Synopsis: “The Other Heaven” (El otro cielo) is a short story by Julio Cortázar, published in 1966 in the collection All Fires the Fire (Todos los fuegos el fuego). It tells the story of a man divided between his routine life in 1940s Buenos Aires and an imaginary, twilight Paris made of covered passages and gaslight. While he fulfills the obligations of the present (work, family, stability), Josiane awaits him in that other world—an enigmatic woman with whom he shares a freer, more secret existence, whose intensity threatens to eclipse everything that binds him to his real life.
The Other Heaven
Julio Cortázar
(Full story)
Ces yeux ne t’appartiennent pas . . . où les as-tu pris?
. . . , iv, 5.
IT WOULD SOMETIMES OCCUR to me that everything would let go, soften, give in, accepting without resistance that you can move like that from one thing to another. I’m saying that this would occur to me, although a stupid hope would like to believe that it might yet occur to me. And that’s why, if strolling around the city time and again seems shocking when you have a family and a job, there are times when I keep repeating to myself that there would be time to return to my favorite neighborhood, forget about my work (I’m a stockbroker), and with a little luck find Josiane and stay with her till the next morning.
Who knows how long I’ve been repeating all this to myself? And it’s pitiful, because there was a time when things happened to me when I least thought of them, barely pushing with my shoulder any corner of the air. In any case, it would be enough to become one of those citizens who let themselves get pleasurably carried away by their favorite streets, and almost always my walk ended in the gallery district, perhaps because arcades and galleries have always been my secret country. Here, for example, the Güemes Arcade, an ambiguous territory where, so many years ago, I went to strip off my childhood like a used suit. Around the year 1928, the Güemes Arcade was the treasure cave in which a glimpse of sin and mint drops deliciously mixed, where they cried out the evening editions with crimes on every page, and the lights burned in the basement movie theater where they showed restricted blue movies. The Josianes of those days must have looked at me with faces both maternal and amused, I with a few miserable cents in my pocket, but walking like a man, my hat slouched and my hands in my pockets, smoking a Commander, precisely because my stepfather had predicted that I would end up blind from foreign cigarettes. I especially remember smells and sounds, something like an expectation and an anxiety, the stand where you could buy magazines with naked women and advertisements of false manicures; already then I was sensitive to that false sky of dirty stucco and skylights, to that artificial night which ignored the stupidity of day and the sun outside. With false indifference, I’d peek into the doors of the arcade where the last mystery began, the vague elevators that would lead to the offices of VD doctors and also to the presumed paradises higher up, of women of the town and perverts, as they would call them in the newspapers, with preferably green drinks in cut glass goblets, with silk gowns and violet kimonos, and the apartments would have the same perfume that came out of the stores, which I thought were so elegant and which sparked an unreachable bazaar of bottles and glass boxes and pink and rachel powder puffs and brushes with transparent handles over the low light of the arcade.
It’s still hard for me to cross the Güemes Arcade without feeling ironically tender toward that memory of adolescence at the brink of the fall; the old fascination still persists, and that’s why I liked to walk without a fixed destination, knowing that at any moment I would enter the region of the galleries, where any sordid, dusty shop would attract me more than the show windows facing the insolence of the open streets. The Galerie Vivienne, for example, or the Passage des Panoramas with its branches, its shortcuts which end in a secondhand book shop or a puzzling travel agency, where perhaps nobody ever even bought a railroad ticket, that world which has chosen a nearer sky, of dirty windows and stucco with allegorical figures that extend their hands to offer garlands, that Galerie Vivienne one step from the daily shame of the Rue Réaumur and of the Bourse (I work at the stock exchange), how much of that district has always been mine, even before I suspected it was already mine when posted on a corner of the Güemes Arcade, counting the few cents I had as a student, I would argue the problem of spending them in an automat or buying a novel and a supply of sour balls in their cellophane bag, with a cigarette that clouded my eyes and, in the bottom of my pocket where my fingers would sometimes rub against it, the little envelope with the rubber bought with false boldness at a drugstore run only by men, and which I would not have the least opportunity of using with so little money and such a childish face?
My fiancée, Irma, cannot understand what I like about wandering around at night downtown or in the southside district, and if she knew how I liked the Güemes Arcade she would not fail to be shocked. For her, as for my mother, there is no better social treat than the drawing room sofa, where what they call conversation, coffee, and the after-dinner liqueur take place. Irma is the kindest and most generous of women. I would never dream of talking to her about the things that count most for me, and in that way I will at some point be a good husband and a father, whose sons will also be the much desired grandsons of my mother. I suppose it was because of things like this that I ended up meeting Josiane, but not only for that, since I could have met her on the Boulevard Poissonnière or on the Rue s, and instead we looked at each other for the first time in deepest Galerie Vivienne, under the plaster figures which the gaslight would fill with trembling (the garlands moved back and forth between the fingers of the dusty muses), and it didn’t take long to know that Josiane worked in that district and that it wouldn’t be difficult to find her if you were acquainted with the cafés or friendly with the coach drivers. It might have been a coincidence, but having known her there, while it rained in the other world, that of the high garlandless sky of the street, seemed like a sign that went beyond the trivial meeting with any prostitute of the district. Afterwards, I learned that, in those days, Josiane never left the gallery, because it was the time when all they talked about were the crimes of Laurent, and the poor thing lived in fear. Some of that terror turned into graceful, almost evasive, gestures, pure desire. I remember her half-greedy, half-suspicious way of looking at me, her questions which faked indifference, my almost unbelieving fascination at finding out that she lived in the heights of the gallery, my insistence upon going up to her garret instead of going to the Rue du Sentier hotel (where she had friends and felt protected). And her trust later on—how we laughed that night at the very idea that I could be Laurent, and how pretty and sweet Josiane was in her dime-novel garret, with her fear of the strangler roaming around Paris and that way of pressing closer to me as we reviewed the murders of Laurent.
My mother always knows if I haven’t slept at home, and although she naturally doesn’t say anything, since it would be absurd for her to do so, for one or two days she looks at once offendedly and fearfully at me. I know very well that she’d never think of telling Irma, but just the same the persistence of a maternal right, which is not at all justified now, annoys me, and especially since I will be the one who in the end comes back with a box of candy or a plant for the patio, and since the gift will represent in a very precise and taken-for-granted way the end of the offense, the return to everyday life of the son who still lives in his mother’s house. Josiane was, of course, happy when I’d tell her about those episodes, which, once in the gallery district, would become part of our world with the same plainness of their protagonist. Josiane had great feeling for family life and she was full of respect for institutions and relatives; I’m not big on secrets, but since we had to talk about something and what she had revealed about her life had already been discussed, we would almost inevitably return to my problems as a single man. We had something else in common, and in that, too, I was lucky, since Josiane liked the galleries, perhaps because she lived in one, or because they protected her from cold and rain. (I met her early one winter, with premature snows our galleries and their world gaily ignored.) We got into the habit of taking walks when she had time, when someone—she didn’t like to call him by his name—was content enough to let her enjoy herself with her friends for a while. We spoke little of that someone, after I had asked the inevitable questions, and she told the inevitable lies of all mercenary relationships; you took for granted that he was the boss, but he had the good taste not to make himself visible. I got to thinking it didn’t annoy him when I kept Josiane company some nights. The Laurent threat lay heavier than ever upon the district after his new crime on the Rue d’Aboukir, and the poor thing wouldn’t have dared to stray from the Galerie Vivienne once night had fallen. It was enough to make one feel grateful to Laurent and the boss; someone else’s fears helped me do the rounds of the arcades and cafés with Josiane, discovering that I could be a real friend to a girl with whom I had no deep relationship. We gradually began to realize, through silences, foolish things about that trusted friendship. Her room, for example, the clean little garret that for me had no other reality than being part of the gallery. In the beginning I had gone up for Josiane, and as I couldn’t stay because I didn’t have the money to pay for a whole night, and someone was waiting for a spotless rendition of accounts, I almost couldn’t see what was around me, and much later, when I was about to fall asleep in my shabby room with its illustrated calendar and silver maté gourd as its only luxuries, I wondered about the garret, but couldn’t picture it. I saw only Josiane, and that was enough to put me to sleep, as if I still held her in my arms. But with friendship came prerogatives, perhaps the boss’s consent, and Josiane managed it many times so that I could spend the night with her, and her room began to fill the gaps of our dialogue, which wasn’t always easy; each doll, each picture card, each ornament settled in my memory and helped me to live when it was time to go back to my room or to talk with my mother or Irma about the nation’s politics or family sicknesses.
Later there were other things, and among them the vague figure of the one Josiane called the South American, but in the beginning everything seemed centered around the great terror of the district, nourished by what an imaginative newspaperman had called the saga of Laurent the strangler. If, in a given moment, I conjure up the image of Josiane, it is to see her enter the Rue des Jeûneurs café with me, settle down on the purple felt bench, and exchange greetings with friends and regular customers, scattered words which immediately are Laurent, because down by the stock exchange all one talks about is Laurent, and I who have worked the whole day on end, who, between two sessions of quotations, have had to put up with the comments of colleagues and customers on Laurent’s latest crime, wonder if that stupid nightmare will end someday, if things will go back to being as I imagine they were before Laurent, or if we will have to suffer his macabre amusements until the end of time. And the most irritating thing (I say to Josiane after ordering the grog we so much need after that cold and snow) is that we don’t even know his name. They call him Laurent because a clairvoyant of the Clichy neighborhood has seen in her crystal ball how the murderer wrote his name with a bloody finger, and the newspapermen are careful not to go against the public’s instinct. Josiane is no fool, but nobody could convince her that the murderer’s name is not Laurent, and it’s useless to fight against the eager terror fluttering in her blue eyes, which are now absently looking at a very tall and slightly stoop-shouldered young man, who has just come in and is leaning on the counter and not greeting anyone.
“It’s possible,” Josiane says, accepting some soothing thought that I must have invented without even thinking. “But meanwhile I have to go up to my room alone, and if the wind blows out the candle between floors . . . The very idea of getting stuck on the stairs in the dark, and that maybe . . .”
“You don’t go up alone very often,” I laugh.
“You can laugh, but there are bad nights, precisely when it’s snowing or raining, and I have to come back at two in the morning . . .”
She continues her description of Laurent crouching on a landing, or still worse, waiting for her in her room which he has gotten into by means of a skeleton key. At the next table Kiki shivers bombastically and lets out little screams which multiply in the mirrors. We, the men, get a big kick out of these theatrical frights, which will help us protect our companions more prestigiously. It’s a pleasure to smoke pipes in the café, at that hour when alcohol and tobacco begin to erase the fatigue of work, and the women compare their hats and boas or laugh at nothing; it’s a pleasure to kiss Josiane, who has become so pensive looking at the man—almost a boy—whose back is turned to us, and who drinks his absinthe in little sips, leaning his elbow on the counter. It’s curious, now that I think of it: with the first image of Josiane that comes to my mind, which is always Josiane on the café bench, a snowy, Laurent night, inevitably comes the one she called the South American, drinking his absinthe with his back to us. I called him the South American, too, because Josiane assured me that he was, and that she knew this through La Rousse, who had gone to bed with him or just about, and all that had happened before Josiane and La Rousse had a fight over corners or hours, which they now regretted with halfway words, because they had been very good friends. According to La Rousse, he had told her that he was South American, although he spoke without the slightest accent; he had told her that before going to bed with her, perhaps to make small talk while he finished untying his shoes.
“It’s hard to believe, him almost a boy . . . Doesn’t he look like a schoolboy who’s suddenly grown up? Well, you should hear what La Rousse says.”
Josiane persisted in her habit of crossing and uncrossing her fingers every time she told an exciting story. She explained the South American’s whim to me, nothing so extraordinary after all, La Rousse’s flat refusal, the customer’s self-possessed exit. I asked her if the South American had ever approached her. Well no, because he probably knew that La Rousse and she were friends. He knew them well, he lived in the neighborhood, and when Josiane said that, I looked more carefully and saw him pay for his absinthe, throwing a coin into the little pewter dish while he slid over us—and it was as if we ceased to be there for an endless second—a both distant and curiously fixed expression, the face of someone who has immobilized himself in a moment of his dream and refuses to take the step that will return him to wakefulness. After all, an expression like that, although the boy was almost an adolescent and had very beautiful features, could easily lead one back to the recurrent nightmare of Laurent. I didn’t lose a minute in suggesting this to Josiane.
“Laurent? Are you crazy? Why Laurent is . . .”
The thing is nobody knew anything about Laurent, although Kiki and Albert helped us to keep weighing the possibilities to amuse ourselves. The whole theory fell to pieces when the café owner, who miraculously heard everything that was said in the café, reminded us that at least one thing was known about Laurent: the great strength that enabled him to strangle his victims with one hand only. And that boy, come on . . . Yes, and it was late already and a good time to go home; I would be alone that night, because Josiane would spend it with someone who was already waiting for her in the garret, someone who had the key because he had the right to, and I accompanied her to the first landing so that she wouldn’t get scared if the candle went out while she was walking up, and with a sudden great fatigue I watched her go, perhaps happy, although she would have said the opposite, and then I went out into the snowy, icy street and started walking in any direction, until at one point I found as always the road that would take me back to my neighborhood, among people who read the late-night edition of the newspapers or looked out of the trolleycar windows, as if there really was something to see at that hour and on those streets.
It wasn’t always easy to get to the gallery district at the moment Josiane was free; so many times I had to wander alone through the arcades, a bit disappointed, until I began to feel that night, too, was my mistress. The moment they turned on the gaslights, things would come alive in our kingdom; the cafés were the stock exchange of idleness and content, you’d drink in the end of the day, the headlines, politics, the Prussians, Laurent, the horse races, in long gulps. I enjoyed having a drink here and another further on, leisurely watching for the moment when I’d spy Josiane’s figure in some corner of the galleries or at some bar. If she already had company, a chosen signal would let me know when I could find her alone; other times she simply smiled, and I was left to devote my time to the galleries; those were the explorer’s hours, and so I ventured into the farthest regions of the neighborhood, the Galerie Sainte-Foy, for example, and the remote Passage du Caire, but even though any of them attracted me more than the open streets (and there were so many—today it was the Passage des Princes, another time the Passage Verdeau, and so on to infinity), the end of a long tour which I myself wouldn’t have been able to reconstruct always took me back to the Galerie Vivienne, not so much because of Josiane, although also for her, but for its protective gates, its ancient allegories, its shadows in the corner of the Passage des Petits-Pères, that different world where you didn’t have to think about Irma and could live not by regular schedules, but by chance encounters and luck. With so little to hang on to, I can’t calculate the time that passed before we casually talked about the South American again; once I thought I saw him coming out of a doorway on the Rue Saint-Marc, wrapped in one of those black student gowns they’d been wearing so much five years back, together with excessively tall top hats, and I was tempted to go and ask him about his origins. The thought of the cold anger with which I would have received an inquiry of that sort prevented me, but Josiane later considered that this had been foolish on my part, perhaps because the South American interested her in her own way, with something of professional offense and a lot of curiosity. She remembered that some nights back she thought she recognized him at a distance in the Galerie Vivienne, which he didn’t seem to frequent, however.
“I don’t like the way he looks at us,” said Josiane. “Before it didn’t matter, but ever since that time you talked about Laurent . . .”
“Josiane, when I made that joke we were with Kiki and Albert. Albert is a police informer, as you must know. You think he would let the opportunity go if the idea seemed reasonable to him? Laurent’s head is worth a lot of money, dear.”
“I don’t like his eyes,” Josiane insisted. “And besides, he doesn’t look at people. He stares, but he doesn’t look at you. If he ever comes over to me I’ll run like the dickens, I swear to God.”
“You’re afraid of a boy. Or are all us South Americans orangutans to you?”
You can already imagine how those dialogues would end. We’d go and have a grog at the café on the Rue des Jeûneurs, we’d wander around the galleries, the theaters on the boulevard, we’d go up to the garret, we’d have a great laugh. There were several weeks—it’s so hard to be precise with happiness—when everything made us laugh. Even Badinguet’s clumsiness and the fear of the war amused us. It’s almost ridiculous to admit that something as disproportionately base as Laurent could crush our happiness, but that’s how it was. Laurent killed another woman on the Rue Beauregard—so close, after all—and in the café it was like being at Mass, and Marthe, who had come racing in shouting the news ended in an explosion of hysterical tears which somehow helped us swallow the knot in our throats. That same night the police went through all of us with its finest comb, in every café and every hotel; Josiane went to her boss, and I let her go, knowing that she needed the supreme protection that smoothed away all cares. But since basically that kind of thing made me vaguely sad—the galleries weren’t meant for that, shouldn’t be for that—I began drinking with Kiki and then with La Rousse, who sought me out as the bridge she needed to make up with Josiane. People drank heartily at our café, and in that hot mist of voices and drink it seemed almost perfect that at midnight the South American sat at a table in the back and ordered his absinthe with that same beautiful and absent and moonstruck expression. At La Rousse’s first intimation, I told her that I already knew, and that, after all, the boy wasn’t blind and his tastes did not deserve such resentment; we even laughed at La Rousse’s make-believe punches when Kiki deigned to say that once she had been in his room. Before La Rousse could claw her with a predictable question, I wanted to know what that room was like. “Bah, what does the room matter?” La Rousse said disdainfully, but Kiki was already plunging into a garret on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires and, like a bad small-town magician, pulling out a grey cat, piles of scribbled papers, a piano which took up too much room, but above all papers, and finally the grey cat again, which, deep down, seemed to be Kiki’s favorite memory.
I let her talk, looking all the time toward the table in the back and thinking that after all it would have been so natural to go over to the South American and say a few words to him in Spanish. I was about to do it, and now I’m only one of many who wonder why at some point they didn’t do what they felt like doing. Instead, I remained with La Rousse and Kiki, smoking a new pipe and ordering another round of white wine; I don’t quite remember what I felt at giving up my impulse, but it was something like prohibition, the feeling that if I defied it I would enter unsure territory. And still I think I did wrong; I was on the verge of an act that would have saved me. Saved me from what? I wonder. But precisely that: saved me from being able only to wonder about it today, and from having no other answer than tobacco smoke and this vague futile hope that follows me on the streets like a mangy dog.
Où sont-ils passés, les becs de gaz? Que
sont-elles devenues, les vendeuses d’amour?
. . . , VI, 1.
Little by little I had to convince myself that we had come into bad times and that while Laurent and the Prussian menace worried us that way, life in the galleries would never go back to being what it had been. My mother must have noticed I was depressed, because she advised me to take some tonic, and Irma’s parents, who had a chalet on an island in the Paraná, invited me to spend some time there, resting and leading a healthy life. I asked for fifteen days vacation and left unwillingly for the island, enemies from the start with the sun and mosquitoes. The first Saturday, I made up any old pretext and returned to the city; I stumbled along streets where heels sank into the soft asphalt. Of that senseless vagrancy remains a sudden delicious memory: As I entered the Güemes Arcade once again, the aroma of coffee suddenly enfolded me, its violence already almost forgotten in galleries where the coffee was weak and reheated. I drank two cups, without sugar, tasting and smelling at the same time, scalding myself and happy. All that came after, until the afternoon’s end, smelled different—the humid downtown air was full of pockets of fragrance (I returned home on foot, I believe I had promised my mother to dine with her), and in each pocket of air the smells were more raw, more intense—yellow soap, coffee, black tobacco, printing ink, bitter maté, everything smelled pitilessly, and the sun and sky, too, were harder and more urgent. For some hours, I almost begrudgingly forgot the gallery district, but when I again crossed the Güemes Arcade (was it really at the time of the island? Perhaps I am confusing two moments of the same period, it hardly matters, really), it was fruitless to invoke the jolly slap of the coffee. Its smell seemed the same as always, and instead I recognized that sweetish, repugnant mixture of sawdust and stale beer that seems to ooze from the floors of downtown bars, but perhaps it was because, again, I wanted to find Josiane and I even trusted in the fact that the great terror and the snows had reached their end. I think it was in those days that I began to suspect that desire wasn’t enough, as before, for things to revolve rhythmically and suggest some of the streets that led to the Galerie Vivienne, but it’s also possible that I ended up giving in meekly to the chalet on the island so as not to make Irma sad, so she wouldn’t suspect that my only true repose was elsewhere; until I couldn’t stand it any longer and went back to the city and walked until I was exhausted, with my shirt sticking to my body, sitting in the bars drinking beer, waiting for I no longer knew what. And when, on leaving the last bar, I saw that I had only to turn the corner to enter my neighborhood, happiness and fatigue and a dark consciousness of failure became one, because it was enough to look into people’s faces to realize that the great terror was far from over, it was enough to look into Josiane’s eyes on her corner on the Rue d’Uzès and hear her grumble that the boss had decided to protect her personally from a possible attack; I remember that between two kisses I managed to get a glimpse of his figure in the hollow of a doorway, protecting himself from the sleet with a long grey cape.
Josiane was not the kind to resent absences, and I wonder if she was really aware of the passage of time. We returned arm in arm to the Galerie Vivienne, we went up to the garret, but later we realized we weren’t happy as before and we vaguely attributed it to all that was upsetting the neighborhood; there would be war, it was inevitable, the men would have to join the ranks (she used these words solemnly, with an ignorant, delightful respect), the people were afraid and angry, the police had been unable to find Laurent. They consoled themselves by guillotining others—that very morning, for instance, they’d execute the poisoner of whom we’d spoken so much in the Rue des Jeûneurs café during the days of the trial, but the terror was still loose in the galleries and arcades; nothing had changed since the last time I saw Josiane, and it hadn’t even stopped snowing.
As a consolation, we went for a walk, defying the cold, because Josiane had a coat which had to be admired on a series of corners and doorways where her friends were waiting for customers, blowing on their fingers or sticking their hands into their fur muffs. Seldom had we taken such a long walk along the boulevards, and I ended up suspecting that, above all, we were sensitive to the protection of the lighted show windows; venturing into any of the nearby streets (because Liliane had to see the coat, too, and further on Francine) sank us further and further into alarm, until the coat had been sufficiently exhibited, and I suggested our café, and we ran along the Rue de Croissant until turning the corner and taking refuge in warmth and among our friends. Luckily for all, the idea of war at that hour was dim in people’s memories. Nobody thought of repeating the obscene refrains against the Prussians, everything was so good with the full glasses and the brazier’s heat and only we, the owner’s friends, were left, yes, the same group as always and the good news that La Rousse had apologized to Josiane and that they had made up with kisses and tears and even gifts. It all had a garland quality (but garlands can be funereal, I understood afterwards) and that’s why, with the snow and Laurent outside, we stayed as long as we could in the café and found out at midnight that it was the owner’s fiftieth anniversary of working behind the same counter, and this had to be celebrated. One flower intertwined with the next, and bottles filled the tables, because now the owner was treating everybody, and you couldn’t slight such friendship and such dedication to work, and around three-thirty in the morning Kiki, completely drunk, ended up singing the best airs of the operettas of the day, while Josiane and La Rousse cried in each other’s arms out of happiness and absinthe, and Albert, almost without giving it importance, twined another flower in the garland and suggested ending the night at La Roquette, where they would guillotine the poisoner at six o’clock sharp, and the owner, extremely moved, realized that the party’s end was like the apotheosis of fifty years of honorable work and he insisted, embracing us all and telling us about his dead wife in Languedoc, upon renting two hackney coaches for the expedition.
After that, more wine followed, the evocation of several mothers and outstanding childhood episodes, and an onion soup that Josiane and La Rousse raised to the sublime in the kitchen, while Albert, the owner, and I swore eternal friendship and death to the Prussians. The soup and cheeses must have drowned such vehemence, because we were all almost quiet and even uncomfortable when the moment came to close the café with an endless noise of bars and chains, and to climb into the hackney coaches where all the cold in the world seemed to be waiting for us. It would have been better for us to travel together to keep warm, but the owner had humanitarian principles when it came to horses, and he got into the first carriage with La Rousse and Albert, while he entrusted me with Kiki and Josiane, who, he said, were like daughters to him. After these words had been toasted to the full with the coach drivers, the spirit returned to our bodies as we rode toward Popincourt amid mock racing, shouts of encouragement, and a rain of false whippings. The owner insisted upon getting off at a certain distance, citing reasons of discretion which I didn’t understand, and arm in arm, so as not to slip on the frozen snow, we walked up the Rue de la Roquette, vaguely lit by occasional gaslight, among moving shadows which suddenly materialized into top hats, trotting coaches, and groups of cloaked figures gathering finally in front of a wide end of the street, beneath the other taller and blacker shadow of the jail. A secret world clinked elbows, passed bottles from hand to hand, repeated a joke that ran through boisterous laughter and choked shrieks, and there were also sudden silences and faces lit for a moment by a match, while we kept pushing ahead, being careful not to separate, as if each knew that only the will of the group could pardon its presence in that place. The machine was there on its five stone bases, and the whole apparatus of justice waited motionless in the brief space between it and the square body of soldiers with their rifles resting on the ground and fixed bayonets. Josiane stuck her nails into my arm and trembled in such a way that I spoke of taking her to a café, but there were no cafés in sight, and she insisted upon staying. Hanging on me and Albert, she jumped from time to time to get a better view of the machine, stuck her nails in me again, and finally made me stoop my head until her lips found my mouth and bit me hysterically, murmuring words I’d seldom heard her say and which boosted my pride, as if for a moment I had been the boss. But of all of us the only real aficionado was Albert; smoking a cigar, he killed the minutes comparing ceremonies, imagining the condemned man’s final behavior, the stages which in that moment were taking place inside the prison and which he knew in detail for reasons he didn’t say. At first, I listened eagerly to learn about each and every part of the liturgy, until slowly, as from beyond him and Josiane and the celebration of the anniversary, something like abandon gradually came over me, the indefinable feeling that this shouldn’t happen in this way, that something was threatening the world of the galleries and arcades in me, or still worse, that my happiness in that world had been a deceptive prelude, a snare of flowers, as if one of the plaster figures had offered me a false garland (and I had thought that night how things were woven like the flowers on a garland), to little by little fall back to Laurent, to turn away from the innocent intoxication of the Galerie Vivienne and Josiane’s garret, slowly moving toward the great terror, the snow, the inevitable war, the apotheosis of the owner’s fifty years, the frozen-stiff hackney coaches of dawn, the tense arm of Josiane, who swore she wouldn’t look and who was already seeking a place on my chest to hide her face in the final moment. It seemed (and in that moment the gates began to open, and you could hear the commanding voice of the officer of the guard) that somehow this was an end—I wasn’t sure of what, because after all I would keep on living, working in the stock market, occasionally seeing Josiane, Albert, and Kiki, who was now beating my shoulder hysterically, and although I didn’t want to take my eyes off the gates that were just opening, I had to give her some attention for a moment, and following her at once surprised and mocking stare, I glimpsed almost beside the owner the slightly bent figure of the South American in a black student gown, and curiously I thought that, too, entered into the garland somehow, and it was a little as if a hand had just woven in the flower that would close it before daybreak. And then I didn’t think anymore, because Josiane pressed against me moaning, and in the shadow which the two gaslights beside the door wavered without driving it away, the white spot of a shirt appeared, floating between two black figures, appearing and disappearing each time a third bulky shadow bent over it with the gestures of a person embracing or advising or saying something in someone’s ear or giving him something to kiss, until it moved to one side, and the white spot became clearer, closer, framed by a group of people in top hats and black coats, and there was a sort of accelerated magic trick, an abduction of the white spot by two figures, which, until that moment, had seemed to form part of the machine, a motion of pulling from someone’s shoulders a now unnecessary coat, a hurried movement forward, someone’s muffled outcry, maybe Josiane’s, convulsing against me, maybe from the white spot, which seemed to slide under the framework, where something was unchained with an almost simultaneous cracking and commotion. I thought that Josiane was going to faint; all the weight of her body slipped down mine as the other body must have been slipping toward nothingness, and I stooped to hold her up while an enormous knot of throats unwound in a Mass finale, with the organ resounding on high (but it was a horse that neighed on smelling blood), and the ebbing crowd pushed us amid the military shouting of orders. Over Josiane’s hat—she was now crying mercifully against my stomach—I had a glimpse of the excited café owner, Albert, in his glory, and the profile of the South American lost in the imperfect contemplation of the machine, which soldiers’ backs and over-zealous craftsmen of justice occasionally revealed, in lightning bolts of shadow between arms and overcoats and a general eagerness to move on in search of hot wine and sleep, like ourselves later piling into a coach to go back, remarking on what each thought he had seen, which was not the same, was never the same, and that’s why it was worth more, because between the Rue de la Roquette and the stock exchange district there was time to reconstruct the ceremony, discuss it, catch yourself at contradictions, brag about sharper sight or steadier nerves to the last-minute admiration of our timid companions.
It was not at all strange that in those days my mother found me worse and outspokenly complained of this puzzling indifference which made my poor fiancée suffer and would end up by depriving me of my deceased father’s friends’ protection, thanks to which I was making my way in stock exchange circles. The only answer to such words was silence, and to come home a few days later with a new plant or a discount coupon for skeins of wool. Irma was more understanding. She must simply have counted on marriage to one day bring me back to bureaucratic normality, and in those last times I was on the verge of agreeing with her, but it was impossible for me to give up the hope that the great terror would come to its end in the gallery district and that going home would no longer seem an escape, a need for protection which would disappear as soon as my mother would look at me sighing or Irma would serve me coffee with the fiancée spider smile. We were then under military dictatorship in Argentina, one more in the endless series, but the people were excited above all about the imminent outcome of the world war, and almost every day they had demonstrations downtown to celebrate the Allied advance and the liberation of the European capitals, while the police charged against students and women, stores hurriedly lowered their metal curtains and I, incorporated by the force of things into some group standing in front of the bulletin boards of La Prensa, wondered how much longer I could stand poor Irma’s inevitable smile and the dampness that soaked my shirt between sessions of quotations. I began to feel that the gallery district was no longer the limit of a desire, as before, when it was enough to walk down any street for everything to revolve softly on any corner, so that I’d effortlessly reach the Place des Victoires, where it was so pleasing to browse around the side streets with their dusty stores and entrance-ways and, at the most propitious hour, enter the Galerie Vivienne in search of Josiane, unless I’d whimsically prefer to first take in the Passage des Panoramas or the Passage des Princes and return by way of a slightly perverse detour around the stock exchange. Now, instead, without even the consolation of recognizing, as on that morning, the fierce smell of coffee in the Güemes Arcade (it smelled of sawdust, of lye), I began to admit from way back that the gallery district was no longer the port of repose, although I still believed in the possibility of breaking away from my work and Irma, of effortlessly finding Josiane’s corner. The desire to return was constantly alluring me; in front of the newspapers’ bulletin boards, with my friends, at home in the patio, especially at dusk, when there they’d be turning on the gaslights. But something made me stay with my mother and Irma, a dark certainty that they would not wait for me as before in the gallery district, that the great terror was stronger. I’d walk into the banks and places of business like an automation, tolerating my daily obligation to buy and sell stocks, listening to the hoofs of police horses charging against the people who were celebrating the Allied victories, and so little did I now believe that I could free myself from all this that when I got to the gallery district I was almost afraid. I felt like a stranger and different than ever before, I took refuge in a doorway and let people and time pass, forced for the first time to accept bit by bit all that had seemed to be mine before—streets and vehicles, clothes and gloves, snow in the patios, and voices in the stores. Until again it was wonderment; it was finding Josiane in the Galerie Colbert and finding out between kisses and leaps that Laurent no longer was, that the whole neighborhood had celebrated the nightmare’s end night after night, and everybody had asked for me and a good thing that Laurent finally . . . but where had I been that I didn’t know anything about it, and so many things, and so many kisses. Never had I wanted her more and never did we love each other better beneath the ceiling of her room that my hand could touch from the bed. The caresses, the gossip, the delicious inventory of the days, while twilight gradually came over the room. Laurent? A curly-haired Marseillais, a miserable coward who had barricaded himself in the loft of the house, where he had just killed another woman, and desperately had begged for mercy while the police knocked the door down. And his name was Paul, the monster, imagine that, and he had just killed his ninth victim, and they had dragged him to the police van while the whole force of the second district halfheartedly protected him from a crowd that would have torn him to shreds. Josiane already had time to get used to it, to bury Laurent in her memory, which seldom retained images, but for me it was too much, and I couldn’t believe it until her joy finally convinced me that there really would be no more Laurent, that we could wander again through the arcades and streets without distrusting doorways. We would have to go out and celebrate the Liberation together, and as it was not snowing now, Josiane wanted to go to the Palais-Royal Rotunda, which we had never frequented in the times of Laurent. I promised myself, while we went singing down the Rue des Petits Champs, that that same night I would take Josiane to the boulevard cabarets, and that we would finish the evening in our café, where, with the help of white wine, I would make all forgive me for such ingratitude and absence.
For a few hours, I drank down the happy time of the galleries, and I became convinced that the end of the great terror would make me healthy and happy again under my sky of stucco and garlands; dancing with Josiane in the Rotunda, I threw off the last oppression of that uncertain interval, I was born again into my better life, so far from Irma’s drawing room, the patio at home, the deficient consolation of the Güemes Arcade. Not even later, when, chatting about so many happy things with Kiki and Josiane and the café owner, I learned about the last of the South American, not even then did I suspect that I was living on borrowed time, a last grace; besides, they talked about the South American with a mocking indifference, as if about any of the neighborhood’s oddballs, who managed to fill a gap in a conversation where soon more exciting subjects would be born; that the South American had just died in a hotel room was scarcely anything more than some information in passing, and Kiki was already discussing the parties being prepared in a moulin on La Butte, and it was hard work interrupting her, asking for some detail, hardly knowing why I asked. Through Kiki, I found out some minor things—the South American’s name, which after all was a French name, and which I forgot immediately, his sudden illness on the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, where Kiki had a friend who had told her; his loneliness, the one measly taper burning on the shelves full of books and papers, the grey cat that her friend had picked up, the anger of the hotel manager, to whom they did those things precisely when he was expecting a visit from his in-laws, the anonymous burial, oblivion, the parties in the moulin on La Butte, the arrest of Paul the Marseillais, the insolence of the Prussians, for whom the time was ripe to give them a lesson they deserved. And out of all that I separated, like one who pulls two dry flowers off a garland, the two deaths which somehow seemed in my eyes symmetrical, the South American’s and Laurent’s, the one in his hotel room, the other dissolving into nothingness to yield his place to Paul the Marseillais, and they were almost the same death, something erased forever in the neighborhood’s memory. That night, I could still believe that everything would continue as before the great terror, and Josiane was again mine in her garret, and when saying goodnight we promised each other parties and excursions when summer arrived. But it was freezing in the streets, and the news of the war required my presence at the stock exchange at nine in the morning; with an effort which I then thought commendable, I refused to think about my reconquered heaven, and after working till dizzy I lunched with my mother and thanked her for finding me in better form. I spent that week immersed in stock exchange struggles with no time for anything, running home to take a shower and changing one soaked shirt for another, which in a while was worse. The bomb fell on Hiroshima, and all was confusion among my customers, I had to wage a long battle to save the most committed stocks and to find an advisable direction in that world where each day was a new Nazi defeat and the dictatorship’s angry, futile reaction against the irretrievable. When the Germans surrendered, and the people filled the streets of Buenos Aires, I thought I could take a rest, but each morning new problems awaited me: In those weeks, I married Irma after my mother was on the verge of a heart attack, which the whole family blamed me for, perhaps rightly so. Time and again, I wondered why, if the great terror had ended in the gallery district, the moment never came for me to meet Josiane and again take walks beneath our plaster heaven. I suppose work and family obligations contributed to keeping me from it, and I only know that at odd moments I would take a walk along the Güemes Arcade as a consolation, looking vaguely up, drinking coffee and thinking, each time with less conviction, of the afternoons when I had only to wander a while, without fixed destination, to get to my neighborhood and meet up with Josiane on some corner of twilight. I have never wanted to admit that the garland was closed definitively and that I would not meet Josiane again in the arcades and on the boulevards. Some days I get to thinking about the South American, and in that halfhearted rumination I invent a sort of consolation, as if he had killed Laurent and myself with his own death; sensibly I tell myself no, I’m exaggerating, any day now I’ll again venture into the gallery district and find Josiane surprised by my long absence. And between one thing and another I stay home drinking maté, listening to Irma, who’s expecting in December, and wonder, not too enthusiastically, if at election time I’ll vote for Perón or for Tamborini, if I’ll vote none of the above and simply stay home drinking maté and looking at Irma and the plants in the patio.
THE END
