Trafalgar (5 page)

“She probably liked the guys who were dancing and didn’t want to admit it,” said the Albino Gamen.

“Albino, you’re a genius,” said Trafalgar.

“She liked them?” asked Cirito, very alarmed.

“Liked them?” said Trafalgar. “Now I’ll tell you how things happened. The thing that had caught Simónides’ attention was that Halabi said the music was irritating and she didn’t want to go see what it was that very first time. And she had remained alone in the camp darning stockings, I imagine, or memorizing the fourth chapter of some treatise on comparative linguistics because they hadn’t yet found the books. The doctor stored the fact away in his little gossipy brain because that was his occupation: to pay attention to what the others said and did, put it all together, draw conclusions and then have a chat with his victim to explain that they had to work out their frustrations or else another one of the things those guys say. I don’t say it’s not useful, on the contrary, and the proof is that everything ran smooth as silk, even poor Fineschi, who, apart from drooling on himself when he looked at the little brunette, was reasonably happy. And outside of the work each of them had to do, the dance was the main attraction. The only problem was that there was a performance only seldom. And when there was one, Halabi got nervous and started to close herself in as soon as the music could be heard and the others went to see. And then they found the ruins and all of them set to work like dwarves and she more than any of them. Things were resolving themselves, except for the writing part, and when I arrived the people of Anandaha-A had begun to dance more frequently all the time. When I saw the spectacle, I was left dumbstruck and I think I even dreamt and from then on I didn’t miss one. Simónides told me his theories, Marina too, I played sintu with Lundgren (who cheated, if you ask me), I tried my luck like everyone else with a few discreet verbal passes at Halabi, who, if one could pull her away from linguistics and her hatred of the natives, was very sociable and smiling, and I resigned myself to not selling anything, but I stayed.”

The dining room was warm and full of smoke and the Albino took off his jacket. Cirito had on an old sweater that was worn through at the elbows, which if Fina saw it, she’d die on us. In the room facing the street the clock struck three but they didn’t hear it.

“One time,” Trafalgar said, “we spent almost the whole day watching them dance. There were only two musicians, one who blew and another who scraped and beat. All the rest danced. It was an obsession: we could not move from where we were. We went to lunch very late and Marina went to see her and told us Halabi was sleeping shut up in her room. It seemed strange to me, and to Simónides, too, because lately the girl slept very little, crazy as she was with trying to decipher the books. We went back to keep watching the dance and when we were too worn out we went to sleep and they kept dancing and Veri Halabi’s room was still closed and the light was off. Simónides peeked in and he told me yes, she was sleeping, but she was very restless. The doctor told me a few things, I don’t know why; maybe because doctors also need someone to listen to them sometimes. The next day, in spite of having slept so much, the girl had circles under her eyes down to here and was pale and haggard. I won’t say she was ugly, because she had a long way to go for that, but she was less pretty. That day there was no dance. The next day she couldn’t take it anymore and she told Simónides that she had dreamed about the texts for hours and hours and Simónides told her of course she did and there was nothing strange about that. He didn’t understand her, she said, it was about the texts deciphered and translated. But she said no, it couldn’t be, everything was nonsense and she started to become hysterical. Simónides took her to bed, not with libidinous but with therapeutic intent, now that is professional ethics, my God. He talked to her for a while and calmed her down and then she told him that shut up inside and everything, she kept hearing the music and even if she covered her ears she kept hearing the music and she had almost started to dance. And so as not to dance, she lay down and she had fallen asleep immediately and she had dreamt about guess what, you got it, about the music and the people dancing. And as happens in dreams, the people dancing had become the unknown letters of the five alphabets, only in the dream she knew them and she could read them. Simónides told her what anyone would have said: sometimes, not often but it does happen, in dreaming one encounters the solution to a problem about which one has thought so much that one can’t even see it clearly while awake. But she told him—
she
told
him
, note—he was crazy and he should open the desk drawer, her drawer. The doctor opened it and he found a pile of papers written by Halabi: it was the translation she had dreamt and that, upon waking, she had rushed to record she didn’t know why since she was still convinced it was nothing but a nightmare. Simónides didn’t manage to read everything, unfortunately. He remembered only a few things. There was, for example, the description of a circle.”

“The description of what?” burst out Flynn.

“Of a circle.”

Flynn tried to pull his leg: “A geometric figure formed by the interior points of a circumference, if I am not mistaken.”

“I am sorry to inform you that you are mistaken. I am going to tell you what a circle is according to the protocol of the sense of Anandaha-A.”

Here all of them interrupted because no one understood that about
protocol of the sense.
But Trafalgar Medrano didn’t know what it meant. Simónides didn’t either, and at that moment neither did Veri Halabi. It was in the texts and that was all.

“A circle,” said Trafalgar, “is formed in the kingdom when the oil lamp burns out in the perceptible game.”

“Just a minute, just a minute,” said Flynn. “If in a dark world like that you light a lamp, in certain a way it forms a circle, but it isn’t formed when you turn out the light, do we agree?”

“Will you let me finish? I am not explaining anything to you. I am telling you what was in the texts Simónides read, which were the translation Veri Halabi did while dreaming, based on a quintuple alphabet that she did not know.”

“What a mess,” said the Albino.

“A circle,” Trafalgar began again, “is formed in the kingdom when the oil lamp burns out in the perceptible game of every distant precinct. As quartz is unaware of the howl of the wild animal and if it rains on the high grasslands it is improbable that the roots will know, all precincts come in contact at the rough edges until knowledge erases that which has been constructed. Its measure depends not on the rocks but on the torrent.”

“And what does that mean?” asked Cirito.

Flynn served himself more whiskey.

“I don’t know,” Trafalgar said. “Simónides had a theory, he always had theories for everything and I think sometimes he was not mistaken. Almost triumphantly, he told me that Anandaha-A was a world of symbols. I allowed myself to suggest that all worlds function by symbols the way all tricycles function by pedal but he told me there is a big difference between
of
symbols and
by
symbols. It seems to me he’s right. And he said that to burn out the oil lamp is to leave the mind blank, to not think of anything, and that this is something that is very easily said but is difficult to do because it is nothing less than the elimination of the conscious to leave room for the unconscious, how’s that? The kingdom is the quality, the essence of being human, and the perceptible game is consciousness and every distant precinct is each individual. When the oil lamp is lit, the precincts are far from one another, each one is alone. The part about quartz and the wild animal and the rain and the high grasslands and the roots means, according to Simónides, that although the universe apparently functions divided into infinite parts, or not so infinite, depending how you look, it is all unique and one, indivisible and the same in all of its points. Understand?”

“No.”

“Nor I. I’ll continue. So, as the universe is one and unique in all of its points, if each individual suspends its consciousness and puts out the oil lamp, everyone meets, they are not alone, they unite and they know everything with no need for and in spite of the great intellectual creations. And knowledge is deeper in proportion to how total each individual’s effort is and not how many individuals there are. That would be the part about the measure.”

“Ingenious,” said Flynn.

“Shit,” said Albino, “I don’t understand a thing.”

Cirito said nothing.

“And so on like that,” continued Trafalgar. “There was a text about how to project statues but Simónides didn’t know if it was project in the sense of drawing prior to the task of sculpting or project through space. There was also a dialogue between God and man in which of course the only one who spoke was the man. A list of harmful volitions: don’t ask me, Simónides didn’t know what that was either and if he had a theory he forgot to tell me. Theorems, a pile of theorems. A travel diary. A method for folding but I don’t know folding what. And stacks of other things. But all of that was lost. Simónides recorded the little he remembered and somewhere I must have a copy he gave me. Because while he was reading, Veri Halabi had some big attack, she stood up and started to shred papers and she even grabbed the papers Simónides had in his hand and ripped them to bits.”

“What a crazy,” said the Albino.

“Uh-huh,” said Trafalgar, “that is what one thinks every time someone does something one does not understand. But wait a little and tell me afterward if she was crazy. The doc put everything aside and took care of her and he gave her something to let her sleep. He told me there had been no such attack, that simply and unfortunately, at that moment the perceptible game had fully invaded her and she had abandoned the kingdom. I preferred not to ask for explanations but I asked him if it wasn’t possible to reconstruct the texts and he told me no, they were confetti and anyway they weren’t texts in danger of being lost. I also asked him if he thought they were the concrete translation of the metal books and he looked at me as if I had asked him if he believed two plus two makes four and he told me of course they were. And what can I tell you, the next day Halabi gets up fresh as a daisy and devotes herself to continuing her work on the translation.”

“But how?” said the Albino. “Hadn’t she already done it and ripped it up? She did it again?”

“No. It was the first time. She didn’t want to believe that what she had torn up was the translation and, awake, she worked by putting into operation logic, reasoning, information—which is to say, outside the kingdom, in the perceptible game—now without knowing and without trying to form a circle. Then life goes on as always and nothing’s happened here and for two days there are no dances. On the third day, it occurs to Romeo Fineschi Montague to propose that we all go on an outing. An outing on that lousy world, imagine. But of course, if he goes and invites Julieta Halabi Capulet alone, he comes up empty, because she says no. We went. Dalmas, Lundgren, Marina, Simónides, me, Fineschi, Halabi, two other engineers and even the sociologist. Very fun it was not, because as I already told you the natural attractions of Anandaha-A are pitiful. We talked nonsense and Simónides described imaginary monuments and parks in the voice of a tour guide until he got tired because we weren’t paying too much attention. The only one who was having a ball was Fineschi, who was talking to Halabi a mile a minute, I imagine about such romantic topics as the degree of saline saturation in the water of the lower Danube. We were on our way back when the music started and Veri Halabi cried out. It was a cry to stand your hair on end, like a cornered beast, as the science fiction writers say.”

“And others who don’t write science fiction,” Flynn noted.

“I don’t doubt it. Apart from science fiction and detective novels, I read nothing but Balzac, Cervantes, and Corto Maltese.”

“You’ll go a long way with that ridiculous mishmash.”

“Ridiculous, how? How? They are among the few that have everything one can ask of literature: beauty, realism, entertainment, what more do you want?”

“Give it up, guys,” said the Albino. “Why’d the girl yell?”

“One cries out from pain or fear or surprise,” said Flynn. “Less frequently, from happiness. Although I think that was not the case here.”

“It was not. She cried out. A long cry that seemed to come up from her heels and that scraped her throat. She stood there a moment planted like a stake with her jaw dropping down to her knees and her eyes like the two of coins and afterward she ran off toward the camp. The music sounded very sharp, urgent, but instead of going to see, we followed her, Fineschi at a trot and the rest walking quickly. Simónides went to see her and he found her sitting on the bed, stupefied. This time she hadn’t shut herself in nor did she cover her ears. The good doctor kicked out Fineschi, who was just a pain in the neck trying to talk to her, he looked at her for a while, took her pulse, did all the things quacks do, and left her alone. She didn’t bat an eyelid. We were all a little overwhelmed and the music continued and a few went to see. The rest of us stayed and ate. Fineschi paced and smoked a pipe that went out every two minutes. The others came back, they ate and all of us sat down for a kind of dismal after dinner talk. From time to time, Simónides would go to see her and when he came back he said nothing. Then, when we were about to go to bed, she appeared in the doorway. The music continued and the girl started to talk. The catch was we understood nothing. She talked and talked in an unknown language in which there were many more vowels than it would seem there should be. We listened to her without moving and when Fineschi tried to approach her, the good doctor did not let him. She talked the whole night.”