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The paving stones — undergoing noontime heliotherapy, recumbent, facing the sun. In the corridor of the street — the windows of air have been opened — the policeman is the doctor who observes, who observes. Among the paving stones there is only one clinically interesting case — a triangular stone on the corner, at the intersection of two sidewalks (Miss CV, twenty-three years old, daughter of consumptive parents. Miss CV swallows. Miss CV has her eyes closed. Miss CV dies. Uterine cancer?. The name of the disease is unknown. Miss CV is a very interesting case.) The rest of the stones have — algias, — itis, — osis, all horribly general — married or widowed women who, in order to prolong the hour, prolong their convalescence. When it is impossible to have a lover because you are sixty years old, the best thing to do is to lie in the sun with your eyes closed and forget your husband, dead or alive. These sexual hours of dinner and digestion. A good time of day at the sanatoriums. The one across the street in the shade is a row of sick individuals of the male sex, the allusive and tragic male sex. In their heads, dark and painful, pounds the fever of business. Through their veins and arteries, wagon carts come and go. In their ears, shrieks the chimes of the telephone. The smell of sickness, the smell of the taste of bile, become the smells of the office — the smell of cedar and reams of paper. A turkey buzzard, with its bent, sallow fortitude of a diabetic Norwegian, leaves for a station in the highlands of the Swiss sky, which has already turned on its ices, its snows, its hotels for the tourists. the management of an oil company, fifteen years of equatorial, Venezuelan, xenophobic sunshine. Bible readings, silent black beer, Swedish exercise, prodigiously not adjusting; the frugal, austere pleasures of a preseptentrional immigrant to this America — luminous, caliginous, brutish, hard, mineral, Miocenic, maritime. The paving stones are stones carved with a hammer. The sun is killing them, but they do not complain. I don’t know why they are here, suffering without being paid. Twenty little tailless mongrel dogs (large ears; the hanging ones are of sheepskin, the erect ones of felt) that range in color from the waxen hue of fresh straw to the bluing on steel, rush along behind one large purebred dog with a tail and a mundane, uncouth, opulent face. The dogs glide along on short, agile limbs. The sun turns all the dogs into gold ingots. Hungering after the great female. The social revolution. Princess Alexandra Canoff, running down this street — almost as solitary and sunny as Tsarskoye Selo — your Parisian follies are now over. Freud does not include Caron’s or Cory’s perfumes among his coprolitic smells. This bitch smells like
The Night before Christmas, like A Night in Siam, like I don’t know what night, just so long as it’s not an afternoon. What a good idea it is to give the names of nights to perfumes. All perfumes are nocturnal. Sometimes I think that flowers exist only to temper the emotions of the day. In the desert, the very same sun that is merely a jovial and idle Barranco sun shining on these rose gardens becomes Libyan, Saharan; this matchmaking sun without a family is a bachelor, a gossipmonger from all five continents; a bluffer; this gallant sun that offers his arm to forsaken aunties on esplanades. Flowers absorb light and heat and carbon gas in the process. At night, wherever there is a flower, there is also a gnomic light with a tender halo of heat enclosed within the coquettish shade of each corolla. The sea is also the outskirts of the city. Now the sea is a mirror that reflects the sky, a thick and enormous looking glass quicksilvered with mullets and corbinas. The sea is green because the sky is green. The sky, an immense face, green and featureless. The sea can be a picturesque, naive sea full of fish. But now it is a mirror. The sky can be a field for farming or livestock. But it isn’t; now it is a face that looks at itself in the mirror of the sea. A heartsick lamp in a street that could have been and wasn’t.; in the land breeze, the stump of a sidewalk, and that spirit of foolish desire common to all streets. A rooster turns to me with a cruel, mechanical gesture, its bald head, its sharp ivory profile, its carmine British ears. The sea hoists tar-covered birds and bundles of waves with the crane of the rusty island. The opaque marine solarium — sunlight rusted by water — trickles of oil at any given moment, suddenly, a large splash of mercury that flounders, that sinks. A mine from the Great War, a broken egg from Moirae. I don’t know which inadvertent slope in the streets always takes me to the outskirts of town. The sea is the outskirts as well.