Trafalgar (6 page)

“That can’t be,” said Flynn.

“What do you know? She talked the whole night and we listened to her the whole night. Fineschi cried from time to time. Marina Solim was sitting at my side and she grabbed me by the arm and she didn’t let go until her hand cramped up. When it dawned, which is a pretty literary figure to stick into this story because it doesn’t dawn there, the little violet sun rises and it is less dark and that’s all; when it dawned, the music was still playing and she was still talking. And suddenly she stopped talking but the music did not stop. I was numb and even cold and the others must have been as well but when Veri Halabi went out, we got up and went after her. She walked as if she had to deposit cash at the bank and it was one minute to four, and the rest of us followed behind, toward where the music was. There at the foot of one of the excavated hills, beside the blackish river, the Anandaha-A folk were dancing with so much enthusiasm it seemed as if they had just begun. And Veri Halabi ran and thrust herself among them and danced and while she danced she tore off her clothes and shook her head until her black hair covered her face like all the rest and we could no longer tell her apart. Another hour passed and, crazy with sleepiness and fatigue and with the sense that something more inevitable than death had happened, we retreated to the camp. Simónides and Dalmas had to drag Fineschi, who did not want to leave. We went to bed and we all slept, Simónides last because he went around handing out pills and he gave Montague an injection. I slept for ten hours and was one of the first to wake up. Marina Solim set to making coffee and the sociologist smoked but did not type. Afterwards, Simónides appeared and little by little the others. We drank coffee and ate sausage sandwiches. And the music that had kept playing—and I don’t know how, because I slept like a log, but I know it had kept playing all day—the music stopped with the last crumb of food. Fineschi announced that he was going to look for the girl and there we all went again, in procession, but it was useless.”

“She wasn’t there?” asked the Albino.

“Yes, she was there. At first we didn’t see her. The natives had sat down or laid down wherever like always, staring fixedly at some point. It was hard to pick her out. Now she was dressed in a sack open at the sides and seated in the mud with her legs crossed, between two women and a man, so similar to them, with her eyes very open, without blinking, mute and more beautiful than before because she had become beautiful like the lords of Anandaha-A. She looked straight ahead but she didn’t see us. We called her and I was sure we were behaving like a bunch of idiots. She didn’t hear us. Simónides grabbed the sociologist and Lundgren and went to get her. I restrained Fineschi. As soon as they put their hands on her, the music started again and everyone stood up and danced, Halabi as well, and dancing they rejected the three men who backed hurriedly out of the whirl and we lost sight of her. In three days we made five more attempts. It was no use. Finally it was Fineschi, and that surprised me, who said we had to admit defeat.”

The Albino said can’t you see she was crazy and Cirito said who knows and Trafalgar drank more coffee.

“She wasn’t crazy,” he said. “She had returned to her home, to the circle. Look, if I think about it a lot, I have no alternative than to say yes, she went crazy. But if I remember her dancing, telling us by dancing that we should leave her in peace because she had stopped searching, resisting, studying, thinking, writing, reasoning, accumulating, and doing, I recognize with some satisfaction—a sad satisfaction, because I don’t carry that marvel in my blood—that she had crossed the kingdom from end to end and she was swimming fresh and lovely in the torrent. Simónides explained it another way and Marina Solim supported him with very concrete data. The people who danced were in fact the descendants of those who had left the ruins. Anandaha-A knew, perhaps, a yellow, hot star and a clean sky and fertile soil and they manufactured things and wrote poems long before we treated ourselves to the stegosaurus and the scaphites. Perhaps they had jewels, concerts, tractors, wars, universities, candies, sports, and plastic material. They must have traveled to other worlds. And they reached so high and so deep that when the star died, it no longer mattered to them at all. After visiting dead worlds, worlds living or to be born, after leaving their seed on a few of them, after exploring everything and knowing everything, they not only stopped caring about the death of the star, but about the rest of the universe and they had enough with the sense of the circle. They preserved nothing but the music that they danced and that was all Simónides had supposed and much more. We don’t know what more but if someone told us, we wouldn’t understand. And Veri Halabi recognized her own but the light of the perceptible game prevented her from seeing them and entering the kingdom where there is the possibility of putting out the oil lamp, and torn between the light and the nostalgic urgency of a few of her cells which bore the seal of the Argonauts of Anandaha-A, she hated them. When the light went out by force of the music and she spoke all the words of her race, those she had learned in dreams, she no longer hated them or loved them or anything. It was enough to return.”

The Albino says they were all quiet. Even Flynn, who is argumentative and likes to take the opposing side, found nothing to say. When Cirito remarked that Fina had called on the phone to let him know she was staying in Salta another week and they talked about other things and drank more whiskey and Trafalgar more coffee, Flynn admitted that Trafalgar could be right, that the matter, if you thought about it carefully, seemed preposterous, yet he had the impression that it wasn’t all that strange. Cirito said:

“I’d like to go to Anandaha-A.”

“It’s all yours,” said the Albino.

“Was Veri Halabi that pretty?” asked Flynn.

“Now she is prettier,” said Trafalgar.

“Patience, drink it anyway,” and I served him another cup while I let my own get cold. “How did you manage to travel to the 15th century?”

“I don’t see why I should travel to the 15th century. Besides, time travel is impossible.”

“If you came to shake up my bookshelves, you can be going and leave me the coffee as tribute. I love time travel, and so long as I think it is possible, it is possible.”

The cat had decided to stay.

“The coffee is a gift,” said Trafalgar. “I am going to explain to you why one cannot travel through time.”

“No. I don’t want to know. But don’t tell me that if you come from the court of the Catholic Monarchs you didn’t travel through time.”

“What little imagination you have.”

That didn’t surprise me either. “Very well,” I said, “tell me.”

And I put the coffee pot on the table.

“Perhaps the universe is infinite,” he said.

“I hope so. But there are those who go around saying it isn’t.”

“I say that because this time I traveled through some very strange places.”

That did surprise me. If there is something Trafalgar, accustomed to traveling among the stars, finds strange, it is truly strange.

“If I tell you,” he continued, and he served himself more coffee. “Don’t you have a larger cup? Thank you. If I tell you that not even the merchant princes go there.”

“And who are they?”

“I call them the merchant princes, you can imagine why. They call themselves the Caadis of Caá. They’re like the Phoenicians but more sophisticated. I know they don’t go there because the last time I was with one of them, I think it was on Blutedorn, I discovered, exchanging itineraries, that they had nothing marked in that sector.”

“What is it? Is it dangerous, sinister, all who enter are lost or go crazy or are never seen again?”

He disillusioned me.

“It’s too far away. The merchant princes aren’t idiots. A lot of expense for questionable profits. I’m not an idiot either, but I am inquisitive and I had plenty of extra money. I had been selling tractors on Eiquen. Did I ever tell you about Eiquen? A little world, all green, that moves very slowly around two twin suns?”

“Spare me Eiquen. How did you end up in the court of Isabel and Fernando?”

“Eiquen is probably a crossroads, or a hinge. Tell me, and if the universe were symmetrical?”

I liked the idea. So did the cat.

“Now you’ll see why,” said Trafalgar. “I left the tractors on Eiquen, I charged more than you can imagine, and instead of coming back, I kept going. Don’t forget I’m inquisitive. I wanted to know what there was farther on, so to speak, and on the way see if I could buy something, because I no longer had anything to sell. And I had cash, and I was tired. It was a long trip. I slept, I ate, I got bored, and I didn’t find anything interesting. I was about to turn around when I saw a world that could be inhabited and I decided to land.” He looked sadly at what remained of the coffee. “Of one thing I am sure: if my heart didn’t fail me that time, it never will.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Make more coffee. But put in less water. And don’t let it boil. And moisten the coffee first with a few drops of warm water.”

“I would like to write my memoirs,” I told him, “but I can’t bring myself to get started. Someday I’m going to write yours and I’ll have my revenge.” I began to make more coffee.

The cat must have given him one of her looks because he continued the story: “The world was blue, gray, green. I got closer and as I descended I began to see Europe, Africa, the Atlantic, and for less than a second it occurred to me that I had returned. I don’t know if you realize how disconcerting the situation was, to put it mildly. A mountain of awful things went through my mind and I even thought I had died at some point between Eiquen and Earth. I calmed myself as best I could and went to check and I found it was the third planet in a system of nine. I said, I’m crazy, and I asked for more data and luckily I wasn’t crazy nor had I died: the spectrum was not entirely the same. Then I got to looking more calmly and there were little things, a few details that did not coincide. It was a world very similar to this one, almost identical, but it wasn’t this one. Don’t tell me the situation wasn’t looking tempting. I, at least, passed from fear to temptation. I turned around and came this way, I mean, I set off toward the part of that world that resembled this one, if there was one. Because if on that world there existed another Europe, another Mediterranean, another Africa, there had to exist another South America, another Argentina, another Rosario. I was half right. The continent existed, but it was empty as a poor man’s pocket, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. I even touched down beside the Paraná, the other Paraná, understand. Nothing was missing for it to be a nightmare: I knew where I was but nothing was as it should have been. There was no one, there was nothing. A viper frightened me, I heard a few roars, it was cold, so I lifted off again. It made me sad: a world like ours and wasted. But again I was mistaken. I flew over Europe and it was populated. I landed in Spain. In Castile. It was summer. This coffee is a little better than the other. I’m not saying it’s good,” he checked me, “it’s a little less undrinkable.”

“Cretin,” I said. “You could be more agreeable with the future author of your memoirs.”

He did no more than just barely smile and keep drinking that coffee that according to him wasn’t good for much.

“Well, and . . . ?”

“And what?”

“Was that where Isabel and Fernando came out to receive you?”

“No. There was a tremendous uproar, true. Imagine, in Castile in 1492, a machine that comes down from the sky.”

“Wait a minute. You really mean to tell me that.”

“Don’t you see you have no imagination? A world almost identical to this one, understand? Almost identical. The contour of Africa, for example, was different. There were some peninsulas and some rather large archipelagos that don’t exist here. And in history, their clock was five centuries behind. Details. There were others, you’ll see. If you don’t keep interrupting me, of course. There was a big uproar, as I said. I had to wait almost the whole morning for someone in authority to get there, while those who had gathered decided whether to lynch me or canonize me. An unruly troop of soldiers finally came, which did nothing to settle things down. I remained locked in, waiting to see what happened. When I saw the embroidered, empurpled, bedamasked, and bemedalled appear, I opened up and climbed down. I offered explanations. The situation amused me, so I invented a story according to which I was a traveler from some vague region in the east, I had been in Cathay, and there the emperor had given me the flying machine. At first I didn’t have much success, but I got all mystical and we finally ended up all on our knees—you can’t imagine what that did to my clothes, between the dirt and the heat—giving thanks to the Almighty and to all the heavenly host. I closed up the clunker and activated the security mechanisms: if anyone got too close, they’d receive a kick strong enough to knock over a camel. The next stop was the court, they told me. I won’t even tell you what the trip was like, with the heat, the thirst, the horse they gave me, from which a big man-at-arms who didn’t take it too well had to dismount (and you already know that very athletic, I am not), but we finally arrived. That very afternoon, I appeared at court.”