Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer Read Free Book Online Page B

for ten hours and was one of the first to wake up. Marina Solim set to making coffee and the sociologist smoked but did not type. Afterwards, Simónides appeared and little by little the others. We drank coffee and ate sausage sandwiches. And the music that had kept playing—and I don’t know how, because I slept like a log, but I know it had kept playing all day—the music stopped with the last crumb of food. Fineschi announced that he was going to look for the girl and there we all went again, in procession, but it was useless.”
    “She wasn’t there?” asked the Albino.
    “Yes, she was there. At first we didn’t see her. The natives had sat down or laid down wherever like always, staring fixedly at some point. It was hard to pick her out. Now she was dressed in a sack open at the sides and seated in the mud with her legs crossed, between two women and a man, so similar to them, with her eyes very open, without blinking, mute and more beautiful than before because she had become beautiful like the lords of Anandaha-A. She looked straight ahead but she didn’t see us. We called her and I was sure we were behaving like a bunch of idiots. She didn’t hear us. Simónides grabbed the sociologist and Lundgren and went to get her. I restrained Fineschi. As soon as they put their hands on her, the music started again and everyone stood up and danced, Halabi as well, and dancing they rejected the three men who backed hurriedly out of the whirl and we lost sight of her. In three days we made five more attempts. It was no use. Finally it was Fineschi, and that surprised me, who said we had to admit defeat.”
    The Albino said can’t you see she was crazy and Cirito said who knows and Trafalgar drank more coffee.
    “She wasn’t crazy,” he said. “She had returned to her home, to the circle. Look, if I think about it a lot, I have no alternative than to say yes, she went crazy. But if I remember her dancing, telling us by dancing that we should leave her in peace because she had stopped searching, resisting, studying, thinking, writing, reasoning, accumulating, and doing, I recognize with some satisfaction—a sad satisfaction, because I don’t carry that marvel in my blood—that she had crossed the kingdom from end to end and she was swimming fresh and lovely in the torrent. Simónides explained it another way and Marina Solim supported him with very concrete data. The people who danced were in fact the descendants of those who had left the ruins. Anandaha-A knew, perhaps, a yellow, hot star and a clean sky and fertile soil and they manufactured things and wrote poems long before we treated ourselves to the stegosaurus and the scaphites. Perhaps they had jewels, concerts, tractors, wars, universities, candies, sports, and plastic material. They must have traveled to other worlds. And they reached so high and so deep that when the star died, it no longer mattered to them at all. After visiting dead worlds, worlds living or to be born, after leaving their seed on a few of them, after exploring everything and knowing everything, they not only stopped caring about the death of the star, but about the rest of the universe and they had enough with the sense of the circle. They preserved nothing but the music that they danced and that was all Simónides had supposed and much more. We don’t know what more but if someone told us, we wouldn’t understand. And Veri Halabi recognized her own but the light of the perceptible game prevented her from seeing them and entering the kingdom where there is the possibility of putting out the oil lamp, and torn between the light and the nostalgic urgency of a few of her cells which bore the seal of the Argonauts of Anandaha-A, she hated them. When the light went out by force of the music and she spoke all the words of her race, those she had learned in dreams, she no longer hated them or loved them or anything. It was enough to return.”
    The Albino says they were all quiet. Even