the blood.”

“Stop talking nonsense,” Morand said, taking a good slug of the whiskey. “Blood would not go very well with our marble doll. Yeah, it’s hot.”

Somoza had taken off his smock with a leisurely and deliberate movement. When he saw that he was unbuttoning his trousers, Morand told himself that he had been wrong to let him get excited, in consenting to this explosion of his mania. Austere and brown, Somoza drew himself up erect and naked under the light of the reflector and seemed to lose himself in contemplation of a point in space. From a corner of his half-open mouth there fell a thread of spittle and Morand, setting the glass down quickly on the floor, figured that to get to the door he had to trick him in some way. He never found out where the
stone hatchet had come from which was swinging in Somoza’s hand. He understood.

“That was thoughtful,” he said backing away slowly. “The pact with Haghesa, eh? And poor Morand’s going to donate the blood, you’re sure of that?”

Without looking at him, Somoza began to move toward him delineating an arc of a circle, as if he were following a precharted course.

“If you really want to kill me,” Morand shouted at him, backing into the darkened area, “why this big scene? Both of us know perfectly well it’s over Teresa. But what good’s it going to do you, she’s never loved you and she’ll never love you!”

The naked body was already moving out of the circle illuminated by the reflector. Hidden in the shadows of the corner, Morand stepped on the wet rags on the floor and figured he couldn’t go further back. He saw the hatchet lifted and he jumped as Nagashi had taught him at the gym in the place des Ternes. Somoza caught the toe-kick in the center of his thigh and the nishi hack on the left side of his neck. The hatchet came down on a diagonal, too far out, and Morand resiliently heaved back the torso which toppled against him, and caught the defenseless wrist. Somoza was still a muffled, dull yell when the cutting edge of the hatchet caught him in the center of his forehead.

Before turning to look at him, Morand vomited in the corner of the loft, all over the dirty rags. He felt emptied, and vomiting made him feel better. He picked the glass up off the floor and drank what was left of the whiskey, thinking Teresa was going to arrive any minute and that he had to do something, call the police, make some explanation. While he was dragging Somoza’s body back into the full light of the reflector, he was thinking that it should not be difficult to show that he had acted in self-defense.
Somoza’s eccentricities, his seclusion from the world, his evident madness. Crouching down, he soaked his hands in the blood running from the face and scalp of the dead man, checking his wrist watch at the same time, twenty of eight. Teresa would not be long now, better to go out and wait for her in the garden or in the street, to spare her the sight of the idol with its face dripping with blood, the tiny red threads that glided past the neck, slipped around the breasts, joined in the delicate triangle of the sex, ran down the thighs. The hatchet was sunk deep into the skull of the sacrifice, and Morand pulled it out, holding it up between his sticky hands. He shoved the corpse a bit more with his foot, leaving it finally up next to the column, sniffed the air and went over to the door. Better open it so that Teresa could come in. Leaning the hatchet up against the door, he began to strip off his clothes, because it was getting hot and smelled stuffy, the caged herd. He was naked already when he heard the noise of the taxi pulling up and Teresa’s voice dominating the sound of the flutes; he put the light out and waited, hatchet in hand, behind the door, licking the cutting edge of the hatchet lightly and thinking that Teresa was punctuality itself.

A
ndrea, I didn’t want to come live in your apartment in the calle Suipacha. Not so much because of the bunnies, but rather that it offends me to intrude on a compact order, built even to the finest nets of air, networks that in your environment conserve the music in the lavender, the heavy fluff of the powder puff in the talcum, the play between the violin and the viola in Ravel’s quartet. It hurts me to come into an ambience where someone who lives beautifully has arranged everything like a visible affirmation of her soul, here the books (Spanish on one side, French and English on the other), the large green cushions there, the crystal ashtray that looks like a
soap-bubble that’s been cut open on this exact spot on the little table, and always a perfume, a sound, a sprouting of plants, a photograph of the dead friend, the ritual of tea trays and sugar tongs … Ah, dear Andrea, how difficult it is to stand counter to, yet to accept with perfect submission of one’s whole being, the elaborate order that a woman establishes in her own gracious flat. How much at fault one feels taking a small metal tray and putting it at the far end of the table, setting it there simply because one has brought one’s English dictionaries and it’s at this end, within easy reach of the hand, that they ought to be. To move that tray is the equivalent of an unexpected horrible crimson in the middle of one of Ozenfant’s painterly cadences, as if suddenly the strings of all the double basses snapped at the same time with the same dreadful whiplash at the most hushed instant in a Mozart symphony. Moving that tray alters the play of relationships in the whole house, of each object with another, of each moment of their soul with the soul of the house and its absent inhabitant. And I cannot bring my fingers close to a book, hardly change a lamp’s cone of light, open the piano bench, without a feeling of rivalry and offense swinging before my eyes like a flock of sparrows.

You know why I came to your house, to your peaceful living room scooped out of the noonday light. Everything looks so natural, as always when one does not know the truth. You’ve gone off to Paris, I am left with the apartment in the calle Suipacha, we draw up a simple and satisfactory plan convenient to us both until September brings you back again to Buenos Aires and I amble off to some other house where perhaps … But I’m not writing you for that reason, I was sending this letter to you because of the rabbits, it seems only fair to let you know; and because I like to write letters, and maybe too because it’s raining.

I moved last Thursday in a haze overlaid by weariness, at five in the afternoon. I’ve closed so many suitcases in my life, I’ve passed so many hours preparing luggage that never manages to get moved anyplace, that Thursday was a day full of shadows and straps, because when I look at valise straps it’s as though I were seeing shadows, as though they were parts of a whip that flogs me in some indirect way, very subtly and horribly. But I packed the bags, let your maid know I was coming to move in. I was going up in the elevator and just between the first and second floors I felt that I was going to vomit up a little rabbit. I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don’t think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit. Always I have managed to be alone when it happens, guarding the fact much as we guard so many of our privy acts, evidences of our physical selves which happen to us in total privacy. Don’t reproach me for it, Andrea, don’t blame me. Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny. It’s no reason not to live in whatever house, it’s no reason for one to blush and isolate oneself and to walk around keeping one’s mouth shut.