Translated from Spanish by Nathaniel Kennon Perkins
The low clack of the milk glass on the wood table startled them. The bald waiter handed them an envelope, and their faces lit up. Finally, some news from Gombrowicz.
For more than a year, at this same table, they’d focused on their hate for the Polish traitor who had disappeared from one day to the next. He had abandoned them.
They were alone, once more in abysmal unease.
Those encounters with Gombrowicz were the only relationship they had managed to have other than with each other, an association that had begun in silence, surrounded by four damp walls, with the pills already in their systems. Afterwards, they returned to the bar, “Rex,” every Friday, hopeful. Burton gripped the letter like it was a bomb.
“It’s him. It’s his handwriting,” he confirmed, opening it meticulously.
Behind his dirty eyeglasses, Manes didn’t flinch. A train could run him over and not elicit any response. Trains ran over him all the time.
***
The first time, Gombrowicz had come into Rex for lunch. With a draft of his novel Trans-Atlantyk under his arm, dressed in a gray overcoat and hat, he sat at a table on the ground floor. He didn’t want to play chess. He didn’t look at anything. He waited for the impulse. A spark of the reality that would throw his stagnant book into motion.
Reality entered through his nose. Manes’s rank odor, mixed with trash and humidity. He looked at the pair carefully.
“Cold milk for lunch?” he asked.
The bald waiter brought the glass of milk, and Manes knocked it back as if he’d had a drainpipe insead of a throat. He was a sewer of a man.
“He hates the skin that forms on the top of milk when it’s boiled. That’s why he orders it cold,” Burton said.
Gombrowicz couldn’t resist.
“Join me. I’m about to eat.”
He offered them cigarettes, which they accepted desperately.
“Where did you two come from?”
They didn’t say anything. The bald waiter interrupted the silence by saying “Sir?” to Gombrowicz, who asked for the usual.
“What’s that supposed to mean, ‘where did we come from?’” said Burton.
He didn’t intend to tell a stranger that they had escaped, or that they were potentially dangerous to society.
“Who are you?”
Burton was flustered. It hadn’t occurred to him to say their names.
“Burton and Manes.”
Burton drained his soda water and poured himself another.
“I’m Count Gombrowicz.”
He held out his hand. Burton shook it.
“You don’t talk?” he asked Manes.
He didn’t respond. He didn’t look at the man.
“He’s not well,” said Burton.
“What does he have?”
“I don’t know. He’s crazy.”
“Not crazy,” said Manes.
“That’s the only way to get him to talk. Say he’s crazy,” Burton explained.
“Why aren’t you crazy?”
“Because I’m not,” said Manes.
They weren’t writers. They didn’t play chess or recommend any books to him. They hadn’t participated in the translation of Ferdydurke, to which even the waiter had contributed words. They didn’t even know he was a writer.
Gombrowicz wanted to serve himself more soda water, but the siphon hissed and coughed.
Flakes of dried skin fell onto Burton’s chest when he scratched his beard.
The noise from the coffee machine was unbearable.
***
Another Friday. Burton and Manes picked up their pace because they were going to Rex. Manes was furious, his jumping crystal eyes darting.
Burton had been running late because his ballpoint pens were practically selling themselves. It happened sometimes.
Without even a word of the salesman’s pitch that was so hard for him to spit out, he crossed a random subway car with the box of pens in his hand, aware that he should get off, when a woman with brown painted fingernails and a silver plated butterfly in her hair, stopped him by touching his right arm.
How long had it been since somebody had last touched him?
When was the last time a woman had touched him?
“Give me one,” she told him.
“Three for ten.”
“Give me three.”
After this unexpected sale, two more buyers emerged, and when he lifted his gaze, the train was once again moving.
That’s why he was late to the corner of the subway station where Manes begged for alms without looking anybody in the eye, just extending his hand. It was as if he had never left those four sky-blue walls, peeling and cracked by the dampness and time.
“You abandoned me,” claimed Manes.
In the street, Burton explained the economic benefits of his delay, but Manes shouted it this time:
“You abandoned me!”
He crouched, snatched a rock from the ground, and smashed it through the display window of a shop that sold men’s suits on Corrientes Avenue.
As a way of saying sorry, Burton bought him a strawberry ice cream.
In silence, they arrived at the door of Rex. When they entered, they saw Gombrowicz seated, scanning the newspaper. They stood in front of him for a few seconds.
When he saw them, he smiled. Manes sat down first, and his gaze stopped at the Pole’s cup: the path of coffee grounds from the rim to the bottom. He made the sign of smoking a cigarette.
Gombrowicz took one for himself and handed over the rest of the pack. They each took one, and when they tried to hand it back, he waved it away as if swatting flies. They didn’t insist. Later, they split it fifty-fifty. Gombrowicz put his cigarette in his mouth but never lit it.
Their conversation followed the topics he felt like discussing. He asked them questions about their lives, and Burton answered. Manes occasionally interrupted, irritated that he had to correct some detail that was irrelevant to everyone else but to him was fundamental.
Afterwards, they smoked in silence, obsessed with the forms the smoke drew in the air, trying to blow perfect rings.
***
Burton took care of Manes like he would a son.
They split rent, but Burton was the one who paid it. The manager was a strict Italian lady. Stocky and ill-tempered, she spoke in shouts, her broom like an extension of her arm.
Her husband was never around. When he did show up he staggered though one of the hallways and she smacked him with the broom and told him to keep out of sight. She didn’t want the tenants to lose respect for her because her husband came home drunk.
After a few scandals with Manes in which the Italian manager had almost smacked the teeth out of his mouth with her broom, she and Burton created a code of handle signals so Manes would not witness the rent payment and unleash his chaos.
Burton entered the room and got to work scrubbing shirts, underwear, pants, and socks with white soap in the bathroom sink. Sitting on the bed, Manes counted out the few bills he had, then the coins. He narrowed his eyes, frowned, breathed heavily. He was greedy. He said that the Italian was a cop, that she stole money from them, all the while hoarding treasure in a secret hiding place.
Later, Burton hung the wet garments over a chair next to the stove, and offered him a glass of milk. Excited, Manes stamped his feet on the floor while Burton dissolved half a pill in the glass. A few minutes later, he was sleeping like a baby.
Burton didn’t regret stealing enough money from him to pay the rent.
***
His work in the Polish bank turned him into a specter, his head elsewhere, his body like a husk. But on Fridays at noon, talking to them allowed Gombrowicz the selfishness of inspiration.
It was striking how, even though their conversations didn’t have anything to do with what he was writing, the novel started coming together in his head. And at the same time, the chats made Burton and Manes abandon their hermetic autism and start living.
The last time they ate lunch together, it was a surprise. Burton and Manes had gone to the Palermo racetrack. Walking around the area, the sound of the horse’s hooves and the shaking ground had attracted them.
“I won!” shouted Burton.
With a pen in his hand, Gombrowicz watched through the window of Rex as they celebrated. In the same surprised moment, he saw they were getting out of hand when they pushed their way into the bar, almost knocking over a customer who was trying to exit. But he felt a certain joy at seeing them. He couldn’t deny it.
“Seriously?” He couldn’t believe it.
“No really! I won!” said Manes.
“No! I won!” said Burton. “I won! I won! I won!”
They sat, and he asked Burton, “How did it happen?”
“I put it all on one horse and won.”
Gombrowicz left his seat, giving them a standing ovation. The bald waiter looked on in surprise, but, encouraged by the Pole, he clapped, too. Then the other seven people in the bar joined in the applause.
He sat, and for the first time Burton’s words flowed. Initially, they had visited the casino slot machines. They played three tokens in each. Manes ran through the aisles afterwards kicking them.
The Pole laughed with his mouth full.
Even though he spent every second of his life losing, Manes didn’t seem to understand what losing was. Each roulette ball that didn’t favor his tiny bet was an ordeal, a curse from hell, one less strawberry ice cream.
They spent every dime that Burton had brought until they were desolately broke, and Burton cried, sitting on the lysergic casino carpet. Then, Manes took a roll of bills out of his sock and gave him his treasure. Burton hugged him hard.
At the ticket counter, the decision already made, they bet everything on Mandrake.
Manes had seen the horse on the track, and he liked him because he had green bandages. Burton was suspicious, but when he saw that the jockey looked just like someone he had known in the psychiatric hospital, he bet.
Manes became exasperated when, as he told the story to the Pole, Burton credited this detail for the triumph.
Gombrowicz congratulated them both, and Manes’s mouth made something akin to a gesture of happiness, a disjointed grin that meant something good.
As usual, they said goodbye in the doorway of Bar Rex. Gombrowicz stood in front of them and said, “I’m going to take your picture.” He arranged them shoulder to shoulder, stepped back a ways, then stood and stared for a few seconds. He didn’t have a camera.
“Gentleman, it’s been a success,” he said.
He crossed the street, and they never saw him again.
***
The same table at Rex. Burton, Manes, and the letter. The wait was over.
Burton read Gombrowicz’s words nervously. He got stuck and went on, got stuck again. There was gummy drool in the corner of his mouth.
Manes flicked the sugar packets while looking at the street’s reflection in the bar mirror. He was impatient.
The letter was a kind of requiem.
Gombrowicz said that Paris was horrifically changed: “They’re rich in Europe,” he wrote. “They laugh at communism. My God. What am I doing here? Where am I? Since I left Argentina I haven’t had a single good day.”
Nothing was going right. An asthma attack had hospitalized him. He didn’t say for how long or if he was still in the hospital. He said, “I’m rotting a little bit all over. Prostrate, I have no choice but to review my life. And I don’t want to live much longer.”
Burton went through the text rapidly, muttering a few comments about Gombrowicz’s literature and literature in general that didn’t matter to him at all, but something made him stop reading. He fell silent. With a few viscous drops of milk still clinging to the glass in the middle of the table, he read the last sentence but could not say it out loud.
Manes got tired of trying to read his face and took the paper out of his hands and read: “Anyway, as I’ve already told you, my dear friends. Kill Borges.”
In the postscript, he said that the letter should be left with the bald waiter so the rest of his companions might receive news from Count Gombrowicz.
When Manes lifted his gaze from the paper, his eyes were tremulous.
***
They were mostly young people. Burton and Manes sat next to each other almost halfway back in the auditorium, which wasn’t full.
Burton had a spiral notebook, his backpack full of blue pens with white caps, and, in his jacket pocket, a kitchen knife wrapped in newspaper.
Manes had had the courtesy to bathe.
Everybody listened to Borges read as though they were at mass. He had raised eyebrows, as if he was trying to see somehow.
Manes thought that it was the right instant to kill him. He used to fantasize about the most important moment of his life, and now he was living it. He stood recklessly, and Burton saw that he held a revolver behind his back. The door slammed open against the wall, drawing the attention of the entire class. Burton yanked Manes back into his seat.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
A group of people entered the classroom. They carried an arrogance greater than that of most adolescents. Borges kept quiet.
One of the militants, some kind of leader, addressed the students vehemently: “This class is suspended. Commander Ernesto Guevara was assassinated today.”
A murmur spread through the crowd. Manes felt the cold body of the revolver.
“No way,” Borges refused.
The militants insisted and became disorganized. They talked over each other and Borges remained in the room like a stone gargoyle.
“We’re going to turn off the classroom lights to permanently suspend this class!” the singing voice insisted.
Nobody moved. The fear of breaking the tension that surrounded them was terrible.
Borges spoke.
“Don’t worry, young man. I’ve taken the precaution of going blind, especially for this moment.”
Nobody killed Borges that day.
***
They investigated him meticulously. His schedules, his habits, the locations he frequented, who accompanied him, where he lived. Everything in order to find the right moment to kill him, but it wasn’t easy. They would have to be patient. Above all, Burton would have to restrain Manes.
The taxi turned at Maipú and Marcelo T. De Alvear, put on its hazard lights, and stopped. Over the preceding hours, Manes had taken the opportunity to sit on the ground a few meters from Borges’s house, in the doorway of a jewelry store, begging. Burton smoked a cigarette with the box of pens in his left hand. He had his hair impeccably parted to one side.
Borges got out of the taxi with the help of an Asian woman who looked at the sky. It was about to rain. Manes stood up, electrified.
“Keep quiet,” Burton said in a low voice and drew hard on the cigarette, “Or I’ll abandon you.” It was a threat he had made various times over the past few days to keep Manes in line. Manes grumbled but obeyed. They waited near the door of Borges’ building until the Asian girl left.
The businesses had lowered their blinds, and Manes had given up begging because people never stopped at night. Burton was thinking intently, leaning against the wall, using one hand to take the cap off of the pen he carried in his pocket and put it back on again.
It began to drizzle when the Asian girl ran out of the building, and they entered before the door could close. Burton slipped in expertly, just like they’d done when they had made their escape all those years ago. Climbing the stairs, Manes’s slippers squeaked on the steps. Burton turned indignantly and made the gesture for silence.
To confirm where they were going, he took from his back pocket a piece of paper on which was written Borges’s apartment number. Manes was unable to prevent a repetition of the nerve-grinding sound of his slippers. They arrived at the door.
A crack of thunder split the sky, and the lightning’s flash came through the windows of every apartment in Buenos Aires. The rain was torrential.
In front of Borges’s door, Manes held the revolver, his finger anxious on the trigger. He was prepared to shoot at the lock, or anything else. Luckily, the thunder hadn’t startled him into firing.
Burton put his hand on the handle. He turned it slowly and opened the door without resistance. No key. Nothing.
Manes hesitated for the first time, staggered mentally, and looked at Burton in astonishment as if seeking an explanation, but Borges’ unmistakable voice gave them the last push: “Come on in, gentlemen. I’ve been waiting for you.”