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This afternoon, the world is a potato in a sack. The sack is a small, white, dusty sky, like the small sacks used for carrying flour. The world is little, dark, gritty, as if just harvested in some unknown agricultural infinity. I have gone to the countryside to see the clouds and the alfalfa fields. But I have gone almost at night, and I will no longer be able to smell the scents of the afternoon, tactile scents, that are smelled through the skin. The sky — affiliated with the avant-garde — creates out of its dusty whiteness round, multicolored clouds that at times look like German balls and at others, really, like the clouds of Norah Borges. Now I must smell colors. And the road I take turns into a crossroads. And the four pathways born to the road screech like newborn babes: they want to be rocked; and the wind turns into a swinging young dandy after nightfall and does not want to rock roads: the air wears oxford trousers, and there is no way to convince it that it is not a man. I walk away from the sky. And, as I leave the countryside that is hemmed in by urbanizations, I notice that the countryside is in the sky: a flock of fat, fleecy clouds, award winners at the Exposition — a romp in the green sky. And this I see from far away, so far away that I get into bed to sweat colors.
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Afternoons were white in winter, and in summer, a reddish gold, a growing gold that eventually turned into a sun, a sun that filled the entire sky. Winter afternoons were white; the luminous and piercing whiteness of salt crystals, and the sun therein was a silvery sun with a chipped circumference. But in March there was a Monday with a pink afternoon, an afternoon of decadence in the style of D’Annunzio, and everybody was deeply moved by the pink afternoon. Long lines of thin-blooded old ladies — black scarves wrapped around yellow necks with red tendons (potbellied old men accompanied by nameless friends) — the current price of cotton, hairy hands wearing wedding rings, and lenses, and glasses, and spectacles, and spherical eyelids, and wrinkles that looked painted on. But suddenly, the pinkness turned red, and the sunset became an everyday sunset, and the audience at the celestial movie house voiced its disapproval at the change of program. Weren’t they showing Divino amor? The story was by D’Annunzio; the hero was Fiume’s, a bald dago who wrote verses, an unlikely man, an Italian national fantasy, an aviator, a wreck, an author in the index, a show not to be missed. Valentino. Dream landscapes. Passion, sacrifice, jealousy, a sumptuous wardrobe, high society. And suddenly, nothing! The vulgar epic poem of the summer, the red sky, the sun sky, and night as a shout. The respectable audience fiercely stamped its feet as it withdrew in an orderly fashion befitting people who know their rights — serious people, honorable people. Suddenly the sky donned the come-look-and-see attitude of a street vendor, and then there was no sun no summer no anything: just buttocks in the air, enormous buttocks reddened by a lengthy sitting. The audience swore it would appeal to the mayor. On Matti Street, the fig trees went quickly to sleep so they could get up early. At a window, a very old piano was dying of love, like the Duke of Hohenburg — pink bald spot, white sideburns — in one or another of Kalman’s operettas.
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We swam in the sea and the afternoon, to the left of the West and concealed by the pier as if it were something the city had forbidden and that could cause the resort to close. Lalá’s mother clung to a wave that had broken at high tide, a violent wave, maned and clumsy like a buffalo — the poor woman looked through the foam for one of her hands that had been carried off by the wave. The previous day — a cold, malignant yesterday — it was one of her slippers that had strayed; by the time she noticed her bare foot — when she stepped on an underwater gringo — the shoe was no longer afloat, for it was made of rubber; the gringo’s shapeless diver’s head surfaced; Lalá’s mother apologized; the gringo did not understand; her mother nodded yes in English, to herself, quickly, between two crashing waves. Her mother had found her lost hand in those of a nearby and bemused Arab, who shouldn’t have been allowed to swim because he was an Arab, et cetera. Lalá showed me the nipple of one of her breasts. I hid in the sea. Lalá could already have been my girlfriend. Her mother rose like a submarine. She simply was not herself in a bathing suit. The legs of the bottoms and the sleeves of the top were puffed up with water. With the purple tip of her tongue she subdued a red lock of wet hair that traversed her face from her hairline to her chin like a scar. The cord of her scapular was wrapped tightly around her shoulder, as if for a bloodletting. The old woman defied the bathhouse, waged war on the sea, and cast a shadow over the shadow under the platform. The ocean-sea descended. Above, in a blue zone of the sky, the waxing moon blinked in time with the frustrated high tide. The stones that had escaped with a horrible din from Lalá’s mother’s path came to rest at our feet — excited, friendly. The sand rushed underfoot — it wanted to knock us down and carry us out to the high seas as if we were seashells. Lalá stuck her pinkies in her ears; her eyes and teeth chattered. Suddenly, unprovoked — behind a large, sickly, complacent wave that did not advance — I kissed her; the kiss resounded through the afternoon like through a theater. The water was flecked with black and green. The railings of the pier broke up and disintegrated underwater into fillets of shadows, shadows of fish, patches of shadow. Everything seemed on the verge of collapse: the sky with its horizon in flames; the sea full of tidal eddies; the pier with its girders dissolved into the sea. I did not love Lalá. My fingers were wrinkled, stiff. Lalá blew on them the warm, humid breath of a hairdresser’s spray. We emerged from our swim as from bed, as from a dream. Lalá yawned.
~ ~ ~
I picture that man as an indistinct uprightness from which hung a badly cut coat. A few words in Ramón’s diary attempt, in vain, to reconstruct in my mind the destroyed, dissipated image of the man. “Dog eyes in a face of wax, full of a sweetness that was nothing but indifference. And one of his index fingers — on the right hand, the finger of idlers, of canons, of boys — was rigid, and yellowed by tobacco. And the ashen moustache with golden handlebars that seemed to burst from his nasal passages like a heavy cloud of pitch. And the trousers, empty holes, with large bulges at the knees. ” So states Ramón’s diary, a black oilskin-covered notebook filled with words that ended up, I don’t know how, in the hands of Miss Muler, preceptor and directress of the Republic of Haiti Elementary School. Ah! Miss Muler’s hands.! How they moved about among the writing instruments and cardboard grammar books — the rudiments of geography taught with angelic purity and remarkable self-confidence! But those notes — I don’t know if they truly reflected Ramón’s image of that man or were simply nonsense that descended into my friend’s fingers while he was writing in his diary, there transformed into the foolish desire to make a point. Did that man ever exist? Is it possible that Ramón and I simply dreamed him up? Might we have created him out of someone else’s features and his own gestures? Did that man have memory, understanding, and will?. Because I can now see the details Ramón mentions arranging themselves in a human form in the atmosphere of a dense and yellow summer. I also see that man dispersed, incomplete, part madness, part environment, part real, with his belly of air and his calves of the marine horizon — vertical, charading, vexed, on the edge of the esplanade without a railing. Perhaps everything is nothing but essential elements, physiognomic dates, crosses and capital letters, the shorthand of a wayfaring observer who at a particular moment re-created in Ramón’s fat and well-groomed head the image of that man who did, in fact, exist. I now feel the desire to have that man in front of me so I can ask him some weighty questions, the answers to which would reveal the humanity or inhumanity of the subject: “Do you support Leguia? What brand of cigarettes do you smoke? Do you keep a mistress? Do you suffer from the heat?” If that man answered that he was a monarchist, that he did not smoke because he did not have a narghile, that he loved a pious old woman, that he suffered from the heat only in winter, then I could know for a certainty that we, Ramón and I, had created that man during an hour of idleness and twilight, while the sun rolled silently and quickly through a concave sky, red and green like a Milanese ball. There is no doubt that there are men who are nothing more than their empty trousers. There are children who are nothing but the joy of a sailor’s hat: children who are not even the hat they wear. There are women who are barely an artificial hand in a purse made of donkey leather. Priests who are nothing but a wrinkle of their cassock. What might that man be?