Trafalgar (12 page)

“Which wasn’t there, nor the Japanese fellow’s house nor anything.”

“Nothing. Except the lake, which perhaps was bigger. And the woods, which was practically a forest. It was a fabulous day. You can’t say it was perfect because we had a visitor.”

“I would almost bet money it was a tyrannosaurus.”

“You just missed by a little. A saber-toothed tiger, so long as saber-toothed tigers were as I imagine them. It seems it had been roaming around eating people and animals, and in the early evening a party went out—as they had been doing for a good while, the old man explained in a conversation that gave us both quite a bit of trouble—they found it and they chased it into a trap they had prepared. But the fellow was well versed in traps and got loose. It didn’t attack, because it was well fed, but, surrounded on all sides, it escaped toward the village. It reached the edge of the land occupied by the huts and there was a big clamor and people scattered in all directions and then the men of the village that had been chasing it appeared and they killed it with lances and axe blows. It was a slaughter. All were left wounded and one dead. But with a sophistication unlooked for in noble savages, first came the celebration and afterward the grief. There was a feast with song and dance which the wounded and the dead attended as guests of honor. They skinned the tiger and we ate the meat: the main course was the entrails marinated in something like vinegar, and the heart, chopped up very fine, of which we each ate a piece.”

“Eating the vanquished enemy,” I said. “What would brother Jean Jacques think of that?”

“Who knows? The tiger was tough, imagine, newly dead meat of a cornered animal accustomed to running and climbing. It wasn’t exactly pheasant, or even close. Dark, fibrous meat, but not at all bland and without a bit of fat. Did I tell you they served the chopped heart in a wooden bowl?”

“No, you didn’t tell me. Was it the same bowl from which you’d eaten the seedless loquats at dra Iratoni’s?”

“No, it wasn’t the same.”

“But then where are we?”

“When I saw the bowl arrive I felt good, as if I no longer had any worries—and did I ever have them. It was like meeting an old, long-lost friend and I almost believed everything was solved, that if this was what I had remembered that night, all the rest of it was no longer important. Nonsense, of course, but I was celebrating the death of the tiger and eating its entrails and drinking the fermented juice of something and you know with all that, a certain irresponsibility gets into one. Especially after having seen how a saber-toothed tiger dies. As the bowl was full and I served myself my little bit but there was still a lot left, I watched as it passed from hand to hand until it was empty. They set it down and I stood up to get it. I cleaned it.”

“With a wooden spoon to complete the reminiscence.”

“Wooden spoons in the stone age, come on.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “spoons are almost as old as knives.”

“Let’s not exaggerate,” said Trafalgar.

“Neolithic,” I insisted, “in the Neolithic there were already spoons.”

“Could be. But not on Uunu of Neyiomdav. I cleaned it with my fingers. It wasn’t the same. It looked a lot like it, that’s true.”

“Of course it looked like it. All wooden bowls look like each other. You can’t make great modifications with something so simple.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t the same. It was made of different wood, it was deeper, it didn’t have the same grain. And in addition, I felt nothing: it wasn’t the same, I tell you.”

“I believe you. What I want to know, and right away, is if you ever found that other bowl.”

“I found it,” he said, “but not there. I kept the bowl in my hand and I even asked the old man if I might have it as a gift and he gave it to me with great courtesy. I lost it afterwards, of course, for the same reason I had lost the shotgun and recovered the cigarettes and the documents. And, speaking of which, I smoked the last one before lying down to sleep.”

“I am terrified,” I said. “What did you find the next day?”

“Cheer up, here comes the best part.”

What came was more coffee in the hand of Marcos. Trafalgar’s trips don’t interest Marcos. I suspect he doesn’t believe him. And he’s interested in other things: in the Burgundy, his kids, the first grandchild (due in the next three months), his wife, Clarisa, who was beauty queen in 1941 in Casilda, race horses and, something in common with Trafalgar, tango.

“I woke up in the Hotel Continental,” Trafalgar said with his nose deep in his cup.

“Which one?”

“The first. Dirty, with my suit immaculate, well shaven and without the bowl or the shotgun but with my documents and a pack and a half of cigarettes in my jacket pockets. I got up, I looked out the window, and I was in the city that resembled Welwyn and my room was number 132 on the second floor and it overlooked a park. I ran my hand over my face and I felt an immense tenderness toward the fat woman. I bathed, I put on another suit and went down to have breakfast. Liters of coffee.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“And some crunchy fritters and more coffee and cigarettes. Afterward, I grabbed a phone and called dra Iratoni; I was scared, you wouldn’t believe, but I called. Only when I heard his voice did I know for sure that I was back on the Uunu to which I’d arrived. He invited me again to dine at his house and I said no thank you, I wanted to see him that very morning. Then he gave me the address of a club or businessmen’s circle and told me he’d meet me there. I took a taxi—with a driver—I went to the port, inspected the clunker and the wood and found everything was fine, I took another taxi and I went to the club. There I had to endure almost an hour of introductions and conversations with other merchants who were with dra Iratoni, until I managed to drag him to a little room and buttonhole him myself.”

“Last chapter,” I said, “and thank goodness, because it’s getting late.”

“Stay and eat downtown,” said Trafalgar.

“I can’t. Besides, if I stay you’re going to extend the story until we finish our dessert, whereas this way you have no alternative but to tell me everything now. And if they were to serve us dessert in wooden bowls, I’d have an attack. So go on.”

“I told dra Iratoni everything,” he said, “and he listened to me with great formality, like the concierge, like ser Dividis, but, like them, he wasn’t the least bit worried. He did say, at least, that he was sorry not to have said anything, but that he had assumed I was informed because if I had said on Karperp that I was going to Uunu, they would have already warned me. When I told him no, on Karperp they had insinuated something and had told me it wasn’t a good idea to go and for that very reason I had come, he was enormously surprised. He stood there with his mouth open and his jaw dropping. How? If a guy wants to go somewhere, why not say so? And if they tell him he shouldn’t go, why would he go? Or why not insist and ask for explanations and afterward decide whether to go or not? A Neyiomdaviano does not understand our give and take.”

“They must be great people.”

“I assure you, they are. A little unsettling. But I maintain that yes, they’re terrific. They say what they think, or they give you a subtle invitation, which to me sounded like reluctance, for you to say what you think, and they say what they are going to do and they do what they have said they are going to do. It’s not as easy as it seems.”

“Must not be much room for neurosis there.”

“You know there’s always room for neurosis, everywhere. But it seems to me we give it more consideration than the Neyiomdavianos. I made dra Iratoni understand some of this and then he explained to me what happens on Uunu and I am going to try to explain it to you but I don’t know if I’ll be able to.”

He finished his coffee and took a breath as if for a pole vault.

“Time is not successive,” he said. “It is concrete, constant, simultaneous, and not uniform.”

Then I was the one who took a breath.

“God, for instance,” said Trafalgar, “perceives it that way, and every religion allows that. And on Uunu it’s perceptible that way for everyone, although with a lesser immediacy, due to a quirk of its placement in space. Space which, of course, could not exist without its coexistant, time.”

“We’re not getting anywhere this way,” I said. “Give me the concrete examples because I don’t read Einstein or Langevin or Mulnö.”

“Imagine time,” said Trafalgar, “as an infinite and eternal—it’s the same thing—bar of a material that has different degrees of consistency both in its duration and in its length. With me?”

“Got it.”

“Now, once a day, or rather once a night, Uunu experiences a chrono-synclastic infundibulum.”

“Oh, no,” I protested. “That’s from Vonnegut.”

“Yes. And dra Iratoni didn’t say it like that but in another way, much more descriptive but also more complicated, so much so that I don’t remember it well. But you know the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. When it occurs, it covers and envelops all of Uunu and then the parts of that temporal bar that at that moment have greatest consistency, surface—I can’t think of another way to say it—and so if today is today, tomorrow can be a hundred years from now or ten thousand five hundred years ago.”

“I understand now,” I said. “I think so, at least. But the people of each era, don’t they find themselves thrown from one to another and have to live a different moment of their history every day? Why did you not meet dra Iratoni the next day even though his house didn’t exist, or how come the concierge from the first Hotel Continental wasn’t in the second one?”

“No, no. Each continues with their life in the era they were born in and in which they live, thanks to their adaptation to the environment. A lousy environment, I’ll agree with you, but not worse than others. Eras don’t mix, one never invades another. They coexist. They are simultaneous. If you’re born on Uunu, you keep living your life day by day, very happy, unaffected and you know that at the same time other things are happening in other eras. With a little effort of the syncretic awareness of time—I don’t know what it is, but dra Iratoni takes it for granted that all of us have it—you can perceive on any given day of your life, the era which on that precise day has the greater consistency since the prior chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Something no one on Uunu bothers to do, or almost no one. They’re prevented by the very fact that all eras are there, as they say, within reach. Historians or philosophers or sociologists do it—or have done it—to demonstrate something, always discreetly and without bothering anyone or getting involved. Or a few crackpots or maniacs, which are almost nonexistent on Uunu so there aren’t problems on that side. I don’t know if the sensitivity of the Neyiomdavianos of Uunu doesn’t come from knowing the consistency of time and knowing they could avail themselves of it if they wished.”

“But wait,” I said, “then you were bouncing here and there, from the future to the Captains to the Neolithic, because you were a foreigner and weren’t adapted?”

“I was born in Rosario, not on Uunu. I don’t have a syncretic awareness of time or if I have it, it’s atrophied. And to top it off, I have the eagerness, the anguish of time. In me, time isn’t something natural, a part of me, it’s almost a saddlesore. In me and in all of us. I got to Uunu and I was defenseless for that reason—floating, let’s say. And when the chrono-synclastic infundibulum came along, there I went to the most consistent part of that eternal and infinite temporal unity.”

“I don’t want to think about the matter too much. It’s very simple and very complicated.”

“Very. And very unpleasant. Now notice that on the first night, when I went to bed in room 132 of the Hotel Continental and dra Iratoni and his family went to sleep in their house, for me, who am not an adapted native, there followed the morning of many years later and I woke up in a Hotel Continental that was going to exist, in a changed city, with robot taxis and skyscrapers. The next day, hundreds of years later, under the paranoid tyranny of the Captains, and the next, in the Stone Age. But the next, when I once again woke up in room 132, dra Iratoni and his family woke up on the morning after the night when I had been having dinner at their house.”

“But how? And those three days in which you were going from one side to the other of Uunu’s history?”

“For them, they didn’t exist or, better put, they didn’t elapse, because as far as existing, they always exist. For them the chrono-synclastic infundibulum of my first night on Uunu was an everyday event that their syncretic awareness of time can ignore. I was snatched away to a hundred or two hundred years later and there another chrono-synclastic infundibulum carried me various centuries later when there was another that carried me to thousands of years before and so on until I was returned to the world of dra Iratoni, luckily. He explained to me, furthermore, that sooner or later that was going to happen, and he showed me the rhythm charts that are something like logarithm tables but thicker than the Tokyo telephone book and that predict toward where and when the most consistent parts of time are moving every night.”

“I was mistaken,” I said. “It’s more complicated than I thought. But tell me—so they know both what has happened and what is going to happen?”

“Of course. From the point of view of knowledge, it’s very useful. And if you need something that has not been discovered, you get into a syncretic temporal trance or whatever it is and you find out, because the rhythm charts tell you when the time in which you believe whatever it is will be already known will be most consistent. Now, from the personal point of view, with the good sense and the calm they have about everything, it doesn’t occur to anyone to try to spy into the future to see when or how they’re going to die or anything like that. I think that would be frowned upon, I don’t mean as criminal but definitely as something that would discredit one.”