Lucas, His Communications
Since he not only writes but likes to go over to the other side and read what others write, Lucas is surprised sometimes at how difficult it turns out to be for him to understand some things. It isn’t that they’re questions that are particularly abstruse (a horrible word, thinks Lucas, who tends to heft them in the palm of his hand and familiarize himself with them or reject them depending on the color, the smell, or the touch), but suddenly there’s something like a dirty pane of glass between him and what he’s reading, whence impatience, forced rereading, imminent explosion, and finally the great flight of the magazine or book against the nearest wall with a subsequent fall and a damp plop.
When his reading ends that way, Lucas asks himself what the devil can have happened in the apparently obvious passage from communicator to communicatee. It’s hard for him to ask that, because in his case the question is never raised and as rarefied as the air of his reading might be, the more that some things can only come and go after a difficult course, Lucas never ceases to verify whether the coming is valid and whether the going takes place without major obstacles. Little he cares about the individual situation of the readers, because he believes in a mysteriously multiform measurement that in the majority of cases fits like a well-cut suit, and that’s why it isn’t necessary to give ground in either the coming or the going: between him and the others there will be a bridge as long as what is written is born of a seed and not a graft. In his most delirious inventions there’s something that at the same time is so simple, so little bird, and so gin rummy. It’s not a matter of writing for others but for oneself, but oneself must also be the others; so elementary, my dear Watson, that it even makes a person mistrust, asking himself if there can’t be an unconscious demagogy in that collaboration between sender, message, and receiver. Lucas looks at the word receiver in the palm of his hand, softly strokes its fur, and returns it to its uncertain limbo; he doesn’t give a hoot for the receiver since he has him there within range, writing what he reads and reading what he writes, what the great fuck.
Lucas, His Intrapolations
In a documentary and Yugoslavian film one can see how the instinct of the female octopus comes into play to protect her eggs by any means, and among other means of defense she decides to set up her own camouflage by looking for algae, piling them up and hiding behind them so as not to be attacked by morays during the two months that the incubation lasts.
Like everybody, Lucas looks at images anthropomorphically: the octopus decides to protect herself, she looks for the algae, she places them in front of her refuge, she hides. But all that (which in a first attempt at an equally anthropomorphic explanation was called instinct for lack of something better) happens outside of all consciousness as rudimentary as it might be. If for his part Lucas makes the effort to look on also as from outside, what is left for him? A mechanism as alien to the possibilities of his empathy as the moving of the pistons in embolisms or the slipping of a liquid down an inclined plane.
Considerably depressed, Lucas tells himself that at this point the only thing that fits is a kind of intrapolation: this, too, what he’s thinking at this moment, is a mechanism that his consciousness thinks it understands and controls; this, too, is an anthropomorphism applied ingenuously to man.
“We’re nothing,” Lucas thinks for himself and for the octopus.
Lucas, His Disconcertedness
Back there in the dim, dead days Lucas used to go to a lot of concerts and all that Chopin, Zoltán Kodály, Pucciverdi and why am I telling you Brahms and Beethoven and even Ottorino Respighi at moments of weakness.
Now he never goes and fixes things up with records or the radio or whistling memories, Menuhin and Friedrich Gulda and Marian Anderson, things somewhat Paleolithic in these accelerated times, but the truth is that at concerts things were going from bad to worse for him until there was a gentleman’s agreement between Lucas who stopped going and the ushers and part of the public who stopped kicking him out. To what was such a spasmodic discord owed? If you ask him, Lucas will remember a few things, for example the night at the Colon when a pianist at the time for encores threw himself with his hands full of Khatchaturian at a completely defenseless keyboard, an occasion taken advantage of by the audience to concede itself a crisis of hysteria the magnitude of which corresponded precisely to the thunder reached by the artist in his final paroxysms, and there we have Lucas searching for something on the floor among the seats and feeling around everywhere.
“Did you lose something, sir?” inquired the lady between whose ankles Lucas’s fingers were proliferating.
“The music, madam,” Lucas said, barely a second before Senator Poliyatti delivered the first kick on his ass.
There was, likewise, the evening of Lieder in which a lady delicately took advantage of Lotte Lehmann’s pianissimos to give off a cough worthy of the horns in a Tibetan temple, a reason for which at some moment the voice of Lucas was heard to say: “If cows could cough, they’d cough like that lady,” a diagnosis that brought on the patriotic intervention of Dr. Chucho Beláustegui and the dragging of Lucas with his face on the floor to his final liberation at the curb of the calle Libertad.
It’s hard to enjoy concerts when things like that happen, it’s better at home.
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From A Certain Lucas by Julio Cortázar, translated by Gregory Rabassa. Used with permission of the publisher, New Directions. Copyright © 2025.
