A Dream Come True Read online

  Copyright © 1993 Juan Carlos Onetti and the heirs of Juan Carlos Onetti

  English language translation copyright © 2019 Katherine Silver

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Cover art: Jean Dubuffet

  Book design: Zoe Guttenplan

  This book was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation, and the Nimick Forbesway Foundation.

  Ebook ISBN 9781939810472

  v5.4

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Translator’s Note

  Avenida de Mayo – Diagonal – Avenida de Mayo

  The Obstacle

  The Possible Baldi

  The Tragic End of Alfredo Plumet

  The Perfect Crime

  Convalescence

  A Dream Come True

  Masquerade

  Welcome, Bob

  A Long Tale

  Ninth of July, Independence Day

  Back to the South

  Esbjerg by the Sea

  The House in the Sand

  The Album

  The Tale of the Rosenkavalier and the Pregnant Virgin from Lilliput

  Most Dreaded Hell

  The Face of Disgrace

  Jacob and the Other

  As Sad as She

  On the Thirty-First

  The Kidnapped Bride

  Matías the Telegraph Operator

  The Twins

  Death and the Girl

  Dogs Will Have Their Day

  Presencia

  Friends

  Soap

  The Cat

  The Marketplace

  The Piggy

  Full Moon

  Tomorrow Will Be Another Day

  The Tree

  Montaigne

  Ki no Tsurayuki

  The Shotgun

  She

  The Araucaria

  At Three in the Morning

  The Imposter

  Kisses

  Her Hand

  Back and Forth

  Tu me dai la cosa me, io te do la cosa te

  Cursed Springtime

  Beachcomber

  The Visit

  Saint Joseph

  Translator’s Note

  Many of the stories in this volume take place in Santa María.

  Santa María, like Buenos Aires and Montevideo, is a town on a navigable river in the Southern Hemisphere, and most of its inhabitants are immigrants from Europe. Unlike Buenos Aires and Montevideo, however, Santa María exists on the map of Juan Carlos Onetti’s imagination and that of his devoted readers. One could say Santa María is Onetti’s Macando.

  The characters from Santa María – Our Lord Brausen, Dr. Diaz Grey, Jorge Malabia and family, Jeremías “Old Man” Petrus, the Bergner family, among others, are, like their creator, living in exile in Madrid or Paris. They do not have traditionally coherent life trajectories, their ages are often static, and their back stories are sometimes hinted at but never affirmed. “It is demonstrably true that time doesn’t exist on its own,” Onetti says, seemingly apropos of nothing, in “Death and the Girl,” “It is the child of movement, and if things stopped moving we would have neither time nor erosion nor beginnings nor endings. In literature, Time is always written with a capital letter.” In literature. In Santa María.

  Onetti once wrote “A poet is someone who writes things – not necessarily in verse – that arouse in me mysterious sensations, which I call poetic, for lack of a better word. Full stop.”

  I can only hope that my rendering in English of this poet’s work arouses a host of mysterious sensations in the reader. Full stop.

  Katherine Silver

  Avenida de Mayo – Diagonal – Avenida de Mayo

  He crossed the avenue during a pause in the traffic and started walking down Calle Florida. A cold shiver shook his shoulders, and his resolve to be stronger than the adventuring air immediately removed his hands from the shelter of his pockets, increased the curve of his chest, and lifted his head – a divine search through the monotonous sky. He could withstand any temperature; he could live way down south, farther even than Ushuaia.

  His lips were sharpening with the same intent that contracted his eyes and squared his jaw.

  First, he acquired an extravagant vision of the poles, without huts or penguins; below, white with two patches of yellow; and the sky above, a sky of fifteen minutes before rain.

  Then: Alaska – Jack London – thick furs obliterating the anatomies of bearded men, high boots transforming them into toy soldiers that could not be felled in spite of the blue smoke from the long handguns of the chief of the mounted police; instinctively they crouched down, the steam from their breath imitating a halo over their fur hats and filthy brown beards; Tongass bared its teeth along the shores of the Yukon; his gaze like a strong arm swept out to grab the trunks coursing down the river – foam again: Tongass is in Sitka – beautiful Sitka, like the name of a courtesan.

  On Rivadavia a car tried to stop him, but a spirited maneuver left it in the dust, along with its accomplice on a bicycle. He carried the car’s two headlights, like easily won trophies, toward the desolate Alaskan horizon. In the middle of the block, he effortlessly avoided the warm air in the poster that was resting on Clark Gable’s powerful shoulders and Crawford’s hips; though he did have the urge to raise to his brow the roses that the star with the big eyes held up in the middle of her chest. Three nights or three months ago he had dreamed about a woman with white roses instead of eyes. But the memory of the dream was merely a flash of lightning to his reason; the memory quickly slipped away, with a flutter, like a sheet of paper just released from a printing press, which settles quietly under the other images that continue to fall.

  He installed the stolen headlights on the car in the sky that was copied from the Yukon, and the car’s English brand made the dry air of the Nordic night resound with energetic What’s, not shuttered away in a muffled room but exploding like gunshots into the cold blue between the giant pine trees, only to rise like rockets into the starry whiteness of the Great Craggy Mountains.

  When Brughtton knelt down, shielding the enormous bonfire with his body, and he, Víctor Suaid, stood up next to the Coroner, ready to fire, a woman made her eyes as well as a cross under the fur of her coat shimmer, so close that their elbows touched.

  On his mysterious back, Suaid’s vest rose and fell like two to the pulse of the breathing, as he sought to embed in his brain the perfume of the woman and the woman herself, mixed with the dry cold of the street.

  Between the two opposing currents of pedestrians, the woman soon became a spot that rose and fell, from the shadows into the shop lights then back into the shadows. But the perfume
remained with Suaid, gently and decisively expelling the landscape and the men; and from the shores of the Yukon only the snow remained, a strip of snow the width of the roadway.

  “The United States bought Alaska from Russia for seven million dollars.”

  Years before, that fact would have softened the fountain pen of the oldest Astin boy in geography class. Now it was nothing but a pretext for a new reverie.

  He made rise lines of mounted soldiers along both sides of the strips of snow. He, the Grand Duke Alexander Ivanovich, marched between them alongside Nicolas II, cleaning the snow off his boots after every step with the edge of his fur-lined ulster.

  The emperor swayed as he walked, like that Englishman, the assistant traffic manager at Central Station. His small boots shimmered to a martial beat, which was by now the only possible expression of his mobility.

  “Stalin ended the drought in the Volga.”

  “Congratulations to the boatmen, Your Majesty!”

  The tsar’s gold eyetooth reassured him. Nothing mattered at all – energy, energy – and his pectoral muscles tensed under the curve of the cordons and the large cross, the ancient beard of Verchenko, the conspirator.

  He stopped at Diagonal, where the Boston Building slumbered under the grey sky across the street from the parking lot.

  Naturally, María Eugenia came to the foreground with the swirl of her white skirts.

  Only once, years ago, had he seen her in white. So well disguised as a schoolgirl that the two simultaneous punches of her breasts against the fabric, colliding with the purity of the large black ribbon, turned the little girl into a mature, skeptical, and weary adult woman.

  He was afraid. Anxiety began to rise in short bursts into his chest till it almost reached his throat. He lit a cigarette and leaned against a wall.

  His legs were shackled with indifference and his attention drew down, like the sails on an anchored ship.

  With the silence of the moviemakers of his childhood, the neon letters sailed along the tracks of the sign: YESTERDAY IN BASEL, MORE THAN TWO THOUSAND VICTIMS.

  He turned his head in anger.

  “Let them all blow up!”

  He knew that María Eugenia was coming. He knew that he’d have to do something and his heart totally lost its rhythm. It annoyed him to have to lean into that thought; to know that, no matter how much his brain would stumble through labyrinths before stopping to rest, he would meet María Eugenia at a crossroads.

  Nevertheless, he automatically made an attempt to escape: “For a cigarette…I would go to the ends of the earth…”

  Twenty thousand posters proclaimed their plague upon the city. The man with perfect teeth and hair offered his red hand, the pack showing two cigarettes – ¼ and ¾ – like cannons on a destroyer taking aim at the boredom of the passersby.

  “…to the ends of the earth.”

  María Eugenia was coming in her white dress. Before the surfaces of her face became features, between the slopes of black hair, he tried to stop the attack. Fear rumbled at the level of his tonsils.

  “Woman!”

  Desperate, he climbed up to the neon letters that were popping, one by one, as gently as bubbles off the black wall: RACER MCCORMICK BREAKS WORLD LAND SPEED RECORD.

  Hope gave him the strength to expel the smoke in one blow, joining the o of his mouth to the landscape.

  EED RECORD – TODAY IN MIAMI

  The trail of smoke conveniently camouflaged the profile that had begun to take shape. Forming a triangle with the wall’s rough skin and the square-checkered ground, his body stayed put. The cigarette between his fingers announced a suicide with the slow thread of smoke.

  TODAY IN MIAMI REACHING AN AVERAGE SPEED

  On the gold sand, between loud shouts, Jack Ligett, the “manager,” polished and repolished the shiny parts of the engine. The car, named after a bird of prey, looked like a gigantic black lobster, tirelessly holding the razorblade of the prow with its two extra legs.

  The twisted organ pipes, port and starboard, each emitted twenty simultaneous blasts, which rose in slow billows. With the edge of the wheels at the same level as his ears, the race began. Each blast resonated triumphantly inside his skull and velocity was the space between two footprints, transformed into a viper dancing in his belly.

  He looked at McCormick’s face, dark skin stretched over thin bones. Under his leather helmet, behind his grotesque goggles, his eyes were hard with courage, and, out of the smile thirsty for kilometers that just barely stretched his mouth, there filtered a brief order, condensed into a verb in the infinitive.

  Suaid leaned over the pump and hit the car to push it forward. He hit it till the wind became a bellow and the wheels gently touched the ground, which quickly repelled them, as a roulette wheel does the marble ball. He hit until the viper in his belly ached, as thin and rigid as a needle.

  But the image was forced, and the futility of this effort became evident, certain, without any possible subterfuge.

  Escape was thwarted as if under a blast of water, and Suaid was left with his face half buried in the ground, his arms waving with the same movements as a semaphore.

  “To hide myself…”

  But he slid under himself, as if the ground were a mirror and his last I the reflected image.

  He looked at his veiled eyes and the damp earth in his left socket. The tip of his nose was squished, like those of children looking through shop windows, and his jaws champed at the hard, smooth sheet of anguish. His thin blond hair edged onto his forehead, and the patch of beard on his neck was turning violet.

  He squeezed his eyes tightly shut and tried to submerge himself; but his nails slipped on the mirror. Vanquished, his body slackened, surrendered, alone, on the corner of Diagonal.

  He was the center of a circle of serenity that continued to expand, wiping out buildings and people.

  Then he saw himself, small and alone, in the middle of that infinite quietude that kept spreading. Gently, he remembered Franck, the last of the clay soldiers he would smash; in his memory, the doll, when viewed from afar, had only one leg and the blackened U of its mustache.

  He looked at himself from many meters above, tenderly observing the familiar shape of his shoulders, the hollow of his neck, and his left ear flattened by his hat.

  Slowly he unbuttoned his coat, pulled on the bottom of his vest, and again slipped the buttons into the slits of the buttonholes. Once he’d concluded this deliberate act, he became sad and serene, with María Eugenia stuck in his chest.

  Now the scabs of indifference that protected his own disquietude dropped away and the outside world began to reach him.

  Without needing to think about it, he started back down Calle Florida. The street, devoid of reveries, had lost Tongass’s teeth and the blond beard of His Imperial Majesty.

  The brightness of the shop windows and the large lamps hanging from the street corners lent the narrow sidewalk an intimate atmosphere. He felt a yearning for a nineteenth-century salon, so refined that the men did not need to remove their hats.

  He quickened his step, wanting to erase an indefinite feeling with touches of weakness and tenderness, which began to work its way in.

  A machine gun on every side street could do away with all this riffraff.

  It was nightfall everywhere in the world.

  In Puerta del Sol, on Regent Street, on Boulevard Montmartre, on Broadway, on Unter den Linden, in all the most crowded places in all the cities, the throngs pressing together, just like yesterday’s and tomorrow’s. Tomorrow! Suaid smiled with an air of mystery.

  The machine guns were hidden on balconies, in newspaper stands, in flowerpots, on rooftops. They were all different sizes and all of them were clean, a ray of cold and joyous light on the polished barrels.

  Owen was sprawled in an armchair, smoking. The window, under the angle formed by
his legs, let in the blinking of the first neon signs, the muffled sounds of the city, growing dimmer, and the pallor of the sky.

  Suaid, sitting next to his telegraph machine, stalked the passing of the seconds with a malignant smile. He awaited, more than the blasts of the machine guns, the decisive moment when Owen’s facial muscles would tremble, revealing emotions through the corneas of his light eyes.

  The Englishman kept smoking until a click of the clock announced that the small hammer was rising to strike the first blow in that series of seven, which would then be reproduced, unexpectedly and multitudinously, under the bells of all the skies in the Western World.

  Owen rose and threw away his cigarette.

  “Ya.”

  Suaid started walking, trembling with nervous happiness. Nobody on Calle Florida knew how oddly literary his feeling was. The tall women and the doorman at the Grand were equally oblivious to the polyfurcation Owen’s ya took on in his brain. Because ya, or ja, could be either Spanish or German; and from here there arose unforeseen paths, paths where Owen’s incomprehensible figure split into a thousand different shapes, many of them antagonistic.

  Facing the traffic on the avenue, he wanted the machine guns to rapidly entone, amid balls of smoke, their rosary of drawn-out stories.

  But he couldn’t make it happen, and he returned to his contemplation of Calle Florida.

  He felt tired and calm, as if he had cried for a long time. Tamely, with a grateful smile for María Eugenia, he approached the window glass and the multicolored lights, which sheltered the street with their rhythmic pulse.

  1933

  The Obstacle

  He stopped gradually, fearing that the abrupt cessation of his footsteps would violently destabilize the ensemble of sounds mixed with the silence. Silence and shadows along a swath that ran from the muffled roar of the brightly lit factory to the four windows of the club, closed to no avail against the laughter and the clinking of glasses, and, at moments, the billiards shots. Silence and shadows peppered with the quivering of crickets on the ground and of stars in the lofty black sky.