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.