Scars

MARCH, APRIL, MAY

MY GRANDFATHER, TOWARD THE END OF HIS LIFE, would say to me, There are three ways to win at cards, son — a bankroll, a steady nerve, or a marked deck. But the bankroll, no matter how large, always runs out. And no matter how well you play, there will always be someone out there better than you. So, the best method is to mark cards. That’s how my grandfather would talk toward the end of his life, which went on a long time.

My grandfather knew. He died when he was eighty-two. The moqoit indians called him father. Two months before every election, my grandfather would sit down at the desk in his general store in San Javier and wait. The political bosses would show up, one by one. My grandfather would listen silently, chewing his cigar and spitting out brown globs. After making their case, the political bosses would leave, without my grandfather saying word one. A week later he would call for one of them. Sometimes the same boss for two or three consecutive elections, sometimes the party would change every election. He would talk for ten minutes with the political boss — spitting his brown globs onto the floor — and then would have his carriage prepared and go out to visit the moqoit reservations. That year, the political boss he had summoned would win the election.

With that, my grandfather made something of a fortune. In 1945, during the February election, my grandfather lost an eye. He had called in the Radicalist boss, and then had gone to the moqoit reservations, where they called him father, begged him for dysentery medicine, and followed his carriage to the edge of the reservation and waved goodbye until the sandy dust it raised had completely settled. But the Peronists won the election. Early the next morning, my grandfather, who lived alone with his desk in the immense shed next to the general store, heard a knock at the door. He asked who it was, and they said there was someone who was very sick. He opened the door and was shot. The bullet emptied his eye socket, but, miraculously, he lived.

So my grandfather retired from politics, sold the store, and moved to my mother’s house in the city. In San Javier, when I was a kid, he liked holding me on his lap, but in 1945, when he came to the city, I had already been shaving for years. He put his entire fortune in my mother’s name, saying he was going to die soon. But five years later, my mother, who was the widow of a man I never knew, my father I suppose, my mother, who had never once been sick, was serving soup at the table and said she was going back to the kitchen to get a spoon; that was the last time we saw her alive. Because she was taking a long time, I went to look for her and found her dead. She’d had time to open the drawer but not to take out a spoon, because she didn’t have one in her hand, nor was there any trace of a spoon in the utensil drawer or anywhere else in the kitchen.

I was twenty-three at the time, and I was left alone with my grandfather. In 1952 I graduated law school, and in 1955 I was married. Five years later I was widowed. I had started playing sometime around 1956, when I got out of prison. I was married on September 16, 1955. I had just finished saying I do to the judge and was walking out with my wife to take some pictures with her and the witnesses in front of the building, when Negro Lencina walks up and tells me that the CGT is holding a rally. I ask him if there’s time to take some pictures, and he says no. So I leave the ceremony and go to the CGT.

We came in through the roof and went down to the yellow-tiled courtyard. It was ten in the morning. Three or four shots were fired, at most, and no one was injured except for a guy who tripped on the curb when he came out shooting and fell to the ground and cracked his head open. Then the army arrived and we were all captured.

They let me go nine months later. My wife was waiting for me in the same dress she’d worn to the courthouse the morning of the wedding, and all the witnesses were there, some other relatives, and my grandfather. I invited Negro Lencina and Fiore, from the millers union, who had been with me in the south for nine months. They’d spent the whole time telling me that we were getting out in nine months and that I was going to get home the day my first kid was born. I would tell them there hadn’t been time for that.

I started playing a month later, at a cookout put on by the union to celebrate the release of five rail workers. After the cookout we sat down to play siete y medio. It’s a simple game, played with a Spanish deck. Face cards are worth half a point; numbered cards, one through seven, are worth their value. Seven and a half is the highest score. The banker deals out one card to each player, face down. You ask for cards up to seven and a half points and run the risk of going over. When you’re dealt a face card, worth half a point, you turn it over and ask for another. If it’s a five or higher you generally stand; if it’s less than five, you hit. Sometimes you even hit with six and a half, because the banker determines the value of the cards and always has a half-point advantage, so if the banker has seven, he only pays out players with seven and a half. Anyone with less than seven and a half pays the banker. If you go over seven and a half it’s called a bust, and you pay the banker. A two and a six make eight, for example. If a player holds a two, hits, and gets a six, he pays the banker.

I won sixty pesos. It was nothing, but what got my attention was that I could predict the cards I got. All I had to do was really want them and they’d come. If I was dealt a face card and then a two I would concentrate, thinking, now I need a five, and it would come. I even ended up hitting on six and a half — where a player usually stands — because I was sure I would get the ace. And the ace would come.

I knew I liked the game. Two days later I asked where they played for larger sums, and I learned that at a club downtown I could play monte at one time, baccarat at another, and dice at a third. I chose the dice game. I took out five thousand-peso bills, ate something at a bar, and went to the club. A mass of people were crowded around a craps table. Craps is an incredibly simple game: the player throws two dice from a shaker and combines the numbers that come up; if the first roll is a six, he tries for a six in the next roll; if a seven comes up before the six, he loses. But if a seven or eleven come up in the first roll, then it’s a natural and he wins without having to throw again; if he throws a two, three, or twelve, then he’s crapped out and can’t roll again. A guy standing next to the table, not playing, explained the game to me. When the shaker got to me, I gave two thousand pesos to the banker; I rolled a seven and two thousand pesos became four. I rolled again and came up with a seven again. On the third roll, an eleven; on the fourth, eleven again; on the fifth, eleven again; on the sixth, a seven. I put down the shaker, took 128,000 pesos from the banker, minus the house take, and went home. On the way I realized that craps wasn’t my game, that it was ruled by chaos, and that those dice rolling around in the shaker and then over the green felt were too dependent on chance. I wanted a game with some order, a game where the odds had already been fixed beforehand, whether I knew them or not. I needed a game with a predetermined past.

I found that predetermined past in baccarat. The next night I took twenty from the hundred-thousand-some pesos I had won at dice and went to play baccarat. This time it was a long table, with people sitting around it. Cards were dealt from a dealer’s shoe, two to the player, two to the banker. Face cards and the tens were worth zero. Whoever got closest to nine won.

I ended up with eighty thousand pesos, but it wasn’t as easy as in dice. It took a lot of work to win. I was never losing, but for more than an hour I wasn’t able to win more than four or five thousand pesos, until the shoe came around to me and I was playing the banker. I dealt nine hands, all of nines. All I had to do was think, I’m going to deal a nine, and I would. It was easy. All I had to do was want it, and believe in what I wanted. By the second lucky night at the game, I had already made a bundle.

I didn’t tell my wife, but I told my grandfather. Son, he said, easy come, easy go; it’s a perspetive. (My grandfather would say perspetive, not perspective, swallowing the c, and he’d say it often). I don’t deny that it’s a perspetive. But the only sure way to win is to cheat.

Soon after that I realized he had a point. The two hundred thousand pesos I had won disappeared from one week to the next. But I was hooked. I had to go home at dawn, just to sleep. Little by little I abandoned my work, and little by little I lost the fortune that my grandfather had made from the desk in his general store, from which he would order his carriage prepared before going out to the moqoit reservations.

Two years later I had nothing except the house and a pile of debts. Luckily, it turned out my wife was infertile, so there were no children to support. My wife never approved of my playing, and what happened in June of 1960 is proof. She didn’t approve at all, as will become apparent.

I had been playing poker all night, around the corner from the house. We’d sat down at eleven to play for an hour, and it was three in the afternoon the next day. Someone knocked at the door. The owner answers and comes back. Sergio, it’s your grandfather, he says. I call him in. He was very old, and a little senile, and he looked outlandish with his missing eye and his tobacco-stained beard — he chewed the whole blessed day. He leaned in close to me and says, Son, your wife says if you don’t come home in half an hour she’ll poison herself. Tell her to poison herself, I said. My grandfather leaves and comes back thirty-five minutes later. He leans in close again and says, Son, she poisoned herself. So I asked permission to leave the table early and I went home and found her dead. She’d changed her mind after taking the poison and had come out to the top of the stairs, calling to my grandfather. But it was already too late, and he was a little bit deaf. I found her at the foot of the stairs.

A year later, my grandfather died. He hocked up his last brown glob and departed for the other world. In the end, he couldn’t even run a simple errand. I would take him a pack of Toscanos every once in a while. He’d cut the cigars in two or three pieces, with scissors, and chew them. He’d sit on the stoop and spit onto the sidewalk. Once he accidentally spit on the pants of a guy who was passing the house and I had to come out and defend him. Another time some city workers came out to tell us that we needed to keep the sidewalk more hygienic. So he moved to the kitchen door, which led to the back courtyard, and eventually the floor was covered with dark stains that were impossible to erase. He died in the afternoon, sitting in his chair, looking at the fig tree in the back. If they come for you tonight, saying there’s someone very sick, don’t open the door, he said. And then he died. When the funeral people came, around nine o’clock that night, they asked for a five thousand peso down payment. I didn’t have it, and I told them to wait till two in the morning. I actually didn’t have a penny. I went to a casino and waited for someone to throw me a chip. No one did. So I leaned close to a guy who was winning thousands. I asked him to put me in for a thousand on his bet. That meant that on his bet of ten thousand, I was in for a thousand. If I lost, I had to pay him the thousand. If he won, he’d give me a thousand. Supposedly I had a thousand somewhere, in case the banker won. It was an impulsive move, because guys who are winning aren’t usually in the mood for jokes. It was impulsive, but it paid off. After that it was as easy as riding a sled. Ten minutes later I had the money for the funeral service. I wouldn’t have been at all interested in having my dead grandfather sitting at the kitchen door for months and months.

From then on, I was alone in the house. There was no rent to pay, because I owned the place, and the utilities and taxes were negligible. Once in a while I ate. Except for reading and playing, I didn’t do anything. Eventually I started writing my essays.

I think the title for the collection was the hardest thing to come up with. First I called them Essays on Contemporary Society, then Keys to Understanding Our Era, and later Fundamental Moments of Modern Realism. I chose the last one, not totally satisfied with it. It seemed like the words fundamental, moment, and modern didn’t mean anything. Whenever you wanted to fill out a conversation or turn a phrase to make it sound deep, you could use any one of these words, or others like dynamic, concrete, or structure. But all that was fine. The hard thing was the word realism. The word had a meaning: the attitude characterized by a disposition toward reality. I was sure about that. What I was missing was knowing what reality was. Or what it was like, at last.

It got harder with each of the six essays, because I came up with them after different readings. Each one was inspired by the principal themes or the central characters of the texts I was reading. I gave myself completely to the reading, trying to find hidden connections in the things I read. The first one was the best, I think, because it came to me unexpectedly one afternoon and I wrote it in one sitting. And the title, Batman and Robin: Confusion of Feelings, despite being taken in part from a Stefan Zweig novel, sums up, I think, the crux of the argument.

Professor Nietzsche and Clark Kent was the second one, and I think it suffers for making an overly simplistic analogy between two homonymous and famous characters of the modern imagination. But if it has any value, I think it has value in the observation I think is the most intelligent in the text: that a single fundamental ideology determined the construction of both myths.

I wrote The Magic Realism of Lee Falk because I was convinced that in Falk’s world I had found the aesthetic basis for the modern Latin American novel. The other three essays can hardly be called that. They’re brief notes, two-page critiques that set up a theme almost without commentary. The first, Flash Gordon and H. G. Wells, is the best, I think. The other two aren’t convincing. Tarzan of the Apes: A Theory of the Noble Savage, is more a response to Jean Jacques than Rice Burroughs, because in my opinion the best ideas on the issue are already in Rousseau, and The Ideological Evolution of Mickey Mouse, I don’t even really know why I wrote it. Notwithstanding Mickey’s psychological density, I consider it a minor work, and the critic could only be interested in it as a point of view: the systematic expression of the liberal North American worldview. But I’ll leave that to liberals to celebrate, if they want.

A year after my grandfather died, I started feeling lonely in the house, so I put an ad in the paper for a woman to clean and run errands. I hired a tiny little fourteen-year-old, who came with her mother. They were from the coast, and I liked that, because I had spent my whole youth there. The mother was missing all her teeth, and she was so fat that she had to come in sideways. I sat her down on the sofa and the girl stayed next to her and kept her mouth shut, then I explained that I lived alone and I needed someone who would live in the house and pay monthly rent. The mother said that was exactly what she wanted; she said that the girl’s things were at the bus stop and if we agreed on a wage she’d go get them herself. Eventually we decided on a number, with the condition that I write a letter to the village every two months telling her how the girl was doing. The girl went along to the station and came back an hour later. She had a package wrapped in pages from the newspaper. She was very thin and looked clean. She had started to develop, and she stared at me in this way that made me look away.

For two years the house hadn’t been as clean as it was the day after she arrived. I had it cleaned by a maid occasionally, but that wasn’t cleaning. She turned everything over, and the white telephone, an extravagance of my mother’s from the ’40s, which for the past few years had started looking like my grandfather’s tobacco, was shining again. She showered every night, before going to bed, and never spoke a word to me. She didn’t know how to read or write, so one night when I had won big at baccarat I bought her a radio, but as far as I know she never turned it on. When she would finish cleaning she’d go into the kitchen and, with her belly against the stove and her arms crossed, look out the window until it got dark. There were better windows to look out, the one by my desk, facing the street, for example, but she would always look out the kitchen window, which faced the courtyard. A few branches of the fig tree, the half-rotten thatch roof of a laundry, and, through the branches of the fig tree, and especially in winter, when the leaves were gone, patches of sky were all you could see through it. The girl’s name was Delicia. Every two months I had to ask her what she wanted me to write in the letter to her mother, and she would say: That I’m good.

We hardly saw each other, in fact. I would get up very late, usually around noon, and eat whatever I found. Then I would shut myself up in the study until dark; I would come out for dinner and we would eat what she’d made. Then I would go out to play, and I would come back early the next morning.

Mostly I played baccarat, because there my past was predetermined. Once in a while it could change, but it felt more solid than the crazy mayhem of the dice in the shaker, better than the blind senselessness of their flight before they came to rest on the green felt. My heart would tumble more than the dice when I shook the cup and turned it over the table. You can’t bet on chaos. And not because you can’t win, but because it’s not you who wins, but the chaos that allows it.

In baccarat I saw a different order, analogous to the phenomena of this world, because that other world, the one in which the opposite face of every present moment is utter chaos, and in which the chaos, reinitiated, could erase all the present moments behind it, just like that, seemed horrible to me. That’s what I felt whenever I shook the dice. In baccarat, my eyes could follow every movement the dealers made as they shuffled the cards and reinserted them into the shoe. First they would spread them out over the table, and then stack them in piles organized in three or four rows. They’d combine all the piles into a single column, two hundred and sixty cards, five decks in all, and drop them into the shoe. Then the game would start. First you had to think about the cards in the shoe. In baccarat, when the player is dealt a five — made up of a face card and a five, a three and a two, a nine and a six, or any other combination — he can choose whether or not to hit in order to improve his score. If the player hits, the entire makeup of the shoe changes. Before, I said that in baccarat I had a predetermined past. But it’s probably better to say I had a predetermined future. Objectively speaking, the cards in the shoe are actually a past. For me, ignorant of their arrangement, they become the present and then the past as they are dealt, two at a time. At that point they become the future. And the player’s decision when he lands a five — hitting or standing — changes the cards. But the present is necessary for that change to take place.

So the dealer’s shoe, its cards arranged in a way that could be completely reorganized by a subjective decision to take a single card, is at once a predetermined past and a predetermined future, and at once determined and changeable according to the player’s decision to hit on five or stand.

Every hand was the present, but with the shoe there in the middle of the table both the past and the future were also the present. The three coincided. All three overlapped on the table. Once played, the two cards from that hand moved to a pile of cards face up next to the shoe, the cards that had been used in previous hands. They formed, in this way, another past. Several relative pasts were thus formed: the past of the discards piled face up next to the shoe; the past in the shoe, which was also the future; and the pasts of the rearrangements suffered by the shoe according to the gambler’s decision to hit on five or stand.

Several futures coincided as well: the future of the shoe as initially arranged, as well as every future determined by the player’s decisions to hit on five or stand. Because the decision to hit was always present, always future, until the decision to hit, standing, you could say, was also a rearrangement.

Every hand was thus a kind of bridge, a crossroads where distinct pasts and futures were exchanged, and where, at its center, all the presents were collected: the present of the current hand, momentary, transitory; the present of the past of the pile of discarded hands; the present of the past of the shoe as it had been arranged initially; the present of the past of the shoe, now that, objectively speaking, the shoe was both a determined past and a determined future, and at once a past and a future from which rearrangement could be dealt.

And with each hand the different pasts and futures would coalesce and intermingle: for example, the first four cards dealt, two to the player and two to the banker — which could reach as many as six each if the player and the banker failed to reach the minimum score (four) — belonged to the past, or the future, of the dealer’s shoe: they originated from the two hundred and sixty cards stacked up inside the shoe and nowhere else. And the pile of cards face up next to the shoe consisted of cards that had originated in the shoe, and which had briefly been the deal — that absolute, coalesced present, which my eyes had seen on the table. A narrow relationship, therefore, unified all the states.

Also present were the precedent chaos, the coincident chaos, and the future chaos. The three coincided, actively or potentially. The precedent chaos coincided with the organization suffered by the cards in the shoe, and rematerialized as the coincident chaos represented by the cards that were piled face up next to the shoe, which it coincided with. And this chaos would undergo a transformation similar to the first — when the dealers shuffled the cards, organized them into several even piles, and combined them, ultimately, into a single column of two hundred and sixty cards before dropping them into the shoe. The precedent chaos was present in this act, as the organization of the shoe was determined by it. The future chaos, at once active and potential since it took shape from the chaos of the cards piled face up next to the shoe — and therefore consisted partly of this chaos and could only come from it — would ultimately be indistinguishable from this — the precedent — chaos and from the coincident chaos, since chaos is in itself indistinguishable and essentially singular. Each chaos was also the future chaos, and the arrangement of the cards and the transitory present of the deal were also part of the future chaos, since they would soon become it. And the three mutually coincident states of chaos, meanwhile, were coincident with the arrangement of the shoe, the present of the deal, and all the intersections of the past and the future that had been, were, or would be coalesced in it.

Each time the shoe resets, having passed through the original chaos in which the dealers’ distracted hands spread the cards in random piles over the table, a new arrangement is produced. As many possibilities for its arrangement exist as there are possibilities for arrangement among the two hundred and sixty cards, each one a fragment of the original chaos submitted to an organization by the reflexive movements of the dealers’ hands. As I see it, no arrangement could be identical to another, and even if in two of the arrangements the cards fell in the same order, the first arrangement still wouldn’t be the same as the second, and for this reason: it would be, in effect, another. On the other hand, it wouldn’t seem the same. There wouldn’t be a way to verify it. The task — a tedious and hopeless waste of time — would be dismaying from the start. And in any case, only the initial arrangement would resemble the other’s. Which is to say, only a given pathway or portion of the process could resemble a pathway or portion of the process of the other arrangement.

Because the other pathways or parts wouldn’t be the same. For that to happen, the following similarities would have to occur: first, the way the dealers shuffled would have to be exactly the same both times, and the way the cards were arranged would have to turn out exactly as before. A five of diamonds that appears in the shoe between a three of diamonds and an eight of clubs would need to come to occupy this location by the same itinerary as before — above a four of spades and a king of diamonds, under a queen of clubs, between an ace of hearts and a two of hearts, for example — something which, of course, is impossible to verify.

Also: every player dealt the five would have to choose the same in every case in each of the arrangements. Bearing in mind that there are players who tend to stand, and players who tend to hit sometimes and other times not, and players who tend to follow their gut when the cards are turned over, the possibility of repetition becomes practically impossible.

Finally: the pile of cards face up next to the shoe would have to be a arranged in the same way as the pile formed by the discarded hands of the previous arrangement. But that arrangement, because no one controls it, is impossible to verify.

In baccarat, ultimately, repetition is impossible.

The cards themselves are also particular. They’re at once significant and insignificant, and what they signify isn’t always the same. We could say that what they signify varies depending on the context in which they appear. The cards are significant on the obverse and insignificant on the reverse. The pattern on the reverse side, identical on all of them, does not signify anything; or at most one thing: its insignificance in respect to the significance of the obverse. In this way, the insignificance of the reverse signifies something.

The significance of the obverse, meanwhile, varies. The distinct values, one, four, nine, six, zero, change significance according to their location. An ace changes significance if it’s with an eight or with a nine. With an eight it signifies zero, with a nine it signifies nine, with an ace, zero. In a way, zero, not nine, is the highest number. Zero is the principal: a nine is a nine from the reference point of the zero — you get nine when the nine incrementally approaches the zero it started from. And the nine, meanwhile, borders the zero. After nine there’s nothing, except zero; and zero, after nine, is a complete reset, from which you have to start counting again.

For example, a seven and a six, combined, usually make thirteen. In the game of baccarat they only make three. Counting up, six, seven, eight, nine — I’ve taken three from the seven, added it to the six, and made nine. After that comes zero, not ten. When I’ve reached the highest number, nine, the count rests and I go back to zero. I’ve used four from the seven and have three left. These three start counting from zero and end up at three. Every significance of the obverse signifiers is filtered through the principal signifier, which is zero, the ultimate number in baccarat. It is the reference point for the highest value, nine, and every time the numbers go beyond nine they must return to zero again, erasing everything up to that point and starting over again.

In short, this is the objective aspect of the game. The subject aspect is also important, but first the place where the game is played needs to be described.

It’s a long, oval table, with two shallow indentions in the middle, opposite each other, their convex sides facing. Inside these indentions sit the dealers, facing each other, above the players, on chairs raised on platforms. The shoe is located in the center of the table. In some places it moves around from one player to another, passed to the right as the player finishes the round. Here it stays in the center of the table, and one of the workers deals the cards from the shoe, first one to the player, then one to the banker, then another to the player, and then another to the banker. The player receives his two cards first, and doesn’t know what the banker has drawn. The whole game takes place on the table, around which, at the perimeter, the players sit. Everything that happens beyond the table, in the space surrounding it, does not affect the game. The cards are turned on the table. This is the place where the game is played. In the city, on any night, eight or ten baccarat tables are active in different places. What happens in one place, at one of the tables, bears no significance on any other. Every place is self-contained, so to speak. Even when two tables are pressed together, what happens at one doesn’t signify anything for the other. Each table has its own order of events with their own rhythm, duration, value, and significance.

Someone observing three tables at once would notice these different states. Even if they were to start and end at the same time, the development would be different. After the first hand, the three would be at different points of development. At the first table, a delay in the betting, just as an example, would slow down the game. At the second, a tie slows things down. At the third, a quick game, in which either the player or the banker are first dealt either an eight or a nine — what’s called a natural—and no further cards are drawn, would have the third table already dealing the second hand while at the first table the first hand hasn’t even been dealt and at the second the tie has forced the players to bet again.

If I were betting at two different tables, on the player, let’s say, the score at one table would have no value at another, and vice versa. Therefore, viewed from the outside, the space where the rules of the table don’t apply, the internal significations are completely erased.

The table, on the other hand, despite resembling a gaming table, has no significance and no development until the shoe is arranged according to the process I described earlier. Before the cards are drawn from the shoe and reveal their significance, nothing happens on the table. Nothing is worth anything. Without the fleeting glow of the cards being dealt, being turned, revealing their significance, and disappearing again, the table is blind and inert. It’s nothing in and of itself. It’s just there, and that’s it.

What remains is the subjective aspect of the game. There are complications, and the only real relationship is between the player and the deal, once the deal has taken place. The rest is pure speculation.

This relationship between the player and the cards has two stages: the hypothesis and the verification. Let’s say that as regards the human faculties, the hypothesis corresponds to what they call imagination, the verification to what they call perception.

The player should bet according to his imagination. He bets on the chance that what he imagines, which could happen, happens. He apprehends the hand as it sets up, not as it happens. But once the cards have been arranged in the shoe, the hand has already happened. It could rearrange itself, if in the previous hand the player was dealt a five and asked for another card, but that transformation of the shoe’s internal arrangement always precedes the moment of the player’s perception of it. If the gambler sees that the player has asked for a card after getting a five, he knows that some change has occurred, but he doesn’t know what.

Evidence, meanwhile, in baccarat, is an accessory to the event, not the event itself. It is, furthermore, subjective. The thing is actualized and only then perceived, but it was no less real while it was hidden. The hand doesn’t change because I perceive it. I’m the one who changes. When it disappears back into the undifferentiated pile stacked at one side of the shoe, I retain the evidence of the thing itself and also the evidence that it had remained hidden and yet real, having been prefigured before I perceived it. It manifests, therefore, a duplicate evidence.

The gambler can only perceive the hand as it is dealt. The most he can do is realize that all that is real to him is a delayed perception of the event itself. But despite this the hand means nothing to him as it is dealt. He must either bet blind or invent a system to keep track of a given number of hands.

During the game itself many different things can happen, within a strict set of possibilities. This rigid, generic structure determines that each hand can only go to the punto or the banco, or it can push. If it’s a push, a tie, the hand is dealt again. It’s like nothing happened. In reality, something has happened, but I act like nothing happened simply because no one has won or lost. Ultimately, the better’s interest shifts depending on what happens, and he assigns each outcome a different value.

The other factors of interest to the gambler are the punto and the banco. He bets on either of the two, according to his inclination. Let’s say he bets a thousand pesos on the punto. If the punto gets the highest score, he, the gambler, wins. The best score is the one farthest from zero, or, to put it optimistically, the one closest to nine.

What makes a gambler bet on one and not the other? The reasons a gambler bets on one and not the other can be separated into two classes: first, irrational reasons; second, rational reasons.

Let’s take my case: when I make an irrational bet, it means I’ve bet based on some kind of feeling. Emotional factors can play a large part. I don’t like the guy playing the banco, so I play the punto. Or I’m determined that it will turn out banco, and I feel sure it will. I play the banco. I owe a favor to the guy who holds the cards for the punto. That makes me play punto. I have a habit of chasing the winner. If the guy who’s winning has just dealt four hands to banco, it follows, I think, to play the banco, so I play banco. Punto or banco can take the trick, or it can push. There’s no other possibility. If my emotions have controlled the reasons for my best, I’ve therefore made an irrational bet.

Let’s move on to the rational reasons. I set up an ideal system for the hands: if punto has been taking it, it will keep doing so, and I should bet on a string of puntos. When it goes to banco, I bet on a string of those. If it goes punto then banco, punto then banco, and so on, I play what’s called a chop, and trade off betting punto then banco. If I see that it’s going two puntos and two bancos, I play twice on punto and twice on banco, and so on.

There’s a second rational reason to bet — on banco let’s say. If the punto takes ten tricks in a row, then logic dictates that a banco will follow. Odds favor it, because the overwhelming imbalance of tricks suggest a limit to the string. And so, after the tenth hand to punto, I bet banco.

My reference point is always the past. Each hand, while prepared at the edge of the future, turns, ultimately, toward the past as it crosses the fleeting horizon of the present evidence. Each present is unique. No present repeats itself. It could, in the end, resemble a different present that’s now confined to the past, could bear some resemblance to it. In the last hand the banco beat the punto nine to six, so we think the same thing will happen in this hand. Twenty tricks have gone to punto, and in the past, or our experience of it, strings of punto have tended to be cut short at some reasonable figure by the banco, so in this string of puntos, which is already at twenty, a completely insane number, reason says a banco will cut short the string.

If it’s gone to banco twice, logic tells us that, necessarily, it should again. It’s gone four hands choppy, so we’re sure it’ll go four more.

These are the rational reasons I bet with at baccarat. But we already know that repetition doesn’t exist. What exists, ultimately, is resemblance, simulation. And because of this, after twenty consecutive hands to punto, it could go twenty more, or thirty, or fifty, a thousand, a million more hands to punto. Ten generations of dumbfounded players could observe, passing the phenomenon down from father to son, a string of puntos that lasted a thousand years. This wouldn’t stop a rational player from betting banco. And it could happen that after the string of a million tricks to punto the rational player finally learns from his experience, plays punto, and just then they deal the provident hand to banco that they’ve been expecting for ten generations.

In a choppy game I’ll play a punto after a banco and a banco after a punto. But this doesn’t mean that a banco can’t follow a banco, or a punto follow a punto. I see that a punto game is taking shape and so, shifting around, I’ll play punto, which itself doesn’t prevent the banco from taking it again and reinitiating the chop. That I can follow a game for ten hands doesn’t mean that the past is repeating itself, only that my sense has overlapped with reality. Like if I fire a shot into the air without looking up and a wild duck falls at my feet.

The examples above demonstrate that, in baccarat, all my reasons for betting, the rational ones as well as the irrational ones, are all irrational.

The singular aspect of the game is its complexity. It precludes all rational behavior, and I’m forced to move through its internal confines with the groping, blind lurch of my imagination and my emotion, where the only perception available to me passes before my eyes in a quick flash, when it’s no longer useful because I’ve already had to bet blind, and then disappears.

In this respect, all the bets in baccarat are bets of desperation. Hope is an edifying but useless accessory.

The extent of experience is not brought to bear. Every flash of evidence is separated from every other flash of evidence by an abyss, and the relationship between them exists outside the reach of our comprehension. I don’t mean to say that there isn’t a relationship — simply that we can’t know it. Every bet is desperate because we gamble for one single motive: to see. We leave everything we have at that place where the spectacle is manifest because, although it’s no longer useful, we are curious to know, to see what was concealed at the moment we bet. If reality overlaps with our imagination, we’re awarded a pile of excrement: money. It’s perfectly natural to walk away from a cesspool with our uniforms covered in shit.

On March first I called Delicia to the study. I told her I was going to pay her monthly salary. She didn’t say anything to me. She just picked the bills off the desk and went back to the kitchen. She couldn’t have been more than two months over fifteen. These days she was having to wear shirts with a bit more room in the front, and her skirt bulged out in the back. I stayed at my desk the rest of the day, writing my seventh essay: Doctor Sivana and Modern Science: Pure Knowledge or Compromised Thoughts? At dusk I went out to the kitchen.

It was hot. Delicia had finished cleaning and was looking out at the rear courtyard through the screen door. She asked me if I wanted to eat something, and I said it was still too early. Then I asked her if she had an idea what she was going to spend her salary on. Nothing, she said. Delicia, I said, Would you do me a favor and loan me those three thousand pesos until tomorrow? She didn’t say a word; she went to her room on the second floor, an attic, and came back with a tea tin. She stood next to the stove and opened it.

There was a pile of thousand-peso bills inside. She counted them, one by one, stretching them out, because some were rolled up and others balled up. She piled them up in a stack and then counted them, wetting her index and thumb with the tip of her tongue beforehand. It was fifty-four thousand pesos. She had worked for eighteen months without spending a cent. She’d been wearing my wife’s old clothes, which had been left in her bureau since the day she died, without me touching them. I supposed she had on her bra and underwear too.

She held out the pile of thousand-peso bills and told me to use what I needed. I asked her how she had managed to live for two years without spending even ten cents, and she said that wasn’t true, that she had brought seven hundred pesos with her from her last job. Then I thought back and remembered that in those eighteen months she hadn’t gotten sick, she hadn’t gone anywhere but the corner store to buy groceries, hadn’t talked to anyone but me, unless they were the butcher or the baker, and hadn’t listened to the radio or read a magazine (she didn’t know how) or done anything outside of cleaning the house during the day or staring out at the courtyard through the kitchen window in the afternoon. I asked if she didn’t need the money, and she said no. So I told her ten thousand should cover me and I gave back the rest. She handed me the tin with all the money and told me to keep it in the desk and go on putting her three thousand in there every month.

Then she made dinner. We didn’t exchange a word during the meal. When I got up, I passed by her and rubbed her head. The most beautiful creature in the world lives in this house, I said, and went to play.

I lost the ten thousand, and ten thousand more that I promised to pay back the next day. I got up at two in the afternoon and went straight to my desk, read a full Captain Marvel comic, marked up the most important frames, and then sat down to write. It was even hotter than the day before. My eyelids felt heavy, and my shirt was sopping wet and stuck to my back. I fell asleep at my desk. When I woke up it was getting dark. I took a shower and went out to the kitchen. Delicia was sitting in front of the screen door. She was looking at the dark stains in the tiles of the passageway, the stains that even she hadn’t been able to erase, the everlasting remains of the my grandfather’s brown spit stains.

Delicia, I said. I’ve decided to teach you how to read and write. Every day at this time, we’ll have a class on reading and writing. Does that sound good? She said it sounded good. Alright, Delicia, I said. Let’s get to it, then. I went to the desk, brought back a notebook and some pencils, and put them down in front of her. I had to show her how to hold a pencil. With large, neat netters, I drew more than wrote the full alphabet. Delicia watched the traces I left on the lined paper. Then I drew a separation line below, and, skipping a line, wrote the letter A. This is the letter A, I said. Fill two lines with the letter A. While I’m doing that, said Delicia, go and shave.

It had been three days since I had shaved. I went up and shaved. When I got back, Delicia had filled two lines with the letter A. Some were unrecognizable. Nobody would have said they were the letter A. They didn’t seem like a letter of any kind. Then I drew the letter B. This is the letter B, I told Delicia. Now fill two lines with this letter. Delicia leaned over the notebook and started writing, with great application and extreme care, the letter B. There have been times that I’ve bet fifty thousand on a card, when it was my last fifty thousand. And I never wanted my card to come as much as, at that moment, I wanted Delicia to be able to draw the letter B. She stuck out her tongue and bit on it, and she was bent so far over the notebook that I thought that from one moment to the next she going to crush her face against the scribble-covered page. Finally she drew the first one. It must have taken her at least a minute to do it. A minute or more. But finally she wrote it. And then she started filling two lines with the letter B. I figured I had time to take a walk to the other end of the city, and when I came back the next day I would find her there still filling out the two lines with the letter B.

Then I told her that was enough for one day and to make dinner. During the meal she asked me if I wasn’t going to give her homework, so when we finished I drew the letter C, left two blank lines and then drew the letter D. I told her to fill two lines with each for tomorrow.

I went to the desk, took out the forty-four thousand pesos that were left, and went to play. I paid the ten thousand I owed and lost the other thirty-four thousand. That night I didn’t get credit, so I left early and went to bed. Early the next day I went downtown and negotiated a mortgage on the house. When I left the estate agency, I ran into Carlos Tomatis outside the Banco Provincial. He was talking with a lottery vendor. He shook my hand and asked if I played the lottery, and I said I didn’t bet against the Lord.

You’re looking thinner every day, Sergio, he said.

I told him that could be his subjective opinion, because he looked fatter to me every day.

He said it was possible. Then he said that God had nothing to do with luck, that the New Testament said that God could see every hair on every last person. And not one at a time, he said, but all at once, and at the same time, one at a time. I told him that was frankly terrifying, that I couldn’t imagine God looking at him so closely. But that in any case God had the disadvantage of not being able to play the lottery. I’ve been chasing two forty-five for over a year, he said then.

I told him that for my part I was tapped out. And that I had just mortgaged my house.

All the better to put the arm on you, said Tomatis.

Then we went to a café for a bite. Tomatis insisted on going to the bar at the arcade, so we walked there. We turned north up San Martín. The province of chance is the devil’s kingdom, Sergio, you have to understand that, Tomatis said as we walked.

Sergio. It’s strange, I said. It’s been months since anyone called me Sergio.

We should see each other more often, said Tomatis.

At the bar he asked me if I had written any more essays.

I’m writing one now, I said. I told him about my work on Sivana. Tomatis offered the theory that next to Sivana, Captain Marvel was a secondary character. That Superman had already exhausted the line.

I told him that he was partly right and partly not. If you examined the issue from an ideological perspective, I said, he could have a point; but still, Superman’s powers had a certain antihuman flavor. The fact that he comes from Krypton already makes him a beggar at a banquet. It precludes the human possibility for change, I said. Captain Marvel, meanwhile, lives up to the name. He’s the apotheosis of the power of the word. It’s the magic word, Shazam, that allows him access to his powers. It doesn’t matter that the word itself is meaningless. At the beginning of language, no word means anything. Shazam is at once a magic word and all words. In that sense, Captain Marvel is a symbolic character.

And so what’s with Sivana, asked Tomatis.

Sivana represents modern science, I said. The anxiety of power concealed behind the narrative of pure science. In the title I add the question, pure science or compromised thought? The thesis of the essay is that Sivana pretends to be a pure scientist, but to be a pure scientist is, in effect, to be compromised. It’s an ideological alibi.

Intelligent, very much so, said Tomatis. Then he added that he had been quoting.

We had a bite to eat, and then another. After paying for the food, Tomatis took a five thousand peso bill from his pocket and held it out. He said it was from what he owed me, but as far as I knew he didn’t owe me anything.

We separated outside the Casa Escassany, just as the clock struck one. I told him to call me some afternoon, that when the essay was ready he had to read it. He said he would and then he left for the paper.

It was even hotter than the previous days. It was a murderous sun. The rows of houses didn’t cast an inch of shade. At a grocery I bought some grapes and then went home. When I got there Delicia asked if I wanted to eat, and I told her that’s what the grapes were for. I put them in the freezer so they would get really cold, then I washed my face and went to my desk. I sat for ten minutes reading a few issues of Superman, because the conversation with Tomatis had left me with a few questions. Then I called for Delicia. When she came in, I told her to sit down. My face felt like it was burning, and not from the heat.

Delicia, I said. I gambled your fifty-four thousand pesos, and I lost them.

Delicia was silent. I thought I noticed an expression, something like surprise, on her face. I thought that maybe she didn’t know that I gambled, and that I should have told her before asking for the money. But she didn’t say a word.

Yes, Delicia, I said. I lost every cent of it.

You had bad luck, said Delicia.

Very bad luck, I said.

Now you don’t have anything else to bet? said Delicia.

I’ve got five thousand pesos, I said. A friend loaned it to me. But I’m not planning to gamble them, but to put them in your savings tin.

I opened the tin, took the bill from my pocket, and dropped it in. Then I closed the tin.

Don’t do that, she said. Bet them.

You want me to play the five thousand pesos after I lost all your savings? I said.

I gave them to you thinking you were asking so you could bet them, said Delicia.

So she did know I gambled. She must have overheard a telephone call, because as far as I knew no one had stepped foot in the house since she’d come to work for me. She’d cleaned the entire house except the dark, indelible stains from my grandfather’s brown spit, charging me the miserable sum of three thousand pesos a month, without spending a cent for eighteen months, and then she had given me all her savings so I could lose it in two hours. I got up and kissed her forehead.

God bless you, I said. God bless every hair on your head, and may He keep you in His glory for all eternity.

Delicia laughed, and then she said she was going to take her siesta. I told her to eat some grapes, that I had bought them for her, and told her not to polish the door handle, that it wasn’t worth it. It’s pointless work, I said.

Delicia said that it wasn’t pointless for everything to be clean, and she left. I heard the sound of the freezer opening and then closing. I sat down to work. I reread all my copies of Superman, and then marked up frames from Captain Marvel. Then I dug through the filing cabinet and took out the complete Mary Marvel series. Translated onto a female character, the story lost its appeal. Mary Marvel, with her American co-ed attitude, didn’t inspire any respect. A dyke, I suspected. Then I started wondering if Clark Kent and Lois Lane slept together. For hours I thought about Superman’s sexuality without reaching any kind of conclusion. Clark Kent showed obvious affection for Lois, but it wasn’t clear to me if that affection went as far as sexual attraction. In the end, without knowing why, I decided it didn’t.

At five, Delicia brought me a bitter mate. She knew that I drank one at that hour, but she’d never brought it for me before. I took a sip, and then told her I was three days late sending the bimonthly letter to her mother, and asked if she wanted me to say anything. I assumed the recent events would lead to a change in the content, which for eighteen months had been, That I’m fine, but she said the exact same thing. Then I told her to leave the kettle and the mate and I wrote for an hour.

That night we took on the letters E and F. Delicia was writing somewhat quicker, and the rows of letters were getting straighter and the letters more alike. Then I ate and went out to play.

I had the five-thousand-peso bill balled up in my pants pocket. When I got there, the game had just started. A crowd of people stood over the table, above the heads of the players sitting in the front row. I made a space behind one of the workers and started observing the game. To catch up, I looked at the note pad of the player sitting to the left of the worker. Two bancos had just turned over. I thought it had to go banco again, but I didn’t play, and it turned out punto. I squeezed the bill inside my pocket into an even tighter, flatter ball. My hand was sweating, and the bill’s hard, crisp consistency gave way to something soft and damp.

I told myself that if I could change my luck with those five thousand pesos I would cancel the mortgage.

The next hand went to banco. Logic told me the following: a game of two bancos and one punto is taking shape. One more banco has to turn over before the next punto. If it goes banco in the next hand, in the one after I should play punto.

When it went banco, as I had calculated, I changed the five thousand bill for five red chips of a thousand. I put three on punto, and a third banco turned out.

So the two bancos and one punto game had been broken up in favor of the banco. I put the two thousand-peso chips on banco, and it came out banco. I cashed in the four thousand and waited.

Two more tricks went to banco. Six bancos had now been dealt. That was too many bancos. In my judgment, it made sense to play punto. So I played the four thousand on punto, and it came out punto, and I cashed out eight thousand.

The next hand was a push at six. History teaches that after a push at six it goes banco. I bet five thousand on banco. It wasn’t a banco, but a push at seven, and historically a push at seven is followed by punto rather than banco, so I took out the chips I had put on banco and put them on punto, and it turned out banco.

Then I played the three thousand pesos on banco, and it turned out banco, so with that I played five thousand on banco, and it turned out banco again. In my hand I had an oval, yellow chip, worth five thousand, and six rectangular, red chips of a thousand. I went to the bar, drank a cup of tea, and returned to the table ten minutes later. I opened a space between the guys who were standing around the table and set myself up behind the worker, leaning toward the table over his left shoulder.

I didn’t even glance at the notebook of the guy sitting to the left of the worker. Now I have to play punto, I thought. I played the eleven thousand on punto, and punto took it. The worker handed me a green, rectangular chip, with 10,000 carved into it in gold numbers. Besides that he gave me an oval, yellow chip, and seven red rectangles.

If I get to thirty thousand, I thought, I’ll cancel the mortgage on the house.

Punto had to take it again. Something in my heart told me punto would take it a second time. I bet eight thousand, handing the worker the oval, yellow chip, and three rectangular, red chips. If punto takes it, I thought while the cards were dealt, I’ll reach thirty with these eight, and I’ll cancel the mortgage on the house. Something in my heart told me again that punto would take it a third time. It’s nothing but a third punto, it’s not too much to ask it to come. There was a push at eight, and then punto took it again. During the push I thought about pulling out the chips I had put in, but something told me I had to be patient, and trust. The worker gave me a rectangular, green chip, with the number ten stamped in gold numerals, an oval, yellow chip, and a red rectangle. In my hand I had two chips with the number stamped in gold, a yellow oval, and five red rectangles. I left the table and went to the bar. I drank a second cup of tea. I took out a thousand-peso chip from my pants pocket and paid for the tea. I took the change and put it in my other pocket.

My shirt was stuck to my back, and my whole face was damp. I leaned over the tea cup and a drop of sweat fell from my forehead into the tea. When I finished drinking the tea, sweating the whole time, so much so that the sweat was running down my face and my whole shirt was a swamp, and I put the empty cup on the counter and paused for a moment, examining the strange shapes formed by the leaves at the bottom of the cup, I had already made a decision, and I went back to the table.

They talk about vices that are solitary and vices that aren’t. All vices are solitary. All vices need solitude to be exercised. They attack in solitude. And, at the same time, they’re a pretext for solitude. I’m not saying that vices are bad. They could never be as bad as virtues, work, chastity, obedience, and so on. I’m simply saying how it is and how it goes.

I reached the table at the exact moment when the guy sitting to the left of the worker was getting up and balling up his notes. I took his place, pulled out the chips, and set them on the felt, against the edge of the table. I arranged them in order: first, against the edge, one of the ten-thousand, then the other, then the oval five-thousand, and then the four red rectangles. The worker told me that it was my turn on the banco. I bet the yellow oval. My plan was to leave the yellow oval in the box for the banco until it rotted. It meant that, after the first hand, there would be ten thousand pesos, after the second, twenty, after the third, forty, after the fourth, eighty, after the fifth, one hundred and sixty, and so on.

When the punto turned over his cards, he showed a king of diamonds and a queen of clubs. That meant he had zero. I turned mine over. It was an eight of hearts and a four of diamonds. That meant I had a two, two more than ten. They gave the punto a third card, an ace.

I was a thousand meters ahead. I could win with any card in the deck except a nine, which would mean a push, and an eight, which would mean zero (two plus eight is ten, or zero). They dealt me an eight. So the banco passed to the next player, the guy to the right of the worker. I have to get to thirty thousand again, I thought, so that I can cancel the mortgage on the house tomorrow.

I lost four straight bets of five thousand. The first I played banco, and it was punto, the second I played banco again, and punto took it again, with the third I played punto and it turned out banco, for the fourth I played banco, then I hesitated when there was a push, took the chip from the banco and put it on punto, and the banco took it.

I was sweating so much that I could feel drops of sweat around my ears — from the outside they must have looked like tears. Once in a while, a drop would fall on the felt and leave a damp ring before it evaporated. The last four red rectangles hadn’t stayed stacked up against the edge of the table, but were scattered over the felt. I would gather them together, without looking at them, and scatter them again. I wouldn’t look at them. With the fingers of my left hand I carried out the same operation over and over. Finally I separated myself from them, piling them neatly and sliding them across the felt into the hands of the worker. Punto, I said.

And it went to banco. I thought about Delicia’s tea tin, where she’d been keeping her savings for eighteen months, and I decided that there wasn’t the slightest difference between her behavior and mine. They were exactly the same. Only one of us changed it for geometrical, mother of pearl shapes of various colors and the other kept it in a tea tin. I got up and crossed the room, toward the exit. On the stairs I put my hand in my pants pocket and felt the bills they had given me as change for the thousand-peso chip. I stopped in the staircase, took out the bills, and counted them. There were nine hundred and fifty pesos. There were still some coins in my pocket: they were all tens, and added up to sixty pesos. I had ten thousand and ten pesos total. So I went back up the steps. I went straight to the cage and changed the thousand pesos, giving them the nine-hundred-fifty in bills and five coins. I asked for chips of five hundred. The cashier gave me two silver-plated circles the size of quarters. That silver-plating was a luxury, because they were charamusca—just eye candy. For protection, I put them in my left shirt pocket instead of my pants pocket, like I had done with the others. My heart was beating so hard while I walked to the table that I thought it would make the chips clink. After the first hand there wasn’t any danger of them clinking, because I only had one left. I turned around and took a spot behind the worker, playing over his left shoulder. So I was in the exact opposite location from where I had been before.

For five or six hands I didn’t play either punto or banco. I didn’t play anything. I didn’t even look at what was happening with the cards. I just waited for the pulse. I’ll let my mind empty out, completely, I’ll open the plug and let everything drain out. Everything: memories, desires, plans, reasons. Everything down the drain and into the black abyss, so my mind is left as blank as the blank page where Delicia wrote her first letter. Just so the pulse writes itself, carved with letters of fire capable of blasting through the rock in the void of my mind. If you know how to empty your mind completely, and especially not lie to yourself, and feel capable of waiting, the pulse comes. When it came, it said banco, so I took the silver-plated circle from my shirt pocket and told the worker to bet it on banco. I got back two silver-plated circles and immediately played them on banco. They gave me back four red rectangles. Then I played one on banco and they gave me back two. I played two and got back four. I now had five red rectangles. I was going to bet them, but just then the power went out.

We formed a line at the cashier and exchanged our chips by the light of a propane lamp. I received a five-thousand-peso bill that was so damp and crumpled that I thought it must have been the same one I had exchanged when I got there. Then I went down the stairs, guided by a worker’s flashlight, and went out into the street. I crossed the dark city and went home to sleep, lighting my way with matches in order to open the front door and find my bedroom.

The next day, Delicia woke me up by banging on the door and saying I had a call on the telephone. It must have been six months since anyone had called me. And I think the last one, six months before, had been some guy with the wrong number. It was Marquitos Rosemberg. He told me he wanted to talk that morning. I told him to come over, then I hung up and took a shower. It was even hotter than the last three days.

Marquitos arrived a half hour later, while I was eating the last of the grapes that had been left from the day before. He was in shirt sleeves and had a black briefcase in his hand. I realized he was coming from the courthouse. At the estate agent they’d asked me for references and I had given his name. He lived eight blocks from me, but it had been three years since I had seen him. The last time, we’d seen each other on the street. He was on the opposite sidewalk. We smiled and raised a hand to each other as we passed. That was it.

I took him to the study and offered him some grapes on a plate. There weren’t more than five or six, and I deprived myself in order to offer them. Marquitos ate them one after the other, spitting the skin and seeds onto the plate. In my pants pocket I had the five-thousand-peso bill, crushed into a wet ball.

So you’re going to mortgage the house, Marquitos said when he finished the last grape.

I told him that, in effect, yes.

Proof that you’re not well at all, said Marquitos.

I said that yes, I was not well at all. That never, that I could remember, had I been so bad. But that I didn’t know of anyone who was any better off than me unless they were insane or had recently passed. Then I called Delicia and asked, if she had time, could she make us some coffee.

Marquitos said he was going to try to find some way to help me. I replied that the only way to help me was to give me half a million pesos.

Half a million? said Marquitos. His eyes opened wide and he leaned forward. The chair creaked.

Half a million, that’s right, I said. My house is downtown, it’s new, it’s two stories. It’s worth five million pesos, at least. I’ll put it up as collateral. I want half a million pesos, and everything arranged.

Half a million pesos, said Marquitos. What do you want half a million pesos for, Sergio?

To play baccarat, I said.

Marquitos rocked back in his chair, laughing.

That joke, he said, is in poor taste.

It would be in poor taste, I said, but it’s not a joke. I said I want half a million pesos to play baccarat, and I haven’t said it as a joke.

Of course, said Marquitos.

I’ve even gambled away my maid’s savings, eighteen months worth, I said.

Don’t expect them to write you a check for half a million in gambling money, Marquitos said. Or that your good references will get your house mortgaged for that price.

I don’t expect anything, I said. I’m almost forty. I don’t have children or any relatives. I live in a house that I didn’t swindle away from anyone’s helpless, paralytic grandmother. Am I or am I not allowed to mortgage the house if I want to?

You’re allowed to, absolutely, said Marquitos.

Alright then, I said. So what’s the problem?

That game is self-destruction, said Marquitos.

I told him I hadn’t given his name as a reference so he could come to my house and demonstrate the great strides made by the Salvation Army. Then Delicia came in with the coffees. Marquitos looked at her. He didn’t take his eyes off of her until she left the room.

You gambled that creature’s savings away, he said, staring at me.

She gave them to me herself to gamble, I said.

You lied to her somehow, said Marquitos.

I didn’t lie, I said. I went to her honestly and asked to borrow three thousand pesos and she gave me everything she had and told me to do what I wanted with it and hold on to it myself.

Marquitos just shook his head and added sugar to his coffee. For several minutes we didn’t say a word. Then I looked him in the face.

Are you going to give me the reference or not? I said.

Yes, he said. I will.

Then he opened the briefcase and took out his checkbook.

I don’t want anything, I said. You’re the second guy who has tried to give me money in the last two days, apart from Delicia. And don’t insist, because I don’t have the luxury of protesting too much.

You’re a rotten petit bourgeoisie, said Marquitos.

Better a rotten petit bourgeoisie than a healthy petit bourgeoisie, I said. A rotten apple is better than a healthy one, because the rotten apple is closer to the truth than a healthy one. The rotten apple is a mirror in which a million generations catch sight of themselves just before they explode.

That aphorism does not do you credit, said Marquitos.

Probably not, I said.

Then I told him that I needed the mortgage arranged as quickly as possible. He asked me if all the paperwork was in order, and I said yes.

I suppose like any gambler you’re under the delusion that you have a sure system for winning, said Marquitos.

I don’t have a system for winning, I said. In fact, I’m pretty certain I’m going to lose. But I want to play. If I had a sure system for winning, I wouldn’t play anymore.

I don’t understand at all, said Marquitos.

I don’t play to win. If there’s money for food and to pay the bills, that’s more than enough. Even if I have to use candles instead and only eat once a week, I’ll still play. My departed grandfather used to say that the only way to win at poker was to cheat. Clearly, he was a man of a different generation. And one who didn’t enjoy the game, in the end. I would even play against a guy who is cheating me, if the scam allows me some chance. I’ve played poker against three guys that were colluding and were using a marked deck, and I beat them. There’s no scam that’s worth a damn if you’ve got luck on your side. So I’ve opted to think of scams as just a bit of luck for the other side.

I want that half a million so I can have an easy mind for at least two weeks and enjoy the game without having to suffer over where I’m going to get money to gamble if they tap me out from one moment to the next. If I was looking for a good return I wouldn’t play; I would get into business or go back to being a lawyer.

I don’t think the mortgage can be arranged in less than two weeks, said Marquitos. And only because I’m good friends with the people at the estate agency, and they owe me favors.

I know it, I said. That’s why I went there.

I’ll try to get it through as quick as possible, said Marquitos.

I’d be grateful if you would, I said.

Marquitos put the checkbook away, closed the briefcase, and stood up. I stood up too. We stared at each other a few seconds, not blinking.

Sergio, said Marquitos. We should see each other more often. We could go out for a drink.

We’d get bored, I said. Then I tried to smile. You’re still in the party, I suppose?

I am, said Marquitos.

That’s a vice like any other, I said.

Marquitos shook his head again. He turned and moved toward the door. Suddenly he stopped, stood a moment with his back to me, then turned around. His eyes were full of tears. I thought he must have been in pain. His eyes were red, and he was sweating. But no, he was crying. Not crying, strictly speaking, but his eyes were filled with tears.

You read the papers, last week, I suppose, he said, hesitating at every word.

I told him it had been years since I had read a newspaper.

César Rey, he said. He killed himself. In Buenos Aires.

Chiche? I said. I couldn’t expect anything less from him.

No, Marcos said. It was an accident. He slipped on the subway platform and was hit by a train.

He was drunk, I suppose, I said.

Marquitos rubbed the back of his hand over his eyes. He wasn’t crying anymore.

And Clara? I said.

She’s back here again, said Marcos.

Then he left. I walked him to the door and stood there, watching him walk away close to the wall, in order to make the most of the shade that was getting thinner as the morning progressed. I stood in the doorway until he turned the corner. I would have gotten teary too, if I had found out that the guy who ran off with my wife got hit by a train and that my wife was days away from coming back home. I would have sobbed, not just gotten teary. Not because the guy had been my close friend, but because my wife was about to come home. We’d had some good times with Marquitos and Chiche, years back. It had been years since I had seen Chiche. He knew the game too, and liked it.

That night, after teaching Delicia a couple more letters and eating something, I went back to the club. I didn’t work at all during the day. After Marquitos left I got in bed and slept until it was dark. I lost the five thousand at the club and didn’t get a penny of credit. The next day I got up late and went straight to my desk. At five Delicia brought me a mate.

Delicia, I said. I’ve noticed you don’t play the radio.

She said she didn’t like it.

Are you sure you’re not going to start liking it? I said.

She said she was absolutely sure.

I’m going to take it in and have it checked out, then, I said.

So I wrapped the radio in old newspapers and tied it up with some thick twine and went out to sell it. After two hours I had gone to so many appliance stores, and unwrapped and rewrapped the package so many times, that there wasn’t any paper left. The pretense of selling it new collapsed, so I went straight to a pawn shop. They gave me seventeen hundred pesos for it. I bought two kilos of white grapes and went back home. I nibbled on the clusters on the way, and when I got there I found Delicia in the kitchen. She was looking down the corridor to the rear courtyard, at the dark brown spit stains left by my grandfather.

They won’t come out, she said.

My grandfather made them, I said. And he’s dead.

That night, at the club, they gave me three circular, silver-plated chips, and I lost them one after the other. I didn’t even have the satisfaction afterward of saying that I had guessed a single hand right. Nor could I entertain myself, on the way home, in the chances I could have had at any moment in the game. I guessed wrong in three straight hands. There was no chance. I went to bed soaked in sweat, but I slept straight through until the next afternoon. It was murderously hot. I took a shower and went to my desk. For two hours I flipped through a complete collection of Blondie that I had been clipping, or had asked to have clipped, from the magazine Vosotras over the past fifteen years. Each week I would cut out the whole comic, which was printed on the last page, and paste it to a sheet of loose paper. Then I would add the page to a school folder and archive it. The last issues had been cut, but I hadn’t pasted any down. They were stacked between the last page and the cover. There must have been fifty.

Then I sat for hours without doing anything, with all the sheets spread out over the desk. The whole time I stared at some vague point in space, not seeing a thing. Every once in a while I would clear my throat or narrow my eyes, nothing else. At five, Delicia came in with the mate. I recognized her dress; it was an old house frock, flower patterned and faded, that had belonged to my wife. I saw that she’d just showered and combed her hair, because it was wet and pulled back, and a drop of water was running down her forehead. The dress was still too big on her, but eventually it would fit tight.

Delicia, I said. In a couple of days I’m going to buy you a primer.

She said that first she had to learn to read, and I explained that a primer was for just that, learning to read. Then she left. Ten minutes later I started going through the house, looking for things to sell. I found my grandfather’s.38 long Ruby revolver. I went out to sell it and got back after dark, with the revolver stuck in my belt. It didn’t fire. I went inside and picked up the telephone. I looked up Marquitos Rosemberg’s number and called him. He answered himself.

Marquitos, I said. It’s Sergio.

Yes, said Marquitos. Just this morning I spoke with the people at the estate agency. They’ll have the money for you on April fifth.

April fifth? I said.

Yes, said Marquitos. April fifth. I was just about to call you to let you know. I supposed you’d be waiting to hear from me, or something like that.

Yes, I said. But I wasn’t calling about that.

No? said Marquitos. Then why did you call me?

Because of the check you were going to write me yesterday, I said.

What’s going on with the check? said Marquitos.

Nothing, I said. I think I need it. How much were you going to write it for?

I hadn’t decided, said Marquitos. I was going to ask you how much you needed and then make it out.

Could you write it for thirty thousand? I said.

Thirty thousand? said Marquitos. Sure, I can. Tomorrow morning I’ll be sure to bring it by.

No, I said. I need it now.

Now? said Marquitos. I’m standing here naked, about to get in the shower.

I can come by for it, I said.

Marquitos hesitated a second and then said it would be better if we met at a bar downtown. He suggested the arcade. Then I hung up. I gave Delicia her writing lesson and then I left. When I got to the bar it was nine. Marquitos was sitting at a table and he had the check in his hands. There was an empty cup of coffee on the table. The check was made out to bearer, for thirty thousand pesos. Marquitos’s signature was an indecipherable scrawl.

Very good, I said, when he gave me the check. There’s only one more problem: who’s going to change it.

That’s easy, said Marquitos. Give me the check.

I gave it to him and he went over to register and started talking to the cashier. The cashier shook her head, and Marquitos came back, saying that the owner wasn’t there. He stood for a moment next to the table, thinking, with the check in his right hand and a key ring that he jingled in his left. Then he said he would be right back, and he disappeared for fifteen minutes. He came back with three ten-thousand-peso bills folded up in his right hand. While he was sitting down he dropped them on the table. I put them in my pocket. Marquitos was staring at me, with a sort of gleeful, surprised smirk on his face.

If you hadn’t been born with such dark skin, people would realize that the summer sun hasn’t touched you once. You’re very thin, Sergio.

Then he asked me if I had eaten, and I said I hadn’t, so he said he’d take me out.

You had something to do, I said.

I cancelled it, said Marquitos.

That was a mistake, I said. We’ll get bored.

I’ll be in charge of the conversation, said Marquitos.

We went to a grill bar and sat down at a table in the courtyard. From where I sat I could see the grill and the cook working the fire and turning the meat without getting too close to either. Each time he finished some task at the fire, he would turn to a sort of counter where he attended the waiters, and every so often he took a sip of wine. I watched him work the whole time. Then I started to speculate whether or not he would take a drink each time he turned around. I tried to guess the moment it would happen: whether after talking to a waiter, after stoking the coals, or after pulling a strip of meat from a hook near the grill, salting it, and laying it on the grill. Mentally, I started trying to guess the exact moment when his hand would reach for the glass, grab it, and take a drink. I guessed right six times and wrong twice. Marquitos asked me what was the matter, that I wasn’t saying a word, and I said that I felt great and I was happy we had gone out to eat. In the courtyard of the restaurant, the heat was subdued. There was a kind of breeze, and the smoke from the grill kept the mosquitos away.

Marquitos asked me if I had read Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, and when I said I had he asked me what I thought of it. I told him I thought it was good. We finished eating and then went downtown in Marquitos’s car for a cup of coffee. It was a small car, sky blue. We had a coffee at the arcade bar, but now even Marquitos didn’t try to talk. He asked me if I wanted to go anywhere, and I said that if it was on his way to drop me off at the club. When we got there, Marquitos stopped and turned off the car. He said he wanted to se me in action and was coming in with me. I said he would get bored, and he answered that there wasn’t any chance it could be more boring than dinner, and then he got out. By the time I got to the foot of the stairs that lead to the game room, I was already sweating. I told Marquitos to wait for me near the table, and I went to the cage and exchanged one ten-thousand-peso bill for a yellow oval and five red rectangles. I put them in my shirt pocket and joined Marquitos. He didn’t even hear me walk up: his eyes were glued to the center of the table.

There wasn’t a single seat open, and the gamblers were pressed close around the table. I had to stand in the second row and watch the game over the shoulders of the guys who were standing behind the chairs. Marquitos was standing on his toes, balancing lightly, his eyes wide open. I asked him which way the last hand had turned out, and he said banco. So I reached over the shoulder of a guy standing behind the table and threw out the yellow oval to bet it on banco. Then I waited for the hand, and it turned out punto. Marquitos gave me a disheartened look. The next hand, I threw the five red rectangles on punto. Punto took it. I left the ten thousand on punto and the third hand turned out banco.

I got in line, then changed the second bill for two yellow ovals and went back to the table. Marquitos was staring at me. I pretended not to see him. I looked away. For a few seconds I knew he was looking at me, even though I was looking at the center of the table. Then he looked away, stood up on his toes again, and looked at the center of the table. I had the two yellow ovals in my right hand, pressed tight. They were damp. I was about to throw one on the table when I saw Marquitos opening a path between two guys who were standing next to the table, and then he disappeared. I turned my head around and saw that he had just sat down. His pale face had reddened, and I thought he looked slightly unhinged. I leaned in and asked him what he was doing.

I want to see it close up, he said.

Then I threw the two yellow ovals to punto. I went to the cage, changed the last ten-thousand-peso bill for a green rectangle with the numbers stamped in the center, in gold, and went back to the table and stood next to Marquitos, opening a path with my elbows through the guys who were standing behind him. I leaned in and asked Marquitos how he saw the thing.

Darkly, he said. His pale color had returned.

We didn’t speak again for at least fifteen minutes. I defended my green rectangle as best I could, but in they end they took it. With my last five thousand I looked for my pulse, but no matter how much I tried to empty my mind for a full, uninterrupted minute, nothing came to fill the space, and in the end I threw the yellow oval blindly. Nothing happened. They took it. Right then, Marquitos turned around and had me lean in. He asked me if I had finished, and I said yes. Then he asked if he could cash a check here. I told him he could. He got up, tilted the chair against the edge of the table, to reserve it, and followed me to the cage. I told the cashier that Marquitos wanted to cash a check. I introduced Marquitos and stepped away. Marquitos said two or three words to the cashier, leaned over the counter, filled out the check, and handed it to him. The cashier gave him ten green rectangles. Marquitos put them in his hip pocket, then looked at me and shook his head, indicating that I should follow him. We went back to the table, and he told me to sit down. His tone made it more like an order. He stood to my right. Then he dropped three green rectangles on the felt in front of me. I looked up and saw that he was staring at the table with a malevolent smirk, but his left leg was shaking, his heel tapping against the floor.

I asked him what he wanted me to play.

I don’t have any preference whatsoever, he said.

So I put the first rectangle on punto, and it turned out punto. I left the two rectangles on punto and they gave me back four. Marquitos leaned in and asked me if I saw how easy it was, and then he picked up the six green rectangles and put them in his pocket. Then he walked away from the table. I got up, tilted the chair to reserve it, and followed him. He was walking toward the cage. I caught up to him halfway there and asked what he was doing.

Cashing in, said Marquitos. He reached the cage, asked for his check back, and gave them ten green rectangles. Then he exchanged the last three rectangles for three ten-thousand-peso bills. He put away the check and handed me the bills.

These are yours, he said.

I took the bills and put them in my pocket. I asked Marquitos if he wanted to wait for me or if he was leaving, and he said he was leaving. I walked him out to the top of the stairs and watched him as he walked down. Then I shouted for him to hurry the mortgage along, and I went back to the table. A guy was sitting in the chair I had reserved, and I tapped him on his right shoulder with the tips of my fingers and he got up. I didn’t play a cent until my turn as the banco came around, and just as I was going to bet the first ten thousand on banco, the game ended. So I went home and went to sleep.

The thirty thousand from Marcos lasted me about eight days, so around the fifteenth I was tapped out. I had defended it well, but in the end they took it. I didn’t even manage to buy Delicia her primer, but we had plenty to eat, and every couple of days I would go to the central market and pick up two or three kilos of the late-season grapes, which are sweet and hard, and are even better because there won’t be any more until the next year. I picked at the bunches on the way home from the market and then put them in the freezer. Then I would shut myself in the study. On the fifteenth, at five in the afternoon, I finished my seventh essay. I decided to call Carlitos Tomatis and read it to him.

Then I decided to wait two or three more days, but on the seventeenth it was Tomatis who called me, asking if I had gotten the money for the mortgage yet. I told him firemen could show up and tear the house apart and they wouldn’t find a single cent in it. And that the mortgage would be paid out soon, on April fifth. Tomatis said that was a shame, and he was about to hang up when I told him I had finished my essay on Sivana and I wanted to read it to him.

One of these nights I’ll come by your house, then, Sergio, said Tomatis.

I’m almost never home at night, I said. The afternoons work for me.

He said that sounded perfect, that he would come by and see me some afternoon soon, and he hung up. I stayed at my desk until after dark, then I opened the window wide and turned off the light. I sat in the dark for hours, until Delicia knocked on the door and told me to come eat.

Between the fifteenth and the fifth of April I only went to the club twice, first the night of March twenty-second, after I sold my typewriter. I made a clean copy of my essay on Sivana, and then I went out and sold it. I had used the typewriter seven times in the last three or four years, once each time I finished an essay and typed it up. I would make three copies and file them in a red folder, which I had specially printed for law school. The folder had letterhead printed on the inside, on the right. It said, Mr. Sergio Escalante, Attorney. They gave me eighteen thousand for the typewriter, and it lasted two nights. After that there was nothing left to sell. We ate like birds, if at all. I spent hours at my desk, going over my comic book collection. Delicia would come in at five with the mate. Five on the dot. I don’t know how she managed to tell the time, because apart from my watch, which was always on my wrist, there wasn’t anything else in the house that did. I didn’t need to look at the time to know it was five when she would knock and then come in with the aluminum kettle and the mate gourd with its silver base. I knew it was exactly five. She didn’t show up a minute before or a minute after. No, she showed up at five exactly. I had once asked her to bring me a mate around five, that I liked to have some bitters around that time. And ever since then she had never gone one day without knocking on the door at five. By the twenty-fourth I didn’t have a cent left, so on the twenty-fifth I sold the watch. I didn’t even get a thousand pesos for it. With a few coins that I found at the bottom of a drawer in my wife’s bureau, which I hadn’t opened since the day she ate rat poison and fell down the stairs, I put together a thousand pesos, which I exchanged for two silver-plated circles that I lost immediately. After that, between March twenty-fourth and April fifth, the autumn came.

It came with a lot of water, but you couldn’t call it cold. It wasn’t cold until May. On the twenty-eighth I went to the estate agency to sign a bunch of papers, and the employee assured me that on the fifth I would have the check for half a million. When I got back home it was the afternoon, and I found Delicia in the kitchen eating some water crackers with minced meat. She scooped some on a cracker and offered it to me, but I said I wasn’t hungry, and I went to the study. After dark I went out to the kitchen. I asked Delicia if there was anything to eat, and she said no. Then I asked if she was hungry. She said she wasn’t. I thought for a while, and then I told her I was going to teach her something new. That for a few days we were going to do without the reading and writing lessons so we could learn something else (Delicia had learned quickly at first, but then she slowed down so much that I realized she had lost interest completely). I asked if that was alright, and she said yes. So I went to my desk, took out five French decks, and a few sheets of paper, and a pencil, and I went back to the kitchen.

She learned quickly. The hardest thing to teach her was how, after nine, the count fell back to zero and you started over. Everything else was simple. At first we kept track of our bets out loud, for low sums, but the amounts kept increasing and getting more complicated, so I started to keep track of them on sheet of paper. Delicia didn’t watch me write. She just waited for the next hand to come together, and she was fine with whatever I decided the bet would be. After the hand, I would write. I wouldn’t write down the partial amounts, one under the other, and then add them up. Instead, I would add them up mentally, cross out the previous number, and then write the new number below it, greater or less the amount of the bet Delicia or I had made, depending on whether we had won or lost. So there were two columns of crossed-out figures along a thin strip of the page that always ended in a legible figure. After every hand, this figure was crossed out, and a new amount would appear below it. We played so many hands the first night that Delicia and I filled up both sides of the page with columns of crossed-out numbers. After that we abandoned the betting and just guessed.

We would take turns guessing. If you guessed right, you kept going. When you guessed wrong, it was the other person’s turn. Delicia never guessed wrong. Seeing her predict every hand so naturally, predict even the sum that would win, and once even the suit of the card that would win the hand, and once the actual cards that would be dealt, I remembered Marcos and I decided that it was necessary to be outside the game in order to see it clearly and predict it. But the gambler couldn’t be outside. He couldn’t make bets that were both infallible and casual. He had to submit to a continuous exercise, from start to finish, without the possibility of finding distance through occasional dissociations. A distancing could work for an isolated hand, which in the larger game or over the course of the life of the gambler meant nothing. To always guess right you had to be always outside. But of course to always guess right meant always playing, and the person who always played couldn’t, because of the rhythm of the game, be outside. It was a circle, though the gambler would tend to think of it as a spiral. But no, not a chance. It’s not a spiral but a circle.

Finally it was April fifth. I got to the estate agency at eight in the morning and was signing papers until after eleven. The employee would offer me coffee every so often. I would say no. The agency’s office, on the fifth floor, looked out over the city, toward the river. Each time I finished signing a group of papers, I would approach the windows and look out at the city. Except for half a dozen buildings that were more than five stories tall, everything was squat. But there was a kind of harmony in all those red-shingled roofs, where the rain endlessly washed countless abandoned objects that had been ravaged by the weather, and between which, every so often, a tiny woman could be seen walking. Beyond these were the port, with its two parallel jetties, and then the river and all the interconnected streams that formed low islands between them. The rain erased the horizon.

At quarter of twelve they called me into the administrator’s office one last time and gave me the check. It had my name on it, and below that it said Five Hundred Thousand Pesos. The figure was also written in the upper right corner of the paper, but in numbers. I folded the check, tucked it into the pocket of my raincoat, said goodbye to the agents, and went out into the corridor. When I got out of the elevator on the first floor and began walking toward San Martín, I realized that the banks must have closed by then. I went home and put the check in the tea tin Delicia had given me. I shut myself in the study and didn’t come out until after dark. When Delicia brought me my mate, I was marking up frames in Blondie. Then I picked up a pencil and wrote, in slow, neat letters, They say that comedy is superficial because it shrouds the features of the tragedy. But in the thing itself there is no tragedy; there is only comedy, insofar as reality itself is superficial. Tragedy is an illusion. That sounded perfect at first, but when I read it again it’s meaning had disappeared. I opened the desk drawer and took out the tin. The check was still there. I spread it out over the page and looked at it for a while. I compared the writing on it to my own. Suddenly, I felt strange. That piece of paper was worth half a million pesos. The next day, I would go to the bank and they would take the check and give me a stack of papers of different colors, some resembling each other, that were also worth half a million pesos. That night I could exchange the paper from the bank for green rectangles and yellow ovals and red rectangles and silver-plated circles. All those geometric shapes would also be worth half a million pesos. But their sphere of influence would be limited. The chips only had value at the gaming table, the check at the Banco Provincial, and the money itself in the country. It’s necessary to believe in certain symbols for them to have value. And to believe in them you have to be inside their sphere of influence. You can’t believe in them from the outside. A bank teller would scoff and think I was crazy if I brought him the silver-plated circles and yellow ovals to exchange for cash. We imagine that those closed circles, as they trace the perimeter of their sphere of influence, could somehow intersect, but in reality they never touch. When I went out, I found Delicia in the kitchen. She said she had asked for credit from the grocer, in my name, and that they had given it to her. We ate steak and potatoes. Then we played baccarat until the next morning.

For four days, the check stayed in the tea tin, but on April ninth, around two in the afternoon, Tomatis showed up. He said he had come to hear my essay on Sivana. When I finished reading it he said it was good, but that I was poisoned by Trotskyism, and I said I couldn’t be poisoned by Trotskyism because I was a Peronist, not a Trotskyite, but then I realized that he had said that just to say something, that he hadn’t even been listening while I read the essay. I knew that he had been thinking about something else, and when he spoke I knew what.

He asked me if I had charged the mortgage, and I told him I had, and then he asked me to loan him twenty-five thousand pesos. I let out a dry laugh, opened the tea tin, and showed him the check. Tomatis looked at it, and his eyes got round like twenty-five peso coins. Then he whistled.

Besides that, I said, there’s not a cent in the house.

He shrugged.

You could have listened to the reading at least, I said.

He said he had listened.

You didn’t listen, I said.

I listened in parts, said Tomatis.

Not even in parts, I said. While I read you were thinking about how you were going to ask for the twenty-five thousand.

There could be some truth in that, said Tomatis.

I laughed, and so did he. Then he said he wasn’t in the mood to hear anything unless it was that special snap of ten-thousand-peso bills. Because they have a distinctive pop, different from the rest, don’t they? he said. Also, he added, they give off a glow. It’s like they’re surrounded by a halo. They emit their own light. Wherever they go, that luster follows.

The overflow of the sign’s significance, I said.

Indeed, said Tomatis.

We cracked up laughing.

But there’s still a problem, said Tomatis. How do I go about getting familiar with my twentieth of that check?

I’ll cash it tomorrow, I said.

So at ten in the morning I took the check from the tea tin and changed it at the bank. They gave me fifty ten-thousand-peso bills, which I put in the tea tin. At five exactly, and I know it was five because Delicia came in the study with the kettle and the mate, Tomatis arrived. It was raining. Since Tomatis didn’t have change, I had to give him thirty thousand. He said he would pay me back at the end of the month, when he got back from Buenos Aires, where he was working on a screenplay. I said I didn’t want it back, but that at some point in the future, I didn’t know when, be ready for me to come asking for it.

I don’t want excuses when that time comes, I said. If I’m asking for the money it’s because I don’t have a single cent left.

It’s a deal, said Tomatis.

Then it was quiet for a minute.

I’m ready to listen to that essay now, he said.

You lost your chance already, I said. I read it and you weren’t listening.

After Carlitos Tomatis left, I went out and called Marcos.

I got the check, I said. How can I get those thirty thousand back to you?

I didn’t give them to you so I could have them back, said Marquitos.

I didn’t ask you why you gave it to me, but how I can get it back to you, I said.

I can wait as long as you want, said Marquitos. I don’t need the money.

Should I come by your house tonight and drop it off? I said.

That’s not necessary, said Marquitos. I’ll see you soon, in any case.

I told him the sooner the better, and I hung up. Then I called Delicia into the study. I took out six ten-thousand-peso bills and held them out.

Here’s the fifty-four thousand you gave me, plus three for March, and three in advance for April, which makes sixty, I said.

Delicia said to keep them in the tea tin. I took the rest of the bills from the tin, then I put the tin in the top drawer of the desk.

It’s not locked, I said. Whenever you want to take it, any time, day or night, it’s here.

Then I put the rest of the money in the second drawer. It was already dark out. And it was still raining. Later, we ate. When I left the house, it was after ten. I had two ten-thousand-peso bills in my pocket. The night was blurred by the rain. I got to the club and walked slowly up the stairs, and as I reached the table I realized that the game hadn’t started yet. Several chairs were open, so I went to the cage and got two yellow ovals and ten red rectangles, then I sat down to the right of one of the workers. I stacked the chips on the felt, in front of me, and asked for notepaper. Just as the worker was handing it to me, two other workers at the table started shuffling the five decks of cards on the felt. Their hands moved randomly, in vague circles, and they took care to shuffle the decks. The two-hundred-sixty striped versos, themselves meaningless, were mixed up under the workers’ hands. Then they started making the short piles. Finally, they stacked them into a single pile, and the worker handed me a joker to cut the deck. So, I had to make the first decision blind. I ran the edge of the joker down the pike and then inserted it. The worker reversed the order of the two sections of the deck, divided where I had inserted the joker, by putting the top under the bottom. Then he put the deck in the dealer’s shoe and the game began.

The first hand, I didn’t play anything. It turned out punto. I didn’t play the second hand either, and punto took it again. The third hand, therefore, I played punto. There was a push at eight, and then it turned out punto. I had put in a yellow oval, and they gave me back two. I put them on punto again and won again. Instead of the two yellow ovals, they gave me back two large green rectangles. I waited a hand and it turned out banco. So I put one of the two green rectangles on banco and it turned out banco. I left the two rectangles on banco and got back four. I waited a hand, which turned out punto. Then I put two green rectangles on punto, and punto took it. I left the four on punto, and punto took it again. They gave me eight green rectangles.

I waited. I felt the way Christ must have felt when he walked on water. Just like that. When he walked on water, he understood he was the son of God. But he contradicted his laws. And because of this he was at odds with God. He was God too, but I was only Sergio Escalante, attorney. I could walk on water without God begetting me. Over the expectant surface. In my case, it was just an accident: the waters chose to not swallow me. But we refer to those exceptional accidents as miracles. And we are filled up with awe and rapture.

So I waited, and while I waited, it turned out banco. So I put three green rectangles on banco, and it turned out banco. I left the six on banco, and it turned out banco. They gave me six more and I waited. Banco took it again. I hadn’t lost, but it was a bad sign, a fracture in the surface of the water that I had to watch not to step in.

During the hands I waited the game got mixed up and progressed without any order at all. Then a game favoring the banco began to take shape, and when I saw that it was holding up, I played thirty thousand on banco and it turned out banco. I left the sixty and it turned out banco again.

While they were giving me the twelve green rectangles, which had the number stamped in gold in the center, I decided that at the next hand the game would shift, and I put five green rectangles on punto. And punto took it. They gave me back ten. I left five on punto, and they gave me back ten again. My pile of green rectangles and yellow ovals was so big that when I stretched my hands over them, with my fingers separated, I couldn’t cover them all.

Now three hands will turn out punto, I thought, then two bancos. I’m going to play five chips per hand, and after the fifth I’ll get up.

I won the first three hands on punto, and on the fourth I played the banco. The dealer turned the cards over on the table, and they showed that I had nine. I thought that the banco probably had a nine too. The banco turned his cards over and showed an eight and an ace. After the push, it turned out banco, and then to banco again. Now the whole circle of players was looking at my pile of green and yellow chips. I started gathering them up, and when I had the pile ready, I got up. I was walking toward the cage, with my pockets full of chips and even more in my hands, when I saw a guy standing next to me suddenly turn his head toward the stairs. I turned around. Then I saw that the police had come in.

There were more than twenty, and three or four had machine guns. They surrounded the table and told everyone not to move. A photographer jumped out from behind one that seemed to be the captain and took two pictures, the flashes bursting, one, then the next. Then they lined us up against a wall and called us over one at a time. When it was my turn, they took every last chip and wrote down my name and address. Then they sent me back to the wall.

When I got back, one of the workers was talking to a group of gamblers. He was saying that he would rather walk around with a chicken spider in his pocket than with a promise from the cops. Then they made us go down the stairs single file and put us in a van that was waiting by the entrance to the club. Less than half of the players made it in. The rest waited in the club. They took us to the police station and put us in a room with high ceilings and a wood floor. A guy was typing out a list with our names and addresses. When it was my turn, the guy asked if I wanted to leave anything in the depository. I said I didn’t.

When the last two groups of players came, they made them line up and they took their names and addresses. Then they started dividing us up among the stations. I was sent to the neighborhood precinct with four other guys. One was a fat guy with a single tooth, a manager at the Copacabana cabaret. Another was one of the dealers, a guy who didn’t say a word. The third was a guy who sold typewriters. The fourth, I don’t even remember anymore. We got to the station around daybreak, and they distributed us all over the building because we were supposed to be sequestered.

The guard who locked me in said to knock on the bars if I needed anything. The door to the cell looked out onto a courtyard where there was a water pump. Beyond the wall, I could make out the bare vines on the house next door. The top of the wall was lined with broken bottles. When the guard left, I threw myself on the cement floor and fell asleep. I woke up because someone was shaking me. It was a guard, but a different one from before. He wore glasses. He said that a family member was there to see me and was asking if I needed anything. I told him I would be right out. I followed him to the courtyard. I looked toward the waiting area at the front of the building, but I didn’t see any familiar faces. Then the guard came back and in a very low voice told me to wait a moment. I went back to the cell. The bars were open. Then the guard returned and told me to follow him.

I followed the guard through the waiting area and then into an office. An official was sitting behind the desk. He told me someone had come to see me and even though it was prohibited, they were going to let me speak to the visitor for a few minutes. He reminded me that I was meant to be sequestered, so I shouldn’t tell anyone that they had allowed it. He called me counselor, so I assumed he must have known me from somewhere. They took me to another room, and Marquitos was there, sitting behind a table, where there was a folded blanket and a packaged wrapped in butcher paper. Marquitos shook my hand and asked me how I was.

Locked up, I said.

He said there was a cold chicken in the package and that he was trying to get me out. I asked him what day it was.

Saturday, he said.

I told him not to bother, that there was nothing to do until Monday, and to tell Delicia.

Don’t tell her I’m in prison, I said.

Don’t you think that was a stupid reason to get locked up? said Marquitos.

I told him that any reason for getting locked up was stupid. That if he refrained from sermonizing it would make being locked up more tolerable. Marquitos said I looked awful.

I lost my luck at baccarat, some time ago, I said.

I have to admit I don’t understand anything about your life, said Marquitos.

I thanked him for the blanket.

Tonight, at the end of the shift, I’ll come back to see how things are getting along, said Marquitos.

I picked up the packet wrapped in butcher paper and turned toward the door. I stopped and turned around.

I sincerely regret my inability to allow you the pleasure of taking my place, I said, and then I left.

When I opened the blanket over the concrete floor, a book fell out. I picked it up and saw that it was Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. I left the blanket and the package and sat down near the door to read it. When it got dark, a light came on. It started getting cold, so I wrapped myself up in the blanket and sat down in a corner, near the light. At around eight, I had finished the book. It talked a lot about greed, ambition, weakness, the Russians, the French, the British. It even talked about gamblers. But it didn’t have anything to say about the game. It seemed like he thought discussing it would be a waste of time. Or, like my grandfather, that he was a man of a different generation. The last page seemed to me like the best in the book. Then the light was shut off. When the guard came by I asked what time it was, and he said it was ten. Then he said someone had come to see me. I told him to say I couldn’t be woken up. Over night, I woke up several times, freezing. When I opened my eyes the next day, it wasn’t raining, and the sun was coming out. It was going to be a pleasant day. I saw the package wrapped in butcher paper on the floor. I pulled off a drumstick and started eating it. Then I knocked on the bars, and when the guard came I said I had to use the bathroom. It was the same guard from the morning before. He asked me how I had passed the night, and I said I had passed it sleeping. Before nine, Marcos arrived. They made me go to the same room as before, where he was waiting. On the table there was another package wrapped in butcher paper and an orange thermos. He asked how I had slept. Sitting up, I said.

I let the girl know, said Marcos. There’s café con leche in that thermos.

What did she say? I said.

Nothing, said Marquitos. I asked if she needed anything, and she said no, that she was fine.

She always says she’s fine, I said.

Yes, he said. She seems to be one of those people.

Then I told him to stop bringing food, that the chicken would be more than enough.

Don’t you want to shave, said Marquitos.

No, I said.

In any case, you won’t be offended if I come back this afternoon to see how things are going, right? said Marquitos.

Absolutely, I said. Speaking of which, if you come back, could you bring me two or three comic books? El Tony, if possible. And, if you could, a notebook, or something like that, and a pencil.

Sure, said Marquitos. El Tony, right?

That’s right. El Tony, I said.

Then Marquitos left, and I went back to my cell. I poured myself two cups of café con leche and then I closed the thermos. Out of curiosity I opened the second package and saw that it was full of rolls. I wrapped them back up and left the package on the floor, next to the chicken. Then I sat down next to the door and looked out at the morning sun.

Well, the two circles had touched. While I was doubling my green rectangles, they were talking on the phone, were getting ready, were picking up their machine guns, were leaving the station, were getting in their cars, were approaching the club. They were getting out of their cars, going up the stairs, and entering the gaming hall. Just then I was standing up. I had just won the last hand to banco, the next-to-last, also to banco, there had been a push, and three hands to punto. I could trace the internal course of each sphere, backward, and see how they coincided, despite there being no connection between them. By the time they arrived, the raid had already happened. But it had already happened for them, not for us. I had won all the small bets, of ten, of twenty, of fifty thousand. But the biggest bet, the one that wiped it all away, I lost. That was the hand being played that night, and I bet blind against it. And I lost. For a moment, they pierced the surface of my circle, passed through like a strong wind, but that was enough for me to lose everything.

Marcos came at two with the comics, the notebook, and the pencil, and I told him not to come back. I read the comics, but I didn’t use the pencil or the notebook.

They let me go the next day, as it was getting dark, after I gave a statement to a judge’s secretary. The secretary knew me, and he said he was going to see if he could take care of things. He also said we were all human.

Some more than others, I said.

Probably, yes, said the secretary. When a guy doesn’t know how else to bust his neighbor’s balls, recommend police work. Don’t worry, counselor, everything here is done with the utmost discretion.

I asked him why discretion was necessary.

He looked at me, but didn’t say anything. I didn’t look away. When we left the station, the manager from the cabaret shook my hand and told me to come see him some night, for a drink. I told him I didn’t drink.

I found Delicia in the kitchen, with her notebook open. She had started drawing the letter A again. I told her I had been in prison, and that I hadn’t washed my face in three days. Then I went up to the bathroom, shaved, and took a shower. While I was shaving, I had a chance to look at myself in the mirror. Yes, I was much thinner, and my beard was going gray. But to myself I was always the same. Other people noticed the changes, after they happened. I was getting old, sure. It would happen again, completely, until I disappeared. Another guy looking for something solid would feel that sudden blackout and disappear when he’d only just glimpsed the possibility of finding his way to it. I could live thirty, forty, fifty more years. It made no difference. I had reached the point where it was clear that the territory I hoped to map out was utterly indecipherable. From the outside, I was passing like a meteor, casting off a green tail that was extinguished just as it was igniting. A blackout, and everything would be dark. Quick spark, then darkness. I stared at myself in the mirror. That’s me, I said. That’s me. Me.

Then I undressed and got in the shower. When I went back down, Delicia was making dinner. We were just sitting down when the doorbell rang. It was Marquitos. I told him to eat something and he started peeling an orange. He asked how I was doing.

Are you really that worried? I said.

Terribly, he said.

Okay. Don’t be, I said.

There’s something self-destructive in all this, Sergio, said Marcos. I’m honestly worried.

There’s no alcohol, I said. I can offer you coffee.

I’ll take it, said Marquitos.

We went to the study, where I had left the comics that Marquitos had brought to the station. I pushed them aside and sat down. Marquitos sat on a sofa.

There’s your blanket and the rest of your whatnots, I said.

After we drank the coffee, he said he wanted to take a drive. I went along. We got in the sky blue car, turned toward the city center, then onto San Martín, drove around the Plaza de Mayo, passing in front of the government buildings and the courthouse, and then turned back onto San Martín, this time to the north. We passed by the corridors of the arcade, and at the corner turned toward the bus station. The post office was ahead, all lit up. Then we took the harbor road, where the palms glowed in the light of the streetlamps, and we reached the suspension bridge. We stopped on the waterfront. We got out and leaned on the cement wall and looked out at the river.

It must be two years since I’ve been here, I said.

Sergio, said Marcos. You’re not even twenty blocks away.

It’s true, I said. But I haven’t come.

I realized he was staring at me.

There’s something — something heroic in this, said Marquitos.

Don’t mythologize, I said.

And something — something. ., said Marquitos.

Stupid, I said.

No. Not that, said Marquitos. Something—

Absurd, I said.

No, he said. Insane.

A swath of light shone on the river, dividing it. A yellowish, jagged band, with black water on both sides. But the water is never the same, Marquitos said when I showed it to him. Neither is the reflection, therefore.

It’s true, I said.

He took me back up the avenue. On 25 de Mayo we turned south, and on the round Banco Municipal clock, in roman numerals, I saw that it was twelve twenty-five. We turned on Primera Junta, passing in front of the building that housed the offices of the estate agency. The clock at the Casa Escassany showed twelve thirty when we passed. When we got to my door I got out and told Marquitos to wait a minute. I went to my desk, opened the second drawer, and took out three ten-thousand-peso bills. I took them to Marquitos and handed them through the window. He took them, saying that he didn’t need them. Then he said he missed Rey.

Chiche was always a thug, I said.

No, said Marcos. It’s something else.

He always needed forgiving for everything, I said.

Who doesn’t? said Marcos.

I wondered if that was an allusion to me. Then he turned on the engine and left. After I got in bed I remembered that I had seen a strip of light at the bottom of the door to the kitchen. I got dressed and went downstairs. When I opened the door I saw Delicia with five decks of cards on the table. Next to the decks there was a disorganized pile of cards, face up. Delicia was drawing them four at a time, in pairs, then she would turn over the first two and see the value.

Two days later I learned that there was a dice game outside of town. It was a clandestine game. I got a telephone call from the worker at the club who never spoke. He gave me the address and said the game started at ten. I would go two or three times a week and always lost. Never very large sums. Twenty, thirty thousand. My heart would start beating hard whenever I picked up the shaker and started to turn it over. Chaos was knocking against the leather sides, I knew, and it was chaos that rolled across the green felt in the shape of those two small cubes. Then the chaos would settle for a moment into a fleeting motionlessness, and then the hands of the worker, who never spoke, erased that moment when he gathered up the dice. It was like an insane force screaming suddenly and then returning to a vague sound. I thought about the dice when I looked at the clouds. They took on shapes that lasted a second, and then, suddenly, with an apparent slowness that confused the eye, they changed. I always lost. On April twenty-third, at midnight, in the rain, I took a taxi from the club, went home, and took out three ten-thousand-peso bills. I had already lost three. I went back in the same taxi. The city, through the windows of the taxi, dripping water, dissolved into a mass of gleaming patches. By April twenty-eighth, I had a hundred thousand pesos left, besides the sixty I was keeping for Delicia in the tea tin. On the twenty-ninth, at three in the afternoon, the club worker called me on the phone. He said that on May second there would be a clandestine baccarat game.

I asked if he was inviting me.

I am inviting you counselor, said the worker. But it’s a large game. Five people are coming in for it. With you it’ll be six.

I said I would go. But he didn’t hang up.

Then he said, I should tell you, counselor, that to play you’ll have to stake a hundred thousand.

How much? I said.

A hundred thousand, said the worker.

A hundred thousand? I said. Who’s going to stake the banco, Rockefeller?

The worker laughed.

Those are the conditions, counselor, he said. I’m very sorry, but those are my orders.

Give me the address, I said.

I can’t give it out over the phone, counselor, said the worker.

Come to my house, then, I said.

He arrived half an hour later and gave me the address. I told him to stay for coffee, and he sat down in an armchair in the study. It was two guys from the Rosario wholesale market, who were coming in specially for the game: one was called Capúa and the other Méndez. Then he named three others, from Esperanza. It’s a no-limit game, said the worker. The bets are for millions of pesos.

I asked about a guarantee as regards the police, and he said that without guarantees they wouldn’t have the game. But that in any case he would call me on the second to confirm. Then he was gone. He left an odor of cologne that I wouldn’t get rid of for the rest of the afternoon and the next day. Even after I opened the window it was still there. It felt like the whole house was saturated with it. I watched the rain through the window until Delicia brought me the mate. She had on one of my wife’s sweaters. It was fitting well now. She asked if I wasn’t planning to shave, and I said that it was possible that one of these days I would shave. Then she went to leave, and I said she should stay. She asked what for.

Just because I want you to stay, I said.

She stared at me and I had to look away. Then I started talking.

Delicia, I said. You know that gambling is my obsession. That if I can’t gamble, I can’t live. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but that’s how it is. I’ve been invited to a large baccarat game. With any luck, I could win millions of pesos. I have a few systems, and if they’re not perfect, my odds are as good as anyone else’s. It all depends on luck. So, from what I got with the mortgage, the last of what I have, there’s only a hundred thousand left. Unfortunately, to play in this game you have to stake at least a hundred thousand. That means I can’t show up with less than a hundred thousand, but it also means that if a hundred thousand is the minimum, that amount is just enough to get started. I think I need to take a hundred and fifty, or more. At best, anything I could get together from now till the second. And all I can get together between today and the second is the hundred thousand left from the mortgage. There’s also the sixty thousand in the tea tin. That’s yours. You don’t have any obligation to me. I want to borrow them from you. To be honest, if I lose them, it’s going to be very difficult to get them back. Impossible, practically. Here’s what could happen: they could take the house, sell it, and give me what’s left over. But before that could happen, lots of time will go by. Under those conditions, would you want to loan me the sixty thousand? Again, it would be pretty difficult to get them back to you if I lost.

I told you to keep it and use whatever you needed, said Delicia.

I stood up and kissed her forehead.

Little angel, I said. God love you.

So I waited for May second. It rained every day but the first of the month. And on the first, at around nine at night, it started again. I kept busy writing my eighth essay, Chic Young: A Modern Hero. I drew mostly from Blondie, but used a lot of material from Colonel Potterby and the Duchess as well. My thesis was that, bearing in mind the observations he had made about the daily life of the middle class, anyone else would have committed suicide, or at least would have chosen an easier form, the tragedy. As an epigraph I used what I had written a few days before about comedy and tragedy. I spent all of May first writing out a clean copy, and by the time it was dark out I felt euphoric. I asked Delicia if she wanted to eat out, and she said that was stupid, that it was raining and we could eat just as well in the kitchen, as usual, without taking the table into the courtyard. I was about to say that I hadn’t meant it like that, but it didn’t seem worth it. In any event, she was right.

After dinner I helped wash the dishes. When we finished, I took out the five decks of cards, shuffled them, wrote Delicia’s name and mine in the upper corner of a clean sheet of paper and separated them with a vertical line. For the rest of the night we guessed hands, and so accurately that long stretches of time would pass before we changed turns. Next thing we knew, it was morning, and we went to bed.

The next day I was woken up by knocking at the door. Delicia said there was someone asking for me. I guessed it was the worker from the game. I told her to have him wait in the study. I got dressed, washed my face, and went down. In the study I saw a fat man with gray-streaked hair. He had his back to me, and the skin on his neck was dark. When he heard me come in he turned. It was el Negro Lencina. For a second we just stared at each other.

You’ve gained weight, Negro, I said.

We shook hands.

Luisito killed his wife, said el Negro.

I sat down at the desk and offered him a seat on the leather couch. Then I asked if he wanted coffee, and he said no.

Alright, I said, looking at him. Luisito killed his wife. But Luisito who?

Luisito, said el Negro. Luisito Fiore.

Fiore? I said. When?

Last night, said el Negro, in Barrio Roma. Pumped two shots in her head. He’s totally crazy.

I insisted that he have coffee, and finally he agreed. I shouted to Delicia to bring some coffee. Then I sat back down behind the desk.

Two shots, I said. In the head.

In the head, right, said el Negro. He put two rounds in her head.

Thanks for coming to tell me, I said.

I didn’t just come to tell you, said el Negro. I came so you would defend him.

I don’t practice any more, I said.

I can see that, said el Negro.

Was he still in the union? I said.

He wasn’t, said el Negro. He worked at the mill, but he wasn’t in the union.

That’s too bad, I said.

I knew it would end up like this, said el Negro. I knew. I told him.

He stood up and turned toward the window. A gray light came from the street. Then el Negro turned toward me.

I told him. Always, he said.

I told him to calm down.

He sat back down on the leather sofa. It groaned under his tense, dark body. For a moment he looked so vigorous that I asked myself what the hell he was feeding himself. His eyes were wide open and his graying hair was starting to look distinguished. There was a time when, after a couple of drinks, el Negro would pick up an accordion or sit down at the piano.

Do you still play the accordion and the piano? I said.

Sometimes, said el Negro. He looked at me severely. You used to defend the workers, he said.

Yes, I used to, I said.

They’ve told me you live off gambling, said el Negro.

Just the opposite, I said.

Then I asked him to tell me about Fiore. He said that he had gone hunting in Colastiné Norte with his wife and their girl. In the truck from the mill. That on the way back they stopped at a bar. There was an argument, and when they were leaving he shot her, twice. I asked if the argument had been violent. He said he didn’t really know. He said that he had used the shotgun.

That could actually help, I said.

They’re going to give him twenty years, at least, said el Negro.

He’ll be comfortable in prison, I said. Much more than on the outside. It’s always more comfortable in prison, in a way.

El Negro stared at me. The skin on his face was thick and taut. Two cords curved from the base of his nose, dropped to the corners of his mouth, and died at his jawline.

I never thought I would find you like this, said el Negro.

Come on, Negrito, I said. We go back. Tell me what you can, because I’m not asking out of curiosity.

I asked if Fiore and his wife got along, and he said that they fought sometimes. Normal stuff, said el Negro. I asked if he often went hunting and if the wife always came along and if he always brought the shotgun. El Negro said that it looked that way. I asked if the wife was cheating. He said it wasn’t likely and added that Fiore was a drunk. Luisito is a good kid, but I was always telling him, said el Negro. Then I asked how long Fiore had been out of the union. A long time, said el Negro. Things got bad, and worse, and finally he left completely. I asked if he had been sanctioned, and he said no.

Boozing and hunting. That’s all he did, said el Negro. Then he asked if I would defend him.

No, I said.

Just as he got up to leave, Delicia came in with the coffee. Another step and they would have collided. When he saw Delicia, el Negro hesitated.

I’m going to recommend a lawyer, I said. Someone better than me.

He didn’t move. Delicia left the coffee tray, walked out, and closed the door. I put sugar in el Negro’s coffee, stirred it, and held it out. I took mine black. El Negro drank his coffee. His skin was almost the same color as the drink. His eyes were wet.

Mr. Rosemberg, I said.

A comrade? said el Negro.

No, a friend, I said.

Can he be trusted? said el Negro.

Completely, I said.

El Negro sat back down, the coffee cup in his hand. The sofa groaned. I said I would call him, and I left the study. I dialed Marquitos’s number and a woman answered. I said it was Sergio.

Oh, said the woman. This is Clara.

Clara, I said. It’s been years since I’ve heard your voice.

Marcos isn’t here, said Clara. He went to the courthouse.

Her voice sounded hoarse.

I’ll call back later, in that case, I said.

At noon, said Clara. He will definitely be home for lunch.

Alright, I said, goodbye.

Ciao, said Clara.

We hung up. I went back to the study and found el Negro back at the window. He didn’t turn around. I approached him.

He’s sequestered, I suppose, I said.

Yes, said el Negro.

Then I asked him if he was still at the mill too. He said no, that he ran a domestic soda delivery. He said he had his own truck. I asked if he had a telephone, and he said no, but that I could call him at the corner store. I took down the number and said I would call him at one.

Things didn’t used to be like this, said el Negro, looking at me and shaking his head.

I said that, in effect, they didn’t. He asked if I was going to the wake for Fiore’s wife, and I said no. He said that he would leave me the address in any case, and if I wanted to go to the cemetery, the burial was the next day at ten in the morning.

Luisito is too hard-headed, he said at the door. I always told him.

Then he left. I followed him to the door and then I went back to the study. I stood exactly where he had stood, facing the window, looking out at the rain. The rain wasn’t the same, of course, but it was hard to tell the difference. It was the same gray sidewalk, the asphalt pavement, the tree on the opposite sidewalk covered in shining green leaves, the house behind it with the two latticework balconies and bronze railings. The rain seemed the same too.

At noon I called Marcos and explained the case. He said to tell el Negro to come by his house at three. I called the store and asked for el Negro. Ten minutes later, el Negro picked up, breathless. I gave him the message from Marquitos and the address, and then I hung up. After that I got in bed and took a nap. At five Delicia brought the mate, and at six the worker from the game called. He confirmed the address and said the game started at ten exactly. I stayed at my desk until after eight, and when I went out Delicia was setting the table. The kitchen smelled like cooking. Delicia had washed my wife’s black sweater, which was fitting her tightly now. It looked good. For the first time, I noticed how long her fingers were, and how dark. We didn’t say anything during the meal. Then I got up from the table, took the hundred-seventy-thousand pesos from the desk, and went to the game.

It was downtown, around the corner from San Martín. So I walked toward the avenue, turned at the Casa Escassany at nine forty-five, and walked three blocks north up San Martín. I passed the news ticker at the La Región building and stopped to read it, but it didn’t say anything about Fiore. I turned east on the next corner, walked a block and a half, and crossed to the opposite sidewalk. I didn’t have to look for the number because the worker was standing in the darkness, in the threshold to a house. I recognized him by the smell of the cologne. He shook my hand and told me to go in.

I don’t know why, but the room looked like a stage set. Five guys sat around a long table covered with a velvet-bordered cloth. Two chairs were still empty. In a corner, a guy was standing over a little wooden table, organizing a box of chips. Behind him, a discolored curtain covered a sort of arch. That was probably what gave me the impression of a stage. The guys at the table had stacks of chips in front of them. I sat down at a corner of the table, with my back to the curtain, and asked the cashier for a hundred thousand. He brought me ten green rectangles. I reached into my pocket for the money, but he said we would settle up at the end. Then he asked if I wanted a whiskey. I said I didn’t drink.

The worker sat down at the empty seat in the center of the table and started shuffling the cards. One of the other guys, who looked vaguely familiar, inserted the joker into the stack and the worker cut it. He separated the two halves of the deck, placed the top one below the bottom one, and then dropped the cards into the shoe. Then he opened the auction for the banco.

I offered ten thousand, and the guy who had cut offered twenty. I let him take it. Then I put twenty on punto and waited for the cards. I got a queen and a nine, both hearts. The guy turned over two black queens, and the worker passed me the four green rectangles. I left them on punto and it turned out punto again. I left the eight on punto and punto took it. I got sixteen green rectangles, and I waited. It turned out punto again, but at the next hand I was on the banco. I staked four green rectangles. The cards were dealt. I had a nine of clubs and a nine of diamonds. The punto only had six. I made three more bancos and on the fourth I passed it. The worker asked for chips, and the cashier brought him a stack of large golden plaques worth fifty thousand. I got ten of these and eight or nine green rectangles. The guy who had cut asked for two-hundred-thousand from the cashier and got four gold plaques. I kept getting distracted, fleetingly, by how familiar he looked.

He staked forty thousand on the banco, and I bet forty on punto. They dealt the hand and we pushed at six. After a push at six it’s presumed the hand will go banco, so I thought about pulling out the four ten-thousand-peso chips. But it seemed like a vulgar move, since I was up. It turned out punto.

See that? said the familiar-looking guy. He takes four hands on the banco, passes it, then he bets on punto and punto takes it.

That was all he said. And not to anyone in particular. He was thinking out loud. After that it went four more puntos, one banco, another punto, and then the banco came back to me. I made five hands and passed it. Then I played punto again and it turned out punto. No one else at the table seemed to have a cent left. They all looked like some guy who needs ten pesos for the bus. Then the familiar-looking guy stood up and whispered in the worker’s ear. The worker listened for a moment and nodded. Then he asked me if I would take a check. I said I would. Then the familiar-looking guy asked how much I would take a check for. I said any amount, as long as there were funds behind it. The guy said there were, but that it would be a little difficult to verify at that hour. He would have to call up the manager at the Banco Provincial in Rosario, get him out of bed, ask him to go to the bank and find his account book in the safe. I said I would rather believe him than waste a hundred and fifty pesos on the phone call to Rosario. With that the guy took a checkbook from the inside pocket of his jacket, sat down, and filled out a check. Then he handed it to me. I must have blushed. It was for a million. I counted out twenty gold plaques and took the check. He put two gold plaques on the banco and I took the bet.

He made six bancos and then he passed it. Two guys who were totally tapped out wrote checks to the guy who had given me the one for a million. Ten minutes later we were neck-deep in the bloodiest game I had ever played in my life. By one in the morning I didn’t have anything left but the hundred-sixty in my pocket, which I owed a hundred of, and the check for a million. So I gave back the check and the guy handed me twenty gold plaques. Then he had to give back a check for three hundred thousand that he had just gotten, and he got six gold plaques. The green rectangles had all but disappeared from the table. We used them for tips.

Soon, the chips were collecting in front of a guy dressed in gray. He had on a gold watch. Its band was too big for him, and every time he moved his arm it slid down to the back of his wrist. He was the one who had taken back the check for three hundred. He made twelve bancos in a row, then it went around the circle, and when it got back to him he made another eleven. Before I knew it, all I had was the hundred sixty in my pocket. I asked for a hundred thousand more in chips and lost them.

I leaned over to the worker and whispered that I was short forty thousand but I wanted another hundred thousand. He said he could give it to me, if and when I wrote a check, for the next day. Not only did I not have a check, I said, I didn’t have a bank account, but by the next afternoon I could get the money. Finally, he agreed. I lost that too, paid the cashier, and walked out into the street. A fine rain covered me and I started walking slowly. The rain refreshed my face. On the corner, I stopped suddenly. I had recognized the familiar-looking guy’s face. One night, as I was leaving the game, he had asked me for two hundred pesos for something to eat.

I turned around, quietly went back in, and softly crossed the dark corridor. Before I even reached the door I could already smell the worker’s cologne. As I was turning the handle and pushing the door open, I heard the worker’s voice and then laughter. When I opened the door completely I saw the full picture. They weren’t playing. No chips were out. They were all standing, bent over the center of the table, and the worker was distributing my money.

Listen, fellas, I said. You should take this show on the road, in the countryside. They all turned at once but no one budged. I walked toward them. The guy with the gold watch looked at me with a kind of half smile. The rest were mute and serious. Then the worker reached into this pocket and pulled out a pistol. But I didn’t stop. He moved to block me.

These things always end badly, counselor, he said. Every time.

I didn’t even slow down as I slapped him. I thought of hitting him with a fist, but I didn’t do it for two reasons. First, I didn’t want to hurt him. Second, if I tried to punch him and missed they would’ve beat me down until I was dead. The slap had the intended effect, and not slowing down reinforced it. The pistol fell from his hand and the others spread around the table in a semicircle. The ten-thousand-peso bills were scattered everywhere. I gathered them up calmly, counted them, and put them in my pocket. As I was leaving the worker said, These things always end badly, every time.

I slammed the door and in a second I was in the street. The rain covered me again. I walked so slowly that it took me more than half an hour to get home. I entered in the darkness and went to my desk. Then I turned on the light, opened the first drawer, took out the tea tin, and put Delicia’s sixty thousand in it. I put the tin back, dropped the other hundred thousand in the drawer, and closed it. I turned off the light and went upstairs. In the bathroom I undressed and washed my face. Then I went into my room, in the dark, and got in bed. As I was laying down I realized Delicia was there, awake, her eyes open, waiting for me. She didn’t say a word. When I touched her I realized she didn’t have anything on. She was shaking.

They cheated, Delicia, I said. They don’t gamble, they cheat instead. My grandfather knew.

Then we rolled around in bed for the rest of the night. When I woke up, it was the afternoon. I took a shower and went downstairs. Delicia was in the kitchen. She was staring hard at the brown stains in the courtyard.

There must be some way to get them out, she said.

I said I wasn’t sure there was and went to the study. I didn’t do anything. I flipped through my comic collection, but couldn’t find anything to focus on. Then I reread my essay on Chic Young. It sounded pretty insolent. At five, Delicia brought the mate. Her sixty thousand was in the first drawer, I said, in the tin. She could take them whenever she wanted. I went into the kitchen after it got dark, ate something, and then shut myself back up in the study. Before midnight, I went to bed. Delicia was there. We rolled around for an hour or so, and then I fell asleep. I woke up before dawn. Delicia was asleep. I got up, washed my face, then I went down to the kitchen and made a mate. I went to my desk and looked out at the rain until it was light out. The sky changed color. First it was blue, then it took on a greenish tint, and finally it ended up a steel gray that lasted the rest of the day. At eight I looked up Negro Lencina’s number and called him. The shopkeeper picked up and told me to hold on. For ten minutes I didn’t hear anything, until finally the shopkeeper picked up again. El Negro was at a wake, he said. That can’t be right, I said, the wake was the day before. But the shopkeeper said he gathered that it wasn’t the same wake, but another one, and then he hung up.