Doubt

Was I leaving your house about two in the afternoon? Why had I gone there? Was that your house? Did we have a relationship? Was I going back to mine or somewhere else? Why did I have a stomach ache? Was that corpse yours?

The everyday’s deaths

I'm home alone, listening to the Beatles and roasting a chicken. Lennon was shot dead and George died of cancer. Paul and Ringo aren't residents of any cemetery yet, but their turn will come soon and, at this very moment, they aren't less dead than their friends. The chicken I'm roasting, I must say, also had a tragic death.

In that case, I'd be the only one alive in this story, but that's relative too. In a way, I'm also dead, since we're at the moment of reading and the only lucky survivor would be you, the one who's reading this.

But don't get too excited, my friend. I bet you don't know who's going to die at the end of this line.

Nobody in Norway

The fortuneteller told me that my other half lived in Norway. I cursed my bad luck: my friends found theirs in our neighbourhood with no effort at all. They came to the airport to see me off and stuffed me with yerba and Quilmes beer so as to alleviate my homesickness.

I wasted twenty years in Scandinavia but didn’t find her. I went back to my old neighbourhood, resigned to my bachelorhood and to listening to my friends complaining about how they don’t get on with their other half, doubting whether they are the ones the fortuneteller guaranteed them long time ago.

Their wives also call me, in their case to tell me how boring my friends are and how much they like adventurous men capable of going around the world to look for their other half.

They aren’t unfaithful. After all, they are the ones who are saving their marriages. Since we’ve been having these encounters my friends are happy and they hardly ever call me to have a beer, talk about football and play pool.

On words and deeds

In spite of what you are thinking, my dear reader, at this moment I’m on the beach, sunbathing, enjoying the summer and the holiday paid for by the dividends of this book. On the other hand, you’re reading and making a great effort in order to develop your intelligence, your knowledge and your literary culture. You should pay more attention to my deeds and less to my words.

Love science

As everyone knows, love is a chemical reaction. Given certain elements and a series of circumstances, particular molecules are created. When the love wheel starts turning, physics plays its part: in the same way that friction holds back a wheelbarrow, time slows down love until it finally makes it stop. Once it’s stopped, it ceases to breathe; this phenomenon is known as biological death.

A scene in the street

She’s looking at me as if she was trying to get through me. She’s coming impetuously towards me and going through my body as though one of us was a ghost. I look back and see her kissing a repugnant man. I scream, but they don’t hear me. I light a cigarette.

Intruder

I was woken up by a high-pitched and melodious voice that was coming through the window. I got dressed, opened the window and went deep into the wood where I’d spent all the years of my life.
The voice was coming from the stream. It was humming a sweet and unfamiliar melody. I approached stealthily and saw her. That was a charming and slim blond girl sitting on a log and wearing a perfectly white dress.
When she saw me, she went silent and smiled:
―Who are you? ―I asked her.
―I think I’ve got lost ―she whispered. I was in another story and I suddenly found myself in yours.

Persepus

Persepus was created especially for the purpose of this story, in a pub in Moron on the 20th of September in 1984.

Several minutes after his creation a gypsy woman came to him and said: "You will die in a few minutes". "On the very day of my birth?", complained Persepus. "Exactly", answered the gypsy calmly.

Persepus looked at me with pleading eyes and asked me if the gipsy woman was another character created by me. I said that she wasn’t, that I didn’t know her. "Oh", said Persepus and vanished.

The armless

Since I don’t have arms, as a child I didn’t play with plasticine and I didn’t draw houses. I’ve played football, but I’ve never been a goalkeeper and I’ve never performed a throw-in. My sexual life started with a woman, I can’t masturbate. I’ve never drunk nor eaten by myself. I can’t pray, ride a bike or a motorcycle. I find it impossible to play a musical instrument. The experience of cutting the nails and the sensation of putting a ring on are unfamiliar to me. I can’t put my vote into the ballot-box and I can’t expect a new government to give me the arms which life has denied me. It would be fantastic if I could write this, but I have to dictate it to my friend Juan who’s looking at me and smiling. I wink at him, as a sign of approval, a substitute for the real gesture of giving the thumbs up.
I haven’t had an accident and I wasn’t maimed, I was born like this. When my mother gave birth to me, the midwife waited for the arms to come out. My family made up for the deficiency through love, dedication and infinite patience.
I can’t do manual jobs like my dad, who’s a blacksmith, or my brother, who’s a dentist. “You’re lucky that you don’t work!”, my uncle Eduardo often says joking. I’ve learned how to do some things with feet, like using the TV remote controller. I like a programme called “Science and Technology”. It was said the other day that in the near future it would be possible to do many things without using hands, with devices which respond to acustic stimuli.
I’m looking at my friend and I ask him: “Hey, Juan, do you happen to be a device that responds to acustic stimuli?”. Juan’s laughing.

Michael Foucault

Michael Foucault was a bald guy who engaged in philosophy. The cultural supplements always published the same photo saying that he'd been a disobedient boy and a very intelligent bloke who said interesting things.
Some of his books are very well-known. I wish I'd had a second life to read them all, as well as the books written about him, to write one myself and to give conferences about Michael Foucault all around the world.
But I wasn't that lucky.
Nevertheless, I found one on sale yesterday. I bought it and I'm just about to read it.

Miricle on the underground B line

Miguel Ángel fell over while he was going up the escalator at the Carlos Pellegrini station, on the line B. Dozens of shoes squashed him, sunk into his stomach, into his neck and into his eye until Miguel screamed with pain and the horde opened up like ants when you kick an anthill.
Miguel’s left eye dislodged from its orbit and jumped about until it rolled away onto a step and down the escalator. With his right eye Miguel could see the people that he was surrounded with, who were offering him handkerchieves or running around looking for a doctor. He also saw the platform, actually he saw it again because the dislodged eye didn’t stop sending information to the brain.
The one-eyed beggar from the station saw the eye falling down the escalator. He grabbed it, put it in the patched-up pocket of his jacket and ran to the Santa Lucia hospital. There he had the eye implanted in a complicated operation which lasted five hours. In a small first aid room, Miguel had his eye replaced with a crystal one.
The beggar quickly learned how to live with two eyes; his takings dropped, but the vision of the world in three dimensions eclipsed all the difficulties. It took Miguel some time to get used to the simultaneous perception of two realities. In the course of time, he started to enjoy some situations, like watching himself while giving change to the two-eyed beggar.

Triangle

He was fond of the rain. She liked the sun. I preferred the snow.
She watched all the soap operas. He preferred football. I liked the news.
He talked only when it was necessary. She was quite talkative. I was much quieter.
She loved God above all things. He was atheist. I was agnostic.
He liked dancing in clubs. She preferred concerts. I liked movies.
She dressed scruffily on purpose. He was always impeccable. I wasn’t that stylish.

We were good friends, but she was in love with him. The problem was that he loved me. And, of course, I loved her.

My Queen

My Queen is one blue whale. She’s neat and ignorant and has all the requirements of a queen. The other day she came to my house and obliged me to kiss her feet and I, the last assistant of the last clerk on the court, told her: "Of course, my Queen!" and I kissed her fins, or whatever the thing that whales have at the end is called. But, when I insinuated something about penetration, she screamed: "You traitor of the Crown!"
She called the Vizier and the guards, but the guards and the Vizier didn’t come along. Then I continued kissing her fins until she fell asleep. We had erotic dreams, copulating wildly in the Dead Sea, heavenly orgasms in the heaving of our drenched loins.
The sun woke us up, pouring through the cracks in the curtains. My Queen ordered me to serve her breakfast and to wipe the sleep from her eyes. I wiped the sleep from her eyes, I served her breakfast and, for good measure, I rubbed her scapulas. She stood up, had a look of her nudity in the mirror, got dressed and said goodbye.

The end of the railway suicides

Fed up with railway suicides, the Government ordered the construction of trains provided with devices in the shape of a funnel which, placed in the front of the units, would suck up the suicidal ones in order to avoid impact by submerging them in an airbag. The suicidal people floated in there until they were deposited in specially equipped living quarters. When arriving at the last stop, the railway police would transport them to the Section for the Assassins of Self, where they would be taken to court, with the corresponding legal warrants, and sentenced to the electric chair.

Borges at the hairdresser’s

-Trim the ends, Ramón.
-Do you think that there’s someone who makes hair grow, your hair for example? Can everything that is written be called literature? Is all literature fantastic? Is philosophy a branch of man?
-The branch is a branch of the tree, Ramón.
-Is the tree a branch of the earth? The man of the idea? The earth of the universe? The idea of the verb? The chaos of philosophy? Is philosophy a branch of fantastic literature?
-The ends, Ramón, just the ends.

A fake story

They met in a chat room, used assumed names and sent each other fake photos. They exchanged inauthentic phrases, lied to each other about the immediate need to meet up. They met at a fake corner, kissed each others’ fake lips and wrinkled the sheets of a nonexistent hotel.
They got married with a fake wedding reception and had toy children. Their affairs were fake, with fake women and men who they met using pseudonyms.
The doctors said that they were hypochondriacs, that their illnesses were untrue. They died a fake death in a fake hospital. Their fake children brought plastic flowers to their fake funerals.

Confused

- My head is away –he said, but he didn’t realize that it was his head who was talking and that the body was away.

Happiness

I liked her eyes: I took a photo of her and wallpapered the room with her look. I liked her voice: I recorded it and now I listen to her all day and all night long. I feel so happy in my room that I haven’t left it for months.
My family begged her to come and take me out from my reclusion. Yesterday she knocked on my door, asked me to come out, to go for a walk with her. She didn’t manage to pull me away from my happiness.

Confirmation of the news

At twenty past five Roberto Giménez bought the newspaper. The newspaper said that at twenty-five past five a certain Roberto Giménez would kill, with one shot, the newsvendor who had sold him a copy of Clarín. Giménez showed the news to the newsvendor. The newsvendor looked at his watch and said: "Five minutes left." Roberto Giménez waited five minutes and proceeded.

Screams

A woman’s unbearable screams wake me up. I jump out of the bed, get dressed and go out onto the street. Wrapped up in my seven colour scarf, I go for a walk and live over the city and the noise. I pass by the shop windows, look at dresses and shoes, until the sleepiness comes back and I decide to go back home.
The frame of the scene on my doorstep is the following: there’s an ambulance, there are some doctors, policemen and neighbours. The body is surrounded by them, they touch it unashamedly, discuss with excitement. I’m trying to get closer: "What’s going on?" I’m asking. No answer. "What’s going on?." Silence. "WHAT’S GOING ON?!" I’m shouting. "THIS IS MY HOUSE!" I insist. No one answers.

Hangman Square

He hanged himself from the tree that had the best shade. That was a relatively busy square (although in that city all the squares were relatively busy). The week he hanged himself the people came closer to see the details. Nowadays no one looks at it, but we all know that he is there; there is a reason why the place is known as Hangman Square. We live in a sort of a “new city”, which is constructed according to a plan, with numbered streets and a square every five hundred meters. The houses are the same, the streets are the same. According to some, this is the reason why people commit suicide. The fact is that the suicides gave a kind of life to the city which this hadn’t had before. Stabbed Man Street, Knocked Down Man Corner, Poisoned People Square and this one, Hangman Square, rearranged the city, becoming the four new cardinal points. We, who live in the area, are really proud of our square and of our hangman. There are quite a few of us who, every now and then, leave flowers or notes next to his feet. On Saturdays, some old women come to say a prayer and cross themselves.

The life itself

After he defeated armies, conquered countries, shot the rebels and shared out the loot of war, the boy turns off the Play Station and answers the call.
There’s milk on the table going cold, the milk that a cow produced, a dairy farmer milked, a truck driver transported, a factory pasteurized and homogenized, a shop keeper sold and the boy’s mother heated up, sweetened and put the chocolate in.
-I don’t want milk, I want whisky! –the boy screams.
The mother slaps him on the face and the boy drinks it without a word.

Learning

I didn’t know what friendship was so she taught me. She told me that we should be friends because friendship, as opposed to all the other relationships, was eternal. So we were friends for many years. But I didn’t know what love was and then she taught me. She told me that we should be lovers because love, as opposed to all the other feelings, was eternal. So we were lovers for many and very happy years. But I didn’t know what suffering was and then she left me. She told me that we should keep the distance from each other because suffering, as opposed to all the other sensations, was eternal. So we suffered for the whole eternity.

Freedom is an abstract noun

- What's freedom? -asked the Colonel.
- I don't know -said the soldier.
- Kill him -said the Colonel.
- What's freedom? -asked the Colonel.
- A slice of pizza -said the soldier.
- Kill him -said the Colonel.
- What's freedom? -asked the Colonel.
- To have a Sunday off -said the soldier.
- Kill him -said the Colonel.
- What's freedom? -asked the Colonel.
No one answered.
- Why is there no answer? -asked the Colonel.
- There are no more soldiers -someone said.
- Then kill me -said the Colonel.
So they killed him.

Impossible love

“I love you”, he says. “But I don't love you”, says her. “I love you”, he insists. “But I don't love you”, insists her. “I love you”, now she says. “But I don't love you”, says him now. And so on.

Me and I

That was the last time that we were on the train together. I was going to the north. Me too.
Having realized that I was looking at me lustfully, I looked back in the same way. We were standing so close that I thought we'd kiss, but the motion of the carriage prevented that to happen.
That wasn't the normal rocking of a train. The people could feel it. Me too. So did I.
Until you could hear a deafening sound of twisting iron. I fell into the abyss and the train we were travelling in smashed me. Luckily, I managed to hold on quickly enough to avoid that terrible fall.