Trafalgar Read Online Free PDF

someone aside and convince them of just about anything, people got along well and were relaxed. And if they had begun to get bored, it was because they had finished what they had to do, or what remained could be done back here in the university offices and on the kitchen table at home. Save for Veri Halabi, who kept discovering things but who didn’t know what they meant, poor girl.”

    And Trafalgar plugged in the electric coffeepot again and waited. He’s like that: when he told Páez about the affair with the machines for making love, he practically drove him crazy, and Fatty Páez is really pretty unflappable. Afterwards he returned to the table and he drank his coffee and the others didn’t make a sound, waiting for the next chapter.
    “The first day, they just wanted to get the idea of selling anything out of my head. I didn’t pay any attention, because the doctors know a lot about science, I’m not saying they don’t, but about buying and selling, nothing, old man, nothing. Marina Solim grabbed me and told me the inhabitants of Anandaha-A were practically an extinct species—unfortunately, according to her—although frankly it was hard to understand what she saw in them but as far as that goes, it was also hard to understand what happened afterward. Marina told me theirs was a primitivism bordering on the bestial. They did not build tools, they lived out in the open, they had forgotten about fire if they ever knew how to light a fire, they didn’t even speak. They dressed, men and women alike, in these shabby sacks open at the sides that they took, that’s what Marina believed, from the dead, because as for weaving, they didn’t weave them. They ate, slept wherever, did their business and even copulated in sight of everyone, there were almost no children or pregnant women, and they spent the days lying down without doing anything. And they danced.”
    Flynn was surprised about the dancing, and the Albino says he tried to give a lecture on the dance as a refined expression, that’s just what he said, refined, of a system of civilization, et cetera, but Trafalgar didn’t let him say much.
    “If you want,” he told him, “I’ll give you the address and phone number for Marina Solim. She’s Chilean but she lives in Paris and she works at the Museum of Man. You go and ask her and you’re going to fall flat on your back at what she tells you.”
    “The only thing I’m saying is . . . ,” Flynn began.
    “They were like animals, I saw them,” Trafalgar said. “Those in the camp, which wasn’t called a camp but rather an Interdisciplinary Evaluation Unit, said they were ugly, but to me they seemed very beautiful. Of course, I have seen many more things than those good doctors and lady docs and I know what is ugly and what is pretty. There is almost nothing that is ugly, on that Marina and I are in agreement. Very tall and very thin, with white skin and black hair, long, narrow faces and very big, very open eyes. Toad eyes, said Veri Halabi, who hated them. The others didn’t hate them; worse, they were indifferent, save for Marina Solim. At the beginning, Doctor Simónides told me, they had tried to speak with them, but it was as if they neither saw nor heard them. Afterward they had realized that they had either never had or had lost the capacity to communicate and they began to treat them like little animals: they took them food and they clicked their tongues and snapped their fingers at them. But the other guys, nothing: didn’t look, didn’t sniff, didn’t turn their heads when they approached, didn’t eat and that even though Dalmas made some crazy good fish stews. Then they decreed they were animals and washed their hands of them. Even Marina Solim was a little disheartened, because the only thing she could do was sit down close to them and pass the hours watching what they did, which was nothing. Live, that’s all, if to live is to breathe and eat and shit and copulate and