Trafalgar (19 page)

“How awful.”

“Yes. So long as it’s true,” said my Aunt Josefina. “I don’t know what to think. Might it not be nothing more than a fairy tale for an old lady all alone drinking her tea?”

“Trafalgar doesn’t tell fairy tales. And you’re not old, Josefina, come on.”

“And in those two places you didn’t know from before, what happened?”

“Nothing,” he opened another pack of cigarettes. “That’s how I like coffee, good and hot. Although it’s a little weak; your husband doesn’t complain?”

“Don’t forget he had an ulcer and can’t drink strong coffee.”

“Poor Goro, how could he avoid having an ulcer after twenty-five years of marriage.”

“Go on, you defend bachelorhood. Some day you’re going to marry a harpy who sweet-talks you into it and you’re going to end up with ulcers, sciatica, and hives. You didn’t meet any candidates on this trip?”

“More or less as usual.”

“And on those two worlds that you hadn’t been to?”

“Nothing worthwhile. A very pretty little blonde, crazier than a goat, on Akimaréz, but I got rid of her as soon as I could.”

“What’s that about Akimaréz? I don’t remembering hearing you mention it.”

“I must have told you something, because I knew it existed and that one could buy graphite and kaolin there. Cheaply, both of them. It’s quite pretty, no great wonder, but it’s not bad. Very big, lots of water and seven continents like enormous islands in the middle of the oceans. The islands have water and vegetation only at the edges and that’s where they’ve planted their cities, which you can tell Goro are the dream of any urban planner: small cities, low buildings, never more than three stories, with gardens; little traffic, none of your noise or smoke or odor. They like music, too. And in the middle of the islands, of the continents, the landscape is fantastic, black and white, dry, impossible to fertilize. But what do they care? They sell the black graphite and the white kaolin and feldspar and granite and I don’t know what else and they’re sitting pretty, strumming their lutes.”

“Cushy life.”

“Yes, but boring. They have a good time, but I’d had enough after two days. I made my purchases and I left.”

“And the other one you didn’t know?”

“Aleiçarga. Almost the complete opposite: little sea and lots of green. Two itty-bitty seas at the poles and another larger one close to the equator. It rains a lot, the rest is fertile ground, and the cities are disgusting.”

“Big, dirty, with smoke and drugs and loudspeakers.”

“Not so fast. Small cities because they, and they’re not the only ones, seem to have figured out what we are just learning; very clean, without smoke, don’t even think about drugs, and a few loudspeakers but they’re not bothersome.”

“Then they’re quite nice. I don’t know why you say they’re disgusting.”

“They are too well organized.”

“So far as I know, that is not a defect.”

“You, being Madam Organization; but when a whole city and all of the cities and everything is like an enormous and efficient company presided over by a narrow gauge logic where the effects always follow the causes and the causes march along single file and the dodo birds don’t worry about anything nor are they surprised by anything and they slither along beside you faintly pleased, I—like any normal person—feel a great desire to kill someone or commit suicide.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t be offended,” he smiled at me a little. “On Akimaréz one gets bored but on Aleiçarga one has to be very careful so as not to fall into the trap and not to enter into the little game of being sensible. That’s what it is, they are sensible, so much so that either they infect you or you do something awful.”

“And what awful thing did you do?”

“Nothing. Didn’t I tell you nothing happened?”

“Nothing, nothing at all?”

“Nothing, are you ever stubborn. I did the same as always: sell, talk, eat, sleep, walk around to get to know the place a bit. And I discovered an interesting guy. I think the coffee is running out.”

“I’ll make you more if you tell me who the guy was and why he was interesting.”

“I don’t know who he was, I never learned his name. And he was interesting because he wasn’t sensible.”

“No?”

“No. He was crazy. And if there’s no more coffee, I’m leaving.”

“Blackmailer.”

“You started.”

I went to make the coffee and I thought it was a sure thing that Trafalgar had been lying when he said nothing had happened and he had done nothing.

“And?” I asked him from the kitchen doorway.

“And what?”

“And the crazy guy?”

“Look, there are so many crazies around, who cares about one more?”

“I care. Here comes the coffee.”

A hassle with the coffeepot. If I took it good and full, it would get cold; if I only took a little, I would have to make more. But as with Trafalgar one has to learn to resign oneself to the coffee, I took it half full.

“Let’s go, tell me.”

“But
che,
I already told you there’s nothing to tell. The Aleiçarganos are sensible, rational, efficient, measured, discreet, and this other one was just the opposite, so he was listed as crazy.”

“But listen, one can be just the opposite of efficient and discreet and sensible and not be crazy. Are you sure he was crazy?”

“No.”

“Ah-ha.”

“Have we begun?”

“We haven’t started anything,” I watched him swallow the coffee. “Couldn’t you be more or less efficient and sensible and for once start at the beginning?”

“Ugh, all right, I arrived on Aleiçarga on a spring day at nine fifteen in the morning, I got out, locked the clunker, went to the reception office, I was received very well by a short little guy and another fellow, a little taller and very fat, the port wasn’t very big but it was very complete, they gave me coffee, they arranged all the paperwork in a flash—it wasn’t much—they pointed me to a hotel and I went there, using very comfortable public transport, at the hotel I had breakfast and more coffee.”

“I am going to strangle you.”

“I went up to my room, I bathed, I changed, I didn’t shave because I had shaved prior to arrival, I left the hotel, took a taxi, went to the Center of Commerce, spoke to the secretary, a birdlike man who resembled a tero, I inquired whether they were interested in buying kaolin and graphite, he said yes, we went to lunch together.”

“Go. Out of my house. I don’t want to see you again in my life.”

“Wait, wait a little. At the beginning I thought everything was perfect and I didn’t like that because you know perfect things smell bad to me; if I have to choose a glass from Murano, I choose one that has a bubble. But as besides rolling along smoothly, everything benefited me, I let myself be fooled—sweet-talked, as you say. Hey, where’s the cat? I don’t see her.”

“She went out for a drink with the tomcat next door. Go on.”

“Of course, I’m not a total moron and it didn’t take long for me to wise up.”

“I would like Josefina to have heard that phrase.”

“Because?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“One’s used to the word perfect and we use it when something went well, end of story. But if something is perfect perfect, without fissures or mending, then it is very bad,” he smoked and drank coffee and maybe looked around for the cat. “Anything heavenly is necessarily hellish.”

And another threat of violent ejection must have floated in the air because he hurried on:

“On Aleiçarga, everyone has a placid face and smiles once in a while but no one guffaws, no one yells, no one runs to catch the bus and if they catch it they don’t fight with the driver and if they don’t catch it they don’t swear, no kid comes to blows with another or cries, begging for gum with trading cards.” He set the empty cup on the saucer. “Gum probably doesn’t come with trading cards.”

And he served himself more coffee and I waited because by now it seemed unlikely that he would cut short the story about how nothing, but absolutely nothing, had happened.

“I don’t know for certain,” he said, “because I’m not among the idiots who chew gum. In the evening I returned to the Center with the secretary; the possible buyers were already there. I asked for quite a bit. Well, I’ll tell you I asked for a lot, a matter of then coming down a bit. They smiled, they said no and they stood up to leave. I stood there with my mouth open. It was just unbelievable: they didn’t know how to haggle.”

“So what? I imagine there are people who don’t haggle.”

“I’m not saying there aren’t. But few, believe me, very few. Almost none. Some more, some less, but everybody argues over prices. And there are places where bargaining is a refined art, sublime, places where you have to go very well prepared, otherwise you’re toast. I am no master but I do have some experience. And there, with the guys about to get away from me, it occurred to me that I could invent a story for them and say I came from a place where bargaining is a form of commercial courtesy and give them the whole song and dance, but I realized the best thing to do would be to grab the bull by the horns and before they finished saying good-bye I showed them my cards. They were a little disoriented but they understood right away. Everyone understands everything right away on that lousy world. No, don’t take it away, it’s still drinkable. I sold everything I had in half a minute.”

“Don’t tell me at a ridiculously low price, because I won’t believe you.”

“Ridiculously low, no; sensible, that’s the problem, sensible, reasonable. It’s not that I didn’t earn anything, no, that’s not allowed on Aleiçarga precisely because it’s not reasonable or logical. I made a profit, but not so much as if they had let me hold forth like a silver-tongued huckster in the bazaar. And they took care of everything, the invoices, the permits, the seals, the unloading, everything. So one minute later I had nothing more to do and the next day I could leave.”

“And why didn’t you leave? Tell me that.”

“How do you know I didn’t leave?”

“The crazy guy, dear, I’m waiting for the crazy guy to appear.”

“I didn’t leave because I was ticked at them. I thought up a few dirty tricks, like for example mixing lower quality kaolin with the first-class stuff, cheating them on the weight, getting myself invited to the guys’ homes and seducing their wives and daughters.”

“Don’t puff yourself up.”

“I’m not puffing myself up. I was playing with my irritation, that’s all. And they weren’t so many. With a little time, who can say?”

And he smiled again, not at me but at the hypothetical daughters of the kaolin buyers.

“Instead of that. Understand me, I didn’t mix the merchandise nor did I fix the weight, because a person has scruples. Sometimes. And I didn’t try to meet the daughters because surely if the fathers don’t know how to haggle, the girls don’t know how to flirt before saying yes.”

“Or no. Instead of that, what did you do?”

“Or no, you’re right. Instead of that, I asked the secretary where there was a bookstore.”

“A bookstore.”

“Not on a whim. When you go to a place of which you know nothing and no one, you have to seek out three things: bookstores, temples, and brothels. There are others, of course, in case you don’t find any of the former: you can also go to the schools, the casinos, the hospitals, the barracks. But I had seen bookstores and I opted for the safe choice. I told the guy I wanted to buy something to read that night in the hotel and he sent me to a little bookstore that had everything, understand?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to understand, don’t make yourself mysterious.”

“That little is written on Aleiçarga, very little. A single monumental work of history with its corresponding compendium in one volume, laws, mathematics, medicine, physics, logic, not more than half a dozen novels, no poetry.”

“What brutes.”

“That’s what you think. And when you go to the bookstore, you have to buy two things: history and a novel. I bought the compendium and a novel called
The Ragemca.
”

“The what did you say?”

“It’s a surname. It was the story of a family. And I read both of them that same night and I almost died of boredom. I read the history first and I learned that nothing had ever happened. It is assumed that the first Aleiçarganos lived in the forests, naked, eating fruit and sleeping under the climbing vines, all very healthy. And that they had wooden instruments and when they died they weren’t buried but rather raised up to the highest branches and tied up there, probably to save them a leg of the journey, but that’s what I say, not the historians of Aleiçarga who don’t permit themselves such fantasies. Later they built houses out of wood, of course, and they planted, made fire, the wheel arrived and after that the alphabet and that’s it, the end.”

“That’s it how? They wrote a whole history book for that stupid little story?”

“That was the most interesting part. When they invented writing, and you can see the prehistoric ones walking around under the trees were more interesting than the modern folk if they thought up the wheel and the alphabet, with writing they started making chronicles of what happened, but the problem is nothing happened. According to the first writings, no one stole fire from the gods, the spirits of the forest never spoke to the people, perhaps because there were no spirits of the forest, the dead died and bye-bye, there was no hero who got lost searching for immortality, no woman cuckolded her husband with a demigod, and so on. So what remained was deadly dull: the harvests, the journeys, the plagues, a casual discovery or two, and nothing more.”