The cards and gifts you send and receive year after year or that we send and receive with a somewhat foolish feeling that overwhelms you or us but which slowly, because of an interweaving of memories and forgetfulness, you or we stop sending or receiving, like those trains that pass with no hope of ever passing one another again, or rather, now for self-criticism, since the comparison with trains is really not very good because you would have to be a very stupid train not to meet up again with the trains you’ve met — like those bourgeois drivers who, just because they are who they are, when they drive their cars feel free of something they cannot name if you ask them what it is and once, only once in their lives, meet up with you at a red light and you exchange foolish knowing glances with them for a moment while you discreetly but meaningfully arrange your hair or adjust your tie or check your earrings or take off or put on your glasses, depending on how you think you look best, with the melancholy suspicion or optimistic certainty that you are never going to see them again but nonetheless live that brief moment as if something important depended on it, or perhaps something not so important, that is, those fortuitous meetings, those conjunctions, just to give them a name, when nothing happens, when nothing needs explanation, when you don’t need to understand each other, when you shouldn’t understand each other, when nothing needs to be accepted or rejected, oh!
CHOOSE ONE
The tulip and the butterfly
appear in coats that are merrier than mine:
if you dress me in the best you can find,
flies, worms and flowers will still outshine me.
The two greatest humorists you know are Kafka and Borges. “The Lottery in Babylon” and The Trial are sheer joy from beginning to end. Recall Max Brod telling us that when Kafka read him passages from this novel, Kafka almost fell on the floor laughing at what happened to K. Still, the book has a tragic effect on you. It is also appropriate to recall the response to Don Quixote: its first readers laughed; the romantics began to weep when they read it, except for the scholars, such as Don Diego Clemencín, who rejoiced if he happened to find a correct sentence in Cervantes; and the moderns don’t laugh or cry over the book because they prefer to do their laughing or crying at the movies, and perhaps they are right.
EVER-PRESENT DANGER
All these idle words, the silly no less than the Self-regarding and uncharitable, are impediments in the way of the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, a dance of dust and flies obscuring the inward and the outward Light.
For his own amusement, he writes three pages of false exegesis of one of Góngora’s octaves. He piles inanity upon inanity, attributing them to a provincial critic. He types a clean copy. He is certain that everyone who reads it will burst into uncontrollable laughter. He shows his work to four friends who are writers. One understands the joke from beginning to end. Two, enlightened by his example, figure it out a third of the way through, and smile very cautiously. The fourth takes everything with complete seriousness, makes two or three observations just to have something to say, and the author is overcome by embarrassment.
He writes a serious note in which he clarifies once and for all the meaning of the so-called “recalcitrant stanza” by Góngora (“the hedgehog pouch of the chestnut”). He shows it to his four friends. The first denies the validity of his thesis, the other three laugh in amusement, and he is overcome by embarrassment.
THE OUTDOOR POET
I have always hated flies; the tickling sensation when they land on my brow or bald head — with the passage of time it amounts to the same thing; the sound of miniature airplanes when they buzz around my ears. But what is truly awful is to see how they land on our open eyes when we can no longer close them, how they penetrate the hollows of our nostrils, how they swarm into an open mouth we would prefer to keep shut, especially when we are stretched out, faces to the sun, a rifle under our shoulder that had been over our shoulder before, but we had no time to use it.
On Sunday I went to the park. In the sun, surrounded by trees, a poet on a bench of indefinite color faced some fifty people who listened to him attentively or casually or courteously.
The poet was reading aloud from papers that he held in his left hand, while with his right he accentuated words when he thought he should. When he finished a poem the applause of his public was so tenuous and unwilling it almost could have been taken for disapproval. The sun shone on all of them with enthusiasm, but all of them had found a way to protect themselves by placing their programs on their heads. A little girl of three and a half pointed out this fact to her father, who also laughed to himself and admired his daughter’s intelligence.
The poet, whose clothes were somewhat out of fashion, continued reading. Now he used his body and extended his arms, as if he were sending from his mouth to his public not words but something else, perhaps flowers, or something, although the audience, carefully keeping their balance so that the programs on their heads would not fall, did not respond appropriately to his gesture.
Behind the poet, behind a long table covered with red cloth, sat the judges, looking serious, as they were supposed to. Nearby, on the sidewalk, you could hear the noise of cars passing, sounding their horns; even closer, you really couldn’t tell where but in among the trees, a band was playing the William Tell Overture. Both diminished the effect the poet was seeking, but with a certain amount of goodwill it was clear that he was saying something about a spring that dwelled in the heart and a flower that a woman held in her hand that illuminated everything and the conviction that the world in general was fine and only a few small things were needed for the world to be perfect and comprehensible and harmonious and beautiful.
TENDER ROSE
I keep a fly / with golden wings, / I keep a fly / with burning eyes. // It brings death / in its eyes of fire, / it brings death / in its hairs of gold, / its beautiful wings. // I keep it / in a green bottle; / nobody knows / if it drinks, / nobody knows / if it eats. // It wanders the nights / like a star, / it fatally wounds / with its red splendor, / with its eyes of fire. // In its eyes of fire / it carries love, / its blood / gleams in the night, / the love it brings in its heart. // Insect of night, / fly that bears death, / I keep it / in a green bottle, / I love it so well. // But it’s true! / It’s true! / Nobody knows / if I give it drink, / if I give it food.
It has the advantage of describing the employee closest to you, or yourself, or even the sales manager. “A muddled education, that is, an education full of holes.” Once again, as I have for years, I take out my notebook and write down a supposedly ingenious phrase in the hope of using it some day, certain the day will never come, but you can all calm down: This will not be yet another story about the writer who does not write.
Back in the café, a café filled with students and families. The usual matrons come in dressed in their green, yellow, blue blouses, accompanied by their children who are now greedily swallowing ice cream. That pretty lady also asks for pink ice cream for her children Alfonsito, Marito, and Luisito who, when it arrives, methodically smear it on their tongues, their lips, and a little on their hair and cheeks, though Mama gets annoyed and has to tell the oldest that he should learn how to eat because how will Alfonsito ever become a doctor if he doesn’t know how to eat and who will set an example for his little brothers if he doesn’t.