Option One:
The Night
face up
Julio Cortázar
(Final del juego, 1956)
Halfway
down the long hotel vestibule, he thought that probably he was going to be
late, and hurried on into the street to get out his motorcycle from the corner
where the next-door superintendent let him keep it. On the jewelry store at the
corner he read that it was ten to nine; he had time to spare. The sun
filtered through the tall downtown buildings, and he--because for himself, for
just going along thinking, he did not have a name-he swung onto the machine,
savoring the idea of the ride. The motor whirred between his legs, and a cool
wind whipped his pants legs.
He
let the ministries zip past (the pink, the white), and a series of stores
on the main street, their windows flashing. Now he was beginning the most
pleasant part of the run, the real ride: a long street bordered with trees,
very little traffic, with spacious villas whose gardens rambled all the way
down to the sidewalks, which were barely indicated by low hedges. A bit
inattentive perhaps, but tooling along on the right side of the street, he allowed himself to be
carried away by the freshness, by the weightless
contraction of this hardly begun day. This involuntary relaxation, possibly,
kept him from preventing the accident. When he saw that the woman standing on the corner had rushed into the crosswalk
while he still had the green light, it was already somewhat too late for a
simple solution. He braked hard with foot and hand, wrenching himself to the
left; he heard the woman scream, and at the collision his vision went. It was
like falling asleep all at once. He came too abruptly. Four or five young men were getting him out from under the
cycle. He felt the taste of salt and blood, one knee hurt, and when they hoisted
him up he yelped, he couldn't bear the pressure on his right arm. Voices
which did not seem to belong to the faces hanging above him encouraged him
cheerfully with jokes and assurances. His single solace was to hear someone
else confirm that the lights
indeed had been in his favor. He asked about the woman, trying to keep down the
nausea which was edging up into his throat. While they carried him face up
to a nearby pharmacy, he learned that the cause of the accident had gotten only
a few scrapes on the legs. "Nah, you barely got her at all, but when
ya hit, the impact made the machine jump and flop on
its side . . ." Opinions,
recollections of other smashups, take it easy, work him in shoulders
first, there, that's fine, and someone in a dust coat giving him a swallow
of something soothing in the shadowy interior of the small local pharmacy.
Within five
minutes the police ambulance arrived, and they lifted him onto a cushioned
stretcher. It was a relief for him to be able to lie out flat.
Completely lucid, but realizing that he was suffering the effects of a terrible
shock, he gave his information to the officer riding in the ambulance with him.
The arm almost didn't hurt; blood dripped down from a cut over the eyebrow all
over his face. He licked his lips once or twice to drink it. He felt pretty
good, it had been an accident, tough luck; stay quiet a few weeks, nothing
worse. The guard said that the motorcycle didn't seem badly racked up.
"Why should it," he replied. "It all landed on top of me." They both laughed, and when
they got to the hospital, the guard shook his hand and wished him luck.
Now the nausea was coming back little by little; meanwhile they were
pushing him on a wheeled stretcher toward a pavilion further back, rolling
along under trees full of birds, he shut his eyes and wished he were asleep or
chloroformed. But they kept him for a good while in a room with that
hospital smell, filling out a form, getting his clothes off, and dressing him
in a stiff, greyish smock. They moved his arm carefully, it didn't hurt
him. The nurses were constantly making wise cracks, and if it hadn't been
for the stomach contractions he would have felt fine, almost happy.
They
got him over to X-ray, and twenty minutes later, with the still-damp negative
lying on his chest like a black tombstone, they pushed him into surgery.
Someone tall and thin in white came over and began to look at the x rays.
A woman's hands were arranging his head; he felt that they were
moving him from one stretcher to another. The man in white came over
to him again, smiling; something gleamed in his right hand.
He patted his cheek and made a sign to someone stationed behind.
It was unusual as a dream because it was
full of smells, and he never dreamt smells. First a marshy smell, there to the
left of the trail the swamps began already, the quaking bogs from which no one
ever returned. But the reek lifted, and instead there came a dark, fresh composite
fragrance, like the night under which he moved, in flight from the Aztecs. And
it was all so natural, he had to run from the Aztecs who had
set out on their manhunt, and his sole chance was to find a place to hide in
the deepest part of the forest, taking care not to lose the
narrow trail which only they, the Motecas, knew.
What
tormented him the most was the odor, as though, notwithstanding the absolute
acceptance of the dream, there was something which resisted that which was not
habitual, which until that point had not participated in the game.
"It smells of war," he thought, his hand going instinctively to
the stone knife which was tucked at an angle into his girdle of woven wool. An
unexpected sound made him crouch suddenly stock-still and shaking. To be
afraid was nothing strange; there was plenty of fear in his dreams. He
waited, covered by the branches of a shrub and the starless night.
Far off, probably on the other side of the big lake, they'd be
lighting the bivouac fires; that part of the sky had a reddish glare. The sound
was not repeated. It had been like a broken limb. Maybe an animal that,
like himself, was escaping from the smell of war. He stood erect slowly,
sniffing the air. Not a sound could be heard, but the fear was
still following, as was the smell, that cloying incense of the war of the blossom.
He had to press forward, to stay out of the bogs and get to the heart of the
forest. Groping uncertainly through the dark, stooping every other
moment to touch the packed earth of the trail, he took a few steps. He
would have liked to have broken into a run, but the gurgling fens lapped on
either side of him. On the path and in darkness, he took his bearings. Then he
caught a horrible blast of that foul smell he was most afraid of, and
leaped forward desperately.
"You're going to fall off the
bed," said the patient next to him. "Stop bouncing around, old
buddy." He opened his eyes and it was afternoon, the sun already
low in the oversized windows of the long ward. While trying to smile at
his neighbor, he detached himself almost physically from the final scene of the
nightmare. His arm, in a plaster cast, hung suspended from an apparatus
with weights and pulleys. He felt thirsty, as though he'd been running for
miles, but they didn't want to give him much water, barely enough to moisten
his lips and make a mouthful. The fever was winning slowly and he would
have been able to sleep again, but he was enjoying the pleasure of keeping
awake, eyes half-closed, listening to the other patients' conversation,
answering a question from time to time. He saw a little white pushcart come up
beside the bed, a blond nurse
Rubbed the front of his thigh with
alcohol and stuck him with a fat needle connected to a tube which ran up to a
bottle filled with a milky, opals cent liquid. A young intern arrived with
some metal and leather apparatus which he adjusted to fit onto the good arm to check
something or other. Night fell, and the fever went along dragging him down
softly to a state in which things seemed embossed as through opera glasses,
they were real and soft and, at the same time, vaguely distaste full; like
sitting in a boring movie and thinking that, well, still, it'd be
worse out in the street, and staying.
A cup of a marvelous
golden broth came, smelling of leeks, celery and parsley. A small
hunk of bread, more precious than a whole banquet, found itself crumbling little
by little. His arm hardly hurt him at all, and only in the eyebrow where
they'd taken stitches a quick, hot pain sizzled occasionally. When the big
windows across the way turned to smudges of dark blue, he thought it
would not be difficult for him to sleep. Still on his back so a little uncomfortable,
running his tongue out over his hot, too-dry lips, he tasted the broth
still, and with a sigh of bliss, he let himself drift off.
First
there was confusion, as of one drawing all his sensations, for that moment
blunted or muddled, into himself. He realized that he was running in pitch darkness,
although, above, the sky crises-crossed with treetops was less black than the
rest. "The trail," he thought, "I've gotten off the
trail." His feet sank into a bed of leaves and mud, and then
he couldn't take a step that the branches of shrubs did not whiplash
against his ribs and legs. Out of breath, knowing despite the darkness and
silence that he was surrounded, he crouched down to listen. Maybe the trail was
very near; with the first daylight he would be able to see it again.
Nothing now could help him to find it. The hand that had unconsciously
gripped the haft of the dagger climbed like a fen scorpion up to his neck
where the protecting amulet hung. Barely moving his lips, he mumbled
the supplication of the corn which brings about the beneficent moons, and
the prayer to Her Very Highness, to the distributor of all Motecan
possessions. At the same time he felt his ankles sinking deeper into the
mud, and the waiting in the darkness of the
obscure grove of live oak grew intolerable to him. The war of the blossom had
started at the beginning of the moon and had been going on for three
days and three nights now. If he managed to hide in the depths of the forest,
getting off the trail further up past the
Marsh country, perhaps the warriors
wouldn't follow his track. He thought of the many prisoners they'd already
taken. But the number didn't count, only the consecrated period. The hunt
would continue until the priests gave the sign to return. Everything
had its number and its limit, and it was within the sacred period,
and he on the other side from the hunters.
He heard the cries and leaped up, knife
in hand. As if the sky were a flame on the horizon, he saw torches moving
among the branches, very near him. The smell of war was unbearable, and
when the first enemy jumped
him, leaped at his throat, he felt an almost-pleasure in sinking the stone
blade flat to the haft into his chest the lights were already around him,
the happy cries. He managed to cut the air once or twice, then a rope snared
him from behind.
"It's the fever," the man in
the next bed said. "The same thing happened to me when they operated
on my duodenum. Take some water, you'll see, you'll sleep all
right." Laid next to the night from which he came back, the
tepid shadow of the ward seemed delicious to him. A violet lamp kept
watch high on the far wall like a guardian eye. You could hear
coughing, deep breathing, once in a while a conversation in whispers.
Everything was pleas ant and secure, without the chase, no . . . But he didn't
want to go on thinking about the nightmare. There were lots of things to
amuse himself with. He began to look at the cast on his arm, and the pulleys
that held it so com fort ably in the air. They'd left a bottle of mineral water
on the night table beside him. He put the neck of the bottle to his mouth and
drank it like a precious liqueur. He could now make out the different
shapes in the ward, the thirty beds, the closets with glass doors. He
guessed that his fever was down, his face felt cool. The cut over the eye brow
barely hurt at all, like are collection. He saw himself leaving the hotel
again, wheeling out the cycle. Who'd have thought that it would end like this?
He tried to fix the moment of the accident exactly, and it got him very
angry to notice that there was a void there, an emptiness he could not
manage to fill. Between the impact and the moment that they picked him up
off the pavement, the passing out or what went on, there was nothing he
could see. And at the same time he had the feeling that this void, this
nothingness, had lasted an eternity. No, not even time, more as if, in this
void, he had passed across something, or had run back immense distances. The
shock, the brutal dashing
against the pavement. Anyway, he had felt an immense relief incoming out of the
black pit while the people were lifting him off the ground. With pain in the
broken arm, blood from the split eyebrow, contusion on the knee; with all that,
a relief in returning to daylight, to the day, and to feel sustained and
attended. That was weird. Someday he'd ask the doctor at the office about
that. Now sleep began to take over again, to pull him slowly down. The pillow
was so soft, and the coolness of the mineral water in his fevered
throat. The violet light of the lamp up there was beginning to get dimmer and
dim mer.
As he was sleeping on his back,
the position in which he came to did not surprise him, but on the other
hand the damp smell, the smell of oozing rock, blocked his throat and
forced him to understand. Open the eyes and look in all directions,
hopeless. He was surrounded by an absolute darkness. Tried to get up and felt
ropes pinning his wrists and ankles. He was staked to the ground on a
floor of dank, icy stone slabs. The cold bit into his naked
back, his legs. Dully, he tried to touch the amulet with his chin and
found they had stripped him of it. Now he was lost, no prayer could
save him from the final.. . From afar off, as though filtering through the rock
of the dungeon, he heard the great kettledrums of the feast. They had
carried him to the temple, he was in the underground cells of Teo call i itself,
awaiting his turn.
He heard a yell, a hoarse yell that
rocked off the walls. Another yell, ending in a moan. It was he who was
screaming in the darkness, he was screaming because he was alive, his
whole body with that cry fended off what was coming, the inevitable end.
He thought of his friends filling up the other dungeons, and of those
already walking up the stairs of the sacrifice. He uttered another choked cry,
he could barely open his mouth, his jaws were twisted back as if with a rope and
a stick, and once in a while they would open slowly with an endless
exertion, as if they were made of rubber. The creaking of the wooden
latches jolted him like a whip. Rent, writhing, he fought to rid himself of the
cords sinking into his flesh. His right arm, the strongest, strained until
the pain became unbearable and he had to give up. He watched the double
door open, and the smell of the torches reached him before the light did.
Barely girdled by the ceremonial loincloths, the priests' acolytes moved
in his direction, looking at him with contempt. Lights reflected off the sweaty
torsos and off the black hair dressed with feathers. The cords went slack,
and in their place the grappling of hot hands, hard as bronze; he
felt himself lifted, still face up, and jerked along by the four acolytes who
carried him down the passageway. The torchbearers went ahead, indistinctly
lighting up the corridor with its dripping walls and a ceiling so low that
the acolytes had to duck their heads. Now they were taking him out,
taking him out, it was the end. Face up, under a mile of living rock
which, for a succession of moments, was lit up by a glimmer of torchlight.
When the stars came out up the rein stead of the roof and the great terraced
steps rose before him, on fire with cries and dances, it would be the end. The
passage was never going to end, but now it was beginning to end, he would
see suddenly the open sky full of stars, but not yet, they trundled him
along endlessly in the reddish shadow, hauling him roughly along and he
did not want that, but how to stop it if they had torn off the amulet, his
real heart, the life center.
In a single jump he came out into the
hospital night, to the high, gentle, bare ceiling, to the soft shadow wrapping
him round. He thought he must have cried out, but his neighbors were peacefully
snoring. The water in the bottle on the night table was somewhat bubbly, a
translucent shape against the dark azure shadow of the windows. He panted,
looking for some relief for his lungs, oblivion for those images still
glued to his eyelids. Each time he shut his eyes he saw them take shape
instantly, and he sat up, completely wrung out, but savoring at the
same time the surety that now he was awake, that the night nurse would
answer if he rang, that soon it would be daybreak, with the good, deep sleep he
usually had at that hour, no images, no nothing . . . It was
difficult to keep his eyes open, the drowsiness was more powerful than he. He
made one last effort, he sketched a gesture toward the bottle of water with his
good hand and did not manage to reach it, his fingers closed again on
a black emptiness, and the passageway went on endlessly, rock after
rock, with momentary ruddy flares, and face up he choked out a dull moan
because the roof was about to end, it rose, was opening like a mouth
of shadow, and the acolytes straightened up, and from on high a waning moon
fell on a face whose eyes wanted not to see it, were closing and opening
desperately, trying to pass to the other side, to find again the bare,
protecting ceiling of the ward. And every time they opened, it was night
and the moon, while they climbed the great terraced steps, his head
hanging down backward now, and up at the top were the bonfires, red columns of perfumed
smoke, and suddenly he saw the red stone, shiny with the blood dripping
off it, and the spinning arcs cut by the feet of the victim whom they
pulled off to throw him rolling down the north steps. With a last hope he
shut his lids tightly, moaning to wake up. For a second he thought
he had gotten there, because once more he was immobile in the bed, except
that his head was hanging down off it, swinging. But he smelled death, and when
he opened his eyes he saw the blood-soaked figure of the executioner-priest
coming toward him with the stone knife in his hand. He managed to close his
eyelids again, although he knew now he was not going to wake up, that he was
awake, that the marvelous dream had been the other, absurd as all dreams are-a dream
in which he was going through the strange avenues of an astonishing city, with
green and red lights that burned without fire or smoke, on an enormous
metal insect that whirred away between his legs. In the infinite he of the
dream, they had also picked him up off the ground, someone had
approached him also with a knife in his hand, approached him who was lying
face up, face up with his eyes closed between the bonfires on the steps.
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