•
There is a knock at the door. Heribert says to come in. Hug comes roaring into the room, telling him that Helena has decided to put on the exhibition any way she can, that they are all casting about for an idea that can save them. Heribert closes his eyes, hides his head under the pillow, and when Hug doesn’t leave, he calls for the nurse and asks her to escort him out.
•
The doctor’s comments lead him to think he has not devoted much attention to the nurses, which he proceeds to do from that moment on. The nurse on the night shift is more attractive than the one on the day shift. Maybe now that he’s all banged up he’ll start feeling passionate again. What’s more, nurses have always been a persistent part of popular erotic mythology, leading one to foresee miracles. At one point, when the night nurse is picking things up from the bedside table, Heribert lifts his hand to caress her thigh, but then lowers it. He concentrates on counting the tiles, the bars on the bed. . He could add them all together. . but what a bore! If here were in a ward, with a lot of other patients, he could watch them, make fun of them, listen to their conversations. He would have company. But no sooner does he have this thought than he realizes it would be horrible to have to put up with all that half-dead, skinny, pale, sick riffraff and their crying and moaning. Let them all die! He doesn’t want to see them! How glad he is to be in a room by himself!
•
He reads an article in the newspaper about the creative crises many painters, filmmakers, and musicians are going through nowadays. “Is there anything left to say?” the journalist asks. “Lately, the speed with which new fashions and cultural tastes succeed each other leads one. .” He drops the paper. He picks up a novel Hilari has lent him, in which there are no dead bodies. He used to think they were boring. Now he thinks the ones with dead bodies are phony.
•
The doctor comes in, with traces of blood on his gown and in need of a shave. There is a nurse with him. They are standing by the side of the bed, looking at him with a smile Heribert finds hard to categorize. The doctor announces that they will be releasing him that evening. He is much better. Soon, the doctor says, if he puts his mind to it he will be able to paint again. Heribert’s blood boils. What is this fool saying? How dare he insinuate something like that? What does he know about it? He had thought him to be an intelligent man, and now he comes out with this nonsense! He musters all the strength he has and spits at him. The arc of the sputum is weaker than he had intended, and it falls on the sheet on top of him. The expression on the doctor’s face changes and gets serious. The nurse wipes the spittle off with a Kleenex. There is a knock at the door. Helena comes in. She speaks with the doctor. Heribert studies the two of them, one right next to the other: Helena and the doctor, observing him. “Is she also getting it on with this quack?” Then the doctor and nurse leave the room. Helena has brought another bouquet of flowers. Why so many flowers? Heribert tries to think of some vulgar phrase that will annoy her, like: “Bring me a nice little eleven-year-old girl, and don’t bring me any more flowers,” but it seems like a cheap shot. For some time now (ever since the doctor and nurse had left), Helena has been telling him that the following day there will be a business lunch at their house, and that Hug will be there, along with other people who have money in the gallery, and Humbert. They have to fill the gap he has left them in, and they can’t do it just any old way. There were just a few days left, and they had to find an artist whose work was so good that this deplorable incident would not have lasting consequences for the gallery. They have to create a brilliant success, turn this error into a new leap forward, convert a debit into an asset. They have to use this opening to fly higher. This is why they can’t use a vaguely-familiar, second-rate artist — it would be like admitting defeat. There is only one possible move: they must introduce a complete unknown, someone whose body of work would amaze the critics, the public, and collectors alike. Humbert has the stuff. Tomorrow, all of them, together, will discuss what has to be done, and she’s telling him now so that he doesn’t think they’ve been plotting behind his back. But Heribert has been thinking the whole time about the “leap forward.” About how perfect metaphors, and strings of metaphors, were for whiling away the hours at play. Why can’t he just stay forevermore in that place, where, as if by a secret pact, everything is white and everyone is dressed in white, juggling similes and metaphors like a circus performer?
December
“Where to, kid?”
“Where?”
“Yes, where. What else?”
“Oh, I thought you meant it figuratively.”
He is dreaming of a swimming pool like the one he is sitting beside: white, spotless, blurred as if drawn in pencil and watercolors; or like a Hockney: lots of colorful awnings and tables with tall glasses. A woman with dark glasses is lying in a white hammock, sunbathing. It’s Helena. When she realizes he’s watching her, she smiles, raises her sunglasses until they are resting on the top of her head, looks back at him, and opens her mouth as if she were speaking, without emitting any sound. And, even though her voice can’t be heard, she is saying: “I’m upset you don’t want to make love with me.” “Make love!” Humbert snorts, and dives into the pool, where everything is warm and light blue, and he can swim for ages and ages underwater without having to come up to the surface for air. It was so easy to breathe underwater. . You just had to open your mouth like a fish out of water, but unlike a suffocating fish (for whom air is a foreign medium), he can breathe perfectly. “What a shame,” he thinks, “that this pool is only a drawing, so the sounds from above can’t reach me. Though sound wouldn’t reach me in a real pool, either.” When his head comes to the surface, Helena, who is sitting on the edge of the pool and splashing her feet in the water, is looking at him from behind her dark glasses, set against a desert background filled with singing Berbers. She has a straw sun hat on. “Do you love me?” she asks. In response, Humbert simply bites her foot, and everything goes into slow motion. Helena says, “Sometimes I think you’ve never loved me, and I mean nothing more to you than that diving board.” “What a great image,” Humbert thinks, “the diving board. As if it had all these different registers and levels of meaning. .” He hears someone laugh. He looks at the diving board, but the sun hurts his eyes, and he is now back in the water, his lungs full of air. He contemplates the bubbles that come out of his mouth. He thinks, “When I get out now, there’ll be a beer by the side of the pool.” When he gets out, a smiling Helena hands him an icy mug of beer with a snow-white head which drips and falls into the water, leaving patches of color that shouldn’t. . As he drinks the mug down, Helena kisses him on the forehead. “If only it could always be like this. .” He plunges back into the water and thinks, “When I get out, I want this house surrounding us, the house I live in, to be gone. I want to be on a beach.” He gets out and opens his eyes: he is on a beach. Wincing at the sunlight, he goes under again. “When I get out, I want to see the signature of the Hockney I’m in, in a corner somewhere.” When he gets out, in a corner of the sky (a cardboard sky right over his head) he sees Hockney’s signature, fading away as if written in smoke. Every time he gets out the sun pierces his eyes. If only he could always live under water. . “I could live there forever if it weren’t for the fact that every time I come up the sunlight hurts my eyes, and the longer and longer I stay under, and the longer and longer I take to come out again, the more it will hurt, until the times comes when I will bleed like a Christ figure, like a menstruating woman, like a wounded soldier, like a fish in a basket. .” A man jumps out a window and falls onto a tumbling mat. He runs down the street. Death is so sad. If he could only hide in a shadow. . To hide in a shadow is like not being there at all; he can only be touched or nabbed if he is in the sun, but then he has to stop, surrounded by the sands of a desert in the center of the world, under a red sun wearing dark glasses with frames the color of the girls riding down the highway on bicycles, on their way home, never arriving because they get lost on dirt trails, beyond the fences, rolling up the mountainside, those girls in the pictures of Helena as a teenager, sitting in meadows, wearing short skirts and high-heeled shoes, always smiling, wearing short pants and socks, with those flaming lips that scorch you as you die with pleasure.