And if you had asked him, Dragoness, he could have explained to you that the whole point is not really to get close to someone but to know how to achieve closeness, that the knowledge is more important and enduring than the accomplishment. And when he called
“Ligeia! Ligeia!”
you were no longer seated beside him on the bed as he had seen you just before he closed his eyes. He looked toward the bathroom and the bathroom light was out. He sighed. He grunted sourly,
“Ligeia, some day I’m going to send you back to the heathens,” and he took the scissors from the night table beside the bed — Lord, have mercy upon us — and stretched his feet out — Christ, have mercy upon us — and began to cut his toenails very carefully and deliberately — Don’t put your hands in your pockets, Javier. It’s bad manners. They are going to say that we don’t — shaping each nail in the shape of an inverted half-moon, the sides extending out slightly to prevent the nail from growing inward. For once as an adolescent he had had to go to a pedicurist to have an ingrown nail removed. Presently he finished and got up and went into the bathroom and swallowed two Librium capsules. Amen.
* * *
Δ I am sure you will forgive me, Pigeons, if I continue to read my tourists’ pamphlets as I whirl along the superhighway from Mexico City to Puebla and the four of you turn your backs on the ruins of Xochicalco and make your way down to Franz’s Volkswagen. You are in advance, Elizabeth, walking slowly. Your shawl has slipped from your shoulders and is dragging in the dust but you do not notice until Franz trots and catches up and tells you. For a moment you stop and look down into the barranca, the ravine, where the trees are stunted and the dusty earth is covered with the dry, hard, faintly sour-smelling excrement of goats. A short distance from the path lies the corpse of a dog, and overhead, patiently circling, are the buzzards that were feeding upon it before you came to interrupt them, that will feed upon it again as soon as you leave. You go down to the Volkswagen and get in, Isabel and your husband in back, you beside Franz in front, and the motor starts and the car moves off with a growl of gears and the sound of Franz’s voice saying
“Erstaunte euch nicht auf attischen Stellen die Versicht menschlicher Geste?”
And in my turismo limousine I make myself as comfortable as I can and from time to time glance out the window at the fields that in the middle of April are white with hail, rest my cheek against the cold glass, and gradually allow myself to be absorbed reading the folder and remembering that around everything is a high-tension electric fence and a deep ditch of mud and you enter by a stone door over which hangs a single yellow electric bulb. A window on each side of the door. Grass above, as if the fortress were a cellar or a tomb; chimneys rising from the grass as if it were a buried factory. The administrative section. The square buildings with flat roofs. The muddy yards, the violet-colored walls, the barred windows. The disinfecting station. The room where prisoners are received. The guard room. A hall with locked racks for the rifles of the guards. The office of the Commandant. A storeroom for clothing. The triple gallery of the solitary cells with their two iron rings in the wall. The garage. Communal cells with three-decker wooden bunks against the wall, one stove that does not burn, a light that is always turned off, one toilet, one washbasin, the walls always damp. Cell 16, where the elderly and the feeble peel potatoes all day. Cell 13, dormitory for the prisoners who work in the laundry. Cell 14, that of those VIP prisoners who fetch and carry, cook, serve table, cut hair. A door and a corridor and the twenty cells for the condemned: absolutely bare, only the cement floor. Dog kennels. A garbage shed. The infirmary, presided over by a prisoner-physician because the official doctor comes only twice a week in the evening and only to sign death certificates. A bridge and the old stable that is now the hospital. Straw-filled mattresses on the bare floor. The garrison garden where vegetables are grown by bent-backed female prisoners. The morgue, a dark room on a low elevation. Here the dead depart for the incinerator in the city, to return in urns marked F or M. The old mansion with its fences and graveled walks, its porches and attics, its central heating, its rooms filled with lacquered furniture and glass tables and paintings of scenes in the Alps, its large radio and its selection of classical recordings, its dining room with polished chairs, its bedrooms with mahogany beds. Another walclass="underline" the women’s section. The same huge cells. The same three-decker wooden bunks. The same barred windows looking out on a muddy yard. The cell where women sit painting wooden buttons, knitting socks for the soldiers of the garrison, sewing dresses for the female guards, shirts for the male prisoners. The garrison canteen. Workshops. The forge. The locksmith. The carpenter: furniture, toys, coffins. The laundry, where only men work but where sometimes on Saturdays selected women prisoners are allowed to come to wash underwear. Then the fourth section, which was built later. Later, Elizabeth, I repeat, later when the prison was overflowing. The prisoners themselves built it. Five enormous communal cells. Solitary cells. A high wall and beyond it lawn, a movie theater, a swimming pool. The tunnel with bins of potatoes, guarded by two Alsatian dogs, the tunnel that leads to the execution yard with its scaffold and bullet-pocked wall. Finally the crematorium. It also was built later. Later, Elizabeth. The crematorium.
I put aside the folder and put memory aside. Why go on? It sickens me, a memory that is treason to my humanity. My nerves do not want me to remember. They reject it. I remember only as discipline. And that may sicken you: vomit, if you want to, Elizabeth. And here I am, here I am, and tonight I will be there. So what? I am traveling the superhighway from Mexico City to Puebla while the four of you are crawling along a winding route, Mexico City — Cuernavaca — Xochicalco — Cuautla — Cholula, that will lead you to a meeting with me and my six young monkish friends. And tonight one of your little group will make his exit, Elizabeth. He will cop out, to be seen no more, and I will be there to attend his departure, to hold the door wide open for him, perhaps to nudge him a little until he walks through it. Tonight one of you will die, Elizabeth. But don’t worry about it. I won’t and God won’t. Let us remember that man seeks above all to give vent to his strength: life itself is will, and the instinct for self-preservation is only one of the indirect albeit more frequent results of this truth. Or, if you don’t like that, reflect that the simplest surrealist action is simply to go out in the street and shoot indiscriminately into the crowd. Nietzsche and Bretón, platoon leaders at Auschwitz? And I? Your caifán and your spinner of words and once your cabby: am I only another rebel without a cause who has begun to grow old, a middle-aging beatnik, an angry young man still angry enough but no longer so young? It makes you think, doesn’t it, Dragoness. You say you don’t like my quotations? Then you quote yours while I quote mine, and we’ll both be happy.