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Ramón’s aunt swam for a long time. With one thick hand she wet her tattered cap, and with the other she subdued the waves. From time to time, a slipper would emerge from her unsinkable bosom: it was a truant foot. She was an old woman who was afraid of the rocks: fat, humid, a good summer vacationer; she arrived at the first sign of heat and left at the last. She rented a rickety cabin with a large window and an enormous window shade. A cat that looked like a Negress and a Negress that looked like a toy. The parish church behind and a phonograph made of tin and wood. The small patio was a basket full of yellowed papers: Ramón’s aunt never read the newspapers. In her polka dot bathrobe, she could hear the band in the plaza from the dining room. An old woman. Fat. She will return in December. Ramón, on the other hand, will never return.
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Now the summer is really over. Summer and the pretext of summer — girls with happy legs, priests with dark circles under their eyes, the members of the court, the heat, the holidays. The pretext. The pretexts. Now winter is upon us — an extra-calendrical winter, orthodoxly Bergsonian: movies in twenty chapters. Lima, filthy Lima, equestrian, commercial, athletic, nationalistic, so serious. Now summer is really over. We have come, Lucho and I, to the midway esplanade, the one we have baptized Proust Boulevard. Yes, Proust Boulevard — esplanade, ancient, brave, outstanding — which is not a boulevard on both sides but only on one, and on the other, the psychological immensity of the sea, where stands the house of the Swann family, its door perceived through each and every molecule, the infinitesimal analysis of its emotional probabilities. Trees.? Streetlamps — the trunks of shrubs the light twists and the shadows turn green. At six in the morning, at six in the evening, the streetlamps are the most vegetable thing in the world, in an analytic, synthetic, scientific, passive, decisive, botanical, simple way — the upper edges of the trunks support crystal jars that hold yellow flowers. In the great hothouse of the dawn, in the household furnace of the dusk — dark rays, hyper vegetation, observation, summary, skeleton, truth, exact temperature. But now it is not the sea that is on one side of the street in a French novel; the sea is now the sea of waves and little bits of daydreams for a spinster aunt. And, moreover, its colors — an extremely discreet sunset, the antithesis of a dawn that arrives on tiptoe, a morning almost like a pretty girl, but without a kiss or a sign of the cross. Sunday and morning Mass. The organ spreads through the fog like stones banging together in the water. Today there will be a plenilune, full moon, a starless night with its breach of light in the middle — a whole and glorious navel. We shall not stop coming here at night. In the cup of coffee of the firmament will float, indissoluble and delicate, the lump of sugar of the moon. And all of it will be poetry, my friend. We shall prelive a superlife, perhaps actually a future in which all men will be brothers and abstemious and vegetarians and theosophists and athletes. And that sugar moon will turn into a horrible sweetness in our mouths. And a cloud the color of café au lait: what will it be? It might not be anything. Or perhaps it is a verse of Neruda’s. Or perhaps a symbolic coast, Amara’s fatherland, Eguren’s dream. Or, if you prefer, simply a cloud the color of café au lait — there’s got to be a reason we are sixteen years old and have peach fuzz on our upper lips. Tomorrow, a soccer match on the rough conch grass of who knows which field on the outskirts of Lima. Champion with tendinous and hairy mosaic legs, beak of the wingless, Byzantine angel in a cloud of dust — a Romanian emigrant, stenographer-typist of the Dess Company, stock agents. And the whole match will be a stupid yet perfect plan of advance — in what appears to be the air — of a hard black ball picked up from the ground by an invisible rubber band. A pathetic, trivial, unlikely, cinematic summer of the newsreels. A Rolls runs off snorting along the paved road like a recently castrated world-renowned Swiss bull. And in that Rolls the summer left for the South Pole, carrying with it the already superseded hope for that silvery October full of gulls — that last October we lived. To be happy for one day. We have been happy for three whole months. And now, what should we do? Die?. Now you get sentimental. It is sane to become lyrical when life turns ugly. But it is still the afternoon — a matutinal, naive afternoon with cold hands, with westerly braids, serene and contented like a wife, but a wife who still has the eyes of a bride, yet. Come on, Lucho, tell tales of Quevedo, of brutal copulations, hasty weddings, the nuns taken by surprise, of chaste Englishwomen. Say whatever comes to mind, let’s play at psychoanalysis, chase old ladies, tell jokes. Everything, anything but die.
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Underwood Poems
Hard and magnificent prose of city streets without aesthetic preoccupations.
Through them one walks with the police toward happiness.
The stunted poetry of windows is the secret of seamstresses.
There is no greater happiness than that of a well-dressed man.
Your heart is a horn prohibited by traffic regulations.
The houses ruminate on their oxen-like peace.
If you let it be known that you are a poet, you will be sent to the police station.
Wipe that enthusiasm out of your eyes.
Automobiles rub your hips, turning their heads. You should believe they are lustful women. In this way you will have your adventure and your smile for after dinner.
The men you stumble over have callous office flesh.
Love is anywhere, but nowhere is it any different.
Workers walk by, their eyes resentful of the afternoon, the city, mankind.
Why did the Czech girl shoot you? You have hoarded nothing but your soul.
The city licks the night like a famished cat.
And you are a happy man, perhaps the only happy man.
You have a shirt and no great thoughts of any kind.
Right now I feel angry at those who accuse and those who
console.
Spengler is an asthmatic uncle, and Pirandello is an old fool, almost one of his own characters.
But I mustn’t get furious at trifles.
Men have done thousands of things worse than their culture: Victor Hugo’s novels, democracy, primary school, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But men are bent on loving one another.
And, as they don’t often succeed, they end up hating each other.
Because they do not want to believe that all of it is irremediable.
I suspect the Greek polis of being a brothel one should approach with a revolver.
And the Greeks, in spite of their culture, were happy men.
I have not sinned much, but I already know about such things.
Bertoldo would say these things better, but Bertoldo would not ever say them. He doesn’t dig very deep — he’s old, wants peace and quiet, and even supports the moderates.