He awoke immobilizedhis face squashed against the straw moved a bithis eyes still closedhis smile shattered by his position and the shivering
I will get to the salting house because the company has chosen medignified honored predestinedJeremy Blackwood redheaded and well bred with the reasoning and the memory of his stationto defeatthe temptation of the identical of the immobile
Blessed be London
Blessed be the throng that walks its benevolent pavements
Blessed be the light that shines from the windows of its houses
Blessed be the noise and the color of the cities
Jeremy satslowlyhe kept his eyes open for a momentproud
He lowers his head and sees againthe blackened ash heapthe scattered shards of glass the broken open watchthe great face whose Roman numerals ended in florid filigreesdelicate
Glory
To English travelers and more than anything
Glory
To Jeremy Blackwood who left not a trace of his journey
Abroad
Nothingness doesn’t occupy my thoughts so much as my life, I read, some days ago, in a letter from Pigeon Garay. I don’t give it the least thought all day; and I spend all night having dirty dreams. It must be because nothingness is a certainty, and there is a race of men, to which, presumably, I must belong, who only dance to the music of the uncertain.
That’s the kind of thing that, occasionally, from abroad, I receive from Pigeon Garay. Or this: “Living abroad doesn’t leave a trace, only memories. Often memories live outside us: a Technicolor film for which we are the screen. When the projection ends, darkness overcomes us again. Traces, on the other hand, which come from deeper, are the mark that accompanies us, deforms us and molds our face, like a punch molds a boxer’s nose. One is always traveling while abroad. Children don’t travel, they just expand their native country.”
Another of his letters brought the following reflection: Garlic and the summer are two traces that always come to me from far away. Being foreign is a complex, useless mechanism that has taken garlic and the summer from me. When I find garlic and the summer again, foreignness demonstrates their unreality. I am trying to tell you that being foreign — that is, my life for the past six years — is a moronic circle, or perhaps a spiral, that pulls me around, again and again, level with the center, but a bit further away each time. Re-reading this, I can confirm as usual that I have left the essential thing unsaid.
Or even: Blessed are those who stay behind, Tomatis, blessed are those who stay behind. Traveling so much, your footprints overlap, your traces are submerged or washed away and, at any rate, if you should ever come back, it comes with you, intangible, that foreignness, and seeps into the very place where you were born.
The Scattering
The people of my generation scatter, in exile. From the living branch of our youth there remain no more than two or three pale petals. Death, politics, marriage, travels have been silently separating us, prisons, possessions, oceans. Years ago, in the beginning, we met in blossoming patios and conversed until daybreak. We walked slowly around the city, from the illuminated streets of the center to the dark river, shrouded in the silence of sleeping neighborhoods, on the cool café sidewalks, in the paradise of our natal homes. We smoked tranquilly beneath the moon.
Of that past life, nothing remains but news or memories. But all of that is something compared with what has happened to those who have not scattered. Among them the exile is even greater. Each one has been immersing himself deeper into his own ocean of hardened lava, and when they imitate conversation, anyone can see that it is nothing more than noises, with no music or meaning. They have all turned their eyes inward, but those eyes see nothing more than a sea of minerals, smooth and gray, refracting every resolution. And if you can look into their pupils, which rarely happens, you would catch a glimpse of a desert compared to which the Sahara would doubtless acquire all the attributes of the Promised Land.
The Body
The body sends messages saying “don’t forget, you up there.” It throbs dully. Death, an elegant exit to such indecisive precariousness, approaches, coming from the very beginning by its own road, until it arrives, so to speak, out into the open. It keeps rising despite every obstacle or interruption.
The problem, Barco kept telling himself, was not in trying not to die, but in maintaining some equilibrium between what lay above and below, chance and its opposites. The body is chance. Its opposites vary historically — if not, really, ideologically.
Today I do not have the strength, truly; no strength. Not even that nourishing strength we call the power of seduction. The absence of hunger is morally wrong, they claim, in this century of gluttons. Do you see what I mean when I say that the opposites of chance vary historically? Illness, fatigue, failure of wilclass="underline" you have proven wisely the durability of chance against the dictatorship of insatiable hunger.
On Dry Shore
The day after acing his geometry exam, Tomatis convinced his father to renew his membership card at the Boating Club and spent the whole afternoon in the office going through the paperwork to reissue it. It was sitting in a cubicle while he waited for the new card that he conceived of the idea of the message, and when they gave him the card he went down to the bar and called Barco on the phone. Barco liked the idea. He said that he had sealing wax — because they would have to seal the top of the bottle — and that they should meet up that very night to discuss the contents of the message. So it was that, at around nine when it began to get dark, Tomatis heard Barco’s voice from his room as Barco spoke with his father in the kitchen, followed by his footsteps coming up the stairs onto the landing. The window to Tomatis’ room was open, and having entered without so much as a hello, Barco poked his head outside and said something about the starry sky. He undid the top two buttons of his shirt and began to wave it against his chest to dry his sweat. From the window Tomatis hollered to his mother to make them some sangria, because the whole house had been inclined to grant his every wish since the day before when, with his geometry exam, he had finished his degree. While they waited for the sangria, Barco helped him hang, on the yellow wall, over the couch, to one side of the bookshelf, a copy of Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows that Tomatis had gotten framed in a picture shop that morning.
They argued over the text of the message for more than two hours, drinking the sangria that Barco continually stirred with a spoon so that the sugar in it wouldn’t settle and the ice tinkling against the inside of the frosty pitcher would melt faster. The idea of writing the message in verse, suggested by Tomatis, was rejected instantly.
“They might think we actually talked like that,” Barco objected.
Immediately they began to throw out ideas: a summary of the city’s history, or perhaps a catalogue of inventions of the era, or, better yet, a brief biography of Carlos Tomatis and Horacio Barco, or even a deliberately false description of the human body to provoke an erroneous theory of evolution. They were tempted for a moment by the last option and laughed about it until they were both in stitches, roaring so loudly that Tomatis’s father, who had gone to bed some time earlier, scolded them from the darkness below to keep it down. Then Barco remarked that the inclination to humor always spoiled things, and that, in the end, the contents of the message didn’t matter — the important thing was the message itself, because the value of a message lay not in what it said, but in its ability to reveal the existence of men disposed to writing messages. He said that if the contents of a message were so important, it wasn’t a message at all but simply information.