Trafalgar (21 page)

“It must be late,” Trafalgar said.

“That’s not important either,” I answered. “I’m going to feed the cat.”

“It seems to me,” I heard him say from the kitchen, “that she tired of the gray moths and the pink paper flowers.”

“And the mists,” Jorge pitched in, “don’t forget the mists, which are important, nor the disheveled blondes who have premonitions in far off lands.”

“Let’s not continue. I don’t think there are cliffs on Donteä-Doreä. And she wasn’t blonde, she was a striking brunette.”

“Ah,” said Jorge and he took a draw on his pipe and then remembered. “But wasn’t there nobody there?”

“The thing is, it’s a little complicated.” Trafalgar drank some coffee, smoked, considered the situation and studied those assembled in the Burgundy. “Are you going to leave with books and everything, or will you stay and listen to me?”

“I’ll stay, but only if you tell me quickly, let’s say in five minutes.”

“Bye-bye,” said Trafalgar.

“What’s this bye-bye?”

“Do you write a poem, let’s say, in five minutes?”

Jorge laughed, cleaned his pipe, put it away and took out another. Trafalgar doesn’t get the pipe thing.

“I don’t get the pipe thing,” Trafalgar said. “All that work, for what?”

“I’ll stay but let’s not digress,” Jorge prodded him.

Marcos came over, left the coffee, heard that about digressions and went away, smiling at Jorge.

“Donteä-Doreä,” said Trafalgar. “The problem is there is a lot of wind, but it’s not ugly. I ended up there by chance,” he drank coffee and lit a black, unfiltered cigarette while Jorge used the twenty-second match on the second pipe. “I was coming from Yereb which is a world you would like a lot. All fertile soil and rivers. Populated by hardworking, hard-drinking, troublemaking farmers. Montagues and Capulets, hereditary enemies, they fight over a woman, over a piece of land, over a pick and a spade, over anything, and afterward they make up at big open-air banquets where two or three more fights are sure to break out.”

“What did you sell them? Boxing gloves?”

“Electrical appliances for the home.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Didn’t I tell you they’re farmers? They export grains, flours, wood, natural fertilizers, fibers, all that, and they import what the surrounding worlds manufacture and on top of that they earn money and live like nobles in huge farmhouses with high ceilings and thick walls and Olympic patios.”

“Not bad.”

“Like hell, it’s not bad. You tell me; there’s a lot of work, otherwise it would be worth going to live on Yereb. And there they saddled me with a passenger.”

“I thought you never took anyone along when you traveled.”

“Uh-huh. That’s my preference. But I’m not inflexible. In a few cases I’m willing to make exceptions and the boy struck me as a nice guy. He was a mechanic from Sebdoepp. Mechanics from Sebdoepp are serious business. It’s a horrible world, full of electrical storms, one after the other, day and night, an unlivable place where you never see the sun and where you have to go out in the open with an anchor because the wind drags you away. As the inhabitants weren’t inclined to emigrate—I don’t know why, because you have to be crazy to want to live there—they started moving into caves, they kept digging tunnels from cave to cave and they ended up living in fabulous cities built underground.”

“Get out of there. I’m dying, it gives me claustrophobia.”

“Don’t talk until you’ve seen the cities of Sebdoepp.”

“Frankly, don’t count on me, leave me in Rosario where on Sunday mornings I can go play soccer in Urquiza Park with the boys.”

“In the cities of Sebdoepp you can also go to the field to play soccer, better put to play pekidep which is a lot more fun although with a higher risk of breaking one or more bones. There’s an artificial sun, and moon, natural rivers, forests—half natural, half artificial—dawns, middays, afternoons, and nights (also artificial), natural lakes, it’s fantastic.”

“Do you want to come to Urquiza Park on Sunday?”

“I don’t play soccer and I warn you I don’t play pekidep either, but if it’s nice out, I’ll go. You can imagine that to have done all that and maintained it in functioning conditions and then answer to millions of inhabitants, you have to be very skilled. There isn’t a man or woman on Sebdoepp who isn’t an artist when it comes to engineering, physics, chemistry, mechanics. All of the worlds recognize the mechanics from Sebdoepp, and there was one on Yereb, installing I don’t know what devices to improve the performance of the agricultural machines, and I took him with me.”

“To the place with the disheveled blonde who was really a striking brunette?”

“Ah, yes,” Trafalgar sighed. “Hey, where’s Marcos?”

The Burgundy was almost full but Trafalgar didn’t manage to turn all the way around looking for him, because Marcos was already there with the coffee.

“To Donteä-Doreä,” he said, “where we weren’t, in fact, going.”

“Huh?”

“No, we weren’t going there. I didn’t even have it registered. We were going to Sebdoepp from where the Yerebianos had brought that young guy, Side Etione-Dól was his name, and where instead of taking him back themselves, they proposed I should take him, since I was going that way, beyond Sebdoepp, to buy Ksadollamis pearls. I said yes and we set out, but not even halfway through the trip, we discovered we had to land somewhere, anywhere, because something had come loose, not in the clunker’s motor, because the clunker’s motor never fails, but on the outside. And we landed on Donteä-Doreä, which is uninhabited.”

“And the brunette?”

“Wait, don’t rush me. As I was telling you, there’s wind there, a lot of wind, and a pile of ruins. Rich and powerful people must have lived on Donteä-Doreä, but so long ago that there’s nothing left but stones. We landed and Side—a tall, tousled blond, nice guy—who plays the harmonica and whistles, it’s a pleasure to hear him, grabbed a pair of pliers, a couple of wires, and a special cement they use, and in two seconds, he had fixed what was broken.”

Trafalgar was quiet, as if he were listening to the conversations in the Burgundy, and Jorge smoked his pipe and waited; he waited a good while.

“And afterward, curiosity did us in,” said Trafalgar.

“And you met the brunette.”

“Tell me, are you obsessed with brunettes?”

“And blondes. And all of them. Admit, there’s nothing nicer than women.”

“Hmmmmm,” went Trafalgar.

They probably thought about whether there was anything nicer than women, although what conclusion they reached is unknown, while Marcos gave them a quick look in passing, a matter of finding out if he needed to bring them more coffee.

“It happened that we had landed close to a city, a city in ruins, of course. And as the clunker was all ready five minutes after we landed, and as there was a wind that for Side was a light spring breeze although to me it was the furious sirocco, and as we had nothing to do, we put our hands in our pockets and started to walk toward the city, which must have been immense. Under the wind and against the light like that, it looked as if it had been carved out in huge bites. When we reached the outer walls, we looked at each other as if to say, now what do we do? And what we did was pick a street and head toward the center.”

“It would be a little bigger than Rosario, I imagine.”

“Easily, easily, a city for ten million inhabitants. And not a bit of brick or cement: stone, all stone. Big, carved stones, sometimes colored and with the round edges made to fit one into another so they’d never move again. Mycenae. A Mycenae the size of Greater Buenos Aires. A lot was still standing and a lot was spilled over the streets, which were double and triple as wide as one of our avenues, and in the plazas which, from their size, could have served as soccer fields. And there we were walking, Side and I, like a couple hicks looking at everything, he whistling and me fighting the wind that was boxed in between the partial walls.”

Jorge settled himself more comfortably in the chair and picked up the pipe, which had gone out a good while ago, put it in his mouth and chewed on it slowly, thinking about ruins in the rain, perhaps.

“We were well inside by then,” said Trafalgar, “where the city was
less ruined, more impressive, and lonelier. And suddenly something moved on the second floor of a building that had the look of a ministry
or temple or something like that. Marcos, do you believe in destiny?”

“Me?” said Marcos. He set two coffees on the table. “Don’t give me a hard time. I’ll bring you cold water. But on Sunday there’s a racehorse registered in the fourth race named My Destiny and a real loser is riding him. I’m going to put a few pesos on it.”

“There you have it,” said Trafalgar when Marcos was leaving.

“There you have what?” Jorge wanted to know. The question came out a little garbled because he was still chewing on that famous pipe.

“Side said it had been the work of destiny after all, and I said the only destiny that exists is each person’s stupidity.”

“Good, that’s fine, but what was it that moved on the second floor of the ministry?”

“We never knew if it had been a ministry or a temple. Side knows a lot about mechanics, a lot. But not all of the places I travel through are peaceful and delightful like Eiquen or Akimaréz. There are some in which you have to be well prepared for anything and have quick reflexes or you don’t come back again. Up to now, my reflexes are in good shape. We hadn’t seen animals or birds or any living thing, so as soon as I saw movement, I threw myself against Side and the two of us tumbled to the ground. Thank goodness, because the shots started immediately.”

“Shots?” Jorge took the pipe out of his mouth and set it on the table.

“Shots. From a shotgun. We crawled over behind a huge rock that had fallen at the edge of the plaza. We heard another couple of shots and then nothing. I took off my jacket, rolled it up in a ball and raised it over the edge of the rock. Whoever was shooting was shooting to kill: it was shot full of holes.”

“Shit.”

“I said something similar, though at greater length.”

“And what did you do?”

“When a city is in ruins, it’s uncomfortable to live in but it has other advantages for less peaceful activities. Crawling along, we got into the house closest to us, and as they were all gutted, we passed from one to another through holes in the walls or wherever we found an opening, circling the plaza and getting close to the building the shots had come from. During all of this the shooter was quiet, either thinking we’d been hit or waiting to see what we did.”

“And how did you know there was only one shooter?”

“That question occurred to us on the way and we sat down on some stone benches—I said they were from a waiting room and Side said a school—to consider the possibilities. If there had been two, the shooting would have been heavier. And if there had been more than two, they wouldn’t even have let us get that far, since being on a war footing, they’d have posted sentinels. So there was only one. Or two but with only one weapon. And as we were developing a strong desire to land a good slug or two, we went on.”

Trafalgar pushed the cup away and leaned over the table: “We surprised him from behind,” he said, “after we climbed a staircase in quite good condition, barefoot so our shoes wouldn’t make noise against the stones. The guy had his back to us, looking out, close against the edge of the window, with the shotgun stock down on the ground. The blondie with the harmonica and I looked at each other, we made a sign and we jumped at the same moment: I went for the shotgun and he for the shooter. And when I stood up with the weapon in my hand, this will kill you, I hear him give out a yell.”