Trafalgar Read Online Free PDF Page A

him.
    “Were any of you ever on Anandaha-A?”
    No one, ever, as was to be expected. It isn’t easy to go to the places where he goes.
    “It’s horrible,” he said. “The most horrible world you can imagine. When it’s day, it seems like it’s night, and when it’s night, you turn on the strongest light you have and you can barely see your hands because the darkness swallows everything. There are no trees, there are no plants, there are no animals, there are no cities, there is nothing. The land is rolling, with stunted little mountains. The air is sticky; there are a few narrow, lazy rivers and the few people that live there, and at first glance one wonders if they can be called people, take some gray leaves or some worms, I don’t know, from the bottom of the rivers, they squash them between their fingers, they mix them with water, and they eat them. Disgusting. The ground is cold and damp, like tamped earth. There is never wind, it never rains, it is never cold, it is never hot. A purplish sun the color of wine sediment always makes the same circuit in the same dirty sky without it mattering to anyone and there are no moons.”
    “You must have had a lot of fun,” said the Albino Gamen.
    “Quite a bit,” Trafalgar admitted. “A few years ago, I had earned a truckload of dough selling little light bulbs on Prattolva, where they have just discovered electricity, and as I knew something about the useless sun of Anandaha-A, it occurred to me that I might earn another truckload selling them lamps, lanterns, those things that would eat the darkness. But of course what I did not know was that those people had no intention of buying anything, anything at all. I went to Prattolva with another load and on the way back I set down on Anandaha-A close to what seemed to be a small city and which was not a city, small or large, but rather an encampment, but something is something. The welcome could not have been more effusive: the people in the camp had become as bored as penguins and I was a big novelty. I don’t know why people choose to study such disagreeable things. Unless it’s the usual: the hope of earning something, an attitude to which I adhere and which I consider quite laudable. And that is how there were twelve or fifteen people in the camp, all with ostentatious titles, but they luckily also took the trouble to cook, fix a faucet, play the harmonica or tell dirty stories. And friendly and courteous, all of them. There was that Swedish geologist, Lundgren, who was quite disappointed when he learned I didn’t play chess but whose disappointment lifted when I told him I was going to teach him the three varieties of sintu—the combative, the contemplative, and the fraternal—which are played in the Ldora system, one on each of the three worlds. Next to that, chess looks like tic-tac-toe. And I taught him all three and he beat me in just one match, a combative one. I prefer fraternal. There was Doctor Simónides, a little bald Greek who did everything, even psychoanalysis, and who enjoyed everything. There was a chemist, I don’t really know what for, Doctor Carlos Fineschi, specialist in river waters, you tell me. An engineer, Pablo María Dalmas. An anthropologist, Marina Solim. A sociologist, an astrophysicist, mechanical engineers, all that. The League of Nations, enough to try to convince God the Father that we’re good and we love one another. And there was Veri Halabi, I don’t know what her nationality was but what a beauty, please. Almost as pretty as the matriarchs of Veroboar, but with black hair. Expert in comparative linguistics—there is no justice. After five minutes one realized they were all infatuated with her and Fineschi most of all because, as for Marina Solim, she is efficient and maternal and incredibly nice, but she in no way has a figure to inspire erotic daydreams. But between the fact that Halabi was gorgeous but she didn’t make you say it and that Doctor Simónides could take