35. A HOSPITAL
The girl weighs 60 pounds now. She's in the hospital and it seems she's losing ground. "Destroy your stray phrases." I didn't understand what she meant until much later. Doubt was cast on my honesty, my reliability: they said I slept while I was on guard duty. Really, they were after someone else and I happened to show up at the wrong time. The girl weighs 6o pounds now and she probably won't leave the hospital alive. (Someone applauds. The hallway is full of people who open their mouths without a sound.) A girl I knew? I don't remember anyone with that face, I said. On the screen there's a street, a drunk kid is about to cross, a bus appears. The prompter said, "Sara Bendeman?" Still, I couldn't understand anything at the time. All I remember is a skinny girl with long freckled legs, undressing at the foot of the bed. The scene continues in a dimly lit alley: a woman, forty, smokes a cigarette on the fourth floor, leaning on the windowsill. Up the stairs comes a panting cop in civilian clothes, his features like mine if I'd overdosed on cortisone. (The one person who applauded closes his eyes now. In his mind something takes shape, something that might be a hospital if the meaning of life were different. In one of the rooms the girl is in bed. The curtains are open and light spills into the room.) "Destroy your stray phrases"… "A policeman climbs the stairs"… "In his gaze there is no hunchback, no Jewish girl, no traitor" But we can still insist"…
36. PEOPLE WALKING AWAY
Nothing lasts, the purely loving gestures of children tumble into the void. I wrote: "a group of waiters returning to work" and "windswept sand" and "the dirty windowpanes of September." Now I can turn my back on him. The hunchback is your guiding light. White houses scattered across the mountainside. Deserted highways, the screech of birds in the trees. And did I do everything? did I kiss her when she'd stopped expecting kisses? (Miles from here people are applauding, and that's why I feel such despair.) Yesterday I dreamed that I lived inside a hollow treesoon the tree began to spin like a carousel and I felt as if the walls were closing in on me; I woke to find the door of the bungalow ajar. The hunchback's face shone in the moonlight… "Lonely words, people walking away from the camera, and children like hollow trees"… "No matter where you go"… I stopped at the fucking "lonely words." Undisciplined writing. It was forty men, more or less, all working for starvation wages. Each morning the Andalusian laughed uproariously when he read the paper. Waxing moon in August. In September I'll be alone. In October and November I'll pick pineapples.
37. THREE YEARS
The only rule that exists is a redheaded girl watching us from the end of the fence. Bruno understood this the same way I did, he just cared about different things. The cops are tired, there's a gasoline shortage, and thousands of unemployed youths roam Barcelona. (Bruno is in Paris, playing sax outside the Pompidou, they say, and without a girlfriend now.) With oily steps, four or five waiters approach the shack where they sleep. One of them used to write poetry, but that was a long time ago. The author said: "I can't be pessimistic or optimistic, everything is determined by the beat of hope that manifests itself in what we call reality." I can't be a science fiction writer because my innocence is mostly gone and I'm not crazy yet… Words that no one speaks, that no one is required to speak… Hands in the process of geometric fragmentation: writing that's stolen away just as love, friendship, and the recurring backyards of nightmares are stolen away… Sometimes I get the sense that it's all "internal"… Maybe that's why I lived alone and did nothing for three years… (The man hardly ever washed, he didn't need a typewriter, all he had to do was sit in that shabby armchair for things to flee of their own accord)… A surprising evening for the hunchback? Policemen's faces an inch from his nose? Did the rain really wash clean the windowpanes?
38. THE GUN TO HIS MOUTH
Screen of blond hair. Behind it the hunchback draws swimming pools, commuter towns, empty streets. Tact or courtesy stems from proper behavior in each situation. The hunchback draws a person with a kind face. "I lay there on my back in bed, I heard the crickets chirp and someone recite Manrique." Under the parched trees of August, I write to understand stillness, not to please. A kind person! Whether it's art or a fiveminute adventure of a boy running up some stairs. "My departure escaped the author's eye." An ah, and an oh, and postcards from whitewashed towns. The hunchback strolls down the empty pool, sits in the deep end, and lights a cigarette. The shadow of a cloud passes, a spider pauses next to his fingernail, he expels smoke. "Reality is a drag." I suppose all the movies I've seen will be worth nothing to me when I die. Wrong. They'll be worth something, believe me. Don't stop going to the movies. Scene of an empty commuter town, old newspapers blowing in the wind, dust crusted on benches and restaurants. I have long had this war inside me, which is why it doesn't affect me internally, wrote Klee. Was it in Mexico City that I saw the hunchback for the first time? Was it Gaspar who told stories about cops and robbers? They put the gun to his mouth and pinched his nose… He had to open his mouth to breathe and then they shoved the barrel in… In the center of the black curtain there's a red circle… I think the man said shit or mama, I don't know…
39. BIG SILVER WAVES
The foreigner stayed here. That tent you see there was his tent. Go on in. He spent a long time under that tree, thinking, though it looked like he was dead. From where we're standing you could see his face covered in sweat. Big drops formed on his chin and dripped onto the grass. Here, feel, he slept for hours in the weeds here, like a dead man. The guy came into the bar and had a beer. He paid with French money and put the change in his pocket, not counting it. He spoke perfect Spanish. He had a camera that the police took as evidence. He walked on the beach in the evening. In this scene, the beach looks pale, pale yellow, with fading golden splotches. He dropped onto the sand, like a dead man. The only soundtrack was the dry obsessive cough of someone we could never see. Big silver waves, the guy standing on the beach, barefoot, and the cough. A long time ago were you happy in a tent too? In some corner of his memory there's a scene where he's on top of a thin brown girl. It's nighttime in a deserted campground, somewhere in Portugal. The girl is on her stomach and he moves in and out of her, biting her neck. Then he turns her over. He lifts her legs onto his shoulders and both of them come. An hour later he's on top of her again. (Or as a Conde del Asalto pimp says: "wham bam wham bam times infinity.") I don't know whether I'm talking about the same person. His camera is in some evidence locker now and maybe no one's thought to develop the film. Endless hallways, nightmarish, along which strides a fat tech from the Homicide Squad. The red light is off now, you can come in. The policeman's face relaxes into a smile. From the end of the hallway the silhouette of another policeman approaches. He crosses the space that separates him from his colleague and then both of them disappear. Empty now, the gray of the hallway quivers or maybe it swells. Then the silhouette of a policeman appears at the other end. He advances until he's in the foreground, pauses. In the background another cop appears. The shadow moves toward the shadow of the cop in the
foreground. Both disappear. The smile of a tech from the Homicide Squad keeps watch over these scenes. Fat cheeks drenched in sweat. There's nothing in the photographs. (A stifled attempt at applause.) Nothing we can see. "Call someone, do something"… "A fucking, cough echoing across the beach"… "The tent full of spiderwebs"… "Everything is wrecked"… "Faces, stray scenes, kaput"…