“It’s easy to see you haven’t traveled much. Everything is white there. It’s not the material that matters, it’s the color. Everything is plastered and white. Everything. Why don’t you put out that marijuana? It stinks.”
Sea of sails whipped by the tempest.
“And Javier?”
“Javier what? Let’s don’t go into Javier. Don’t try to be his psychiatrist. He’d like nothing better.”
Before Sappho caused the moon of the sea to rise with its pallid fingers …
“Psychoanalysis. Ho-hum. The science of feelings. Bullshit, caifán. All Freud did was make the melodramatic respectable. Oh, Javier loves it. He wants them to say ‘Oedipus’ or ‘Jason’ when he’s really nothing but a bastard blend of John O’Hara and Caroline Invernizzo transplanted to cactus land. It’s pure camp, all of it. Pure tango. Oh, don’t get me started on Javier. I’m not interested in Javier. And the point is that nobody is interested in Javier.”
“No, I was merely wondering how he dressed.”
Moon of the sea …
“Free romantic bohemian, I suppose?”
“Well, I’ve already told you. Barefoot. Corduroy pants. A turtle-neck sweater. No, that…”
Surrounded by sea stars …
“That was a beach in Maine, the first time we…”
“Maine? I thought you said Long Island?”
While on the shore girls danced.
“Forget it. He was writing a novel. I got mixed up for a minute.”
“I don’t suppose you remember what he wrote in?”
“In Aramaic, wise guy, so Christ could understand. Oh, I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I have my plastic Jesus.”
“There’s flies on you and there’s flies on me, but there’s no flies on old J.C. With the best-seller of all time. And ghost writers. Blood, balls, and the Holy Spirit, via Lloyd C. Douglas and Cecil B. De Mille.”
And the sleep of dark eyes fell upon them and their wings closed.
“No, I meant what kind of paper. What sort of notebook.”
“Hah! There he was always prepared. Wherever he went, he always took his notebooks. School notebooks, with lined pages.”
Sea of Orpheus.
“He loaded up at a Woolworth’s before we left New York. Ink, erasers, Faber pencils, an old orange-colored pen like Gironella’s, Scotch tape, paper clips. Enough junk to make Barbara Hutton even richer.”
“Dragoness, that isn’t quite right.”
Chieftain, immortal virgin.
“What isn’t quite right?”
“Scotch tape hadn’t been invented then.”
“No. Excuse me. Anyone can make a slip. Don’t look at me like that.”
God-root of the sea.
“The notebooks.”
“Lined. Marble covers. A multiplication table. The year’s calendar.”
Sea that stretches like the horns of a bull.
“And what year was that?”
“Oh, no, nosy. How do I know what year? You’re trying to find out how old I am.”
Sea that rocks in its immense awkwardness.
“What color ink did he use?”
“White. It didn’t leave a trace, not a word. Invisible ink!”
Sea that sleeps at midday upon its bed of waves.
“I’ve seen his handwriting. It’s small, very neat.”
“Baloney. He writes like a hurricane. With waves, tides, mountain ranges. And tick-tack-toe and doodles.”
Prophetic sea.
“You didn’t have electric lights. What did you do after dark?”
“We played footsie, Mr. District Attorney. Look, we’re getting nowhere fast. It was a time of feeling, love, poetry, and you want to hold an auction of it.”
Sea armed with the ships of Troy.
“Pop lit, Dragoness. Does it bore you?”
“Okay, you have a point. Excuse me.”
Sea of Prometheus who destroyed the trident of the ocean.
“But really, weren’t you bored?”
“No. I had my collection of pebbles.”
Blond sea.
“Just the same…”
“The best-seller that year was … was … Anthony Adverse. I read Anthony Adverse from cover to cover.”
Mirror of the youth, of the little girl, of the tree, of the bird.
“I thought you had only seen the movie.”
“No, I read the book and saw the movie, too. Fredric March and Claude Rains. And Olivia de Havilland when she was still lovely, before that miserable snake-pit thing.”
Mirror of its own fish mute in its profundities.
“Holy macaroni!”
“Gulp! You mean you don’t believe me? You doubt my veracity, eh? Well, just let me tell you what happened that year we went to Greece. Hitler gobbled up Austria. Mussolini pulled out of the League of Nations. We listened to Kate Smith and Kay Kyser and laughed at Jack Benny. Father Coughlin was spouting off. Huey Long was killed, I think. Cárdenas expropriated the oil companies. Garbo loved Taylor. Dick Tracy was working on Boris Arson. Little Orphan Annie didn’t grow an inch. Léon Blum’s cabinet fell. Alice served tea to four lunatics at Berchtesgaden. John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath and John Ford made the movie with Henry Fonda. We were humming a tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket. Li’l Abner escaped from Daisy Mae again. Orson Welles invaded New Jersey. Let’s see, what else? Snow White and her seven dwarfs. Enough?”
Sea: element withdrawn from the original One, that by losing itself, it might recover itself.
“Okay, okay, so we used acetylene lights. Write it down.”
“Ten point o and you win your diploma, Dragoness. What about letters? Did you write home? To Gershon?”
“Are you nuts? Haven’t I already told you? We threw the letters into the trunk.”
“Well, the point is, I have an old envelope here.”
Sea of whiteness.
“Give me that. Where in God’s name did you find it?”
“In an old trunk, Dragoness. So?”
Cradle of dreams that ignore grief.
“Check the address. Avenida Amsterdam 85, Colonia Hipódromo, Mexico, D.F.”
“No! You have no right! Not yet. Where did you find the trunk?”
Prince of magic hours.
“What’s more, it isn’t true … No … 85 West 99th Street. Yes, that’s it. Or some address in the Bronx. I don’t remember now. It’s so long ago.”
“Take it easy, Dragoness. We all want to be different from what we are.”
Sea that receives the ashes of brothers.
“We can’t be different today. Listen, caifán. We need something to hang on to. And this is all I can see, it’s all that can be seen and touched, not Greece and not Mexico, not anything, just the world called Paramount Pictures Presents…”
“Sure, Elizabeth. The flag of Revlon. The national anthem of Disneyland. General Motors’ army. And the countries are called U. S. Steel and Conrad Hilton and IBM. That’s the atlas of the stinking world we live in today.”
Sea of Orestes and Electra.
“We don’t have myths any more?”
“No, suddenly they are only dreams. But a dream you can touch is called a myth.”
Sea of little voyages that cannot reach the regions of the sun.
“And a place, caifán. There has to be a place. It can be any place, even an imaginary one. So that we can go there and return reborn.”
“A setting, Dragoness, a place to stand fast. The Last Time I Saw Paris. Or San Francisco, Here I Come.
Sea dyed with the blood of Agamemnon.
“What’s wrong with Greece? The harmony, the classicism, the spirit. Our cradle.”