Blow-Up by Julio Cortázar Read Free Book Online Page B

briskly at the clover hidden in my pockets which makes ephemeral lacy patterns on the carpet which they alter, remove, finish up in a minute. They eat well, quietly and correctly; until that moment I have nothing to say, I just watch them from the sofa, a useless book in my hand—I who wanted to read all of Giraudoux, Andrea, and López’s Argentine history that you keep on the lower shelf—and they eat up the clover.
    There are ten. Almost all of them white. They lift their warm heads toward the lamps in the living room, the three motionless suns of their day; they love the light because their night has neither moon nor sun nor stars nor streetlamps. They gaze at their triple sun and are content. That’s when they hop about on the carpet, into the chairs, ten tiny blotches shift like a moving constellation from one part to another, while I’d like to see them quiet, see them at my feet and being quiet—somewhat the dream of any god, Andrea, a dream the gods never see fulfilled—something quite different from wriggling in behind the portrait of Miguel de Unamuno, then off to the pale green urn, over into the dark hollow of the writing desk, alwaysfewer than ten, always six or eight and I asking myself where the two are that are missing, and what if Sara should get up for some reason, and the presidency of Rivadavia which is what I want to read in López’s history.
    Andrea, I don’t know how I stand up under it. You remember that I came to your place for some rest. It’s not my fault if I vomit a bunny from time to time, if this moving changed me inside as well—not nominalism, it’s not magic either, it’s just that things cannot alter like that all at once, sometimes things reverse themselves brutally and when you expect the slap on the right cheek—. Like that, Andrea, or some other way, but always like that.
    It’s night while I’m writing you. It’s three in the afternoon, but I’m writing you during their night. They sleep during the day. What a relief this office is! Filled with shouts, commands, Royal typewriters, vice presidents and mimeograph machines! What relief, what peace, what horror, Andrea! They’re calling me to the telephone now. It was some friends upset about my monasterial nights, Luis inviting me out for a stroll or Jorge insisting—he’s bought a ticket for me for this concert. I hardly dare to say no to them, I invent long and ineffectual stories about my poor health, I’m behind in the translations, any evasion possible. And when I get back home and am in the elevator—that stretch between the first and second floors—night after night, hopelessly, I formulate the vain hope that really it isn’t true.
    I’m doing the best I can to see that they don’t break your things. They’ve nibbled away a little at the books on the lowest shelf, you’ll find the backs repasted, which I did so that Sara wouldn’t notice it. That lamp with the porcelain belly full of butterflies and old cowboys, do you like that very much? The crack where the piece was broken out barely shows, I spent a whole night doing it with aspecial cement that they sold me in an English shop—you know the English stores have the best cements—and now I sit beside it so that one of them can’t reach it again with its paws (it’s almost lovely to see how they like to stand on their hind legs, nostalgia for that so-distant humanity, perhaps an imitation of their god walking about and looking at them darkly; besides which, you will have observed—when you were a baby, perhaps—that you can put a bunny in the corner against the wall like a punishment, and he’ll stand there, paws against the wall and very quiet, for hours and hours).
    At 5 A.M. (I slept a little stretched out on the green sofa, waking up at every velvety-soft dash, every slightest clink) I put them in the wardrobe and do the cleaning up. That way Sara always finds everything in order, although at times I’ve noticed a restrained astonishment,