“Et puisque cette magie a été prévue et
décrite dans les livres, la différence
illusoire qu’elle introduit ne sera jamais
qu’une solitude enchantée.”
Les Mots et les Choses
Δ You were going to tell me some day, Elizabeth, that the snail was moving across the wall and you, lying on the bed, lifted your head and saw first the silver track and followed it so slowly that several seconds passed before your eyes reached the dark shell. You felt drowsy and there you were on the bed in the second-rate hotel with your neck stretching out and your hands in your armpits and all you saw was a snail on a wall of peeling green paint. Javier had worked the cord of the drapes and the room was in shadow. Now he was unpacking, and you turned your head and watched him release the catches of the blue leather suitcase and pull the zipper and raise the top. Just then, Javier looked up and saw a second snail, this one gray-striped and motionless within its shell. The first snail approached the second and Javier looked down and admired the perfect order with which he had packed his clothing for this trip. You bent your knees and drew your heels back until they touched your buttocks and now you too observed that there was a second snail on the wall, that the first had stopped beside the second and was showing its head with the four tentacles. With one hand you smoothed your skirt while you studied the mouth of the snail, an open gap right in the middle of the wet horned head. Now the head of the second snail appeared too. Their shells were like small spirals pasted on the wall. Their sticky slaver dripped beneath them. The two sets of tentacles touched. You spread your eyes wider and wished that you could hear more acutely, microscopically as it were. The two soft driveling bodies slowly emerged from their shells and immediately, with a suave vigor, embraced. Javier, standing, was watching them. You, on the bed, spread your arms. The snails trembled lightly. Slowly they separated. They observed each other for a few seconds and then returned to their shells. You stretched a hand out and found your package of cigarettes on the table beside the bed. You lit a cigarette and wrinkled your eyebrows. Javier began to lift his trousers from the suitcase: the blue linen slacks, the cream linen slacks, the gray silk slacks. He laid them on the bed and smoothed them, passing his hand over the wrinkles. He went to the ancient wardrobe and got some coat hangers, carefully selected the least bent ones, returned to the suitcase on the bed. You observed every movement and you laughed with your cigarette resting against your cheek.
“You act like you’re thinking of living here.” You looked around the room, its damp walls, its broken windowpanes. Some pad.
With both hands Javier removed the socks he had chosen to match his slacks and shirts. “This was quite a modern hotel ten years ago, I believe,” he said. “It has been eroded by all the unfortunate travelers forced to stop over, as we are, involuntarily.”
That’s how he talks, Dragoness. Yes, that’s how your husband talks. You can bet all you have on it. You ask him. “When will the car be ready?” simply to hear him reply, very subtly, “You should ask Franz.” He presses his socks to his chest while you exhale smoke.
“But really, why put your things in the drawers when we’ll be here only one night?”
He carried his socks to the dresser as if they were a dozen fragile eggs.
“One night, one month, the principle is the same. We should take advantage of what time we have.”
“Advantage?” You curled up in the bed, resting on your elbows. “In this miserable dump of a town?”
Javier arranged his socks all in a row in the top drawer. You began to laugh. You drew your legs up again and laughed and pushed out your breasts and watched him putting his shirts in the pine dresser one by one, very neatly, the blue cotton shirt, the black knit wool, the yellow silk, the pleated guayabera, the terry-cloth shirt to be used after swimming in the sea. You slapped your hands on your open thighs and laughed.
“The point is not that the town is miserable,” said Javier, “but that whatever you see, you never really observe.”
“I saw their benighted children, didn’t I?”
His underwear was at the bottom of the suitcase. He lifted it out and on his open palms carried it to the dresser. There he counted: six jockey shorts, six undershirts. He made a face. You knew it: as usual he had forgotten his handkerchiefs.
“The beggars came out of the city at dawn and went from dwelling to dwelling, marketplace to marketplace…”
Abruptly you got up from the bed.
“You can’t hear what they say here, Javier. You can’t hear a damn word they say.” And with both hands you struck Javier’s hands, sending his underwear flying around the room. You laughed again.
“… a barefoot multitude of rags and outstretched arms…”
You will tell me about it many times, Dragoness. You know that the first time will be hard, that you will expect too much of the second, and that only the third time will everything seem right to you. So. You panted for a moment against Javier’s face. Then you let yourself fall face down on the bed. “They were then just what they are today. Things with neither eyes nor ears nor voice. To hell with them, they bore me. Let me sleep now.”
Javier knelt and retrieved his jockey shorts and undershirts. He placed them in the drawer.
“Don’t you want to bathe, change clothes?”
“What for? To stroll in that withered-up park and listen to cha-cha-cha?”
You hid your face in the pillow again. Javier closed the drawer. You rolled over, shut your eyes. Javier looked at you, at the fatigue just faintly showing on a face that with the eyes closed seemed to disengage itself from the world as if its voice would never be heard again, as if its body were no longer there. He walked toward the bathroom carrying the small leather case in which his medicines and pomades travel. At the door he stopped and you said slowly, laughing quietly: “Abandon human sacrifices. Stop worshipping idols. Well, why not? No longer eat the flesh of your fellow man. Give up sodomy and your other stupid degeneracies. Hah, hah. Sure. Graduate and join the Navy and see the sea. Ship ahoy.”
You rose and looked at your husband as you sat down before the broken-paned window that opened on a sour interior patio. You sat in a rocker beside the drapes and began to rock back and forth, awaiting the moment when you could say: “We walked along the arcade, silent, infected by the living death…”
You jerked the cord violently and the drapes swirled open and the afternoon sun poured in. Viciously you went on: “… by the dead life of this goddam funereal town. Javier! Javier, are you satisfied?”
You opened your eyes. He was no longer in the room.
“Javier! Javier! Don’t you understand I’m doing it all for you?”
You heard a gush of water into the washbowl, then the voice of your husband: “The battle lasted only five hours. Three thousand lay dead in the streets, in the ashes of the destroyed temples.”
You waited with your hands resting against the sides of the bathroom door and in a very slow voice you said quietly: “Oh, yes, they are gods. They divine treachery in advance and in advance they take their vengeance. Who can oppose them?”
You went into the bathroom. At its farther end, half hidden by the shower curtain, Javier sat on the throne with his naked knees showing, his trousers down around his ankles and shoes. You approached him without haste, even with a certain professional air. You pulled back the curtain and lifted him from the seat and offered him the roll of paper. He took it. Mechanically, yet precisely — oh, yes — he tore off exactly three segments. His hand went to his buttocks. Then he pulled the chain and hoisted his trousers. You smiled with a twisted mouth. Thus, good Father, would I like to stand before Thy final judgment.