I know it's hard to read much text on a computer screen. And one most often has no desire or time. But a story Cortázar, and always worth the effort ..
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Andrée, I did not come to me to live in his apartment on Suipacha. Not so much for the bunnies, but because it hurts me to join a closed order, and built up the thinner air mesh, such as in your home preserves the music of the lavender, the flutter of a swan with dust, the game violin and viola in the quartet of Rara. I am bitter enter an area where someone who lives beautifully has arranged everything visible as a reiteration of his soul, here the books (back in English, one in French and English), green cushions there, at this very site of the table the glass ashtray that looks like the cut of a soap bubble, and always a perfume, a sound, growing plants, a photo of dead friend, a ritual of tea trays and tongs for sugar ...
Ah, dear Andrée, how hard to oppose, even accepting it with entire submission of the self, the minute order establishing a woman in her home light. How culpable take a metal cup and put the other end of the table, put there just because you brought your English dictionaries and is on this side, to reach where they will area. Move the cup is worth a horrible red amid unexpected modulation Ozenfant, as if suddenly the bass strings all broke down at the same time with the same terrible whipping in the quietest moment of a Mozart symphony. Move the cup game alters the relationships of the whole house, every object with another, each time 12 of its soul with the heart and soul of the house and its inhabitants away. And I can not bring the fingers to a book, just belting the cone of light from a lamp, open the music box, without a sense of outrage and defiance eyes go through me like a flock of sparrows.
You know why I came to his home to his quiet room requested noon. It all seems so natural, as long as no one knows the truth. You have gone to Paris, I stayed with the department of Suipacha street, we developed a simple and satisfactory plan of mutual co-existence until September to bring it back to Buenos Aires and I set myself to some other house where perhaps .. . But that's why I write this letter was sent because of the bunnies, I think just would learn, and because I like writing letters, and perhaps because it rains. I moved last Thursday, at five in the afternoon between fog and boredom. I have closed many bags in my life, I've spent many hours making luggage that led nowhere, which on Thursday was a day full of shadows and straps because when I see the straps of the bags is as if he saw shadows, elements of a whip that strikes me indirectly, in the most subtle and horrible. But I packed my bags, I told the maid to come to settle, and got on the elevator. Right in between the first and second floor felt was going to throw a bunny. Never had explained before, does not believe that for disloyalty, but of course one will not get to tell people that occasionally throws a bunny. As always happened to me being alone, kept the fact as many records are kept of what happens (or does one happen) in total privacy. Do not blame me, Andrée, I do not reproach. From time to time I can think of throwing a bunny.
's no reason not to live in any house, it is not a reason to be ashamed and be isolated and keeping quiet ride. When I feel I'll throw up a bunny I put two fingers in her mouth open like a clamp, and I hope to feel in your throat warm fuzz that fizz up like a fruit salt. Everything is fast and hygienic, takes place in a split second. Saco fingers in the mouth, and they bring the subject by the ears of a white bunny. The bunny seems happy bunny is a normal and perfect, albeit a small, small as a guinea but white chocolate and entirely a bunny. I put it in the palm of his hand, he raised his lint with a touch of the fingers, the bunny seems pleased to have been born and bustles and paste the muzzle against my skin, moving with that crushing silent and tingling of the mouth of a rabbit against the skin of one hand. Looking to eat and then I (I speak of when this happened in my house in the suburbs) it out with me to the balcony and put it in the big pot where clover grows the way I have sown. The bunny ears up at all, involves a sweet clover with a fast reel of the muzzle, and I know I can leave and go, go for a while a life not unlike that of many who buy their rabbits on farms.
Between the first and second floors, Andrée, as a notice what would my life at home, I knew I was going to throw a bunny. Then I was afraid (or was it strange? No, afraid of the same strangeness, perhaps) because before I left my house, just two days before, there were 14 vomited a bunny and I was sure for a month, for five weeks, perhaps six with a little luck. Look, I was perfectly solved the problem of bunnies. Clover planted on the balcony of my other house, vomited a bunny, put him in clover, and after a month, he suspected that at any moment ... then gave the rabbit and grown to Mrs. Molina, who believed in a hobby and was silent. On another pot had been growing sweet clover and supportive, I am awaiting without concern that the tickle of a fluff up my throat closed, and the new bunny repeated since that time the life and customs of the former. The customs, Andrée, are specific forms of rhythm, rhythm is the fee that helps us live. It was not so terrible once you vomit bunnies had entered the period unchanged, in the method. You want to know why all that work, why all the clover and Mrs. Molina. It would be advisable to kill the bunny then y. .. Ah, would you throw only one, take two fingers and put it in the open hand, yet acceded to you by the act itself, by ineffable aura of their proximity just broken. A month away from both, one month's size, long hair, jumps, eyes wild, Andrée absolute difference, a month is a rabbit, really makes a rabbit, but the opening minute, when the cod end conceals a warm and bustling inalienable presence ...
Like a poem in the opening minutes, the fruit of a night of Idumea, so one of yourself ... and then as not one, so isolated and distant in his letter-size plain white world. I decided, however, just kill the bunny was born. I live four months at home: four, perhaps, with luck, three-tablespoons of alcohol on the nose. (Do you know that mercy can kill instantly a bunny giving a spoonful of alcohol drinking? Their meat tastes better then, they say, but I ... Three or four tablespoons of alcohol, then the bathroom or adding a pinch to waste.) Crossing the third floor of the rabbit was moving into my open hand. Sara waited up to help me get the bags ... How do you explain that a whim, a pet shop? Bunny wrapped in my handkerchief, put it in the pocket of his overcoat, leaving his coat loose for not pressed. Barely moved. His conscience was fine ELECTED revealing important facts: that life is an upward movement with a final click, and is also a low sky, white envelope and smelling of lavender, at the bottom of a well warm. Sara
saw nothing, fascinated too the hard problem of adjusting their sense of order to my suitcase, closet, my papers and my indifference to his elaborate explanations which abounds the phrase "for example." I just locked myself in the bathroom to kill him now. Heat a thin area surrounding the tissue, the rabbit was very white and I think more beautiful than the others. I looked, only boiled and was happy, what was the most horrible way of looking at me. I locked myself in the empty cabinet and I went to unpack, confused but not unhappy, not guilty, no hand soap to remove one last convulsion. Realized I could not kill him. But that night I threw a black bunny. Two days later a white one. And on the fourth night, a gray rabbit. You have to love the beautiful wardrobe in your bedroom, with large door that opens generous empty tables waiting for my clothes. Now I have there. There. Truth
seems impossible, and Sara believe it. Because Sara unsuspecting, and not suspect anything comes from my horrid task, a task that takes my days and nights in one fell swoop and I will rake calcining inside and hardening as the starfish that has you over the bathtub and each toilet seems to fill a body of salt and sun and great scourges of rumors of depth. By day they sleep. There are ten. By day they sleep. With the door closed, the cabinet is a day-night just for them, there sleep his night with quiet obedience. I took the keys from the bedroom to my job. Sara must believe that distrust of his honesty and looks at me doubtfully, he looks every morning that is to say something, but the end is silent and I'm so happy. (When arranged the bedroom, nine to ten, make noise in the room, I put a disc of Benny Carter fills the air, and as Sara is also a friend of arrows and double leg, the closet seems quiet and perhaps it is because for the bunnies and the night passes and the rest.)
His day begins at that hour after dinner, when Sarah takes the tray with a tinkling often sugar tongs, I wish good night, yeah, I want them, Andrée, the more bitter is that I want a good night, and is locked in his room and suddenly I am alone, alone with the cabinet condemned, only my duty and my sadness. I leave out, throw agile to assault the room, smelling perennial clover that hid my pocket and now the carpet does ephemeral nails that they alter, remove, just at a time. Eat well, quiet and right, until that moment I have nothing to say, I look only from the sofa with a book in his hand useless I wanted to read me all Giraudoux, Andrée, and Lopez Argentina's history you have in the lowest shelf, "and eat the clover. Ten. Almost all white. Raise their head lamps warm the room, the three suns still out of your day, they who love the light because the night has no moon or stars and lanterns. Miran its triple sun and are happy.
So jump on the carpet, chairs, ten light spots are transferred as a constellation movent one party to another, while I still want to see them, watch them at my feet and still, "a little god's dream, Andrée, never fulfilled the dream of the gods, but not insinuating itself behind the portrait of Miguel de Unamuno, around the green vase, the black cavity desk, always less than ten, always six or eight and I walk wondering where the two missing, and if Sara got up for anything, and the Presidency of Rivadavia I wanted to read the story of Lopez. 18 Do not know how to resist, Andrée. You remember that I came to rest in his home. It is not my fault if occasionally vomiting a bunny, if this change also altered inside me-not nominalism, not magic, but that things can change so suddenly, sometimes brutally, and when things veer you expect the blow to the right. Thus, Andrée, or otherwise, but always well. I write at night. It's three in the afternoon but at night I write them. By day they sleep What a relief this office cover screams, orders, Royal machines, vice and mimeograph! What a relief, what peace, what horror, Andrée! Now they call me by phone, are friends who are concerned about my nights secluded, it is Luis who invites me to walk and Jorge that keeps me a concert.
I hardly dare to say no, prolonged and ineffective invention stories of ill health, backward translation, evasion and when I return and go up the elevator that stretch between the first and second floors me every night inevitably formulate the vain hope that is not true. I do what I can to avoid wrecking your stuff. Have eaten a little lower shelf books, you will find hidden to not notice Sara. Did you very much for your lamp with porcelain belly full of butterflies and knights of old? The barely cracked notes, worked all night with a special cement that sold me an English house, you know that the best English houses have cement-and now I am standing next to none of them reached again with the legs ( is almost beautiful to see how they like to stand up, longing for the distant man, perhaps in imitation of their god wandering and looking sullen, plus you will have noticed, in its infancy, perhaps, you can leave a rabbit in penance against the wall, standing, the legs supported and very still for hours).
At five in the morning (I slept a little, lying on the green couch and waking up to plush every race, every ting) put them in the closet and do the cleaning. So Sara is all good but sometimes I have seen some astonishment content, a stare at an object, a slight discoloration on the carpet and again the desire to ask me something, but I whistled Franck symphonic variations, so odd . To do tell, Andrée, the minutiae of that dawn hapless deaf and plant in lifting ropes that way entredormido clover, flyers, white fluff, giving me against furniture, crazy dream, and my Gide that is late, I have not translated Troyat, and my answers to a lady who will be wondering as far if ... why go all this, why keep this letter I write between mobile and interviews. Andrée, Andrée dear, my consolation is that they are ten and no more. A fortnight ago I held in the palm of your hand one last bunny, after all, only the ten with me, her day and night to grow as naciéndoles ugly and long hair, and young and full of emergency and whims, jumping on the bust of Antinous (is Antinous, right, that boy who looks blindly?) or lost in the living room, where their movements create resonant sounds, while I throw them away for fear that Sara and I hear appears horrified, perhaps in a nightgown, because Sarah has to be so, nightgown and then ...
Only ten, you think I have that little joy in the midst of the growing quiet with return postage to the rigid heaven of the first and second floor. I interrupted this letter because I had to attend a commission job. The still here at home, Andrée, under a dull greyness of dawn. Is it really the next day, Andrée? A blank piece of page is for you the range, just the bridge that connects my letter of yesterday to my letter today. Say that in that interval everything is broken, where you see the bridge break easy I hear water furious waist, for me this side of the paper, this side of my letter does not continue the calm with which I came when I stopped writing for attend a work of commissions. In its cubic night without sleep eleven sad bunnies, perhaps now, but no, not now - in the elevator, then, or entering, and no matter where, if the when is now, if you can be anywhere now than I have left.
enough, I wrote this because I care to prove that I was not as culpable in the destruction of his house insurmountable. Let this Carter hoped it would be sleazy to deliver mail is the one clear morning in Paris. Last night I turned the books of the second shelf, and reached them, standing or jumping, gnawed their backs to sharpen the teeth-not hunger, clover have all bought and stored them in desk drawers. They broke the curtains, fabrics of the chairs, the edge of self-portrait of Augusto Torres, carpet full of hair and shouted, were in a circle under the light of the lamp, circular, and how to worship, and suddenly screamed, shouted and I do not think rabbits scream. I wished in vain to remove the hairs that spoil the carpet, smoothing the edge of the corroded material, lock them back in the closet.
The day goes, maybe Sarah will soon be lifted. It's almost strange that I do not care to see them hopping in search of toys. I had so much guilt, you will see when I get a lot of the damage are in good repair with cement I bought in an English house, I did what I could to avoid an angry ... As for me, from 10 to 11 as a hole is unsurpassed. You see, ten was good, with a closet, clover and hope, many things can be built. And not eleven, because once is surely say twelve, Andrée, twelve to be thirteen. Then there's the cold dawn and a loneliness that fit of joy, memories, you and perhaps many more. Is this balcony on Suipacha full of dawn, the first sounds of the city. I do not think it difficult bunnies brought eleven sprinkled on the stones, may not be set on them, busy with another body which should be soon, before the first college pass.
Included in Bestiary
