Trafalgar (20 page)

“Legends?” I asked. “Sagas? Cosmogonies? Mythologies? Dreams?”

“The Aleiçarganos? Come on, it’s so obvious you don’t know them. With the wheel, fire, writing, a little bit of empirical medicine, another bit of engineering and architecture, also empirical, and no birth control or natural catastrophes or dangerous animals, they expanded and from the beginning they had a single state, a single government, plenty of work, no religion or poetry or politics.”

“Wars,” I thought. “There will have been wars, invasions, dethroned kings, junior officers with imperial ambitions, assassinations for power, don’t tell me no.”

“I’m telling you no. Those who are most fit to govern, govern. Those who are most fit to operate are surgeons. Those who are most fit to drive a tractor.”

“Drive a tractor, thank you, I get it. But then without visionaries, without ambitions or schemers or prophets or delusionals, can you tell me how they moved forward?”

“Very slowly. They are very old and they had a lot of time.”

“They’re a bunch of dim bulbs.”

“Agreed. The most spectacular, the great inventions, what they set aside because they thought it was impossible, all that came to them from outside. They still had wooden plows and carts pulled by oxen tied at the neck and wood stoves when other people who already traveled among the stars reached them and taught them things. Then they started to advance for real, because they learn quickly, so long as the big ideas occur to others.”

“I don’t see how they didn’t just keep swinging from the trees. Tell me, and the novel?”

“Even more boring than the history text. Generations and generations of a family of industrious idiots, in which there were neither fights nor adultery nor fraudulent bankruptcies nor clashes between father and son; nor crazy aunts nor incest nor monsters nor geniuses, nothing, nothing, nothing. I fell asleep when I don’t know which son of I don’t know who and married to I don’t know who else was building a house I don’t know where and opening a factory of I don’t know what and had three sons and a daughter.”

“The next time, don’t sell them graphite, sell them the complete works of Shakespeare and Balzac and you’ll kill them all with a heart attack.”

“Not even that. To start, I’m not going back. And if I go and I sell them Shakespeare and Balzac, I’ll bet whatever you like that they read them, study them, and decide it’s all a bunch of nonsense.”

“I congratulate you. What an enjoyable trip.”

“I told you and you didn’t believe me.”

“Because a person knows you already.”

I almost stood up to go make more coffee but I remembered something and started to doubt again.

“Wait a sec. The crazy guy?”

“Well, of course, the crazy. Yes, the crazy. I met him the next day, at night. I couldn’t bring myself to leave and I was still wandering around there. I couldn’t believe, being used to, as you know, so many strange and absurd and stupid things not only here but on many other worlds, I couldn’t believe there existed people who were so reasonable, but I was becoming convinced and I was almost taken over by so much calm. I went for a walk, I left the city and followed the walking paths that run beside the roads and that from time to time open and take you to the fields or the forests. The guy was sitting on the ground, whistling. When I heard the whistle I thought, no, it can’t be. They don’t have poets, did I tell you? Or musicians, except for dancing at parties or accompanying physical activities. For that matter, no painters, either. Illustrators, yes, but no painters. So nobody whistles, doesn’t that seem reasonable to you? What for? No, of course, why would they whistle? And I was hearing a whistle, a little monotonous but the whistle of a person whistling because they feel like it, how’s that? I stopped short and asked myself if I might not be the one whistling. No, it wasn’t me. I left the path, set off toward the forest, and I found him.”

He was quiet. And the worst of it was, he didn’t even demand coffee.

“Trafalgar,” I said.

“Huh?”

“I imagine you’re not going to leave me hanging there.”

“No.”

“I’ll make you coffee.”

“Fine.”

I went, heated the water, made coffee, returned, Trafalgar served himself and drank half the cup.

“He was huge,” he said, “and blond and he had a beard and he whistled, seated on the ground. I said hello, good evening, and he answered that the cranes.”

“That the cranes what?”

“Nothing, that’s it, that the cranes.”

He drank the other half of the cup and served himself more.

“Right then, and note that I am not sentimental.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not. Right then I remembered a stupid game my cousins and I played when we were kids at the estate in Moreno and I came to the realization that it wasn’t a stupid game. Someone said a sentence and the others had to answer in turn, quickly, with sentences that had nothing to do with the previous ones. It seems easy until you try. You can’t think of anything beforehand, because you don’t know what those who go before you are going to say, so suddenly you have to say something and if you take too long or if what you say is related to what has already been said, you blew it. There were more times we had to pay a forfeit than that we got it right. Hello, good evening and immediately: that the cranes, sounded like that. Look, there’s the cat.”

“I’m going to turn on the light.”

“There you have it. We just did the same thing. There’s the cat, I’m going to turn on the light. Is it reasonable or not?”

“No, but we understand each other, so it’s fine.”

“We don’t understand each other, we comprehend each other and of course it’s fine. But the Aleiçarganos didn’t share that opinion and said the guy was crazy.”

I went to turn on the light and when I returned Trafalgar was serving himself more coffee.

“We had a very interesting conversation. I still didn’t know who he was nor what he was, but starting from the cranes and what I remembered from Moreno, I went forward. If I’d been playing with my cousins I’d have had to pay the forfeit because I was quiet for a while thinking about everything I told you before, but I laughed to myself, I forgot I was on Aleiçarga and I said, you know what?”

He didn’t expect me to answer, nor did he give me time to say no, how was I going to know?

“My cousin Alicia is married to a Japanese.”

In fact, poor Alicia Salles, who is very pretty but quite silly, is married to a nice, bald dermatologist from Salta.

“And then, magnificently, he answered that there was a lot to say about paper flowers so long as they were pink. And I told him my wristwatch was five minutes fast. Or slow, I don’t remember.”

“I don’t understand how you remember so many unconnected things.”

“I remember perfectly because they’re not unconnected.”

“Come on, old man, hello, the cranes, the watch, the retard Alicia, the paper flowers, the imaginary Japanese—come on.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Are you going to tell me my watch has never been five minutes slow and my cousin Alicia isn’t married and you don’t have paper flowers on that coat stand and there is no Japanese married to a woman named Alicia and there aren’t cranes somewhere?”

I wanted to protest but he didn’t let me.

“More than that. Are you going to tell me that at some moment a Japanese—just as much as Alicia and you and I and the crazy—hasn’t seen cranes or thought about cranes or about pink paper flowers and Alicia hasn’t had a wristwatch that ran fast and some crane won’t have flown by—well, I don’t know if cranes fly like storks or if they walk around pecking at worms like chickens—flown by over a tower that had a clock that ran fast and over a store where they sold paper flowers?”

“Yes, I get it,” I said.

And I got it. There in the dark garden everything was one great fresco moving with the wild and strict ballet of the cranes and the watches and the Alicias and the Japanese and the paper flowers and more, many more things and people and animals and plants and Trafalgar and I and the cat, the cats, the book covers, necklaces, salt, warriors, eyeglasses, hats, old photographs, chandeliers and trains, Giorgio Morandi’s bottles, gray moths, streetcar tickets, quill pens, emperors and sleeping pills, axes, incense and chocolate. And even more. Everything, to tell the truth.

Then Alicia isn’t a retard.

“Your cousin Alicia isn’t a retard,” I said, “at least no more than anyone else. Why don’t we always talk, all of us, like you and your cousins in Moreno or like the crazy guy on Aleiçarga?”

“Because we’re afraid, I think,” said Trafalgar. “And he wasn’t crazy, it was that Aleiçarga had finally acquired, like no other world in the universe—in the one I know—the true awareness of total order. For the moment all they can do is reject it, of course, that’s why they say he’s crazy, but I don’t think that will last long.”

As we were also spinning comfortably in the universe, in the one we know for now, we had forgotten about the coffee not because we were thinking about other things but because we were also aware of all of the coffee possible and it was there and I could make more at that moment or three hours or ten months or seven years later because time was there, too.

“In other places,” Trafalgar said, smoking, “right here, that awareness is fragmented and hidden. You would have to put together, for example, I don’t know, a goatherd, a mathematician, a sage, a child who doesn’t yet go to school, a schizophrenic, a woman giving birth, a teacher, a person dying, an I don’t know what, I don’t know how many more, and it could be that you would approach from a distance the true panorama. There they had everything in just two halves. On one side the sensible, logical, rational, efficient Aleiçarganos, incapable of a paradox, a vice, a sonata, an absurd joke, a haiku. And on the other, the crazy.”

“He wasn’t crazy.”

“No, of course he wasn’t crazy. They said he was because if they accepted him, it shook everything up for them. But I decided he wasn’t crazy. He was.”

“I’m going to make you more coffee,” I said.

“Go on.”

And he got up and went into the kitchen with me.

“He was primordial chaos,” he said while the water heated and I washed the coffee pot. “He saw the forms and so what he said seemed unformed; he lived all times and so he spoke without order; he was so complete that one couldn’t span him fully but saw him fragmented, and so normal that the Aleiçarganos said he was crazy. I think he was what we should have already become.”

Trafalgar picked up the coffee pot and we went back to the garden where the cat was lying in wait for gray moths that had come to the light. He drank a cup of coffee and took out cigarettes and he offered them to me but I don’t smoke the black ones.

“I don’t know how you can smoke that trash,” he said. “It rusts your lungs.”

“Oh, of course, the black ones don’t.”

“They do, too, but less.” He served himself more coffee.

“Was it the only time you saw him?”

“Who?”

“Him. Mr. Chaos.”

“Uh-huh. But so what? I saw him one time, two, twenty, a million times. And I was with him until dawn. An entire night talking and talking without stopping and without paying a forfeit for anything because we couldn’t be mistaken, ever; I went back to the hotel when the sun was high but as fresh as if I had slept for ten hours.”

“You came back that day?”

“That night. In the morning I looked for the secretary of the Center of Commerce and asked him directly who he was. The guy smiled. He smiled discreetly, with a smile so reasonable, so without indulgence, without embarrassment, without malice, without anything, so much a smile and nothing more than a smile, that I don’t know how I managed not to grab him by the suit and shake him until his brains were scrambled. He told me he was an unfortunate who had been born that way and he even explained why but I preferred to draw the curtain and I didn’t hear that part. He told me they had tried to cure him but without success and I thought, what luck, and he told me, this will kill you, that they had thought about eliminating him but that as he was harmless, they allowed him to live and the municipality was responsible for feeding and clothing him. And as I kept asking, he told me he lived in a house the municipality loaned him and they also paid people to keep it in reasonable condition. And that he, the crazy, at the beginning gave them a lot to do because every morning the house was disarranged, with the furniture in the patio or the mattress in the bathtub or the rug on the roof or the frying pans hanging from the latch or things like that until they had nailed everything, not the frying pans, to the floor or the walls and since then the guy went there seldom and preferred to live in the forest like the savages, that’s what he said, like the savages.”

“The savages.”

“Yes, but don’t think about Thoreau, think about the savages.”

“Of course.”

“But he told me something more.”

And he was quiet. I served him coffee and I waited for him; I waited for a long time.

“He told me they were thinking about reconsidering the benevolent attitude. Because it seemed that in his way Mr. Chaos had started courting the girls.”

“Those who didn’t know how to flirt before they said yes. The daughters of those who didn’t know how to bargain.”

“The same. I trust one of them will learn,” said Trafalgar, “before the Aleiçarganos have time to reconsider anything. What I rely on is that, as is the case everywhere, the women on Aleiçarga will be more curious, more audacious, wiser than the men; like mother Eve, they will quickly eat the apple while that wimpy Adam waffles. I don’t dare hope it will be many of them but one, one at least, I am confident that one will say yes.”

“And if they kill him?”

“It could be that they kill him. But I think that is no longer important.”

The cat was getting impatient.