40. THE MOTORCYCLISTS
Imagine the situation: the nameless girl hiding on the landing — it's an old building, poorly lit, with an opengrille elevator. Behind the door a man of about forty whispers, in a confessional tone, that he, too, is being chased by Colan Yar. The brownandblack opening shot vanishes almost instantly, giving way to a deep panorama— stores with multicolored roofs. Then: dark green trees. Then: red sky with clouds. Was a kid asleep in the tent just then? Dreaming of Colan Yar, police cars parked in front of a smoldering building, twentyyearold criminals? "All the shit in the world," or: "A campground should be the closest thing to Purgatory," etc. With dry, trembling hands he pushed back the curtains. Below, the motorcyclists revved their engines and took off. He whispered "very far away" and clenched his teeth. Fat blondesyoung women from Andalusia confident of their appealand among them the nameless girl, with her guillotine mouth, strolling through the past and the future like a movie face. I imagined my body tossed away in the countryside, just a few yards from the town's first houses. A camper, out for a walk, found me, he was the one who alerted the police. Now, under the cloudy sky, I'm surrounded by men in blue and white uniforms. The guardia civil and tabloid photographers, or maybe just tourists whose hobby is taking pictures of dead bodies. Gawkers and children. It isn't Paradise, but it's close. The girl goes slowly down the stairs. I opened the office door and ran downstairs. On the walls I saw furious whales, an incomprehensible alphabet. The street noise woke me up. On the opposite sidewalk a man yelled and then wept until the police came. "A body just outside of town"… "The motorcyclists are lost on the highway"… "No one will ever close this window again"…
41. THE BUM
I remember one night at the Merida train station. My girlfriend was asleep in her sleeping bag and I was keeping watch with a knife in the pocket of my jacket. I didn't feel like reading. Anyway… Phrases appeared, I mean, I never closed my eyes or made an effort to think, the phrases just appeared, literally, like glowing ads in the middle of the empty waiting room. Across the room, on the floor, slept a bum, and next to me slept my girlfriend, and I was the only one awake in the whole silent, repulsive Merida train station. My girlfriend breathed calmly in her red sleeping bag and that calmed me. The bum sometimes snored, sometimes talked in his sleep, he hadn't shaved for days, and he was using his jacket as a pillow. His left hand shielded his chest. The phrases appeared like news on an electronic ticker. White letters, not very bright, in the middle of the waiting room. The bum's shoes stood next to his head. The toe of one of his socks was full of holes. Sometimes my girlfriend shifted. The door to the street was yellow and in some places the paint had a bleak look. I mean, only slightly, but at the same time absolutely bleak. I wondered whether the bum was dangerous. Phrases. I clutched the knife, still in my pocket, and waited for the next phrase. In the distance I heard the whistle of a train and the ticking of the station clock. I'm saved, I thought. We were on our way to Portugal, and this happened some time ago. My girlfriend breathed. The bum offered me cognac from a bottle he had in his bag. We talked for a few minutes and then we were quiet until morning.
42. CLEAR WATER ALONG THE WAY
What's yet to come. The wind in the trees. Everything is the projection of a forlorn kid. He's walking alone along a back road. His mouth moves. I saw a group of people opening their mouths, unable to speak. The rain filters through the pine needles. Someone is running in the woods. You can't see his face. Just his back. Pure violence. (In this scene the author appears with his hands on his hips watching something offscreen.) The wind and the rain through the trees, like a curtain of madmen. The wind blows like a ghost on a deserted beach: lifts his pajamas, pushes him across the sand until he disappears in the middle of an asthma attack or a long yawn. "Like a rocket sliced open"… "The poetic way of saying that you no longer love back streets lit up by patrol cars"… "The melodic voice of the sergeant speaking with a Galician accent"… "Boys your age who'd settle for so little"… "It's too bad"… "There's a kind of dance that turns into lips"… Wells of clear water along the way. You saw a man on the ground under the trees and you kept running. The first wild blackberries of the season. Like the screwedup eyes of the excitement that rushed to meet you.
43. LIKE A WALTZ
In the railroad car a girl on her own. She looks out the window. Outside everything splits in two: tilled fields, woods, white houses, towns, suburbs, dumps, factories, dogs, and children waving goodbye. Lola Muriel appears. August 1980. I dream of faces that open their mouths and can't speak. They try but they can't. Their blue eyes stare at me but they can't. Then I walk along the corridor of a hotel. I wake up sweating. Lola has blue eyes and she reads Poe stories by the pool, while the other girls talk about pyramids and jungles. I dream that I'm watching it rain in neighborhoods which I recognize but have never visited. I walk along an empty passageway. I see faces with eyes that close and mouths that open, though they can't speak. I wake up sweating. August 1980? A girl, eighteen, from Andalusia? The night watchman, madly in love?
44. NEVER ALONE AGAIN
Silence hovers in the yards, leaving no pages with writing on them, that thing we'll later call the work. Silence reads letters sitting on a balcony. Birds like a rasp in the throat, like women with deep voices. I no longer ask for all the loneliness of love or the tranquility of love or for the mirrors. Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore. Silence is love just as your raspy voice is a bird. And no work could justify the slowness of movements and obstacles. I wrote "a nameless girl," I saw a radio by the window and a girl sitting on a chair and in a train. The girl was tied up and the train was in motion. The folding of wings. Everything is a folding of wings and silence, from the fat girl afraid to get in the pool to the hunchback. Her hand turned off the radio… "I've seen some happy marriages — the silence builds a kind of double victoryfoggy windowpanes and names written with a finger"… "Maybe dates, not names"… "In the winter"… Scene of policemen rushing into a gray building, sound of gunfire, radios turned all the way up. Fade to black. The tenderness of an old whore and her cloak of silvery silence. And I no longer ask for all the solitude in the world, but for time. They shoot. Phrases like "I've lost even my sense of humor," "so many nights alone," etc., remind me of the meaning of retreat, a folding inward. Nothing's written. The foreigner, motionless, imagines that this is death. The hunchback trembles in the empty pool. I've found a bridge in the woods. Lightning flash of blue eyes and blond hair… "For a while, never alone again"…
45. APPLAUSE
She said she loved busy days. I looked up at the sky. "Busy days," and also insects and clouds that drift down to the bushes. This flower pot I leave in the country is proof of my love for you. Then I came back with my butterfly net in the fog. The girl said: "calamity," "horses," "rockets sliced open," and turned her back on me. Her back spoke. Like the chirping of crickets in the afternoons of lonely houses. I closed my eyes, the brakes squealed, and the policemen leaped out of their cars. "Keep looking out the window." Without any explanation, two of them came to the door and said "police," the rest I could hardly hear. I closed my eyes, crickets chirped, the boys died on the beach. Bodies riddled with holes. The brakes squealed and the cops got out. There's something obscene about this, said the medic when nobody was listening. I'll probably never come back to the clearing in the woods, not with flowers, not with the net, not with a fucking book to spend the afternoon. His mouth opened but the author couldn't hear a thing. He thought about the silence and then he thought "there's no such thing," "horses," "waning August moon." Someone applauded from the void. I said I guessed this was happiness.