Springtime in a Broken Mirror Read online

  Mario Benedetti

  * * *

  SPRINGTIME IN A BROKEN MIRROR

  Translated by Nick Caistor

  Contents

  Intramural (Tonight I am alone)

  Battered and Bruised (Political actions)

  Don Rafael (Rout and route)

  Exiles (Green horse)

  Beatriz (The seasons)

  Intramural (How are your phantoms doing?)

  The Other (Solitary witness)

  Exiles (Cordially invited)

  Battered and Bruised (A landscape or two)

  Don Rafael (A strange guilt)

  Intramural (The river)

  Beatriz (Skyscrapers)

  Exiles (He came from Australia)

  The Other (To want to, be able to, etc.)

  Don Rafael (God willing)

  Battered and Bruised (A terrible fear)

  Intramural (The bonus)

  Exiles (Man in a doorway)

  Beatriz (This country)

  Battered and Bruised (Daydreaming)

  Don Rafael (Benign and cruel madmen)

  Exiles (Immobile solitude)

  The Other (First choice and substitute)

  Intramural (The seaside resort)

  Beatriz (A huge word)

  Exiles (Penultimate abode)

  Battered and Bruised (Truth and postponement)

  Don Rafael (News of Emilio)

  The Other (Flabbergasted and everything)

  Beatriz (Pollution)

  Exiles (The acoustics at Epidaurus)

  Intramural (A mere possibility)

  Battered and Bruised (The sleeping man)

  The Other (Shadows and darkness)

  Exiles (Goodbye and welcome)

  Don Rafael (A country called Lydia)

  Beatriz (Amnesty)

  The Other (Put on your body)

  Battered and Bruised (Life’s a bitch)

  Exiles (The proud people of Alamar)

  Don Rafael (Clearing the rubble)

  Extramural (Fasten seat-belt)

  Beatriz (Airports)

  The Other (For now, improvise)

  Extramural (Arrivals-Arrivées-Llegadas)

  Follow Penguin

  In memory of my father (1897–1971), who was a chemist and a good man.

  If I knew I were to die tomorrow

  And spring came the next day

  I would die happy

  Because it was the day after tomorrow.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Out-of-date calendar, broken mirror.

  Raúl González Tuñón

  Intramural

  (Tonight I am alone)

  Tonight I am alone. My cellmate (one day you’ll know his name) is in the sick bay. He’s a good guy, but sometimes it’s not such a bad thing, being alone. I can think more clearly. I don’t have to screen myself off to think of you. You’ll say that four years, five months and fourteen days is too long to spend just thinking things over. And you’re right. But it’s not too long to spend thinking of you. The moon is shining, and I’m making the most of it, writing to you. It’s like a balm, the moon, it always calms me. And its light, however faint, shines on the paper, which is important because at this time of night they cut off the electricity. I didn’t even have moonlight, though, for the first two years, so I’m not complaining. As Aesop concluded, there’s always someone worse off than you. A lot worse off, I’d say.

  It’s odd. When you’re on the outside and you imagine that, for whatever reason, you might end up spending several years between four walls, you think you wouldn’t be able to stand it, that it’d be simply unbearable. And yet, as you see, it is bearable. I, at least, have been able to bear it. I won’t deny that I’ve had moments of despair, desperate moments, made much worse by physical suffering. But I’m talking about pure, unadulterated despair; the kind where you start counting each day as it passes, day after day, and you end up with this one day of being imprisoned, multiplied by many thousands of days. And yet, somehow, the body adapts, better than the mind. The body is first to grow accustomed to the new schedule, new positions, the new rhythm of its needs, its new periods of tiredness and rest, its new activity and non-activity. If you’re given a cellmate, at first you see him as an intruder. But gradually he becomes someone to talk to. This current one is my eighth. I think I’ve got on pretty well with all of them. What’s hard is when the despair you both feel doesn’t coincide, and his despair infects you, or your despair infects him. Or sometimes it’s the case that one of you just stubbornly refuses to accept the other’s despair, refuses the spread of the contagion, and this resistance gives rise to an argument, a bitter stand-off. Then, being cooped up together really doesn’t help, it only stirs things up, provokes you (and the other person) to say wounding or sometimes even unforgivable things, which hang in the air, and seem even crueller by the mere fact that you can’t avoid the other person’s presence. And if things become so tense that the two occupants of that one tiny, confined space won’t even exchange a single word, then that awkward, anguished company makes the shared cell much less bearable, much more quickly, than being in complete isolation. Fortunately, in the already lengthy saga of my time here, there has been only one episode of that kind, and it didn’t last long. In the end, we both grew so fed up with our silent duet that one evening we looked at one another and started to speak almost in unison. After that it was easy.

  It’s been almost two months since I had any news from you. I won’t ask, because I already know what’s going on. And what isn’t. They say that in a week everything will be back to normal. I hope so. You’ve no idea how important a letter is for everyone in here. When we’re allowed out into the exercise yard, you can tell straightaway those who’ve received a letter and those who haven’t. The lucky ones’ faces are strangely lit up, although they often try to conceal their utter delight to spare the feelings of the less lucky ones. For obvious reasons, in recent weeks all of us have had long faces. And that’s no good either. So I have no answers to any of your questions, simply because I don’t have any from you. But I do have some questions of my own. Not ones you already know that I’ll ask without my having to ask them; ones which, by the way, I don’t particularly like to ask just in case you reply (as a joke or, worse, in all seriousness), ‘Not any longer.’ I wanted to ask you about Dad. He hasn’t written to me in ages. And, in his case, I get the impression there’s no other reason for my not having heard from him: it’s just that he hasn’t written to me in a long while. And I can’t work out why. Sometimes I go over (in my mind, that is) what I can remember writing in some of my short letters, but I don’t think there’s anything that could have upset him. Do you see a lot of him these days? And another question: how is Beatriz getting on at school? From the last little letter she wrote, I thought there was something a bit ambiguous about her account. And do you know how much I miss you? Even though I’m pretty good at adapting, that’s one of the things neither my mind nor my body can grow accustomed to – being without you. Not so far, that is. Will I ever get used to it? I don’t think so. Have you?

  Battered and Bruised

  (Political actions)

  ‘Graciela,’ says the girl, holding a glass in her hand, ‘would you like some lemonade?’

  She is wearing a white blouse, jeans, sandals. Long, dark hair, but not too long, tied back with a yellow ribbon. Very pale skin. Nine years old, possibly ten.

  ‘I’ve told you not to call me “Graciela”.’

  ‘Why? Isn’t that your name?’

  ‘Of course it is. But I would prefer you to call me “Mum”, please.’

  ‘All right, but I don’t get it. You don’t call me “daughter”, you say, “Beatriz”.�
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  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Well, anyway, do you want some lemonade?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  Graciela looks somewhere between thirty-two and thirty-five, and possibly even is as old as that. She is wearing a grey skirt and red blouse. Chestnut-coloured hair, and big, expressive eyes. Warm lips, with only a trace of lipstick. She has taken off her glasses to talk to her daughter, but now replaces them so that she can carry on reading.

  Beatriz puts the glass of lemonade on a side table that has two ashtrays on it, and leaves the room. Five minutes later, she comes back.

  ‘Yesterday at school I had a fight with Lucila.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You don’t want to know why?’

  ‘You’re always fighting with Lucila. It must be a way you two have of showing you like each other. Because you’re good friends, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, we are.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘Other times when we fight it’s like a game, but yesterday it was serious.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘She talked about Dad.’

  Graciela takes her glasses off again. Now she is interested. She gulps down the lemonade.

  ‘She said that if Dad is in jail he must be a criminal.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I said he wasn’t. I said he was a political prisoner. But afterwards I thought I didn’t really know what that means. I always hear people say it, but I’m not sure what it is.’

  ‘And that’s why you fought?’

  ‘Yes, and also because she said that at home her father says political exiles come here to take local people’s jobs.’

  ‘What did you say to that?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to say, so I hit her.’

  ‘So now her father will be able to say that the children of political exiles are coming here to beat up his daughter.’

  ‘But I didn’t really hit her, it was more of a pat. But she acted like I’d really hurt her.’

  Graciela bends forward to straighten a stocking, perhaps also to give herself time to think.

  ‘It was wrong of you to hit her.’

  ‘I guess so. But what was I supposed to do?’

  ‘Well, it’s also true that her father shouldn’t say things like that. He, of all people, should understand what it’s like for us.’

  ‘Why he of all people?’

  ‘Because he’s a man with political ideas.’

  ‘Are you a woman with political ideas?’

  Graciela laughs, relaxes slightly. She ruffles her daughter’s hair.

  ‘Yes, to some extent, but I’ve a long way to go.’

  ‘To go where?’

  ‘To be like your father, for example.’

  ‘Is he in jail because of his political ideas?’

  ‘Not exactly. More for his political actions.’

  ‘Do you mean he killed somebody?’

  ‘No, Beatriz, he didn’t kill anyone. There are other political actions.’

  Beatriz controls herself. She seems to be on the verge of tears, and yet she is smiling.

  ‘Go and fetch me some more lemonade.’

  ‘Yes, Graciela.’

  Don Rafael

  (Rout and route)

  The essential thing is to adapt. I know it’s hard at my age. Almost impossible. And yet. After all, my exile is my exile. Not everyone has their own. They wanted to impose somebody else’s on me. No chance. I made it my own. How? That doesn’t really matter. It’s neither a secret nor a revelation. I’d say you have to start by taking charge of the streets. The corners. The sky. The cafés. The sun and, most important of all, the shade. It’s only when you start to realize that a street isn’t strange to you that it stops looking at you like a stranger. It’s the same with everything. When I first got here I used a walking stick, as perhaps befits someone aged sixty-seven. But it had nothing to do with my age. It was a sign of how disheartened I was. Back there I had always taken the same route home. And that was the thing I missed, being here. People don’t understand that sort of nostalgia. They think nostalgia has to do only with skies or trees or women. At best, with political activism. The home country, in short. But I have always felt a greyer, less well-defined nostalgia.

  That’s an example. The route I took back home. It soothes you, gives you peace of mind to know what’s coming next, to know what’s round every corner, after every streetlamp, every newspaper kiosk. Here, on the other hand, when I first set out walking, everything took me by surprise. And all that surprise made me weary. And then, I didn’t reach home, I just went to the room. I was tired of being surprised. Maybe that’s why I started using the stick. To stop being thrown off balance. Or perhaps so that any fellow countrymen I met would say: ‘But Don Rafael, back there you never used a cane,’ and I could reply: ‘Well, you didn’t wear those guayabera shirts, either.’ Surprises, surprises. One surprise was a shop selling gaudily coloured masks that almost hypnotized me. I couldn’t get used to them, even though they were always the same each time I passed by. But always seeing the same masks in the shopfront also led me to wish, or possibly even to expect, that their faces would change, and every day I was astonished to see that they were still the same. That’s how the stick helped me. Why? How? Well, I could lean on it every evening when I felt that twinge of disappointment upon discovering that the masks still hadn’t changed. And I must say that my thinking here wasn’t really so absurd. Because a mask is not a face. It’s a made object, isn’t it? A face is only altered by accident. I mean its structure, not its expression, which is, of course, forever shifting. A mask on the other hand can change for thousands of reasons. For example: as a trial, an experiment, or an adjustment, an improvement, because it’s damaged, or replaced. It took me three months to realize there was nothing to be gained from these masks. Those stubborn numbskulls were never going to change. So I started paying attention to faces instead. It turned out to be a good decision. The passing faces were never the same. They came towards me, and I abandoned my stick. I no longer needed it to bear the weight of disillusionment. Each face might stay the same from day to day, but it would change over the years, and those that came towards me (apart from a timid, bony beggar woman) were always new. And with them came all the social classes, some in swanky cars or more modest ones, in buses, wheelchairs, or simply on foot. I no longer missed the route home in Montevideo that I knew by heart. In this new city there were new routes to be taken. A new route is not a rout. We were not completely routed, but we did suffer a defeat, we did retreat. I had understood this, but it was only really confirmed to me when I gave my first class here. A student stood up and asked permission to speak. He asked: ‘Sir, why did your country, a well-established liberal democracy, turn so quickly into a military dictatorship?’ I asked him not to call me ‘sir’. We never used to do that. But I said it just to give myself time to construct an answer. I told him what everyone knows: that the process began a long time earlier, in the years of calm, but deep beneath that calm. I put the different headings up on the board, the phases, definitions, corollaries. The youngster nodded. And in his understanding eyes I saw the extent of my rout, of this new route. Ever since, I’ve taken a different way back in the afternoons. Besides, I no longer return to a room. It’s not a house either. It’s simply an apartment, that is, a pretend house: a room with bits added on. But I like this new city; why wouldn’t I? Its inhabitants – thank goodness – have their flaws. And it’s great fun for me to detail them. Virtues – of course they have those, too – are usually boring. But not flaws. Kitsch, for example, is such fertile ground here; it never bores me. My stick was an attempt at kitsch, but I had to abandon it. Whenever I feel I’m being kitsch, I despise myself a little, and that’s terrible. It’s never right to despise yourself unless it’s with good reason, which isn’t the case for me.

  Exiles

  (Green horse)

  Six months earlier he had slipped on a polished
hotel floor, in another city, and hit his head hard on the ground. As a result, one of his retinas had become detached, and now he had been operated on. On medical advice he had to spend a fortnight in bed, with both eyes bandaged, which meant he was completely dependent on his wife. Every seventy-two hours the surgeon came, raised the bandage on his operated eye to make sure everything was fine, and then replaced it. He’d been advised that for the first week at least he should have no visits, so as to get complete rest. But he could listen to the radio and the cassette recorder. And, of course, answer the telephone.

  The news bulletins weren’t boring, as they had been in the old days; sometimes they were downright terrifying. By January 1975 ten or twelve bodies were being found each day on Buenos Aires rubbish dumps. Between broadcasts he enjoyed listening to cassettes of music by Chico Buarque, Daniel Viglietti, Nacha Guevara, Silvio Rodríguez, but also Schubert’s Trout sonata and the occasional Beethoven quartet.

  Another distraction was to call up images in his mind. This had become the most fascinating of his passive activities. There was definitely something creative about it, something more original than his eyes’ simple, straightforward registering of the images reality presented him. No longer. Now he was the one inventing and summoning that reality, which appeared with all its traits and colours on the inner wall of his closed eyes.

  It was a fascinating game. To think, for example: now I’m going to create a green horse in the rain, and then to see it appear on the reverse side of his motionless eyelids. He didn’t dare make the horse trot or run, because the doctor had told him his pupils shouldn’t move, and with this new discovery he wasn’t sure if the affected pupil might be tempted to follow the galloping green horse. But he felt completely free to imagine static paintings. For example: three boys (two blond-haired kids and one little black one, like in the ads for the big American corporations), the first one with a skateboard, the second a cat, the third with a cup and ball. And also, why not, a naked girl, whose vital statistics he carefully chose before completing the image. Or a wide panorama of a Montevideo beach, with one part full of gaily coloured parasols, and another by contrast almost deserted, with a bearded old man in shorts walking a dog that gazed up at its master in an attitude of stiff loyalty …