Summary
"End of the Game" is narrated from the first-person perspective of an unnamed narrator looking back on a story from her childhood in the Argentinian countryside. The story begins in the habitual past tense in which the narrator describes her ritual of play with her cousins Letitia and Holanda. She (the narrator) and Holanda always help do the washing after lunch, and their goal in the process is always to tire out their mothers with conflict and commotion so that by the end of the washing, the adults take their siestas leaving the narrator, Holanda, and Letitia to leave the house and play beyond the fence near the train tracks.
At first, the narrator describes Letitia as having privileges over her and Holanda because she doesn't have to participate in chores, has a room to herself, and spends her days "reading Pondson de Terrail, or some equally inexplicable book" (136), but it becomes clear early in the story that Letitia suffers from some chronic spine condition that keeps her in need of frequent medical treatments and therapies and puts limitations on her childhood that aren't suffered by Holanda or the narrator.
The narrator describes the game that the three of them play once they left their property, climbed the hill, and made it out to the train tracks. The game involves making Statues and Attitudes. The three draw lots, and the winner has to perform either a Statue or an Attitude. If they are a Statue, the two others go into their box of adornments which they kept hidden under a rock and drape the Statue in costume garments and jewelry. Attitudes generally do not get ornaments. The girls emulate well-known statues or statue forms—Venus, the ballerina, the "Chinese princess"—and for attitudes, challenge themselves to express different emotions like spite, rage, repentance, and so on. They are not performing for themselves, but for the train that passes at 2:08 from Tigre. Over time, because the cousins put on their show with such regularity, the commuters begin to expect them out there, and the girls enjoy a little bit of fanfare from the passing train cars.
The story enters the simple past tense when the narrator begins to describe a particular sequence of events that occured as a result of Statues and Attitudes. They are out one day, playing their game—Holanda is performing an Attitude—when a commuter throws a note down to them from the train car. The note is rolled up and slid into a metal knut. It reads, "The Statues very pretty. I ride in the third window of the second coach. Ariel B" (140). Though the handwriting is scrawled and inelegant, the girls are very excited to catch a glimpse of Ariel the next day, and they do. They see "a boy with blond curly hair and light eyes, who smiled brightly" when he saw them waving to him (141). He continues to throw them complimentary notes as they continue to pose for him. After several days of Holanda and the narrator winning the draw, he throws them a note that reads, "The prettiest is the laziest" (142), and they realize that he's referring to Letitia, who, realizing, blushes and goes off by herself.
Holanda and the narrator privately discuss the matter. They feel confused and slightly jealous but mostly concerned that the boy doesn't understand Letitia's condition, and that if he were to meet her or come up close to her, he would ultimately reject her. Letitia suspects this to be the case as well, and Ariel's attraction to her from a distance is a painful thing. That week, Ariel throws them a note proclaiming that he's going to get off the train at the closest station and meet them the next day. Letitia refuses to be present for it, but she writes him a note and seals it in an envelope for Holanda and the narrator to give to him if he insists on meeting her.
Holanda and the narrator meet him, and while they find him to be very nice and gentlemanly, he falls short of their mythic expectations. For example, he doesn't attend the English school; he attends an industrial school. And he isn't as confident as his note-throwing would suggest. He repeatedly asks after Letitia, and when a lull in the conversation makes it clear that he's very disappointed about not meeting her, Holanda hands him the letter Letitia wrote. He doesn't read it in front of them, but eventually makes his way back to the station.
The next day, Letitia performs the most magnificent Statue they'd ever seen her perform. She sneaks her mother's jewels out of the house and wears them for the Statue (this is a very big deal, and neither the narrator nor Holanda is remotely comfortable with the idea of taking the jewels out of the house). Ariel sees them from the train and stares at Letitia the whole time he's passing. Then the narrator and Holanda help Letitia stuff the jewels back in her pockets, and she starts home before them as they pack up the garment box. Letitia stays at the house the next day, exhausted from a new treatment therapy, and when Holanda and the narrator make their usual trek to the tracks, they're unsurprised to find Ariel's usual window empty. Holanda predicts that the whole ordeal with Ariel will mark the end of their game.
Analysis
With "End of the Game," Cortázar offers us another take on the "end of childhood"/"loss of innocence" theme. His narrator offers conflicting accounts of how she, herself, views Letitia's privileges and disadvantages in light of her own. Of Letitia, the narrator first says, early on in the story, "she was the luckiest and most privileged of the three of us. Letitia didn't have to dry dishes or make the beds, she could laze away the day reading or pasting up pictures, and at night they let her stay up later if she asked to, not counting having a room to herself, special hot broth when she wanted it, and all kinds of other advantages" (138). As the story progresses, however, the narrator recognizes the suffering that Letitia has to endure because of her medical condition. She says things like, "what I really would have wanted was that Letitia not suffer; she had enough to put up with and now the new treatment and all those things" (144), so there is a definite attempt at empathy, but the narrator and Holanda both at times espouse a childish, unapologetic jealousy of Letitia for her so-called "privileges" without considering the debilitating pain and impediments that accompany her condition—an oversight that is understandable, given that they are children.
Cortázar explores Letitia's delicate pride and the longing felt by all three of the cousins, who feel hemmed in by the countryside, and Letitia's longing, which is compounded by her disability. The narrator says, "in a household where there's someone with some physical defect and a lot of pride, everyone pretends to ignore it starting with the one who's sick, or better yet, they pretend they don't know that the other one knows" (142). The stakes of Letitia's letter to Ariel, her appearance or absence when he visits, hinges upon this unspoken and unspeakable anxiety that she will be rejected for her condition; the fact that she opts to stay home and instead gives Ariel a letter, presumably to provide him with the facts and allow him to decide what he'll do next, demonstrates a tragic maturity and understanding on Letitia's part about how people react to her condition. Ariel's absence from the train window confirms Letitia's fears and expectations: Ariel rejects her.
And there their game ends, because the comfortable distance the girls once felt between themselves and the commuters on the train no longer exists. Ariel breaches their innocent illusion that they cannot be touched by those for whom they perform. The narrator remarks, "at that height above Palermo the trains went by pretty fast and we weren't bashful doing the Statue or the Attitude. We hardly saw people in the train windows, but with time, we got a bit more expert, and we knew that some of the passengers were expecting to see us" (140). Ariel's communications negate the speed of the train and introduce consequences into their game. And just like that, something that was once innocent fun becomes hurtful and no longer worth doing.
