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A nighttime stroll. We have found a street hidden from the sky by dense, serious foliage. Now the sky does not exist; it has been rolled up like a rug, leaving barren the floorboards of space where the worlds walk, high society, slowly, silently, fastidiously. Now I love you as I have never loved you — truly, painfully. I don’t know how. Walking through the street that returns our footsteps and our voices to us as in a cavern. A streetcar destroys a corner, a borehole of light and sound. For a moment we resound, we vibrate in this region of the night like all things — windows, windows, windows. Now I can be a hero with a convex and bloody chest. If I kidnapped you now, you would tear out locks of my hair and cry out to indifferent things. You will not do it. I shall not kidnap you, not for anything in the world. I need you in order to be at your side, longing to kidnap you. Woe to the one who realizes his desire! The sea sings in the distance like a chorus that begins to sound like an opera. Suddenly it whispers in my ear like a glass of soda that is losing its gas. A piano is the night — sorrow that is antique, clichéd, with four hands. Now I will tell you how I feeclass="underline"
“I love you because you love me. Your smallness orients my hope as I search for bliss. If you grew like the trees, I would not know what to desire. You are the measure of my pleasure. You are the measure of my desire. Behind all death is the joy of finding you in an earthly paradise. My love, a little thing that never grows. If a star were to fall, you would catch it, and you would burn your hands. My love has not fallen from the sky, and that’s why you do not catch it. You are silly and pretty like all women. You laugh, and your laughter reconciles me with the night.
“Why do you not love me? You simply abandon me to the passing wind and the leaf that falls and the lamp that illuminates, as if by losing me you lose nothing. And my love at this hour is the only thing that pays attention to you. Now there is nothing you perturb except my love that follows you like your shadow, wanting to see your eyes. Love me, even if tomorrow, when you awake, you will no longer remember me. Love me, the hour demands it of you! Woe to the one who disobeys time!”
Beyond the night, the dawning of the morning with its colors and its odors. Beyond the night, the birds’ song matures in the future like the fruit of the trees. Beyond the night, your thoughts pick realities to embody. And my love follows you through the skyless night of the street, like the memory of a dog you once had that died.
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At the end of a very urban street, the countryside begins abruptly. From the cabins with their little patios and palm trees and mounds of bellflowers, the broom bushes fall on the hillocks of spongy earth, over the adobe walls, across the monotonous blues of the sky. Droves of donkeys carry adobe bricks all day long in a gray cloud of dust. Here, in patches on this hard and spongy ground, lie the city’s future houses with their tarred roofs, delicate plaster window frames, living rooms with Victrolas and love secrets, perhaps even with their inhabitants — prudent mothers and modern girls, daredevil young men and industrious fathers. The face of a distant aunt can be divined in a clod of earth — the face of one of those aunts three times removed who comes for a visit to get a breath of fresh air, drink a glass of cold water. A very old jacaranda tree — the retired municipal inspector of decoration — whiles away the hours, so many, of this extra afternoon, making a few flowers of such expert perfection that, once finished, he tosses them away with the impassive nonchalance of a mandarin in his palace in this hasty suburb. And on the horizon, the blinding smell of smoke sweeps away the view of poplars and breast-shaped hillocks — the pale, almost blue, color of granite. A dove passes low overhead, carrying
in its beak a bell from the parish church, and the bell is a piece of straw for its nest. A native girl pulls on the halter of an enormous mule; and she isn’t even yet fifteen years old; and the mule grows stubborn and refuses to move; and the arc of the native girl’s fragile body grows tenser and tenser; and the mule braces itself with its front legs; and I want to kidnap this girl and run away with her on the mule to the sierra, so nearby, until its peaks scratch the skin off my nose, making me squint when I stare at her. I would then descend, with the native girl in my arms and the mule between my legs, into a dark chasm full of cacti, with somnambulistic confidence in this happy nightmare. And the mule has pulled the halter out of the native girl’s hands and now runs wild, slouching, and bent in a loud and rapid trot along the road, hugging the wall, not knowing where to go. And the halter that drags behind in the dust has the clean and perverse irony of a rat’s tail.
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I have received a letter from Catita. She says nothing in it except that she would like to see me with a sad face. It is a long, tremulous letter in which a nubile girl pulls love by the ears with those sure, those slow, those surgical fingers women use for torture from the age of fifteen until they deliver their first child. There are women who never conceive, and it is they whom Death fears most, for in order to carry them to the next world, he must wage a fierce battle and the bones of his skeleton are sure to get a severe scratching: spinsters die heroically.
Catita’s letter smells of spinsterhood — of incense, dried flowers, soap, plaster, medicine, milk. Emblematic spinsterhood with tortoiseshell glasses and a stiff index finger. A blue bun gives the final touch to her appearance — always inevitably partial. A lapdog licks the austere perfume exuded by the silk lace of the blouse. And a blouse of poetic fabrics — a robe of madapollam. And moreover — this, an indispensable detail — a long face whose features — both hard and weak, rough and useless — make a face out of buckram folds. Perhaps a parrot that knows the Litany of Loreto. Perhaps the portrait of an unlikely suitor. Perhaps an obsession to know everything. Perhaps a virtue crowned with thorns. But Catita is not even fifteen years old. The truth is, there is no reason her fingers should know how to pull on ears. Who knows if some boy, mad with love, doesn’t already want to marry her? Catita, taster of young boys, a bad woman who already has the hands of a spinster before the age of fifteen. English spinster, expert in explosives — propaganda department; a strange, short man; dry, veined hands. Is that how you’d like to be, Catita? What am I supposed to do with your letter? At this hour it is the impossible of all impossibilities for me to be sad. I am happy at this hour — it’s a habit of mine. A fishing boat off the coast of Miraflores waves with its white handkerchief of a sail — so useless in this still, pretty atmosphere, as if painted by a second-rate artist. This greeting is a greeting to nobody, and that happiness, a happiness of nonsense, of smallness, of regress, of humility. My cigarette draws admirably, and it is the rejoicing of a youthful fire with blue and minuscule rings and balls; and it is the rural peace of the smell of burned brambles. You see, Catita? You don’t see anything because you are not with me on the esplanade above the sea; but I swear to you that it is just as I say. In the afternoon, facing the sea, my soul becomes good, small, silly, human, and is gladdened by the fishing boats that unfurl their joke of a sail, and by the burning ember of a cigarette — a red-haired child who loses his head in a blue toy shop. And high-flying gulls — black flies in the sky’s mug of watery milk — make me want to shoo them away with my hands. When I was five years old and didn’t want to drink my milk, I would drown flies in it, then trap them with a spoon — a net compressed by the light until it hardened; and the flies in the milk turned into propellers. And now, suddenly, I feel like a naughty child, and I refuse to drink the glass of milk of the sky because it has no sugar in it. And my Mother Totuca, sweet ebony Buddha, might come along with the sugar bowl painted with a boy monkey dressed as a pirate and a girl monkey dressed as a Dutch girl, together making reverential gestures over the blue band stretching around the bowl’s belly. Perhaps your star would become sweeter if I sweetened the sky with sugar — your star: so bitter; your star: a spinster who falls in love with impossible comets; your star: leading you down the wrong path of love. Did you hear, Catita? I cannot be sad at this hour — this hour, the only one of the day when I am happy unknowingly, like a child; my hour of foolishness; my hour, Catita. You tasted Ramón, and he did not taste bad to you. Well, okay, so I will be Ramón. I will take upon myself his duty of kissing you on your wrists and looking at you with stupid eyes, worthy of all Ramón’s sayings. Foolish and large-winged duty accepted at an insular, celestial, windy, open, desolate hour. I will be Ramón for one month, two months, for however long you can love Ramón. But no: Ramón is dead, and Ramón’s face was never sad, and above all, you have already tasted Ramón. Yes, Catita, it’s true, but I am not a sad man. As I am at this hour, foolish and happy, so I am most of the day. I am a cheerful boy. I was born with a happy mouth. My life is a mouth that speaks, that eats, that smiles. I don’t believe in astrology. I accept that there are sad stars and happy stars. I even assert that sad stars are an excellent motive for writing sonnets with lines of fourteen syllables. But I do not believe our lives have any relationship whatsoever to stars. Oh, Catita! Life is not a river that flows: life is a puddle that stagnates. During the day, the same trees, the same sky, the same day is reflected in it. At night — always the same stars, the same moon, the same night. Sometimes an unknown face — a boy, a poet, a woman — is reflected in it — the older the puddle, the murkier — and then the face disappears because a face will not contemplate itself eternally in a puddle. And the face does contemplate itself. And the puddle is a turbid and interceding mirror. And an old man is a puddle in which no young girl would look at herself. Because one’s own life is a puddle, but the lives of others are faces that come to look at themselves in it. Yes, Catita. But some lives are not puddles, but rather a lake, a sea, an ocean wherein only the sky and the mountains, the clouds, the great ships can be seen. Thus the life of Walt Whitman — a Yankee who was half crazy and therefore an excellent poet — was an ocean full of transatlantic liners; Napoleon’s, on the other hand, was an ocean full of warships and cetaceans. Saint Francis’s was a trough from which a donkey with a dove perched on its forehead drank. Phillip II’s: a dead sea with a very sad face and sinister legends. Puccini’s: an alpine lake, white with canoes from the Cook Travel Agency. Bolivar’s: a dangerous and frightening channel with reefs and floating casks. Your life: a washbasin in which one soaks an armful of broom that has the color and smell of sulfur. Thus is the soul, Catita — either enemy waters or stupid waters — lake, sea, swamp, washbasin full of water. But never a flow with a current and a bed. My life is a hole dug with the hands of a truant child in the sands of a beach — a malignant and tiny hole that distorts the reflections of gentlemen who scold truant children, the image of respectable gentlemen who come to the beach and infest the sea air — so clean, so brilliant — with their horrible office odors. Such is my life, Catita — a little puddle on a beach — so now you see why I cannot be sad. The high tide undoes me, but another truant child digs me again at the other end of the beach, and I cease to exist for a few days, during which time I learn, always anew, the joy of not existing and the joy of resuscitating. And I am the truant child who digs his life in the sands of the beach. And I know the insanity of setting life up against destiny, because destiny is nothing but the desire we feel alternately to die and to resuscitate. For me the horror of death is nothing but the certainty of never being able to resuscitate again, that eternal boredom of being dead. Oh, Catita, don’t read sad books, and don’t read the happy ones either! There is no happiness greater than being a little hole full of seawater on a beach, a hole destroyed by the high tide, a little hole full of seawater where a paper boat floats. To live is nothing but being a truant child who makes and unmakes his life in the sands of the beach, and there is no pain greater than being a hole full of seawater on a beach that is bored of being one, or of being one that is too easily undone. Catita, don’t read destiny in the stars. They know as little about it as you do. Sometimes the puddle of my life coincides with the fall of one of them, and I have had more than one, whole and sincere, in my drop of water. Catita, the stars know nothing about issues that concern girls. They themselves are perhaps nothing but girls with boyfriends, with mothers, and with spiritual addresses. What you decipher in them is nothing but your own concerns, your own joys, your own sadnesses. Moreover, stars have a much too provincial beauty; I don’t know. too naive, too real. The poor things imitate your way of viewing things. Your star is nothing but a star that no doubt views things as you do, and its flickering is nothing but fatigue at having to look in a way that has nothing to do with its feelings. Catita. Catita, why does your destiny have to be in the sky? Your destiny is here on Earth, and I have it in my hands, and I feel a terrible urge to throw it over the railing into the sea. But no. What would you be without your destiny? Your destiny perhaps is to be a puddle on an ocean beach, a puddle full of seawater, but a puddle in which there is, instead of a paper boat, a little fish that raises a fat and brutish wave.