The Dream (2)
The kid in the white shirt walked the streets of the dark city… In the distance, silhouetted against the horizon, he saw the movie theater… But no, to say that it was silhouetted might erroneously suggest that it was on level ground, which was not the case… The streets rose and fell, stone staircases everywhere, gleaming in the night… The city, or at least this part of the city, seemed to be built on hills and crags… Uneven ground, paved with stone and cement, flanked by ravines filling up with black garbage bags as shiny as stones… And there were columns… Roman or Greek columns, holding urns… Urns plain and simple: the flowerpots of hell, muttered the boy… The kid glanced sidelong at the urns (flowerless) and the pillars… The kid was in a hurry, I know; it’s not that he was scared… If I could climb a pillar, he thought, and reach into one of those pots… On the kid’s face, hidden in shadows, a white smile with yellow streaks like strands of gold appeared… Imperceptibly, the silhouette of the movie theater loomed larger… There was no one in the stone and cardboard ticket booth… In any case, the kid had no plans to buy a ticket… He strode along the inner corridors of the movie theater… The corridors seemed like sections of an underground parking garage, they were too wide and the curtains that covered the cement wall barely concealed a swarm of pipes… Finally he pushed through double doors and stepped into a side gallery… From here he could see only part of the screen… The faces projected, a close-up of two platinum blondes, moved with exasperating slowness… Still standing, the kid watched the scene… The gallery was long and narrow… At the back were stacks of cane chairs and a row of seats rotted by the rain… The kid took a pack of Cabañas and a gold lighter out of his pocket… Along with the knife, they were his only possessions… He lit a cigarette and the smoke veiled his eyes like a tiny screen between him and the Diorama screen…
The Oarsman of Fate
Walt Whitman’s daughters have hairy balls
Walt Whitman’s daughters are gilded dolls
Walt Whitman’s daughters sail as night falls
Eating breasts
Of turkey
Signed (in the air):
Carlos Ramírez
FACh Lieutenant
“What do you think of the poem?” asks Bibiano Macaduck.
“I don’t know…”
“It’s crap. The fucking goose-stepper thinks he’s Céline.”
“Are you including him in your Signals, too?”
“His complete works, compadre. The acme of the arrogance brigades, confound them, pack of morons…”
“But this poem isn’t in the Watchful Eye…”
“Ah, but we have our sources. The poem in question turned up at the Concepción Library on the shelf of lost works, between a monograph on the Seventh Regiment (an insane book that has our valiant troops scaling the slopes of Machu Picchu) and a Crawford and Sons volume on certain forays of Chile’s premier botanist, full of sketches of the nation’s flora and some of its fauna. What was the botanist’s name, for Christ’s sake? There must be something wrong with me, Rules Boy! I remember the publishing house, gone more than sixty years now, and I can’t remember the botanist.”
“Philippi.”
“That’s right. Rudolf Amand. God, what’s wrong with me!”
“Relax, Macaduck. You found it between the Seventh Regiment and Philippi. But what did you find, exactly?”
“The journal with the poem in it, you dolt. Poems by Ramírez, some guy, Ismael Copero, and somebody else I can’t remember. All of it crammed into an oversize eight-page booklet. The title of this monstrosity was Semana Santa, I shit you not. Semana Santa, get it? Initials: SS.”
“Take it easy.”
“Fine…”
“So where can I see this journal?”
“I told you, dumb ass, in the library. I’ll make you a map so you can find the famous shelf without getting scrambled. Some strange books are buried in that dump. On Ramírez’s shelf, you’ve got the Italian Fascists cuddling up to the Nazis and the National Unionists. Or their artistic manifestations. I mean: thugs on the plane of the sublime. The truth is, there’s not much to choose between them, but you can trace the resolve. A straight line from the turn of the century, followed relentlessly, sometimes successfully and sometimes not: usually not. Occasionally I try to imagine what the rat who drops books off there must be like. The rat or the monk.”
“I’ll go and see it with my own eyes,” I said.
“Better wait and read my Signals. Poking around in the dust will only confuse you more, Rules Boy.”
“I’m going anyway,” I said.
“What do you think he meant by saying that the daughters have hairy balls?”
“That they’re men, obviously, Bibiano. Walt Whitman’s daughters are men. Which is why they have hairy testicles… He must be referring to Neruda, Sandburg, de Rokha, Vachel Lindsay…”
“What about when he says that they’re gilded dolls?”
“Man, ‘dolls’ is there to rhyme with ‘balls,’ that’s the only reason I can think of. Unless the point is that they have money. Golden girls. But I doubt it.”
“What about Walt Whitman’s daughters sailing as night falls?”
“Same thing: it’s for the rhyme. Makes no difference whether they sail as night falls or whether they sink their ships, like Hernán Cortés.”
“Look, this is how I see it. Walt Whitman is America. ‘Walt Whitman’s daughters have hairy balls’ is a reference to the Amazons or the angels, the original inhabitants of the continent. The second line, about gilded dolls, means that the Amazons have forgotten their true nature and gotten mixed up with the new throngs of European immigrants, and on top of that they have gold: money or wisdom. The third line, when the daughters of Walt Whitman sail as night falls, is a reference to the Amazons’ voyage to America. When you brought up Hernán Cortés, you unintentionally came close to hitting the nail on the head. The fourth and fifth lines, in which they eat turkey breasts, suggests—no, flat out states—that the Amazons came down to Earth devouring their parents, the gods of heaven. Devouring them with smiles on their faces, I’d say.”
“You’re messing with me, Macaduck.”
“Actually, the events described in the poem aren’t in chronological order. If we read it this way around, our birdie will sing a different tune: ‘Walt Whitman’s daughters sail as night falls / Eating breasts / Of turkey / The daughters of Walt Whitman have hairy balls / The daughters of Walt Whitman are gilded dolls,’ and even better: insert the adverb ‘today.’ Today Walt Whitman’s daughters (now, at this moment of struggle and destruction) are gilded dolls (they mingle complacently with decent working women, decent wives and mothers). And, as I’m sure you know, in some cultures the turkey is synonymous with sovereignty, wealth, and power… In America, and Europe too, the turkey stands for the father…”
“I always thought that kids who acted dumb were called turkeys. In school that’s what they called me for a while.”
“That’s true, too, that’s the flip side of it… We want to believe that the gods are stupid. But we don’t lift a finger in the face of their wrath. Only the Amazons have ever been capable of eating them…”
“So, according to you, the hidden message of the poem is…”
“I’m not surprised you got a zero in mythology, Rules Boy. These chicks devour their parents and come down to earth thinking they’re the shit, prancing around, even eating! Can you imagine the movie? Like the dinner party from Venus Attack, when an H-bomb is dropped on San Francisco and the guests come out on the terrace carrying chicken wings and glasses of wine, and they keep chewing and sipping as the mushroom cloud grows in the distance, have you seen it?”