So I craved a smoke. I needed relief from my nervous breakdown. I walked toward Chale’s bodega, which happened to be nearby.
With the caution warranted by such a situation, I reached the door, put my ear up to it, nothing. After waiting a moment, I got ready to leave, when I heard someone jump out of bed, scampering barefoot inside. I tried to catch a glimpse, to see if anyone was there. Through the keyhole I managed to discern Chale lighting the room, sitting noticeably disturbed in front of the oil lamp, its pathogenic greenness in a mossy halftone welded to El Chino’s layer of face, harangued by visible ire. No one else was there.
Chale’s impenetrable appearance made him seem to have just woken up, perhaps from a terrifying nightmare, and I considered my presence importune, deciding to leave, when the Asian man opened one of the desk drawers, captained by some inexorable voice of authority. With a decisive hand he removed a laconic coffer of polished cedar, opened it, and fondled a couple of white objects with his disgusting fingernails. He put them on the edge of the desk. They were two pieces of marble.
Curiosity got the better of me. Two pieces—were they really marble? They were. I don’t know why those pieces, at the outset and without my having touched them or clearly seen them up close, traveled though the space and barraged my fingertips, instilling in me the most certain sensation of marble.
El Chino picked them up again, angling egregious, flitting observations so that they wouldn’t unscrew certain presumptions about the motive of his watchfulness. He handled and examined them at length in the light. Two pieces of marble.
Then, with his elbows on the table and the pieces still in hand, between his teeth he let out one hell of a monosyllable that barely entered his beady eyes, where El Chino’s soul welled up in tears with a mixture of ambition and impotence. Again he opened the box perhaps out of an old determination that he now relived for the hundredth time, taking out several steel pieces, and with these he began to work on his cabalist marble pieces.
Certain presumptions, I was saying, jumped out in front of me. Indeed. I had met Chale two years prior. The Mongol was a gambler. And as a gambler he was famous in Lima; a loser of millions when he was at the table, a winner of treasures when he speaking with peers. So what was the meaning of that tormenting all-nighter, that furious episode of nocturnal artifice? And those two stone fragments? Why two and not one, three or more? Eureka! Two dice! Two dice in the making.
El Chino was working, working from the very vertex of night. His face, in the meantime, also was working out an infinite succession of lines. There were moments when Chale went into a frenzy and tried to break those little objects that were to be rolled on a felt-covered table chasing each other, in search of a random or lucky win, with the sound of one person’s two closed fists pounding hard against each other until they emitted sparks.
As for me, I had taken considerable interest in that scene, which I could hardly think of leaving. It seemed to be an old endeavor of patient heroic production. I sharpened my wits, wondering what this ill-destined man was after. To engrave a set of dice. Could that be it?
This much is affirmed about digital maneuvers and secret deviations or willed amendments in the game’s shaker. Something similar, I said to myself, comes through this man for sure. And this, because of what he rolled in the end. But what intrigued me most, as one will understand, was the art of the medium and its preparation, which had seemed to demand Chale’s complete commitment. This is the correlation that must be preestablished, between the kind of dice and the dynamic possibilities of the hands. Since, if this bilateral type of element was not entirely necessary, then why would El Chino fashion his own dice? Any material kicking around would’ve worked. But no.
There’s no doubt that the dice are made of a specific material, under this weight, with that edgility,62 hexagonned63 on this or that untouchable cliff to be bidden farewell by fingertips and then to be shined with that other dimple or almost immaterial coarseness between each frame of the points or between a polyhedral angle and the white exergue on one of the four corresponding faces. Therefore, it’s necessary to bear the flair of the random material so that—in this always improvised (and therefore triumphant) point—it is always obedient and docile to human vibrations of the hand that thinks and calculates even in the darkest and blindest of such avatars.
And if not, one simply had to observe the Asian man in his creative, tempestuous task, chisel in hand, picking away, scraping, removing, crumbling, opening up the conditions of harmony and jaggedness between unborn proportions of the die and the unknown powers of his fickle will. At times, he’d momentarily stop working to contemplate the marble, and his depraved face would smile syrup in the glowing light of the lamp. Later, with an easy deep breath, he’d tap it, swapping one tool for another, and give the monstrous dice a practice roll, tenaciously inspect the sides, and patiently ponder.
A few weeks after that night, there were people amid scruffy crowds and others with similar opinions, who spread stupefying unbelievable rumors about amazing events that had recently transpired in the great casinos of Lima. From one morning to the next, the fabulous legends would grow. One evening last winter, at the door to the Palais Concert, an exotic personage whose goatee seemed to be dripping64 was speaking to a group of gents, who lent him all their ears:
“Chale had something up his sleeve, when he gambled those 10,000 soles. I don’t know what, but El Chino possesses a mysterious unverifiable ability to summon when he’s at the table. This can’t be denied. Remember,” that man stressed with sinister gravity, “that the dice El Chino plays with never appear in anyone else’s hands. I’m talking about unmistakable facts drawn from my own observations. Those dice have something to them. What it is, I don’t know.”
One night I was driven by my distress into the hole in the wall where Chale used to gamble. It was an affair for the most ostentatious of duelers at the table, and many people were standing around the table. The crowd’s attention, haltered by the ganglionic cloth covered with piles of money, told me that a low pressure system had set in that night. A few acquaintances led me through and encouraged me to place a bet.
There was Chale, at the head of the table, presiding over the session in his impassive, torturous, almighty appearance, two vertical straps around his neck, from the stumpy parietal bones of a bare hide to the livid bars of his clavicles, his mouth deceitfully forged in two taut pieces of greed that would never open in laughter out of fear of being stripped bare naked, his heroic shirt rolled up to his elbows. The pulse of life beat in him over and over, searching for the doors of the hands to escape from such a miserable body. Nauseating lividness on his predatory cheekbones.
He seemed to have lost the faculty of speech. Signs. Barely articulated adverbs. Arrested interjections. Oh, how the bronchial wheezing of the walking and living dead sometimes burns in each of us!
I decided to observe El Chino’s minutest psychological and mechanical ripples as discreetly and meticulously as I could.
The clock struck one in the morning.
Someone placed a bet of 1,000 soles in the hands of fate. The air popped like hot water pierced by the first bubble of the ebullition. And now if I wanted to describe the appearance of the surrounding faces in those seconds of scanning, I’d say that they all oozed out of themselves, scrubbed and squeezed along with Chale’s set of dice, lighting on fire and standing there in a line, until they needed and wanted to extract a miraculous ninth face on each die, as if it were the weary grin of Fate herself. Chale violently rolled the dice, like a pair of sparking embers, and he groaned a terrific hyenic obscenity that made its way across the room like dead flesh.
I touched my body as though I’d been looking for myself, and I realized that I was there, shaking in awe. What had El Chino felt? Why did he roll the dice like that, as if they had been burning or cutting his hands? Had the spirit of all those