A poem lacing up its shoes
Preparing itself entirely
And gentlemen
Making sausages with facts
Tiny eructations
Flitting terrified around the room.
Pink corridors
of the University.
Niches pulsing
Text and geometry.
I vomit, nude on the asphalt.
I hear:
Is this, my friend, this silly thing
You call a Nobel Prize?
— How odd.
— I think it’s nice.
— Superb! Mathematician, right?
Pity for Amanda washes over me. She has, looking at me, a stupid and childish look on her face. Some seminary man will say that a child can’t have a stupid look. I have always been afraid of children (I think my father was too, deep down), afraid they’ll spit in my face my eye my chest. For instance, the kid of one of Amanda’s friends spit in my glass of whiskey during one of those tedious parties, a birthday party for somebody’s little Junior, come on Amanda, come, afterward we’ll play a little game, well okay, he spit, and another little twerp let out a drawn-out fart that really set me off, and he just wandered away, a little cardboard party hat on his head. Amanda tersely screeching: Amós, I’m thirty years old, you get it? thirty. I say I don’t get it. She explains: I’m trying to say I’m young, Amós, and living with you it’s like I was dead, get it? Sheesh, Amanda, why would you say that? Every day you look older to me, more closed up, you don’t say a word to my friends, not even to that mathematician who seems to adore you. Who? Isaiah. Well that’s because we understand each other. How can you understand each other without even talking? I understand Isaiah, I do, Amanda. I don’t tell her that Isaiah lives with a pig in his house. Isaiah: I took a shine, Amós, to that little animal, she’s called hilde and she just showed up one day at my house, she’s friendly, very nice, she makes great company. And mathematics? Ah, it helps me a lot to have hilde around the house, she doesn’t annoy me, doesn’t shed, she’s gentle, patient, quiet. A few grunts at times, but that gets me a bit excited, you know? I know. Amanda continues: Amós, you’re acting strange. She leans over me. I’m seated. I see the groove between her breasts and the pendants on her neck. She says: you stink. I say: it was that little twerp that farted. Ah. You’re being very strange. You always knew that I was a bit confused. Confused how, Amós? You were never confused, you’re a professor of pure mathematics, you’re a university professor, you did a thesis and all that, remember? You were simply adorable. Adorable, huh? And they said you were brilliant. Brilliant, huh? Please, Amós, tell me what’s going on. I don’t even drink my whiskey. I couldn’t do it. I go home.
When will you give me, O Great Laughter
A string of agates or of threads of water
Fine like those silky strands
That hang from anemones
When? So that I can
Lace you, darkness and pleasure
My selves disintegrating
AND BARELY
The you of you in me
When
This love clasped to your bone?
Suspicions. Whispers that flare in the corners, at the edges. I’m stretched out on the sofa, looking at the ceiling. A friend of Amanda’s: could I squeeze in here on the edge? Her buttocks against my waist. Little lizards up above me. Their little feet clutching the long boards. I clutch at that understanding, the one from up there on the hill. A univocal universe, yes. A perfect and splendid Absolute. A short formula injected with light. Did the possibility of Amós having felt that incommensurable meaning create a loss or a gain? Around him objects, shelves, books, the kid’s bike, notebooks, the little building where he lived, walls roof floor, and the old car outside, and the two beings he lived with, and drawers with some shirts and socks and underpants, Amanda’s dresses, the boy’s clothing, and me here stretched on the sofa, this woman’s buttocks still warming my waist, and sweetened words, the sweetness of squash (want some?) and foolishness, a ride in the car (wanna go?) and senselessness, a cup of tea (want some?), whiskey (want some?). But is there any? We’ll buy some says Amanda, of course we’ll buy some says the hot buttcheek, I reflect: after that incommensurable experience there are only two options: live a pathetic, indecent life, transude obscenity, why not? Get drunk every night, and vicious, sputtering, shake my dick timetotime for Amanda’s friends, plumed knowitalls, psychologists historians nattering housewives, wives of my horrid colleagues, and jerk off right between their thick legs, stiff and bright exploding with haikus, eh? I close my eyes. The second option: abandon house Amanda son university. Have nothing. Lean my carcass against a nearby wall and here comes someone: you hungry, man? I say yes and here comes a piece of bread (without butter) and a plate of food. Or not? Or here comes that phrase: you look young, can’t you work? I croak, say no, you idiot, I’m never going to work again, because I felt it and I understood it in that instant, got it? They’ll call the police. Right? Just because I lean against somebody’s wall and croak? He of the cross, they ran him out for a lot less than that. Just for wiping sweat. Catching his breath. I felt the un-feelable, I understood the non-equational. If Kadek were still alive I could join up with him. He studied the Möbius strip for ten years. He was rich. And what a wino. Later it was only cachaça. They say some guy heard his last words, as Kadek lay dying in the grass: winged and ocher bird of death, he said. Was there some bird flying by? Isaiah and I asked around. I didn’t see one, professorsirs, well to tell the truth I did see two black cuckoos, but way over there. Over where? Way over in the ass-end of the sky, professorsirs. Whiskey was it? I think that would be nice. The two of them were clucking like hens. Amanda: look, if after a few stiff whiskeys you don’t get better I’m calling your mother. Mom? That’s right, Amós, because only a mother can understand a son at a time like this. What time? This time of yours that I don’t understand. Mom. She’ll put on that purple hat with little light-gray felt flowers. Or is the hat gray with purple flowers? All alone. Out in the country. My father dead. The hot buttcheek whispers: I’m going to bring you a really nice scotch. They leave. Staring at the ceiling I think I should take a walk down to Maria Ancuda’s brothel. Are they all dead? Freshness. Lightness. Early morning brothel silence. Would there still be a corner for my desk? To live at the brothel. Mother and I at the brothel. She’ll say: I’m going wherever you go, my son. I think: would all that still exist? Twenty-eight years later. I know Eni’s brothel lasted generations. Grandfather father son. And why shouldn’t Maria Ancuda’s? I think it over again. Mother in the brothel. It’s not possible. I explain: mother, this is good for me, I’ll be calm there, some friend of mine will still be there and I’ll be a little at peace. At peace, she says, in a brothel? Mother, you’ve never been to a brothel, it’s nice in the early morning, calm like the country, just like at your house. And won’t she smile? A vast smile, showing her dentures. Mother at seventy. Yes, you laugh, but you won’t be able to go, you’ll stay in a boardinghouse in the suburbs, or go back to the farm, okay? I’ll go wherever you go, son. They’ll say I stuck my little old mother in a brothel. She: is there a yard there? Well, I don’t really remember, but it was a good piece of land, it had a little dog kennel, just wait, it had a tree with purple flowers. Glory-bush, she tells me, a sad tree for a brothel, but there should be room to plant some collards in the back. You’re going to plant collards in the yard at the brothel? Collards, lettuce, what’s wrong with that? I’ll sew too, someone’s likely to tear some clothing, with the hurry of getting everything off, right? We both laugh. I’m taking the car. It’s old but I like it. Amanda went out with the boy. I leave a note: I went with mother. Still don’t know where. Take care of the kid. It’s what a father says. Some day I’ll come back. I have some money. You have more in the little savings account book. Don’t make a scene. Say I’m not there, in Timbuktu, okay? I’m taking the car, since you don’t like it anyway. Amós. Two suitcases. Mine and mother’s. She in her light-gray hat, a little tuft of violets by the brim. Or is it the other way around? Wearing a hat, eh? I always wear this hat when I go out, I came here with it, you don’t remember. No, I don’t remember, it’s pretty. I always liked violets, son, maybe I’ll plant some there. Glory-bush, violets, I think I’m going to die. My son shakes me, hey hey? Where was I? What’s wrong, dad? Today I dreamed about you, dad, I dreamed that I was going up a mountain with you in front of me. You were collecting pretty little stones and we went up and up. After you gathered so many little stones that no more would fit in your hand, I went grabbing all the ones that were falling. But there was also something funny. What’s that, son? You were dressed like a priest. A priest, huh? And the funniest part was that your skirt kept flying up with the wind and showing your butt. Very funny, son. The boy climbed up on my legs and started to laugh resplendent-hysteric, repeating: daddy’s butt, daddy’s butt. All right, I tell him, that’s enough, everyone has a butt, including your father. He jumped off my legs, grabbed his bike, and went around in circles in the yard, shrieking: everyone has a butt everyone has a butt, daddy too. I close my eyes, twist my face, disgusted. The world seems dim and fauve at the same time. Fuzzy and effulgent. Going up a mountain, eh? Gathering little stones. So many that they wouldn’t fit in my hands. Little stones. Words? Words that another will try to put together to explain the inexplicable. My backside in full view. This complicates things. The wind of ideas uncovering the grotesqueness of our condition. Human condition. Dressed just like a priest. Pretensions of a life spent getting to know the sacristy. Libitina had a friend, Jacinta, who could only cum with priests. She’d go to the confessional in those silk blouses, so delicate, a little shawl on top. She squeezed her breasts against the lattice of the confessional. The so-called sins were related haltingly, with little whimpers, full of saliva, and well-detailed. Libitina said the priests would go nuts. One of them poked his fingers through the holes in the grating and pinched frenetically at the tips of her nipples. Jacinta would get wetter and wetter and weak in the knees. Later the sacristy. Priestly skirts, Jacinta’s pants, the former raised, the latter lowered, and according to Jacinta: what joy, Libi, the silence and the perfume of saintliness, and so calm after, at peace with God, at peace with men, may they be praised. Praised be this quietude of mine in this instant.