Please Talk to Me: Selected Stories

THE NIGHT OF THE COMET

All we knew about the comet was that someone had plunged to his death to dodge its arrival, that its tail had luminously sliced across certain nights of the Centenary Year of the Argentine Independence, that, like the Paris Exhibition or the Great War, its path through the world had memorably illuminated the dawn of this century. The man on the wicker chair had spoken of a photograph he had seen, he couldn’t remember where, in which several gentlemen wearing boaters and ladies in plumed hats were staring as if bewitched at a dot in the sky, a dot that unfortunately (he said) did not appear in the photograph. I had recalled an illustration in my fifth-grade reader: a family paralysed by the vision of the comet passing through the skies. In the drawing the family members could be seen sitting at a table, stiffly erect, their eyes full of terror, not daring to turn their heads to the window for fear of seeing it again. (As soon as I said this, I had a feeling that the text referred to a Montgolfier hot-air balloon, but since I didn’t know what a Montgolfier hot-air balloon was — I wasn’t even sure that such a thing existed — and since I found it suggestive that I had attributed the family’s surprise, whatever the real phenomenon might have been, to the arrival of the comet as early as the fifth grade, I didn’t correct my conceivable mistake and everyone, myself included, was left with the impression that the comet was capable of sending people into shock, of leaving them frozen in their seats.)

We had a number of questions. How big did it seem when it was last seen? How big would it seem now? How long did it take to cross the sky? The man next to the table with the lamp suggested that, since it was as fast as a plane, unless one paid close attention the second it went by, snap, one would miss it. The man on the stool said no, that it rose over the river at nightfall and set over the western high-rises at dawn.

‘That’s impossible,’ said the woman leaning against the French door, ‘because then it would seem stationary in the sky. And something that seems stationary can’t leave a trail on the sea or in the sky, anywhere.’ Since this seemed illogical but plausible, several of us agreed with her. What we couldn’t agree on was the size.

‘The size of the moon,’ said the woman in the light-coloured armchair.

‘Of a very small star,’ said the man who was putting on the tape of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and he added that it could only be distinguished from the star by its tail. And how long was the tail? The questions never stopped.

‘My grandfather told us he’d seen it,’ said the man smoking a pipe. ‘He was in the courtyard, sitting on a three-legged stool’ (I thought the stool was an aleatory detail and I immediately decided that his testimony was suspect) ‘and the comet went by, neither very slow nor very fast, like a scarf made out of light. No: like a scarf made out of air that was also light, I think he said.’ But, of course, this piece of information was simply too unreliable: given the age of the man with the pipe, his grandfather must have died long ago. Even if he hadn’t made the story up (as the detail of the stool led one to suppose), who could swear that the grandson remembered the words exactly? And would he have been able to tell what was false from what was true? In fact, he had repeated the thing about the stool without lending the superfluous detail the slightest touch of irony.

But why were we to care what that grandfather saw? We had no need for grandfathers; our turn had come at last: it would cross the skies of our time. And we felt fortunate in those unfortunate days just being alive, still able to move around happily, still able to wait happily on the night of the comet.

Actually, that whole year had been the year of the comet, but since the previous week everyone’s hopes had run wild. The newspapers predicted glorious events: this time it would pass closer to the Earth than at the beginning of the century; it would look mainly red; it would look mainly white but would be dragging an orange tail; it would have the apparent size of a small melon, the length of a common snake; it would cover seventy percent of the visible sky. This last possibility intrigued us the most.

‘What do they mean, seventy percent of the sky?’ asked the woman drinking coffee.

‘But then almost the whole sky will be the comet,’ said the man who had come with his girlfriend.

‘Night will become day’ (the woman lighting the cigarette).

‘Better than day’ (the man with the pillow on the floor) ‘as if the moon, with all its reflected light, were barely a hundred metres from the Earth. Low down, in a corner, one sees the black night sky, but all the rest is Moon. Can you imagine? Solid Moon.’ There was a silence, as if we were all trying to imagine a sky of solid Moon.

‘And how long will it stay like that?’ (the man with his eyes glued on the woman who came alone).

‘The comet is constantly moving. It will move on and the strip of darkness will become wider and wider until there’s only a thin thread, a thin thread of light on the horizon that will then disappear and it will be night again.’ I felt a sort of sadness; I had only just realised that this thing which had once seemed out of my reach — like the boiling oil thrown by the women of Buenos Aires on the invading English troops in the mid-eighteenth century, or the Firpo-Dempsey match — was not only about to take place; it would also come to an end.

‘But how fast will it disappear?’ No one knew.

The woman with her back against one of the men’s knees hit herself on the forehead: ‘Now that I think about it, no,’ she said, ‘it can’t be the width. The comet will take up seventy percent of the length. Don’t you see? The tail. It’s the tail that will take up seventy percent. Like a rainbow going from here to there’ (she drew a vast segment of a circle with her extended arm) ‘but ending before it reaches the horizon.’ She thought for a moment. ‘At a distance of thirty percent,’ she added, with a touch of scientific rigor.

That wasn’t bad, though I still preferred the vast Moon unfolded a hundred metres from Earth. And at what speed would that great arch of light cross the sky? That question — and many others — remained unanswered.

But we didn’t feel uneasy. Uneasy we had felt at the beginning of the week, when the papers announced that the comet was already over the world. We had always imagined that we’d rush out into the street to greet its arrival. ‘Here it comes, here comes the comet!’ But none of that happened. We looked up into the sky and saw nothing.

There were those with telescopes, of course. Those with telescopes made calculations and drew up schedules and strategic points. It seems that the brother-in-law of the woman caressing one of the men’s ears, after consulting several manuals, had found the very best optical conditions: on the balcony of one of his cousins at 3:25 Wednesday morning with a telescope aimed at 40 degrees off the constellation of Centaurus.

‘But your brother-in-law, did he actually see it?’ we asked at the same time, as both the man and I played with the cat.

‘He says he thinks he saw it,’ was the cautious answer.

We had heard of some people who had travelled to Chascomus or to a place somewhere between San Miguel del Monte and Las Flores, or of others who had hurried to Tandil, to a small hill close to the Moving Rock. But as we had not had the chance to talk to any of them, we didn’t know whether these peregrinations had been fruitful. Through adverts in the newspapers we knew that several kinds of charters had been organised, from a jet flight to San Martin de los Andes that included champagne dinner, diplomatic suite, sauna and full American breakfast, to bus tours to several suburban areas, a few with traditional barbecue and guitar music under the comet’s light. We didn’t know what the results had been. But three very precise lines in a Thursday paper made us dismiss all those telescopes and nocturnal ramblings. And that’s how it had to be. Because what we had always dreamt of, what we truly wished for, was simply to look up and see it. And that, the three lines in the paper said, would become possible on Friday night once it was completely dark; then the comet would come closer to Earth than ever before. Then, and only then, might it be seen as those men in boaters and those women in hats had seen it, as the grandfather on his three-legged stool and the bewitched family in my reader had seen it. Right here, by the river, on the Costanera Sur. And, in honour of that unique moment for which we had longed since our days of reading adventure stories and which, with luck, would repeat itself for our children’s grandchildren, this Friday night, all the lights of the Costanera would be switched off.

That was the reason that waiting in this house in San Telmo, among lamps and stools, was something of a vigil. Every so often someone would go out onto the balcony to see whether it was already dark.

‘No use going earlier’ (the woman drinking white wine). ‘We wouldn’t see anything in the light.’

And the man on the balcony: ‘No, it’s not because of the light, it’s because it won’t come over the horizon until it’s dark. That’s what the paper says.’

But at what time exactly? We didn’t know that either. Darkness isn’t something that falls over the world for an instant. True. But there comes a moment when, suddenly looking out at the street, one can say, ‘It’s night already.’ This was said by the man eating peanuts, and we all went out onto the balcony to check.

On the way to the Costanera we said very little. We were crossing Azopardo when the man nearest to the sidewalk asked, ‘You think it’s appeared already?’

And the woman next to the wall said, ‘Better if it has. Then when we get there we’ll see it suddenly, over the river.’

‘The river?’

I don’t know who said that. It didn’t matter much. I realised that I too, since I’d read the announcement in the paper, had imagined it like that: with its tail of powdered stars extending down into the river. But there’s no real river in Buenos Aires any longer.

‘Grass and mosquitoes, that’s all there is on the Costanera Sur,’ said the man on my right.

‘Still the place has kept its own magic’ (the woman behind). ‘It’s as if it has preserved a memory of the river.’ I recalled the majestic ghost of the Municipal Balneario Beach, the square celebrating the triumphant arrival of the Solitary Seaman, Luis Viale, and his stone lifebelt about to dive (into a muddy lot where there are now only screeching magpies) to save the victims of the shipwrecked Vapor de la Carrera. I recalled the drawbridge, the same bridge I’d crossed in the No. 14 streetcar when my mother took me to the Balneario, so familiar that I could tell the width of the beach by the height of the water hitting the stone wall. I loved that bridge, the breathless wait on the days when it opened leisurely to allow a cargo ship to pass, the suspense as it closed again, since the slightest mistake in the position of the tracks (I suspected) would provoke a terrible derailment. And the joy when the streetcar emerged unscathed and the river lay waiting for me. The river was like life: the comet was something else. The comet was like one of those moments of ecstasy that can be found only in books. Distractedly, I knew that it would return one day, but I didn’t expect it to. Because in the days when happiness consisted in playing in the mud of the Balneario, any comet or paradise glimpsed beyond my twentieth year didn’t merit being dreamt about.

‘And here I am walking across that bridge,’ I said to myself, ‘not so different from the person who once crossed it in a streetcar so as not to love it still, nor so decrepit as not to be on the verge of shouting with joy, as I march in procession to meet the comet with this bunch of lunatics.’

It took me a while to realise that the word ‘procession’ had occurred to me because of the mass of people who, on foot or in cars or trucks or even in a tractor, were gathering together in greater and greater numbers as we approached the Costanera.

The Costanera itself was a virtual wall. Between the crowd trying to find a good spot from which to view the sky, the smoke from the improvised bread-and-sausage vendors, and the absence of spotlights, the only thing visible from the Los Italianos Boulevard (where we now found ourselves) was a bloated amoeba of more or less human consistency, into which we were sucked and which didn’t stop moving and humming.

‘Over there, over there.’ Not far from me, a forceful voice managed to emerge from the amoeba. Several of us turned to look. I detected a thin and knotted index finger pointing towards the northeast.

‘Where? I can’t see a thing.’

‘There. Can’t you see it? A fraction to the side of those two stars. About this far away from the horizon.’

‘But is it rising?’ asked an anguished voice to my left.

‘Well, it’s rising slowly.’

I thought I saw it, gently separating itself from the tiny light of a booth or something, close to the horizon, when behind me a hoarse voice shouted, ‘No, it’s there, far up. To the right of the Three Marys.’

I had no trouble finding the Three Marys and I was scrutinising their right side when I heard a child’s voice full of enthusiasm: ‘I see it! There it is! It’s huge!’

I looked for the child’s finger and, somewhat hopefully, for something huge in the direction his finger indicated. In vain.

‘You know what the problem is?’ said a voice almost in my ear. ‘We’re looking for it straight on. And that can’t be done: it can’t be seen straight on. What we should do is stand sideways and look for it out of the corner of our eyes.’

I turned halfway round. I noticed that several other people had done the same, only they turned sideways relative to different things. I shrugged and looked upward out of the corner of my eye, first with my right eye and then with my left. A hand touched my ankle. Startled I looked down. There were several people lying on the ground.

‘Can I give you some advice?’ came a voice next to my feet. ‘Lie down on the grass. That way, face up, you can see the whole sky at once and I think you should be able to find it immediately.’

Obediently I lay down next to several strangers and again I looked upward. In the unlit and moonless night, under the continuous music of the universe, I felt on the point of discovering something that might have allowed me, perhaps, to continue with my life with a certain degree of peace. Then, a few metres away from my head, someone spoke: ‘Don’t you realise it’s useless to look up from the ground? The trick is to make a reticule with your fingers. Didn’t you read that this reticular effect increases the power of your vision? It’s just like having a microscope.’

The microscope man seemed unreliable to me, so I never got around to trying the reticular effect. Somewhat disheartened, I stood up. I looked around me. Pubescent youngsters, hunchbacks, women about to give birth, people suffering from high blood pressure, idlers and matrons were simultaneously and noisily pointing at the zenith, at the horizon, at the fountain of Lola Mora, at the planes taking off from the Municipal Airport, at certain falling stars, at fireworks, at the Milky Way or at the unexpected phantom ship of La Carrera. Cross-eyed, frowning, using the reticular effect, twitching their ears, jumping on one leg, swinging their pelvises, using telescopes, microscopes, periscopes or kaleidoscopes, through engagement rings, straws, the eyes of needles, or water pipes, everyone was peering at the sky. Each person was searching, among the avalanche of stars (cold and beautiful since the awakening of the world, cold and beautiful when the last little glimmer from our planet is extinguished), each one was searching among those stars for a singular undefinable light. We never even realised that we were discovering death. And yet that is what it was: we had lost, once again, our last chance. One day, like a melon, like a snake, like a scarf of light, like everything round or with a tail or resplendent that we can create through our sheer desire to be happy, the golden-tailed comet would spin again through the space that had been our sky. But we, we who struggled and waited that night under the impassive stars, we on this bank and shoal would no longer disturb the soft evening mist to chase it.