A herd of a dozen horses, maybe more, almost all of them gray, some dappled. And a little farther on, head raised proudly as though he was the leader, a black stallion pawed at the ground and whinnied. The horses weren’t far, no more than two or three hundred meters, yet she hadn’t seen them, and only now, looking at them, it seemed to her that they were looking at her, and then the black stallion whinnied louder, and as though their mutual gaze were a sign of agreement, the horses started forward in waves on that trembling hot afternoon, the stallion shook his mane, whinnying louder now, and began galloping on, dragging the herd behind him. She watched them advance, unable to move, realizing that the space of the vast plain had distorted the view, they were more distant than she’d thought, or they were taking too long to approach, like certain scenes in films where movements occur more slowly in space, almost like liquid, as though their bodies were endowed with a hidden grace revealed only by a strange sorcery. They advanced like this, the horses, with that fluidity a dream sometimes offers, almost as though they were navigating in the air, but their hooves were touching the ground because behind them rose a thick curtain of dust, veiling the horizon. They advanced, changed formation, now a line, now fanning out, now splintering off as if each had a separate aim, and finally reuniting in a compact line, each head and neck following the same rhythm, the same pace as they fanned out again like an ocean wave of bodies. For a moment she thought of fleeing, but realized she couldn’t. She turned toward the animals and stood still, hands crossed over her breasts as if to protect them. In that moment the black horse halted, planting his hooves in the dust, the whole herd stopped with him as though an unknown conductor’s baton had decreed a pause in that mysterious ballet without music, it was only an interval, this she understood. She watched and waited, they were no more than ten meters away, she could see their huge moist eyes, their pulsing nostrils, the sweat shining on their backs. The black horse raised his right hoof as circus horses do when the show begins, kept his hoof raised, then bolted ahead, circling around her, his hooves scoring a perfect circle in the soil, and then, almost as if this were an agreed-upon signal, all the other horses began following after, first at a trot, then at a gallop that gained in intensity, their speed set by the stallion’s, like a crazy whirling merry-go-round with broken brakes. So she saw them streaking by, an ever faster circle, so fast there was almost no space between them, only a wall of horses become one horse, the uninterrupted shape of a horse whose head resumed with a tail and whose tail was a head; and the hooves, raising a cloud of dust all around her resounding on the dry ground, seemed to her like the pounding of drums from a place she didn’t recall but sensed with utter clarity, and for a moment she saw hands beating the drum skins, the music rising to her ears emerged from the soil, as if the earth were shaking, she sensed it, before reaching her ears it climbed from her feet to her legs, her torso, heart, brain. Meanwhile the horses were circling, ever faster, fast like her thoughts gone circular, a thought that thought itself, she was aware only of thinking she was thinking, nothing more, and in that moment the leader of the herd, in the same sudden way he’d drawn the circle, now broke it, and with an unexpected swerve that seemed to defy the laws of nature, he slanted off dragging the whole herd behind him, and the horses galloped away.
She stood there, watching the shimmer of the straw specks raised in the dust as they glinted in the sunset, she thought she should keep thinking of not thinking of anything, she sat down and scraped at the grass stubble, searching for the ground, the sun was disappearing and the orange light already held hints of indigo, up there the horizon was circular, it was the only thing she was able to think, that the horizon was circular, it was as though the circle drawn by the horses had expanded to infinity, transmuting into the horizon.
Drip, Drop, Drippity-Drop
The pain that woke him ran down his left leg, from the groin to the knee, but its provenance was elsewhere, by then he knew this all too well. With his thumb he began to press from his tailbone upward, when he arrived between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, he felt a sort of electric current running through his body, as if right from that spot a radio station was broadcasting out from the neck to the toes. He tried rolling over in bed. At the first attempt the pain paralyzed him. He stayed on his side, actually not even on his side, on half his side, which isn’t a precise position, it’s a would-be position, a passage. He stayed suspended in this movement, if one can put it that way, as in certain Italian Baroque paintings where the saint, male or female, gracefully overexcited from fasting or from Christ, remains forever suspended within the painter’s brushstrokes, because the craziest of painters, who are also the ones of genius, are marvelous at catching the unfinished movement of their depicted character, usually crazy himself, and the pictorial miracle happens as a kind of bizarre levitation that seems to dispense with the force of gravity.
He tried to wiggle his toes. With a little pain they moved, the big toe included, the one most at risk. He stayed like this, not daring to shift a millimeter, looking at his toes, and thought of that poor guy from Prague who one day awoke out of context, meaning that instead of lying on his back he was lying on his armor-plated shell, and watching the ceiling of his little room, which he imagined to be pale blue, who knows why, he helplessly waved his hairy little paws and wondered what to do. The thought irritated him, not so much because of the comparison but because of the reference to genre: literature, literature again. He tried out an experimental phenomenology of the situation. He got up his courage and shifted his side a centimeter. From the fourth vertebra a dart of pain shot to the base of the neck — he could almost hear the whistle — then it spun around, reached the groin, and spread along the entire leg. How to Speak with Your Own Body was a book he’d read with skepticism yet with a certain curiosity, he couldn’t deny that, a popular book though probably not very reliable in scientific terms, but why shouldn’t one talk to one’s own body? There are people who talk to walls. As a young man he’d read a novel by a writer quite popular at the time, then unjustly neglected, quite a guy, who really got down to the nitty-gritty at times and who in that book spoke to his own body, indeed a specific part of his body, which he called his “him,” and from there arose a dialogue that was anything but banal. Here though it wasn’t the same, since his “him” wasn’t involved, and so he simply said: leg, oh leg! He moved it and it responded with a lacerating pain. Dialogue was impossible. He stretched it very carefully and the pain concentrated in his spinal column. The column of infamy. He grew irritated again. He thought that if he called the doctor, who at this point he was all too familiar with, he’d tell him he was suffering from literature, an observation already made in the past. He pictured the doctor saying: my dear fellow, the problem is mainly due to the fact that you assume the wrong positions, actually you’ve assumed the wrong positions all your life, to write, because the problem unfortunately is that you write, don’t be offended, instead of leading a life more consonant with hygiene and well-being, that is, going to a pool or jogging around in shorts like other men your age, you stay all bent over writing your books for whole days at a time, and not only bent over — I’ve seen you — you’re all crooked too, like a misshapen biscuit, your spine looks like the sea when a southwest wind blows, all crooked, but it’s too late to reform it now, you could try torturing it a bit less, you don’t seem capable of reading the X-rays I brought you, so to make you really understand, tomorrow I’ll bring you the plastic articulated spine I used to study with at college, and I’ll shape it like yours, so you’ll finally see what you’ve reduced it to.