Cold Soup

He died in Argentina. She lived it hundreds of times: she saw him on the edge of the window, smoking, throwing cigarette butts over the hopscotch plane which lay below. He spoke only nonsense, talking just to talk, philosophizing just to frustrate the people down below that begged him not to jump, Horacio, come down and have some mate. But a moment later, almost without her realizing, he wasn’t on the windowsill anymore, and the smell of cold soup from his trench coat was mixed with the smell of blood. 

Her phone rang. She looked up, closing the book. She sighed and didn’t move. 

She already knew what the message said. She knew it was rude to be late to a going away party, and even ruder to be late to one’s own. But she couldn’t stop thinking. 

She stood up and started gathering her things to leave. She was about to pick up her cigarettes, but she stopped herself. 

“Addict,” she said to herself, then walked out the door. 

The sky was getting cloudy. She hadn’t brought her umbrella.

She began to think. It was her vice, really, to think. She began to think about the worst things in life. The worst one, without a doubt, was to die in Argentina. 

But what was what Freud said? If you want to stand life, prepare yourself for death. Che, that’s what she was doing, what didn’t let her sleep. She had read the book dozens of times, trying to find a scenario where Horacio survived. But he always ended up dead, or lying on the pavement or the bottom of some metaphorical river. In the end, he didn’t manage to become more than a hollow trench coat stained with blood and smelling of cold soup.

She began to think about that trench coat that smelled of cold soup. There lay the answer to the mystery of Horacio. That trench coat distinguished him from other characters, which she imagined wore those turtleneck sweaters that intellectuals used in the sixties, and marked his way through Paris, the smell of old soup leaving behind an invisible trace that only dogs could follow. She liked the thought that Horacio’s smell would become impregnated everywhere: in the couches in which he sat, in the glasses that he drank out of, in the corners through which he wandered. She imagined La Maga washing their sheets over and over again, smelling them for the thousandth time and asking herself why the fuck they still smelled like cold soup. Florencia smelled all of these scenes with a frightening clarity. However, she didn’t smell anything with the same clarity with which she smelled Horacio’s last scene, in which the smell of cold soup was mixed with that of blood. 

Would other writers have saved him? Cortázar was cruel, that much was clear. His protagonists ended up being sacrificed by Aztecs or turned into axolotls. With him, they had to die. But what would have happened if it had been Dickens or Dostoyevsky that had written the story? Maybe that way Horacio would have been saved from the intellectual tumult that suffocated him, would have been saved by the divine grace of God or the money of some lost, rich relative. But if it had been someone even crueler than Cortázar, someone like Kafka or Camus? What would have happened to Horacio? Would he have ended up dead in the desert, or turned into a cockroach?

Who is the person that writes our stories, and on who is our character based on? Was Hamlet perhaps the inspiration behind her being, or Madame Bovary? Who was writing her story? Maybe it was someone cruel, someone that would lead her to the abyss of solitude and would call it poetry. Could she do anything about it? Could she step out of the writer’s page and create her own destiny, her own story? She didn’t know. But she supposed it didn’t matter, because she had already arrived to her going away party. 

She sighed outside the door. She didn’t know what to expect. She entered the apartment complex and went up to the seventh floor. There, she knocked on the brown door with the number 756 on it, from where the sound of music was coming from. 

She waited. She turned to see the rest of the apartment complexes, identical in an almost frightening way. If she squinted, the brown doors and white walls seemed to mix themselves into a strange, uniform entity. 

She closed her eyes and sighed. She should have brought her cigarettes, she thought, and then scolded herself for having thought that. 

The door opened. There, standing with a big smile on her face, was Mariana. 

“Che, you finally arrived! Come in, my dear Florencia, come in, come in. Everyone was waiting for you.”

“Was?”

“Of course, they’ve already left! Arriving two and a half hours late is too much even in Argentina. But don’t worry, piba, I told them you were sick and that it was hard for you to come, gave them a bit of mate and beer, and with that the problem was solved. Nothing too bad. Come, come. I’ll make you some good Argentinian mate before you go to Paris.”

Florencia nodded. She followed Mariana into her small kitchen, which was filled with the plates and glasses of the previous guests. The kitchen smelled of mate and food that had been left out for more than two hours. In the sink there was a pile of plates, all thrown haphazardly, some shining with some soap bubbles. In the corner there was a blue rag.

“Tell me, what were you doing those two hours we were waiting for you, eh?” said Mariana calmly.

“I was reading.”

“Don’t tell me you were reading that hellish book again. You already know it by memory, Florencia.”

“I promise you I don’t.”

“What do you see in that book? I think I’ll never understand it.”

“It has various hidden truths.”

“Hidden truths you can’t find in your going away party?,” said Mariana with a smile, then gave Florencia her mate. 

Florencia smiled, distracted. 

“Come on, let’s go to the rooftop, for the night is nice.”

Florencia followed Mariana through some little stairs hidden in a corner. She opened a door and found herself on a regular rooftop, with a view of the crumbling rooftops that surrounded it. Mariana sat down in a corner and sipped her mate. She turned to look at Florencia with a disarming smile. 

“Do you see yourself reflected in that book?”

“It’s something more complicated,” said Florencia, sitting next to her friend. “How do I explain it to you. Once, as a girl, my mom saw an old woman crossing the street. She was a regular old lady – there was nothing special about her, no quality that stood out. But my mom, upon seeing the old woman, knew in that instant that she was a reflection of her own future. She saw herself reflected on the old woman, she saw herself years later crossing the street with the same clothes on, with the same hump on her back, with the same glasses that fell off her face. And my mother knew that if, in that moment, a truck came and ran the old woman over, or if the poor thing fell down a sewer, the same thing would happen to her. 

“Shit,” Mariana answered. 

Florencia said nothing, only turned to look at the edge. She wondered if there was a hopscotch plane down below. 

“Che, and are you excited to go to Paris? Because I don’t see you very happy, if you’re reading that pretentious book for the thousandth time,” said Mariana. 

Florencia sipped her mate. 

“I think so.”

“Come on, think of all the things you’re going to see. The Eiffel Tower, the buildings, the bridges…”

“Parisian bridges work for only two things: to fall in love and to commit suicide.”

“They only work to throw oneself off them and to masturbate, then. Noted, my friend.”

Mariana took some cigarettes out of her pocket. She offered one to Florencia, who declined with a subtle movement of the head. 

“You don’t smoke anymore, piba?”

“No, not anymore,” Florencia said slowly, as if she were dreaming.

“Good. You don’t want to end up like me.”

“I’m more scared to end up like him.”

“Who? Your father? Che, but he’s still alive.”

“No, no, like Horacio.”

“But who the fuck is Horacio. Don’t tell me he’s the character from your book.”

Florencia didn’t answer. She looked at her surroundings and sighed. 

“But it has become an obsession, this,” said Mariana. 

“I’m an obsessive person.”

“What the fuck are you saying. Che, you’re going to go to Paris and live a lot of people’s dreams, and you can’t stop thinking about some crappy book we had to read in high school.”

“It’s not that I can’t stop thinking about it. I think of him in the same way you think of your arm, of your intestines. He’s like an integral part of me, an undiscovered truth inside my being. It’s like my destiny. But I don’t want it to be my destiny. I tell myself that there must be something to do to avoid it. But I don’t know if there is something one can do to avoid something that is programmed inside of us. Aristotle says you can. Kant says you can’t.”

“Che, what a philosopher you turned out to be.”

“It’s like the story of the old man in Greece who was told he would die because something would fall on his head. He decided to stay outside so nothing could fall on his head. But then a turtle fell on his head and he died.”

“But that happened because of bad luck, Florencia.”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s something more profound than that. I’m talking about determinist philosophy, about destiny, about free will.”

“That doesn’t matter, Florencia. Life is lived and that’s it. There’s no other option.”

“But you don’t understand–”

“But of course I understand. You’re worried about the future, just like all of us. But, do you want to know my opinion? Maybe I can’t say it as elegantly as you do, but I can say it with more conviction. Life is like a game. If you start to overthink it, if you start overanalyzing it, the fun is removed. Go on, stop thinking and just live, live your life and go to Paris.”

“A game. Like hopscotch.”

Both stayed silent. Mariana took out another cigarette.

“Have you ever thought about the worst things in life?,” Florencia asked.

“I suppose not. I don’t spend much time thinking about sad things.”

“But if you had to choose something, what would you say is the worst thing that could happen to you in this life?”

“To love someone that doesn’t love you. Shit, there’s nothing worse. Seeing someone else with that level of admiration, of adoration, and having them not feel the same… fuck, what pain.

“Typical answer of someone in love.”

Mariana laughed and hit Florencia with love. 

“And you? What do you think is the worst thing that can happen to you in this life?”

“To die in Argentina.”

“Lies, lies. What you’re afraid of is seeing yourself reflected in someone you hate. Like in Horacio. You’re scared of determinism. You don’t care about dying in Argentina – you could die in Buenos Aires, in Mendoza, in Iguazú – what you care about is ending up like him. Dead but with too many thoughts in your head, drowned by everything that you think. That’s why you are escaping to Paris. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if you were going to Paris for another reason.”

“Which would be?”

“To become that which you hate. To become Horacio.”

The two of them stayed silent for a while, Florencia sipping mate, Mariana smoking.

“Well, we must think of the good things in life. You’re flying to Paris, that’s important. And I actually have a little gift for you.”

Mariana stood up and went down the stairs quickly. She left her cigarettes behind. Florencia saw them and stole a cigarette rapidly. 

After a couple of minutes, Mariana came back with a gift-wrapped box.

“For you,” she told Florencia. 

Florencia smiled. She took the box and opened it. 

Inside the box was a trench coat. 

Florencia paled. She felt that something was squeezing her chest, that the world was falling on top of her. She could hear Mariana calling her from afar, but she couldn’t answer. She stood up slowly, took her things and, saying goodbye to Mariana, left the apartment. 

She went down the stairs and leaned against the wall, shaking. She took a cigarette from her pocket and, after a few tries, lit it. She felt like nothing mattered anymore. 

She let the air slip out of her mouth slowly, imagining herself sitting on a windowsill.

It was cold. Without thinking (or perhaps after much thinking), Florencia put on the trench coat. It had already begun smelling like cold soup.