Mario Benedetti
SPRINGTIME IN A BROKEN MIRROR
Translated by Nick Caistor
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published as Primavera con una esquina rota 1982
This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2018
Copyright © Fundación Mario Benedetti, c/o Schavelzon Graham Agencia Literaria, www.schavelzongraham.com
Translation copyright © Nicholas Caistor, 2018
The moral right of the author and translator have been asserted
Cover: Ananke Asseff
I don’t want to talk about it (Remains of paradise)
Analog photograph 63 x 50 inch
2008
ISBN: 978-0-241-30263-7
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Out-of-date calendar, broken mirror.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
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?
‘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”.’
‘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.’
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.
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 …
Then the phone rang, and it was easy for him to stretch out his hand. It was a close female friend, who of course knew about the operation but didn’t ask how he was getting on or if everything was all right. She also knew that his apartment on Las Heras and Pueyrredón did not give on to the street, but you could get a glimpse of three or four metres of the square from the tiny bathroom window. And yet she said: ‘I’m just calling so you’ll go out on to the balcony to see the wonderful military parade taking place outside your building.’ With that she hung up. So he told his wife to go and take a look out of the bathroom window. It was what he had expected: a military search operation.
‘We’ll have to burn a few things,’ he said, and could imagine the worried look on his wife’s face. Despite the urgency of the situation, he did his best to calm her down. ‘There’s nothing illegal, but if they come in here and find things you can buy at any kiosk, like Che’s diaries or the Second Havana Declaration (I’m not talking about Fanon or Gramsci or Lukacs, because they have no idea who they are) or copies of Militancia magazine or the Noticias newspaper, that’ll be enough to cause us problems.’
She began to burn books and newspapers, every so often peering out at the corner of the square visible from the bathroom. She had to open other windows (the ones that gave on to the garden between the two blocks) to get rid of the smoke and smell of burning. All this took her twenty minutes. He tried to direct her: ‘Look on the second shelf, the fourth and fifth books on the left, they’re Aesthetics and Marxism in two volumes. Can you see them? And on the shelf underneath are Episodes from the Revolutionary War and The State and Revolution.’
She asked him whether she should also burn Socialist Cinema and Marx and Picasso. He said she should burn the others first: those two were easier to explain away. ‘Don’t throw the ashes down the rubbish chute. Try to use the toilet.’ The smoke made him cough a little. ‘Won’t it damage your eyes?’ ‘Maybe. But we have to choose the lesser evil. Anyway, I don’t think it will. They’re bandaged tightly.’
The phone rang again. The same friend. ‘Well, what do you reckon? Did you enjoy the parade? A shame it was over so quickly, don’t you think?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, taking a deep breath, ‘it was magnificent. All that discipline, the colours, they looked so elegant. I’ve been fascinated by military parades ever since I was a kid. Thanks for letting me know.’
‘OK, you can stop burning things. For today, at least. They’ve gone.’ His wife also breathed heavily, swept up the last ashes with the brush and pan, tipped them down the toilet, pulled the chain, made sure they were all flushed away. Then she washed her hands and came to sit down, more relaxed, next to the bed. He managed to take hold of one of her hands. ‘We can burn the rest tomorrow,’ she said, ‘but more calmly.’
‘It’s a shame. They’re books I need sometimes.’
He tried to think of the green horse in the rain. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, this time the horse was jet-black, and ridden by a stocky rider wearing a military cap who didn’t have a face. At least, not one he could make out on the inside walls of his eyelids.
The seasons are mainly winter, spring and summer. Winter is famous for scarves and snow. When it’s winter, old men and women shake and you say that they shiver. I don’t shiver because I’m not an old woman, I’m a girl. And also because I always sit near the stove. In books and films winter means that there are sleighs, but we don’t have those here. There’s no snow either. The winter here is so boring. But there is a wonderful wind that you can feel in the air and all round your ears. Sometimes my Grandpa Rafael says he’s going to withdraw into his winter quarters. I don’t know why he doesn’t withdraw into his summer quarters. It seems to me that if he goes to the winter ones he’s going to shiver, because he’s quite elderly. You should never say old, you say: elderly. A boy in my class says his grandmother is an old bitch. I taught him that he should at least say she’s an elderly bitch.
Another important season is spring. My mum doesn’t like spring because that was the season they arested Dad. That’s not the same as rested. Without the letter a it means sleep. Spelt like that with an a it means sort of like going to the police. My dad was arested, and as it was spring he was wearing a green pullover. Nice things happen in spring, too, like when my friend Arnoldo lends me his skateboard. He would lend it to me in winter as well, but Mum says I’m susceptible and I’ll catch a cold. No one else in my class is susceptible. Graciela is my mum. Another great thing about spring is flowers.
But summer is the champion of the seasons because it’s sunny and there is no school. In summer the only things that look as if they’re shivering are the stars. In summer all human beings sweat. Sweat is something that is sort of like damp. When you sweat in winter it’s because you have bronchitis, for example. In summer my forehead sweats. In summer fugitives go to the beach because nobody recognizes them in their swimsuits. At the beach I’m not scared of the fugitives, but I am of dogs and waves. My friend Teresita was not scared of waves, she was very brave and once almost drowned. A man was forced to save her so now she’s scared of waves, too, but she’s still not scared of dogs.
Graciela, who’s my mum, always insists there’s a fourth season called thortum. I say that’s possible, but I’ve never seen it. Graciela says that in thortum there is a great abundance of dry leaves. It’s always good to have an abundance of something, even if it is in thortum. Thortum is the most mysterious of the seasons because it’s neither cold nor hot so you don’t know what clothes to wear. That must be why I never know when I’m in thortum. If it’s not cold I think it’s summer, and if it’s not hot I think it’s winter. But it turns out to have been thortum. I have winter clothes, summer and spring clothes, but I don’t think they’ll be any use in thortum. It’s thortum now where my dad is, and he wrote that he’s very happy because the dry leaves float in through the bars and he imagines they’re letters from me.
I spent today staring at the damp patches on the wall. It’s a habit I’ve had since childhood. First I would imagine faces, animals, objects in the patches, then I’d turn them into things that caused me fear, even panic. So it’s good, now, to transform the stains into objects or faces and not feel afraid. But it also makes me somehow nostalgic for that distant time when my worst fears were self-inflicted, conjured out of ghostly patches on walls. The adult reasons, or maybe the adult excuses, for the fears we have now are no such phantoms. They are unbearably real. And yet we still sometimes supplement them with phantoms of our own invention, don’t you think? By the way, how are your phantoms doing? Make sure they get enough protein, you don’t want them to starve to death. A life without phantoms isn’t good, a life where all presences are of flesh and blood. But to get back to the damp patches. My cellmate was caught up reading his Pedro Paramo, but even so I interrupted him to ask whether he had ever noticed the patch close to the door. ‘Not especially, but now you mention it, I can see you’re right, there is a patch. What of it?’ He looked surprised, but curious. You have to understand that in a place like this, anything can be interesting. I can’t tell you what it means if all of a sudden we see a bird in between the bars, or (as once happened to me, in a previous cell) a little mouse becomes someone to talk to at the hour of the angelus, or the hour of the demonius, as Sonia used to joke, remember? So I told my companion I was wondering if he could make out any figure (human, animal or inanimate) in that patch. He stared at it for a while, then said: ‘Charles de Gaulle in profile.’ Incredible! To me it looked more like an umbrella. When I told him so, he laughed out loud for about ten minutes. That’s another good thing when you’re in here: being able to laugh. I don’t know, but if you really laugh, it’s as if your insides have settled down, as if all of a sudden there are reasons to be optimistic, as if all this makes some kind of sense. We ought to prescribe ourselves laughter as therapy. But, as you can imagine, the problem is that there aren’t all that many opportunities to laugh. For example, when I realize how long it’s been since I last saw you: you, Beatriz, Dad. And, above all, when I think of the time that may pass before I see you again. When I gauge how long that is, well, it’s hardly a laughing matter. Then again, it’s nothing to cry about. I barely ever cry, actually. But I’m not proud of this emotional constipation of mine. I know a lot of people in here who can just suddenly let it all out and weep inconsolably for half an hour, only to emerge from that pit feeling better, in a better frame of mind. As if the release has helped them adjust. Sometimes I’m sorry I’ve never acquired the habit. Maybe I’m scared that if I let myself go, the result for me personally wouldn’t be better adjustment – it’d be a breakdown. I’ve always had more than enough screws half-loose to want to risk an even greater collapse. Besides, to be completely frank with you, it’s not that I don’t cry out of fear of breaking down, but simply because I don’t feel like crying; that is, the tears just won’t come. That doesn’t mean I don’t experience anguish, anxiety or other such diversions. It wouldn’t be normal if I didn’t, given the circumstances. But everyone has their own way of doing things. Mine is to try to overcome these mini-crises through the power of reason. I often succeed. But there are, also, occasions when no amount of reasoning is enough. To misquote that classical author (who was it?) I’d say that sometimes reason has its hunches that the heart can’t understand. But tell me about you, what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling. How I’d have loved to walk along the streets you’re walking along now, so that we would have something in common there as well. That’s the problem with not having travelled much. It’s possible that you yourself, but for this unexpected turn of events, would never have visited that city, that country. Maybe, if everything had followed the ordinary course of events – our lives, our marriage, the plans we made no more than seven years ago – we might one day have saved enough to make a long journey (not like the little trips to Buenos Aires, Asunción or Santiago, remember those?), and our destination would probably have been Europe: Paris, Madrid, Rome, London perhaps. How far away all that seems. This upheaval has brought us down to earth, back to our own earth. Now, as you see, if you have to leave, you go to another country here in the Americas. It’s only logical. And even those who now, for whatever reason, are in Stockholm, Paris, Brescia or Amsterdam or Barcelona, even they would no doubt wish they were in one of the cities on our continent. After all, I, too, have left our country, in a sense. I yearn for what you yearn for. Exile (internal or external) is bound to be a key word for this decade – you know, someone will probably strike out this sentence. But whoever does so needs to remember that he, too, in some strange way, is also an exile from our real country. If the sentence has survived, you’ll have seen how understanding I’ve become. I amaze myself sometimes. It’s life, my girl, life. If it didn’t get through, no worries. It wasn’t important. Kisses and more kisses for you, from me.