Barefoot
by Silvina Ocampo
translated by Matty Matsagoura
Those fights dished out like a cut of yesterday’s cold meat are the worst. They tie you to a double-knotted uneasiness, impossible to untangle and sticky to the touch, like chest rub— thought Cristián Navedo, as he aggravated the situation on his desk, deepening the disorder by piling up new books and documents, whose presence contributed to the ever-growing range of paper mountains that loomed over the table. He lived in constant fear of suffocating to death beneath those papers lost forever in clutter, the kind of bits of paper that you search for and never find, for they float about in undefined space, somewhere in a pool of even more papers, behind bookshelves, trapped in dark corners sprinkled with dashes of earth. And yet, as a child, he was taught to be orderly, to leave his clothes folded over the chair before bed, to put his work-
books and pencils away neatly in his desk drawer, and, not infrequently, he went without dessert. But all this achieved nothing except aggravate his inclination for disorder. It only really showed him how better to organise his disorder—manically. Cristián kept everything, even his childhood notebooks, and despite this he lived in perpetual worry of having lost everything. Behind the scenes of this regimented object-chaos lurked an obsessional inner life that seeped right through him, reaching unimaginable depths; he kept everything, even fights aborted the day before. But he could always find those again; arguments never got lost. Arguments... He logged every single one he had with Alcira, as one would in an accounts book. They hadn’t known one another for very long, but they felt so in tune with
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