“Whatever He Sees, He Sees Soft”
by
Julio Cortázar
translated by Robert Coover and Pilar Coover
I know a great softener, a fellow who, whatever he sees, he sees soft, softens it merely by seeing it, not by looking at it for he doesn’t look, he only sees, he goes around seeing things and all of them are terribly soft, which makes him happy because he doesn’t like hard things at all.
There was a time when no doubt he saw things hard, being then still able to look, for he who looks sees twice: he sees what he’s seeing and at the same time it is what he sees, or at least it could be, or would like to be, or would not like to be, all exceedingly philosophical and existential means of locating oneself and locating the world. But one day when he was about twenty years old, he began to stop looking, this fellow, because in point of fact he had very soft skin, and the last few times he’d wanted to look straight out at the world, the sight had torn his skin in two or three places, and naturally my friend said. Hey baby, this won’t do! Whereupon one morning he’d started just seeing instead, very carefully, only that, nothing but seeing-and from then on, of course, whatever he saw, he saw soft, softened it simply by seeing it, and he was happy because he couldn’t abide hard things at all.
“Trivializing vision” is what a professor from Bahía Blanca called it, a surprisingly felicitous expression coming as it did from Bahía Blanca, but my friend paid it no heed, and not only that, but when he saw the professor, he naturally saw him as remarkably soft, and so invited him home for cocktails, introduced him to his sister and aunt, the whole event transpiring in an atmosphere of great softness.
It bothers me a little, I must say, because whenever my friend sees me, I feel like I’m going completely soft, and even though I know it’s got nothing to do with me, but rather with the image of me my friend has, as the professor from Bahía Blanca would say, just the same it bothers me, because nobody likes to be seen as some kind of semolina pudding, and so get invited to the movies to watch cowboys or get talked to for hours about how lovely the carpets are in the Embassy of Madagascar.
What’s to be done with my friend? Nothing, of course, At all events, see him but never look at him: how, I ask, could we look at him without, horribly, risking utter dissolution? He who sees only must be seen only: a wise and melancholy moral which goes, I am afraid, beyond the laws of optics.
Biblioklept 