En la caverna

Out in the street now, Erdosain noticed that it was drizzling, but he kept walking, driven by a dull resentment, the bad mood of not being able to think.

Besides, there was that... that helplessness to think, to think with reasoning of clean lines, the way chess moves are, and a mental incoherence that set him on edge against everyone.

He imagined they were hatching endless swindles, while their gutted wives let themselves be seen from the back rooms, spreading tablecloths over wobbly tables, sweeping up vile stews that, when uncovered in their serving dishes, hurled into the street belches of paprika and tallow, and the harsh stale reek of reheated breaded cutlets.

And in his innermost self he went on insulting them atrociously, imagining that those tradesmen were bolted to imminent bankruptcies by dreadful promissory notes, and that the misery flinging him to the depths of despair would also hang over their filthy wives, who, with the same fingers with which moments before they had taken away the rags they bled into, would now cut the bread the men would devour amid curses aimed at their competitors.

At the ticket window he bought a round-trip ticket to Ramos Mejía.

He was going there as he might have gone in any other direction.

Tired, disconcerted by the certainty that he had hurled his soul into a pit from which he could now never climb out again.

And waiting for him, the lame woman.

Wouldn't it have been preferable to be a ship's captain and command a super-dreadnought?

The funnels would vomit torrents of smoke and on the bridge he would talk with the turret commander, while in his heart there would take shape the image of a woman who perhaps was not his wife.

But why was his life like this?

And the lives of others too, also "like this," as if the "like this" were a stamp of misfortune that, seen in someone else, stood out in fainter relief.

The strong life that suddenly makes an existence appear to us without the prior stages of preparation and that has the perfect fluency of cinematic compositions.

Who kept a photograph of the heroes?

And yet they were suddenly revealed on a balcony haranguing the bearded crowd, or among the broken columns of some recent ruins, in sports shoes and a panama hat that did not belie the fierceness of their conqueror's faces.

He, by contrast, felt there, lodged in his life, the small images of the lame woman, the captain, his wife, Barsut, all of them lives that, the moment they left his sight, were restored to the tiny dimension that distance confers on physical bodies.

The car slid forward and then stopped; at the guard's second whistle the train pulled away, and it entered, screeching fiercely, the points and crossings that clanged like iron as they were forced apart by the edge of the wheels.

In the night the train communicated its shuddering to the rails, and the mass multiplied by speed imprinted on his thoughts the vertigo of a course equally implacable and dizzying.

He recalled the other man's words when he stood at the edge of ruin: "beat it, you little crook, beat it," and steadying his head against the padded corner of the seatback, he thought of times gone by, closing his eyes to make out clearly the images of a memory.

This produced in him a certain strangeness, for it was the first time he had noticed that in a memory certain figures keep the normal dimension in which one has known them in reality, while other figures or things are tiny like lead soldiers or present only a profile, lacking depth.

Thus, beside the bulk of a black man whose hand was lost in the backside of a small boy, he saw a minuscule little table, as if for dolls, on which the small heads of some thieving men were flattened, while the ceiling, at its real height, gave an aspect of even more extraordinary desolation to the gray scene of the memory.

And another memory showed him how exact his presentiment of imminent ruin had been, when he had not even thought yet of defrauding the Sugar Company, but already sought, in sinister haunts, an image of his possible self.

But now he was heading toward the one that led to the eating house, the enormous eating house that sank its taciturn cube like a butcher's shop into the very last folds of his cerebellum, and although the slope of that cube, which began at his forehead and ended at the nape of his neck, was twenty degrees, the minuscule little tables with the grown-up little thieves did not slide across the floor as would have been logical, but rather the cube righted itself under the counterweight of an instantaneous habit, that of thinking about it, and his flesh, already used to speed multiplied by the mass of the electric train, let itself settle into a dizzying inertia; and now that the memory had overcome the inertia of every cell, the eating house appeared before his eyes, like a precisely cut-out quadrilateral.