~ ~ ~
The afternoon arises from this slow-moving, dapple-gray mule with a long stride. It emanates from her in waves that make visible the light of three o’clock postmeridian and reveal the canvas of the atmosphere, a movie screen — but a round one that does not need shadows; all things emanate from her. At the end of each sheaf of rays: a house, a tree, a lamp, myself. This mule is creating us as she imagines us. Through her I feel the solidarity of my origins with the animate and the inanimate. We are all images conceived during a calm and supple trot, images that become foliated, plastered, and fenestrated, or dressed in drill, or topped with a glass helmet. Cosmic logic divides us up into undefined species of only one kind. window and I. sea gull and I. With each step the mule takes — a step that is duplicate, rotund, eternally inalterable, predetermined by a divine genius — my being trembles at unknowable destiny. At this moment the mule has never existed. The mule has been cancelled as she turns a corner. Now the afternoon is itself — atheistic, autogenetic, romantic, liberal, desolate. These famished dogs — mute scavengers with protruding backbones, sagging hides, and arched bodies — look like cats, street cats with realistic, socialistic, enlightened, herbivorous eyes. A gust of wind unfurls a Chinese flag at a towering height, as if it were a parchment, from left to right — the flag veils precisely that rectangle of the sky where the sun is. The afternoon grows black, and it becomes night. The poles, along these streets of low and nitrous walls, have the rather violent appearance of pedestrians. The day, with its invariably rainy mood, holds them for its fourteen hours at the edge of the sidewalk. Soon after nightfall, the poles begin to walk. Summer nights poured like black beer with gray, star-studded foam. The poles were working very hard, they grew tired, were widowed, their only son went to Guatemala. By now their arms are falling off from just plain old age. And if their backs are not bent, it is only because their bones are made of wood. Aged electricians with hands dried and corroded by the gutta-percha and balata gum, by leaking batteries, and greasy tools. They are retired and have acquired, along with the pleasure of a full pension and the right to frolic, the lines of certain former public officials who have fallen out of favor with the present government, survivors of distant battles, eccentric old uncles who gather herbs and collect postage stamps. Between one pole and the next there is a distance of eighty feet that never decreases or increases — the poles neither love nor hate one another. misanthropy, misogyny, at the most a grumble of irritation or a greeting from one to the other, and this only because they can’t not do so. At night the poles go for walks. On a street quite far away, I recognized a pole that spends the whole day at the door of my house with hat in hand, stiff and thoughtful, as if suffering quietly from a pain in the kidneys or doing arithmetic in its head. The poles never gather. During these strange walks the distances between them remain constant; they tie ropes around their waists: mountain climbers on the mountain of their lives at twenty-five degrees below zero. We attribute to them the reckless daring of men without families or trite pleasures — a Count Godeneau-Platana, pederast and Egyptologist; another Prince Giustati, Castilian and aesthete; a Mexican millionaire suddenly impoverished by a revolution. The following morning (mornings always follow) the poles return to their assigned places. And there they are while fourteen gyrating hours mutate the color of the air — long, skinny, erect, rigid, wondering whether or not it will rain. One pole is called Julián, because he lets his beard grow. the beard: paper streamers from the carnival of 1912. Another pole is called Matías, because that is his name. A poor asthmatic pole on Mott Street dreams of buying an overcoat made of French fabric. There are poles that cater to dogs. There are poles that are friends of beggars. There are European poles with the green eyes of crystal insulators. There are streetlight poles. There are telephone poles.
~ ~ ~
An ice cream vendor’s trumpet drew attention to a nocturnal howling of dogs, symphony of tin and moon, rip-roaring from the beginning, a rip that exposed black, canine palates bristling with taste buds as hard as calluses. If their singing could be musically annotated, it would have to be done on a temperature scale, on graph paper, with a dotted line, with odd numbers. Musical skeleton. Forty-two degrees Fahrenheit: a fatal fever. A whirlwind of light and dust rises to the sun from a nearby field surrounded by thick adobe walls. A contemptible soaring wind that lifts the whirlwind, catching it without bending it. Hidden, childish, imprisoned air. Above the mud entablature, and behind it, is an evil comet, the upper funnel broken along the wind’s axis; the tilt of an elliptic circumference; a clear, closed curve. At night this street will be a different street. We shall walk by here without knowing where we are going. At noon, footsteps make no sound. The shadow follows alongside — dwarfed, shapeless, the silhouette of an unkempt gangster feigning an attack. Silence closes its parentheses in each window. Ramón, shaving soap, green blanket, holy palm at the head of his bed — and at the window, barely opened onto the heat of a yellow sky; oh, second floors in a low town! — an oozing eucalyptus tree that drops round moments into the painted gutter, delicate balls of scorched paper, burned and rolled-up leaves — folk medicines, ancient recipes, rest, rest. Sweaty, dark-skinned girl, suddenly so ugly with a mere gesture, so pretty if you stand under the light at the edge of the pavement, breath of summer, afternoon nap dreams. You make my steps fall into rhythm with yours. I don’t know what to say to you. A sudden gust of cold wind changes our lives. You disappear from my consciousness at every instant, and when you reappear, you are warm, like the hat or the book we leave in the bright sun when we escape to the shade. The wide street opens our eyes, violently, until it hurts and blinds us. The whole town drags itself along. poles, trees, people, streets. along the banks of this stream of freshness and sea breezes. In the oven of summer, the houses made of bread dough bake and get burned on the bottom. You no longer walk by my side. A sexton extinguished the sun with a willow branch. And six steel bells — Ite missa est — ritualistic, mechanical — spoke simply. The sultriness is over, as is our sitting still, the tedium of being indoors, and the inevitable shadow of this four-hour mass.
~ ~ ~
A Previously Omitted Fragment
The following fragment, omitted from the book when published, appeared as an extract in the magazine Amauta, no. 10, Lima, December 1927.
What were our ideas? The truth was, we didn’t have any. We believed vaguely in very vague vaguenesses. Ramón doubted everything. I had screaming dreams about the monarchy. A mad and sainted king, a Phillip the Second who would make me his prime minister. I would send Ramón to Peking as a special ambassador, and I would build a castle out of glazed tiles on the peak of San Cristóbal. I would give food to everybody, and I would turn anybody who complained into my favorite. Ramón believed that feeding imbeciles was an imbecility, but he believed that grudgingly. Lucho Mos was terribly socialistic; he carried around in his wallet a greenish caricature of Marx and a list of people to execute; he didn’t go to Mass on Sundays or other holy days, but he did take communion at Lent. Manuel was the absurd mentor of those absurd boys: in response to a distinguished quote from one of us, he would punctually repeat in cursive the famous reply of So-and-so in such-and-such a chapter of such-and-such a book. Manuel believed everything at the moment he said it, and he was, therefore, the one most sure of his own words, which belonged to others but were magnificent.