The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Page 4

  I had such a moment of anguish that I forgot that it was he I was seeing: Díaz Vélez’s arms, Díaz Vélez’s legs, Díaz Vélez’s hair, Díaz Vélez’s hatband, the woof of Díaz Vélez’s hatband, the warp of the warp of Díaz Vélez, Díaz Vélez, Díaz Vélez. . . .

  The realization that, in spite of my terror, I hadn’t missed one moment of him, Díaz Vélez, assured me completely.

  A moment later I was possessed by the mad temptation to touch him without his noticing it, and immediately, filled with the greatest happiness one’s own original creative act can hold, softly, exquisitely, I touched his jacket, just on the lower edge—no more, no less. I touched it and plunged my closed fist into my pocket.

  I am sure that more than ten people saw me. I was aware of three. One of them, walking in the opposite direction along the sidewalk across the street, kept turning around with amused surprise. In his hand he was carrying a valise that pointed toward me every time he turned.

  Another was a streetcar inspector who was standing on the curb, his legs spread wide apart. From his expression I understood that he had been watching us even before I did it. He did not manifest the least surprise or change his stance or move his head, but he certainly did follow us with his eyes. I assumed he was an elderly employee who had learned to see only what suited him.

  The third person was a heavy individual with magnificent bearing, a Catalan-style beard, and eyeglasses with gold frames. He must have been a businessman in Spain. He was just passing us, and he saw me do it. I was sure he had stopped. Sure enough, when we reached the corner, I turned around and I saw him, standing still, staring at me with a rich honorable bourgeois look, frowning, with his head thrown back slightly. This individual enchanted me. Two steps later, I turned my head and laughed in his face. I saw that he frowned even more and drew himself up with dignity as if he doubted whether he could be the one intended. I made a vague, nonsensical gesture that disorganized him completely.

  I followed Díaz Vélez, once again attentive only to him. Now we had crossed Cuyo, Corrientes, Lavalle, Tucumán, and Viamonte (the affair of the jacket and the three looks had occurred between the latter two). Three minutes later we had reached Charcas, and there Díaz stopped. He looked toward Suipacha, detected a silhouette behind him, and suddenly turned around. I remember this detail perfectly: for a half-second he gazed at one of the buttons on my jacket, a rapid glance, preoccupied and vague at the same time, like someone who suddenly focuses on one object, just at the point of remembering something else. Almost immediately he looked into my eyes.

  “Oh, how are you!” he clasped my hand, shaking it rapidly. “I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing you since that night at Lugones’s. Were you coming down Artes?”

  “Yes. I turned in at Viamonte and was hurrying to catch up with you. I’ve been hoping to see you.”

  “And I, you. Haven’t you been back by Lugones’s?”

  “Yes, and thank you for the honey cakes; delicious.”

  We stood silent, looking at each other.

  “How are you getting along?” I burst out, smiling, expressing in the question more affection than real desire to know how he was.

  “Very well,” he replied in a similar tone. And we smiled at each other again.

  As soon as we had begun to talk, I had lost the disturbing flashes of gaiety of a few moments before. I was calm again and, certainly, filled with tenderness for Díaz Vélez. I think I had never looked at anyone with more affection than I did at him on that occasion.

  “Were you waiting for the streetcar?”

  “Yes,” he nodded, looking at the time. As he lowered his head to look at his watch, I saw fleetingly that the tip of his nose touched the edge of his upper lip. Warm affection for Díaz swelled from my heart.

  “Wouldn’t you like to have some coffee? There’s a marvelous sun. . . . That is, if you’ve already eaten and are in no hurry . . .”

  “Yes, no, no hurry,” he answered distractedly, looking down the tracks into the distance.

  We turned back. He didn’t seem entirely delighted at the prospect of accompanying me. I wished he were happier and more subtle—especially more subtle. Nevertheless, my effusive tenderness for him so animated my voice that after three blocks Díaz began to change. Until then he had done nothing but pull at his right mustache with his left hand, nodding, but not looking at me. From then on he began to gesticulate with both hands. By the time we reached Corrientes Street—I don’t know what damned thing I had said to him—he smiled almost imperceptibly, focusing alternately on the moving toes of my shoes, and gave me a fleeting glance from the corner of his eye.

  “Hum . . . now it begins,” I thought. And my ideas, in perfect order until that moment, began to shift and crash into each other dizzily. I made an effort to pull myself together, and I suddenly remembered a lead cat sitting on a chair that I had seen when I was five years old. Why that cat? I whistled and quickly stopped. Then I blew my nose and laughed secretly behind my handkerchief. As I had lowered my head, and the handkerchief was large, only my eyes could be seen. And then I peeked at Díaz Vélez, so sure he wouldn’t see me that I had the overwhelming temptation to spit hastily into my hand three times and laugh out loud, just to do something crazy.

  By now we were in La Brasileña. We sat down across from one another at a tiny little table, our knees almost touching. In the half-dark, the Nile green color of the café gave such a strong impression of damp and sparkling freshness that one felt obliged to examine the walls to see if they were wet.

  Díaz shifted in his chair toward the waiter, who was leaning against the counter with his towel over his crossed arms, and settled into a comfortable position.

  We sat for a while without speaking, but the flies of excitement were constantly buzzing through my brain. Although I felt serious, a convulsive smile kept rising to my lips. When we had sat down, I had bitten my lips trying to adopt a normal expression, but this overwhelming tic kept breaking through. My ideas rushed headlong in an unending procession, piling onto one another with undreamed-of velocity; each idea represented an uncontrollable impulse to create ridiculous and, especially, unexpected situations; I had a mad desire to undertake each one, then stop suddenly, and begin another: to poke my forked fingers in Díaz Vélez’s eyes, to pull my hair and yell just for the hell of it, and all just to do something absurd—especially to Díaz Vélez. Two or three times I glanced at him and then dropped my eyes. My face must have been crimson because I could feel it burning.

  All this occurred during the time it took the waiter to come with his little machine, serve the coffee, and go away, first glancing absent-mindedly into the street. Díaz was still out of sorts, which made me think that when I had stopped him on Charcas Street he had been thinking about something quite different from accompanying a madman like me. . . .

  That was it! I had just stumbled onto the reason for my uneasiness: Díaz Vélez, a damned and pursued madman, knew perfectly well that he was responsible for my recent behavior. “I’m sure that my friend,” he must have said to himself, “will have the puerile notion of wanting to frighten me when next we see each other. If he happens to find me, he’ll pretend to have sudden impulses, psychological manifestations, a persecution complex; he’ll follow me down the street making faces; he will then take me somewhere to buy me a cup of coffee. . . .”

  “You are com-plete-ly wrong,” I told him, putting my elbows on the table and resting my chin in my hands. I looked at him—smiling, no doubt—but never taking my eyes off him.

  Díaz seemed to be surprised that I had come out with this unexpected remark.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Just this: you are com-plete-ly wrong!”

  “But what the devil do you mean? It’s possible that I’m wrong, I guess. . . . Undoubtedly, it’s very probable that I’m wrong!”

  “It’s not a question of whether you guess, or whether there’s any doubt. What I’m saying is this—and I’m going to repeat it
carefully so you’ll be sure to understand—you-are-com-plete-ly-wrong!” This time Díaz, jovially attentive, looked at me and then burst out laughing and glanced away.

  “All right, let’s agree on it!”

  “You do well to agree, because that’s the way it is,” I persisted, my chin still in my hands.

  “I think so, too,” he laughed again.

  But I was very sure the damned fellow knew exactly what I meant. The more I stared at him, the more dizzily the ideas were careening about in my head.

  “Dí-az Vé-lez,” I articulated slowly, not for an instant removing my eyes from his. Díaz, understanding that I wasn’t addressing him, continued to look straight ahead.

  “Dí-az Vé-lez,” I repeated with the same incurious vagueness, as if a third, invisible person sitting with us had intervened.

  Díaz, pensive, seemed not to have heard. And suddenly he turned with a look of frankness; his hands were trembling slightly.

  “Look,” he said with a decided smile. “It would be good if we terminated this interview for today. You’re acting badly and I’ll end up doing the same. But first it would be helpful if we spoke to each other frankly, because if we don’t we will never understand each other. To be brief: you and Lugones and everyone think I’m pursued; is that right or not?”

  He continued to stare at me, still with the smile of a sincere friend who wants to eliminate forever any misunderstandings. I had expected many things, anything but this boldness. With these words, Díaz placed all his cards on the table, and we sat face to face, observing each other’s every gesture. He knew that I knew he wanted to play with me again, as he had the first night at Lugones’s, but nevertheless he dared incite me.

  Suddenly I became calm; it was no longer a matter of letting the flies of excitement race surreptitiously through my own brain and waiting to see what would happen, but of stilling the swarm in my own mind in order to listen attentively to the buzzing in another’s.

  “Perhaps,” I responded vaguely when he had completed his question.

  “You thought I was pursued, didn’t you?”

  “I thought so.”

  “And that a certain story I told you at Lugones’s about a mad friend of mine was to amuse myself at your expense?”

  “Yes.”

  “Forgive me for continuing. Lugones told you something about me?”

  “He did.”

  “That I was pursued?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believe, more than you did before, that I am, don’t you?”

  “Exactly.”

  Both of us burst out laughing, each looking away at the same instant. Díaz lifted his cup to his lips, but in the middle of the gesture noticed that it was empty and set it down. His eyes were even more brilliant than usual, with dark circles beneath them—not like those of a man, but large and purplish like a woman’s.

  “All right, all right,” he shook his head cordially. “It’s difficult not to believe it. It’s possible, just as possible as what I’m going to tell you. Listen carefully: I may or I may not be pursued, but what is certain is that your eagerness that I see that you are too will have this result: in your desire to study me, you will make me truly pursued, and then I will occupy myself in making faces at you when you’re not looking, as you did to me for six blocks only a half-hour ago . . . which certainly is true. And there is another possible consequence: we understand each other very well; you know that I—an intelligent and truly pursued person—am capable of feigning a miraculous normality; and I know that you—in the larval stage of persecution—are capable of simulating perfect fear. Do you agree?”

  “Yes, it’s possible there’s something in that.”

  “Something? No, everything!”

  We laughed again, each immediately looking away. I put my elbows on the table and my chin in my hands, as I had a while before.

  “And if I truly believe that you are following me?”

  I saw those two brilliant eyes fixed on mine.

  In the exchange of our glances there was nothing but the perverse question that had betrayed him, the brief suspension of his shrewdness. Did he mean to ask me that? No, but his madness was so far advanced that he could not resist the temptation. He smiled as he asked his subtle question, but the madman, the real madman, had escaped and was peering at me from behind his eyes.

  I shrugged my shoulders carelessly, and, like someone who casually places his hand on the table when he is going to shift his position, I surreptitiously picked up the sugar bowl. But the moment I did it, I felt ashamed and put it down. Díaz watched it all without flickering an eyelid.

  “Just the same, you were afraid,” he smiled.

  “No,” I replied happily, drawing my chair a little closer. “It was an act, one that any good friend might put on—any friend with whom one has an understanding.”

  I knew that he wasn’t putting on an act and that behind the intelligent eyes directing the subtle game still crouched the mad assassin, like a dark beast seeking shelter that sends out decoy cubs on reconnaissance. Little by little the beast was withdrawing, and sanity began to shine in his eyes. Once again he became master of himself; he ran his hand over his shining hair, and, laughing for the last time, he stood up.

  It was already two o’clock. We walked toward Charcas talking about various things, in mutual tacit agreement to limit the conversation to ordinary things—the sort of brief, casual dialogue a married couple maintains on the streetcar.

  As is always true in these circumstances, once we stopped neither of us spoke for a moment, and, also as always, the first thing we said had nothing to do with our farewell.

  “This asphalt is in bad shape,” I ventured, pointing with my chin.

  “Yes, it never is any good,” he replied in a similar tone. “When shall we see each other again?”

  “Soon. Won’t you be going by Lugones’s?”

  “Who knows. . . . Tell me, where the devil do you live? I don’t remember.”

  I gave him the address. “Do you plan to come by?”

  “Some day . . .”

  As we shook hands, we couldn’t help exchanging a look, and we burst out laughing together for the hundredth time in two hours.

  “Good-by, be seeing you.”

  After a few feet, I walked very deliberately for a few paces and looked over my shoulder. Díaz had turned around, too. We exchanged a last salute, he with his left hand and I with my right, and then we both walked a little faster.

  The madman, the damned madman! I could still see his look in the café. I’d seen it clearly. I’d seen the brutish and suspicious madman behind the actor who was arguing with me! So he’d seen me following him in the glass of the shopwindows! Once again I felt a deep need to provoke him, to make him see clearly that he was beginning now, he was losing confidence in me, that any day he was going to want to do to me what I was doing to him. . . .

  I was alone in my room. It was late and the house was sleeping; in the entire house there was not a sound to be heard. My sensation of isolation was so strong that unconsciously I raised my eyes and looked around. The incandescent gaslight coldly and peacefully illuminated the walls. I looked at the cone and ascertained that it was not burning with the usual small popping. Everything was deathly still.

  It is well known that one has only to repeat a word aloud six or seven times for it to lose all meaning and for it to be converted into a new and absolutely incomprehensible utterance. That is what happened to me. I was alone, alone, alone. . . . What does alone mean? And as I looked up I saw a man standing in the doorway looking at me.

  I stopped breathing for an instant. I was familiar with the sensation, and I knew that immediately the hair would rise at the back of my neck. I lowered my eyes, continuing my letter, but out of the corner of my eye I saw that the man had appeared again. I knew very well that it was nothing. But I couldn’t help myself and, suddenly, I looked. That I looked meant I was lost.

  And all of this was Díaz
’s work; he had got me overexcited about his stupid persecutions, and now I was paying for it.

  I pretended not to notice and continued writing, but the man was still there. From that instant, in the lighted silence and the empty space behind me surged the annihilating anguish of a man who is alone in an empty house but doesn’t feel alone. And it wasn’t only this; things were standing behind me. I continued my letter, but the eyes were still in the doorway and the things were almost touching me. Gradually the profound terror I was trying to contain made my hair stand on end, and, rising to my feet as naturally as one is capable in such circumstances, I went to the door and opened it wide. But I know what it cost me to do it slowly.

  I didn’t pretend to return to my writing. Díaz Vélez! There was no other reason why my nerves should be like this. But I was completely certain, too, that—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—he was going to pay for all this evening’s pleasures.

  The door to the street was still open, and I listened to the bustle of people leaving the theaters. “He could have attended one of them,” I thought. “And since he has to take the Charcas streetcar, it’s possible he passed by here. . . . And if it’s his idea to annoy me with his ridiculous games, pretending he already feels himself pursued and knowing that I’m beginning to believe he is . . .”

  Someone knocked at the door.

  He! I leaped back into my room and extinguished the lamp in a flash. I stood very still, holding my breath. My skin tingled painfully as I awaited a second knock.

  He knocked again. And then after a while I heard his steps advancing across the patio. They stopped at my door, and the intruder stood motionless before its darkness. Of course there was no one there. Then suddenly he called me. Damn him! He knew that I had heard him, that I had turned out the light when I heard, and that I was standing, not moving, by the table! He knew precisely what I was thinking, and that I was waiting, waiting, as in a nightmare, to hear my name called once again!

  He called me a second time. Then, after a long pause, “Horacio!”

  Damnation! What did my name have to do with all this? What right did he have to call me Horacio, he who in spite of his tormenting wickedness would not come in because he was afraid! “He knows that this is what I am thinking at this instant; he is convinced of it, but the madness is upon him, and he won’t come in!”