Historias que me cuento (part 2)

The conclusion to a work ("Stories I tell myself") by this Argentine. You can read the original as part of this collection.

So I let her sleep; the story now possessed the development that I always liked in the stories I tell myself, the meticulous description of every item and every act, a super-slow film for a pleasure that would keep increasing on account of her body, her words, and her silence. I still asked myself why Dilia that night and then almost immediately stopped asking, for now it seemed so natural for her to be there half-asleep at my side, every so often accepting a new cigarette or murmuring an explanation about why here amid the mountains. The story would then get expertly muddled between yawns and broken sentences since nothing could have explained how Dilia was here at midnight on the most remote and godforsaken part of the road. At that moment she stopped speaking and looked at me, smiling that little-girl smile that Alfonso termed that of a buyer, and I gave her my truck driver name, always Oscar in my stories; and she said Dilia and added as she always added that it was a stupid name imputable to an aunt who loved reading trashy novels. It was almost incredible, I thought, that she didn't recognize me, that I was Oscar in the story and she didn't recognize me.

After that comes everything that the stories tell me but that I cannot tell the way they tell it. I only have uncertain fragments, potentially false deductions: the lamp lighting the folding table at the back of the truck parked now between the shelter of two trees; the screeching of the fried eggs, then of the cheese and jam; Dilia looking at me as if she were about to say something and then decided to say nothing; that it was not necessary to explain her getting down from the truck and disappearing beneath the trees. I would be facilitating matters with coffee, almost ready, with a cup of grappa, Dilia's eyes, which would close between drink and sentence, my insouciant way of bringing a lamp to the stool by the side of the mattress, tossing on a blanket because it would indeed get colder later, telling her that I was going to go up to the front cab to make sure the doors were properly closed since you never knew on these deserted stretches of road, and she would lower her eyes and say: don't go now and sleep in the seats in the front cab, that would be stupid – and I would give her my back so that she wouldn't see my face when I became vaguely surprised at what she was saying although, of course, it would always happen as such in one way or another. At times the squaw in her would talk about sleeping on the floor or her inner gypsy would take refuge in the cab and I would have to take her by the waist and steer her back inside, then take her to bed despite her tears or arguments. But not Dilia. Dilia would be going slowly from the table to the bed with a hand looking for the zipper on her jeans, the gestures which I could see in the story although I had my back to her and entering the cab I was giving her time to tell me that, yes, everything would be the way it had to be one more time, an uninterrupted and perfumed sequence, a super-slow traveling from the immobile silhouette caught in my headlights on the mountain swerve until Dilia as she was now, almost invisible beneath the woolen blankets, and then the cut that always occurred: turning off the lamp so that all that remained was the vague ash of the night entering the rear peephole with the plaintive call of a nearby bird.

This time the story went on interminably because neither Dilia nor I wanted it to end. There are stories that I would like to prolong but the Japanese girl or the icy and condescending Norwegian tourist do not let them continue, and despite the fact that I am the story's decision-maker there comes a moment in which I no longer have the strength or even the desire to make something last which, after the initial pleasure, begins to slip into insignificance. It is here where I might invent alternatives or unexpected incidents so that the story may continue in a lively fashion instead of going to sleep with one last, distracted kiss or more useless crying. But Dilia did not want the story to end; from her first gesture when I slipped next to her and instead of the unexpected, I felt her looking for me; from the first double caress I knew that the story had not done anything more than begin, that the night of the story would be as long as the night during which I was telling it. Only now there is nothing more than this, words talking about the story, words like matches, groans, cigarettes, laughs, supplications and demands, coffee at dawn, a dream of heavy waters, of fogs and returns and abandonments, with an initially timid tongue of sun coming from the peephole and slicing Dilia's back turned towards me, blinding me while I pressed against her to feel her open herself again amidst screams and caresses.

The story ends there, without the conventional farewells at the first village on the road as would have been practically inevitable, and from this story I drifted into sleep without anything apart from the weight of Dilia's body falling asleep on mine after a final murmur. I woke up when Niagara spoke to me about breakfast and an engagement we had later that evening. I know I was about to tell her and something held me back, something that was perhaps Dilia's hand returning me to the night and prohibiting me from uttering words which would have spoiled everything. Yes, I had slept very well; no problem, we'll meet at six at the corner of the square to go see the Marinis.

At the time we knew from Alfonso that Dilia's mother was very sick and that Dilia was traveling to Necochea to be with her. Alfonso had to take care of the baby, which gave him quite a bit of work, and we would have to see whether we'd visit them once Dilia returned. Her mother died a few days later and Dilia didn't want to see anyone for two months after that. When we went to dinner we brought some cognac and a rattle for the baby and everything was fine: Dilia was finishing up the duck à l'orange and Alfonso had the table all set up to play canasta. Dinner slipped into friendliness as it should have because Alfonso and Dilia are people that know how to live and began speaking about the most painful matter, quickly draining the subject of Dilia's mother; afterwards it was like softly passing a curtain to return to the immediate present, the games we always played, the keys and codes of humor through which we would spend a pleasant evening. It was already late and cognac time when Dilia alluded to her trip to San Juan, the necessity of forgetting her mother's final days, and the problems with such relatives that complicate everything. It seemed to me as if she were speaking for Alfonso's benefit, although Alfonso must have already known the anecdote because he smiled amicably while serving us another cognac, the car problems in the mountains, the empty night and the interminable wait on the side of the road where every nocturnal bird was a threat, the inevitable return of childhood phantasms, the lights of a truck, the fear that the truck driver would also be afraid and just keep on driving, the blinding lights sticking to the cliff, then the marvelous screeching of the brakes, the warm cab, the descent between dialogues hardly necessary but which helped her feel so much better.

"She's still traumatized," said Alfonso. "You've already told me the story, sweetheart, and each time I notice more details about the rescue, about your Saint George in overalls saving you from the evil dragon of the night."

"It's not that easy to forget," said Dilia. "It's something that just keeps coming back, and I'm not sure why."

She perhaps did not; Dilia perhaps did not know why, but I did. I had to drink my cognac in one gulp and serve myself another as Alfonso raised his eyebrows surprised at an abruptness that he did not recognize in me. His jokes, on the other hand, were more than predictable, telling Dilia that he had decided to stop the story, knowing, in addition, the first part but sure that there had been a second, that it was so obvious, the truck in the night, all that which is so obvious in our life.

I went to the bathroom and stayed there a while trying not to look at myself in the mirror, trying not to find what had been horribly there while she was telling me the story and which now I felt once more. But here this very night, this was what began to take over my body, this was what I had never imagined could be possible after so many years with Dilia and Alfonso, of our happy couple friendship of parties and movies and kisses on the cheek. Now it was the other, it was Dilia, and again the desire, Dilia's voice coming in from the living room, Dilia and Niagara's laughs which had to be making fun of Alfonso for his stereotypical jealousy. It was already late; we drank some more cognac and made ourselves a final round of coffee. From upstairs came the baby's cry and Dilia ran up and brought the baby down in her arms ("He's wet himself completely and it's just a mess. I'm going to change him in the bathroom"). In the meantime Alfonso was elated because this gave him another half-hour to talk to Niagara about Vilas's chances against Borg, and enjoy another cognac and a pipe; in the end we were all quite plastered.

But I was not there. I had gone to the bathroom to accompany Dilia who had put her son on a small table and was looking for things in a cabinet. And it was as if somehow Dilia knew when I told her that I knew the second part; when I told her that it couldn't be but she could see that it was so; I knew that second part. And Dilia gave me her back so as to undress the baby and I saw her incline not only to remove the safety pins and diaper, but also because she was suddenly oppressed by a weight from which she had to free herself. This was the same weight she was shedding when she turned, looked me in the eye, and said that it was for sure, that it was stupid and had no importance whatsoever, but it really was for sure, that she had slept with the truck driver. "Tell Alfonso if you want. In his own way he's convinced of it anyway; he doesn't believe it and yet he's sure of it."

This is how it was. I would say nothing and she would not understand why she was telling me this, why me, since I had asked her absolutely nothing and instead had told her something that she could not have understood from that side of the story. I felt my eyes descending like fingers towards her mouth, her neck, looking for the breasts which her black blouse outlined like my hands had outlined that whole night, that whole story. The desire was a crouched leap, the absolute right to approach her and seek out her bosom below her blouse and involve her in our first hug. I saw her turn, incline once more but this time lightly, freed from silence. She swiftly pulled out the diapers; the smell of the baby which had peed and shat himself came to me together with Dilia's murmurs to stop him from crying. I saw her hands which reached for the cotton and placed it between the baby's raised legs. I saw her hands cleaning the baby instead of coming to me as they had come to me in the darkness of that truck which I have used so many times in the stories I tell myself.

Historias que me cuento (part 1)

The first part of a work ("Stories I tell myself") by this Argentine. You can read the original as part of this collection.

I tell myself stories when I sleep alone, when the bed seems bigger and colder than it really is; but I also tell myself stories when Niagara is there and she falls asleep between indulgent murmurs, almost as if she too were telling a story. More than once I've wanted to wake her up and find out what this story is (yet it is only a sleepy murmur and in no way a story); but Niagara always comes home from work so tired that it would hardly be fair or becoming to wake her just as she falls asleep, just as she seems filled to the brim, lost in her perfumed and murmuring shell. So I let her sleep and tell myself stories, just like those days when she works the graveyard shift and I sleep alone in this brutally enormous bed.

The stories I tell myself are any old thing but almost always feature me in the lead role, a type of Buenos Aires Walter Mitty who imagines himself in anomalous or stupid situations, or through intense and belabored dramatics whereby the listener might amuse himself on melodrama or affectedness or humor deliberately inserted by the narrator. Why should Walter Mitty also have a Hyde aspect? Because English literature has wreaked havoc on his unconscious and his stories are almost always born to him from the learning of books, armed with an equally imaginary imprint. The very idea of writing down the stories I tell myself before falling asleep seems to me inconceivable the next morning – and anyway, a man should have his secret luxuries, his silent squanderings, things from which others will profit until there is nothing left. And there is also the superstition that I have always told myself, that if I were able to write down any of my stories, that story would be the last for a reason that escapes me now but which may have to do with notions of transgression or punishment. Therefore, no: it is impossible to imagine myself waiting for sleep next to Niagara or by myself without being able to tell myself a story, having stupidly to count sheep or, even worse, recall my workdays that were scarcely memorable.

Everything depends on the humor of the moment because it would never occur to me to choose a certain type of story. Hardly would I or we have turned off the light then I would enter into that very second and beautiful cape of night atop my lids. The story is there, an almost always provocative beginning. This could be an empty street with a car approaching from a great distance; the face of Marcelo Macías as he learns that he has been promoted – until that moment an almost inconceivable action given his incompetence; or simply a word or sound repeated five or ten times from which the initial image of the story begins to emerge. Occasionally I am amazed that after an episode that may be termed bureaucratic, the following night yields a story either erotic or sports-related. Surely I am imaginative even if it's only evident right before I fall asleep; yet I do not cease to be amazed at my unpredictably varied and rich repertoire. Dilia, for example, why did Dilia have to appear in that story and precisely in that story when Dilia was not a women who in any way could be linked to such a story? Why Dilia?

But I decided a while ago that I would not ask why Dilia, why Trans-Siberian, why Muhammad Ali, or why to any of the scenes adopted by the stories I tell myself. If I remember Dilia at this time already outside of the story, it is because of other things that were also there and are now also outside, because of something that is no longer the story and, perhaps for this reason, that obliges me to do what I would not have wanted or been able to do with the stories I tell myself. In that story (only in bed, Niagara would return from the hospital at eight in the morning) I would be running through a mountain pass and a route which they feared, which obliged them to drive with caution, their lights marking the ever-possible visual traps of every curve, alone and at midnight in this enormous truck that was hard to steer on this coastal road. Being a truck driver has always seemed like an enviable job because I imagine it as one of the simplest forms of freedom, going from one place to another in a truck which at once is a house with its mattress to spend the night on a tree-lined road, a lamp to read with cans of food and beer, a transistor to listen to jazz in perfect silence, as well as this sensation of knowing yourself to be unknown by the rest of the world, where no one would learn whether we have taken this road and not another, with so many possibilities and villages and adventures on the way, including muggings and accidents which are always the best part, as would suit Walter Mitty.

I have asked myself at times why a truck driver and not a pilot or transatlantic captain, knowing all the while the simple and ground-level answer at my fingertips: I have to hide more and more from the day. Being a truck driver is being the people who speak with truck drivers, it is those places through which a truck driver moves. As such, whenever I tell myself a story of freedom it frequently begins in this truck crossing over the pampas or an imaginary landscape like the one now, the Andes or the Rocky Mountains, in any case a difficult road to travel that night when I was driving up and saw the fragile silhouette of Dilia at the foot of the rocks violently picked out of nowhere by the beams of my headlights, the violet walls which rendered the image of Dilia even smaller and more abandoned. The image of Dilia making a gesture of entreating aid after having walked for so long with a satchel on her back.

If being a truck driver is a story I've told myself many a time, I was not forced to meet women asking me to give them a ride like Dilia was doing. Although, of course, I had placed them there so that these stories almost always satisfied a fantasy in which the night, the truck and solitude were the perfect accessories to the brief happiness of finishing a stage. At times, no, at times there was only an avalanche from which I escaped – God knows how – or the brakes which failed during the descent so that everything ended in a whirlwind of changing visions which obliged me to open my eyes and refuse to carry on, then to look for Niagara's warm waist with the relief of having eluded the worst. Whenever the story dealt with a woman on the side of the road this woman was always a stranger, the caprices of my stories which would opt for a redhead or a woman of mixed race seen perhaps in a film or magazine and forgotten in the surface of the day until my story brought them back without my recognizing them. Seeing Dilia was therefore more than a surprise, it was almost a scandal. Dilia, you see, had nothing to do on this road and in a way was damaging the story with her gesture both imploring and threatening. Dilia and Alfonso are friends whom Niagara and I see from time to time; they live in different orbits and we are only brought together by a certain faithfulness to our university years, our common tastes and interests, eating now and then at their house or here, following from afar their life with baby and quite a bit of dough. What the hell was Dilia doing there when the story was proceeding in such a way that any imaginary girl, but not Dilia ... because if anything was clear in this story it was that, this time, I would meet a girl on the road and hence would occur some of the many things which can happen when you arrive at the plains and make a stop after the great tension of the crossroads. Everything was so clear after that first image, dinner with other truck drivers in the village inn before the mountain, a story in no way original but always pleasant in its variations and mysteries, only that now the mystery was different. It was Dilia who was completely incongruent with this curve on the road.

Maybe if Niagara had been there murmuring and snorting softly in her sleep, I would have chosen not to pick Dilia up, and instead erased her and the truck and the story by simply opening my eyes and saying to Niagara: "It's strange: I was about to sleep with a woman and it was Dilia." At which point Niagara in turn might have opened her eyes and kissed me on the cheek, calling me an idiot or mentioning some phony pop psychology, or asking me if I had ever desired Dilia, just to hear me say the truth or whatever about a dog's life, and so then more phony psychology or something to that effect. Yet feeling so alone within the story, as alone as I was, a truck driver in the middle of the mountain crossroads at midnight, I did not have the willpower to pass her by. I braked slowly, opened the cab door, and let Dilia climb in. In her fatigue and somnolence she barely murmured a "thank you" and stretched herself out in the seat with her travel bag at her feet.

The rules of the game are fulfilled from the very beginning in the stories I tell myself. Dilia was Dilia but in the story I was a truck driver and nothing more than that for her; it would never have occurred to me to ask her what she was doing there in the middle of the night or to call her by her name. The exceptional thing about the story, I think, was that this girl contained the person of Dilia, her limp red hair, her bright eyes, her legs almost conventionally evocative of those of a foal, too long for her height. Apart from this the story treated her like anyone else, without a name or prior relation, the perfect meeting by chance. We exchanged two or three sentences, I gave her a cigarette and lit myself another, and we began to descend the slope the way one has to descend a slope in a heavy truck. Meanwhile Dilia stretched herself out even more, smoking out of neglect and the torpor which had washed over her during her many hours walking and perhaps even out of fear of the mountain.

I thought that she would fall asleep at once, and it was pleasant to imagine her like that all the way down to the plain below; I also thought it might have been pleasant to invite her to the back of the truck and pull out a real bed. But never during a story had things permitted me such a liberty because any of those girls would have looked at me with a bitter and desperate expression of what they imagined to be my immediate intentions, and almost always looked for the door handle, for the necessary flight. Both in these stories and in the presumable reality of a truck driver, things could not happen this way. A truck driver had to talk, smoke, make friends, obtain from all this the inevitably tacit acceptance of a stop at some woodland or shelter, the acquiescence of what would come later and yet not be bitter nor angry. A truck driver would simply share what he had already been sharing since the chat began, his cigarettes, and the first bottle of beer drunk straight from the neck between two turns.

Borges, "Adrogué"

A poem by this Argentine and, research tells me, "a town at the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires which was a summer refuge for the Borges family."  You can read the original here.

Nobody in most baffling night
May see me lost among the swell
Of flowered parks. where garments fell
In folds by love's nostalgic light.

Past noonday sloth, that secret thrush
Refining still the selfsame song;
The fountains purl by arbor's throng,
And statues and odd ruins brush.

In hollow shade a coach apace
Marks, I know well, the confines' shake;
This dust and jasmine world we break,
Herrera and Verlaine's sweet place.

The eucalyptus shade emits
A healing and now ancient scent,
That past its time and language sits
On country farms of memories spent.

Steps search and find the threshold's feet
Its darksome limit the roof suggests;
On chessboard patio facing west
Some water drips in broken beat.

Beyond the doors, they sleep and think
Those who still dream and work at night;
Those lords of visionary sight
Of yesteryear and deadest things.

I know each thing in this old house:
The crystal faces of the clocks,
Revealed in turn upon grey rocks
In faded mirrors' endless joust.

A lion's head whose teeth hold firm 
A ring, then multicolored panes:
A child's first sense of worlds that churn
In red and green, they never wane.

Beyond pure chance and death's black shroud
They last, alone in detailed shape. 
Yet all occurs by fate's mad cape: 
Dimension four, mnemonic cloud.

They last, alone, and so exist 
The gardens, patios, and the past;
In that preserve of rounded cast,
That dawn and dusk will both have kissed.

How could I then have lost the thread,
Beloved, humble things once known?
As distant as the roses shown
In Paradise to Adam's breath?

An elegy of olden days 
Still haunts me now, that house I see!
Yet time remains a mystery
For me, who is time, blood, and pain.

Borges, "Ragnarök"

A prose poem by this Argentine on this series of events.  You can find the original in this collection.

In dreams (writes Coleridge), images assume the shape of the impressions we think they cause. We do not feel horrified because a sphinx oppresses us; we dream of a sphinx to explain the horror that we feel. If this is so, how could a mere chronicle of its forms transmit the stupor, the exaltation, the alarm, the menace, and the joy woven together in the dreams of last night? Nevertheless, I will attempt this chronicle; perhaps the fact that a single scene completed that dream may erase or mitigate the essential difficulty.

The place was the Department of Philosophy and Literature; the time was twilight. Everything (as tends to occur in dreams) was a bit different; a subtle magnification altered things. We were choosing committees; I was speaking with Pedro Henríquez Ureña, who during wakefulness had died many years ago. Suddenly we were deafened by the sound of a band of street musicians or demonstration. Human and animals screams reached us from El Bajo. One voice shouted: Here they come! And then: The Gods! The Gods! Four to five subjects emerged from the mob and occupied the dais of the main lecture hall. We all applauded, sobbing; it was the Gods returning from centuries of exile. Enlarged by the dais, their heads thrown back and their chests thrust out, they welcomed our homage with arrogance. One of them was holding a branch, which doubtless corresponded to the simplistic botany of dreams; another, with a broad gesture, extended his hand which turned out to be a claw; one of Janus's faces looked distrustfully at Thoth's curved beak. Excited, perhaps, by our applause, one of them – I don't know which – burst into a victorious and incredibly sharp cluck, gargling and hissing. From that moment on things changed.

It all began with the suspicion (perhaps exaggerated) that the Gods did not possess the faculty of speech. Centuries of life as wild fugitives had atrophied what was human about them; the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome had been implacable with these deserters. Beetling brows, yellowed teeth, the sparse mustaches of a mulatto or Chinaman, and bestial protruding lips announced the degeneration of the Olympian line. Their clothes did not declaim decorous and decent poverty, but rather the baleful luxury of the gambling dens and brothels of El Bajo. A carnation was bleeding in a buttonhole; beneath a tight jacket one could espy the bulge of a dagger. We suddenly felt that they had played their last card, that they were cunning, ignorant and cruel like aging predators, and that if we let them win through fear or shame, they would end up destroying us.

We took out our heavy revolvers (revolvers appeared in the dream out of nowhere) and gleefully put an end to the Gods.

Queremos tanto a Glenda

A short story ("We all love Glenda so much") by this Argentine. You can read the original here.

At that time it was hard to tell. A person may go to the cinema or theater, live the night without thinking about those who have already completed the same ceremony, choose the place and time, get dressed and make phone calls, line eleven or five, the shadows and the music, the land of no one and everyone where everyone is no one, the man or woman in his or her seat, perhaps with a word to excuse themselves for coming late, a half-voiced comment which someone catches or ignores, almost always silence, looks directed at the stage or screen, the howling from nearby, from this side. It was really hard to tell, over and above all the publicity, the endless queues, the posters and reviews, that there were so many of us who loved Glenda.

It would be presumptuous to claim that core membership took its shape three or four years ago from Irazusta or Diana Rivero since at the time, out for drinks with their friends after the cinema, they had no idea how they managed to say or conceal things that rudely forged a bond, what we, the core members and the youngsters, all later termed the club. I should say it was not much of a club; the only thing we had was a love for Glenda Garson. This was enough to reduce our numbers to only those who admired her. And just like they did, we admired Glenda, as well as Anouk, Marilina, Annie, Silvana, Marcello, Yves, Vittorio and Dirk, but we were the only ones who loved Glenda so much. This was how the nucleus or core was defined. Soon it became something that only we knew about and we trusted those who, in the course of chats and conversation, came to show that they loved Glenda as well.

Following Diana and Irazusta, additions to core membership were few and far between. The year of The Snow's Fire we must have been barely six or seven. Once The Use of Elegance debuted, core membership expanded and we felt that it was increasing almost unbearably and that we were threatened by snobbish imitation or seasonal sentimentalism. The first ones, Irazusta and Diana, and two or three others, decided to close ranks, to admit no one without screening him first, without a test hidden behind whiskeys and the braggings of erudition (those midnight exams were as much of Buenos Aires as of London or Mexico). When The Fragile Returns debuted, we had to admit in melancholy triumph that there were a lot of us who loved Glenda. We would meet in the cinema, exchange glances at the exit, the women's almost lost air and the men's pained silence a better indication of our confederacy than any insignia or password. Inexplicable mechanisms lured us to the same café in the center of town; single tables began to be put together; and all of this was accompanied by the polite custom of looking each other in the eye and ordering the same drink to preempt any useless skirmishes. And there we found the final image of Glenda and the final scene from the final film.  

There were twenty, perhaps thirty of us; we never knew how many we came to be because sometimes Glenda would be playing in theaters for months at a stretch, and at the same time in two or four. Moreover, there was this exceptional moment in which she appeared on stage playing the young assassin in The Enraptured, and her success broke all barriers and created momentary enthusiasm which we never accepted. Since we already knew one another at that time, many of us would visit each other to talk about Glenda. Initially Irazusta seemed to exercise tacit control which he had never asked for, while Diana Rivero played her slow chess game of approvals and refusals which assured us total authenticity without any risk of spies or fusspots. What had begun as a free association now attained the structure of a clan, and following the initial frivolous interrogations came concrete questions, the stumble sequence from The Use of Elegance, the final retort in The Snow's Fire, the second sex scene in The Fragile Returns. We all loved Glenda so much that we couldn't deal with Johnny-come-latelies or tumultuous lesbians, or those erudite men and women devoted to aesthetics. This included (we'll never know how) our taking for granted that we'd go to the café every Friday that one of Glenda's films was being shown, and that, to give us enough time, we'd move from one screening to another in the neighborhood theaters a full week before meeting up. This was a steadfast rule; obligations were defined without any vagueness; and not adhering to these obligations would have provoked Irazusta's disparaging smile and that pleasantly horrific look with which Diana Rivero would announce both crime (in this case, treason) and punishment. At that time our meetings were only Glenda, her luminous ubiquity emanating from each one of us, to whom quarrels and reservations were alien. Only gradually and at the beginning with a sense of guilt, a few of us dared slide in a few partial criticisms, some disaccord or disappointment in the face of a less felicitous sequence, slippage into the conventional or predictable. We knew that Glenda was not responsible for the weaknesses that clouded at times the splendid crystal-like quality of The Whip, nor the conclusion to We Will Never Know Why. We were versed in some of her directors' other work, the origin of the plots and screenplays; and when it came to them we were implacable because we began to feel that our affection for Glenda went above and beyond mere artistic territory and that she alone could save herself from what others did so imperfectly. Diana was the first to speak of a mission; she did so in that same tangential manner of not affirming what that really entailed, and we saw her double-whisky happiness and satiated smile and knew one thing was certain: we could no longer keep doing all this cinema and café routine, and we couldn't love Glenda so much.

Nor did we say anything clear at the time; that wasn't necessary. The only thing we talked about was Glenda's felicity in each one of us, and this felicity could only have been the product of perfection. Suddenly the errors and deficiencies became unbearable; we couldn't accept that We Will Never Know Why ended the way it did, nor that The Snow's Fire contained the infamous poker game sequence (in which Glenda did not participate but which somehow tarnished her like vomit, that Nancy Phillips gesture and the unacceptable arrival of the repentant son). As was almost always the case, it fell to Irazusta to define clearly the mission that awaited us. That night we returned to our homes as if crushed by the responsibility which we had just acknowledged and assumed, and at the same time we were beginning to see the happiness present in an unblemished future of a Glenda bereft of stupidity and betrayal.  

Instinctively, the core closed ranks. The task did not allow for an indistinct plurality. Irazusta spoke of the laboratory when it was already installed on an estate in the Recife de Lobos. We divided up the tasks in impartial fashion among those who had to procure every last copy of The Fragile Returns, chosen for its relatively minor imperfection. It would not have occurred to anyone to think about any money issues: Irazusta had been an associate of Howard Hughes's in the Pichincha tin mining business, an extremely simple means of placing in our hands the power, jets, connections, and financial sway we needed. We didn't even have an office; Hagar Loss's computer programmed the tasks and stages. Two months after Diana Rivero had spoken, the laboratory was equipped to stand in for the ineffective sequence in The Fragile Returns with the birds so that Glenda was graced with the perfect rhythm and exact sense of its dramatic action. The film was now a few years old and its re-release into the international circuit did not engender the mildest surprise: memory plays with its deposits and makes them accept its own permutations and variants. Perhaps the same Glenda would not have perceived the change and if she had, because all of us saw it clearly, she would have beheld the marvel of perfect coincidence with a memory rinsed of its slag, exactly identical to her desire.

The mission was carried out with no respite. Hardly had the effectiveness of the laboratory been assured when we began the salvation of The Snow's Fire and The Prism. The other films entered into the process with the rhythm precisely planned by Hagar Loss's staff and that of the laboratory. We had difficulties with The Use of Elegance because some people from the oil-rich Emirates had retained copies for their personal enjoyment, and certain measures and extraordinary collaboration were necessary in order to steal them back (there is no reason to use any other word), and replace them without the users' noticing. The laboratory was functioning at a level of perfection that, at the beginning of all this, we had thought unattainable – but we dared not say anything about this to Irazusta; curiously enough, the most skeptical of us all had been Diana. But when Irazusta showed us We Will Never Know Why and we saw the real ending, we saw a Glenda who, instead of going back to Romano's house, now drove her car towards the rocky cliff and ruined us with her splendid and quite necessary plunge into the torrent below. Now we knew that perfection could be of this world and that now this was Glenda's perfection forever, for us forever.

Of course, the most difficult thing was to decide on the changes, the cuts, the modifications of montage and rhythm. Our different ways of feeling and sensing Glenda led to some harsh confrontations that could only be alleviated by lengthy analysis and, in certain cases, the imposition of the majority of our core members. And although some of us, defeated, sat through the new version with bitterness in that the film did not in the end match up to our dreams, I still think that no one was disappointed with the work we did. We loved Glenda so much that the results were also justifiable, many times far beyond what we had foreseen. This included a few alarms: a letter from a reader of the never-missed Times amazed that three sequences in The Snow's Fire came in an order that he happened to remember differently; as well as an article from a critic of La Opinión who protested over a supposed cut in The Prism, concocting reasons of bureaucratic prudishness. In all these cases rapid measures were taken so as to avoid possible consequences. It didn't cost much; people are frivolous and forget or accept or are on the lookout for something new; the world of cinema is a fugitive like historical reality is a fugitive, save for those of us who love Glenda so much.

Much more fundamentally dangerous were the polemics that emanated from our core, the risk of a schism or diaspora. Nevertheless more than ever we felt united in our mission. There was one night when analytical voices infected with political philosophy were raised, and they discussed – in the middle of our work – moral problems; they asked whether we weren't deceiving ourselves in a series of onanistic mirrors, in engraving overelaborate madness in a tusk of ivory or grain of rice. It was not easy to turn our back on these voices because only our core members could carry out their work like a heart or plane carries out theirs, throbbing in perfect coherence. Nor was it not easy to hear the criticism accusing us of escapism, which suspected a squandering of deviant forces from a more pressing reality, a reality more needed for competing in the times in which we lived. But it wouldn't be necessary to squash this heresy hardly sketched even if its protagonists were willing to limit themselves to a partial reservation; all of us (they and we) loved Glenda so much that over and above the ethical or historical arguments, there reigned the feeling that would always unite us, the certainty that the perfection of Glenda was making us and the world more perfect as well. We were even splendidly rewarded by the fact that one of the philosophers reestablished the equilibrium after having overcome this period of inane scruples. It was from his mouth that we heard that every partial work was also history, and that something as immense as the printing press started out as the most individual and parceled out of our desires, that of repeating and perpetuating the name of a woman.

Thus arrived the day on which we had the tests for Glenda's image projected now without the slightest frailty. The screens of the world would render her the way she herself – of this we were sure – would have wanted to be rendered. And perhaps it was for this reason that we were that surprised to learn in the press that she had just announced her retirement from both the stage and the silver screen. Glenda's involuntary and marvelous contribution to our work could have been neither a coincidence nor a miracle, but simply something which she had obeyed without knowledge of our anonymous affection, and from the depths of her being came the only answer that she could give us, the act of love that covered one last handover, that which the profane would only understand as absence. We lived in the happiness of the seventh day, of the rest on the heels of creation; now we could see every work of Glenda's without the hidden menace of a tomorrow plagued with errors and stupidities. Now we could meet with the lightness of angels or birds in an absolute present which perhaps resembled eternity itself.

Yes, but a poet beneath the same skies as Glenda once said that eternity is enamored with the works of time, and it fell to Diana to know this and inform us a year too late. Usual and human: Glenda announced her return to the screen. And the reasons were the ones always given: the frustration of the professional with nothing but time on her hands; a role that was on her level; filming that was about to begin. No one would forget that night in the café after just having seen The Use of Elegance which had returned to the theaters of downtown. It was almost unnecessary for Irazusta to say what we all were experiencing like the bitter saliva of injustice and rebellion. We all loved Glenda so much that our despondency never reached her. What guilt did she have in the matter, being an actress and being Glenda? The horror was to be found in the broken machine, in the reality of figures and prestige and Oscars entering like an overlapping crack in the sphere of our hard-won sky. When Diana placed her hand on Irazusta's arm and said, "Yes, it's the only thing left to do," she was speaking for all of us without any need for consultation. Never had the core possessed such terrible strength; never did it need fewer words to set it in motion. 

We split up, devastated, experiencing what had to occur one day which only one of us would know of in advance. We were certain that we wouldn't be meeting up at the café, that henceforth each one of us would conceal the perfection of our kingdom. We knew that Irazusta would do what was necessary; there was nothing simpler for someone like him. We didn't even say goodbye as was our custom, with the fluffy security of seeing each other again after the cinema, that night of The Fragile Returns or The Whip. It was good to turn our back on all of this, under the pretext of its being late, of implying that we had to go. We left in our separate directions, each one bearing the desire of oblivion, of having everything consumed, and knowing that it wouldn't be so, that we wouldn't even be free of opening up the newspaper one morning and reading the announcement, those stupid phrases of professional consternation. We would never talk about this with anyone; we would politely avoid each other at the theater and in the street; and this would be the only way for the core to maintain its fidelity, to keep in silence its completed work. We all loved Glenda so much that we were offering her a final inviolable perfection. In the intangible heights to which we had exalted her we would preserve her from the fall, and there her faithful could follow her in adoration without incurring any harm. And she would never descend alive from a cross.