Antwerp (4 page)

The fuzzy images of the hunchback and the policeman begin to retreat in opposite directions. The scene is black and liquid. In the space without memory a freshly shaven man with short hair appears. He's notable for his pallor and slowness. A voice says that the South American didn't die. (It's to be assumed that the figure who replaces the misthunchback and the mistpoliceman is the South American.) He's wearing a navy blue jacket that calls to mind the last days of fall. Clearly he's been sick, his pallor and haggard face suggest as much. The screen splits down the middle, vertically. The South American walks along a deserted street. He recognizes the author and keeps walking. The screen recomposes itself as if it's just stopped raining. Sundappled gray buildings appear on an empty, familiar afternoon. The asphalt of the streets is clean and gray. The wind sweeps down avenues of red trees. Bright clouds are reflected in the windows of offices where no one is at work. Someone has created an extra silence. The mountain swoops at the end of the street. Little redroofed houses scattered along the slope; thin spirals of smoke rise from some chimneys.

Above is the reservoir, a lot for trucks, some makeshift latrines. In the distance a farmworker bends over the black earth. He's carrying a package wrapped in yellowed newspaper. The blurry heads of the hunchback and the policeman disappear. "The South American opened the door" ... All right, take him away" ... "I don't know whether I'll be able to get in"...

The nameless girl spread her legs under the sheets. A policeman can watch any way he wants, he's already overcome all the risks of the gaze. What I mean is, the drawer holds fear and photographs and men who can never be found, as well as papers. So the cop turned out the light and unzipped his fly. The girl closed her eyes when he turned her face down. She felt his pants against her buttocks and the metallic cold of the belt buckle. "There was once a word"... (Coughs)... "A word for all this"... "Now all I can say is: don't be afraid" ... Images forced up by the piston. His fingers burrowed between her cheeks and she didn't say a thing, didn't even sigh. He was on his side, but she still had her head buried in the sheets. His index and middle finger probed her ass, massaged her sphincter, and she opened her mouth without a sound. (I dreamed of a corridor full of people without mouths, he said, and the old man replied: don't be afraid.) He pushed his fingers all the way in, the girl moaned and raised her haunches, he felt the tips of his fingers brush something to which he instantly gave the name stalagmite. Then he thought it might be shit, but the color of the body that he was touching kept blazing green and white, like his first impression. The girl moaned hoarsely. The phrase "the nameless girl was lost in the metro" came to mind and he pulled his fingers out to the first joint. Then he sank them in again and with his free hand he touched the girl's forehead. He worked his fingers in and out. As he squeezed the girl's temples, he thought that the fingers went in and out with no adornment, no literary rhetoric to give them any other sense than a couple of thick fingers buried in the ass of a nameless girl. The words came to a stop in the middle of a metro station. There was no one there. The policeman blinked. I guess the risk of the gaze was partly overcome by the exercise of his profession. The girl was sweating profusely and moved her legs with great care. Her ass was wet and occasionally quivered. Later he went over to look out the window and he ran his tongue over his teeth. (The word teeth slid across the glass, many times. The old man had coughed after he said don't be afraid.) Her hair spilled over the pillow. He mounted her, seemed to say something in her ear before he plunged into her. We knew he had done that by the girl's scream. The images travel in slow motion. He puts water on to boil. He closes the bathroom door. The bathroom light softly disappears. She's sitting in the kitchen, her elbows resting on her knees. She's smoking a cigarette. The policeman, the fake policeman, appears in a pair of green pajamas. From the hallway he calls her, asks her to come with him. She turns her head toward the door. There's no one there. She opens a kitchen drawer. Something gleams. She closes the door.

"He had a white mustache, or maybe it was gray"... "I was thinking about my situation, I was alone again and I was trying to understand why" ... "There's a skinny man over by the body now, taking pictures" ..."I know there's an empty place near here, but I don't know where"...

The Englishman spotted him through the bushes. He walked away, treading on pine needles. It was probably eight o'clock and the sun was setting in the hills. The Englishman turned and said something to him but he couldn't hear a thing. It occurred to him that it had been days since he'd heard the crickets chirping. The Englishman moved his lips but all that reached him was the silence of the branches moving in the wind. He got up, his leg hurt, he felt for cigarettes in the pocket of his jacket. It was a denim jacket, old and faded. His pants were widelegged and dark green. In the woods the Englishman moved his lips. He noticed that his eyes were closed. He looked at his fingernails: they were dirty. The Englishman's shirt was white and the pants he was wearing looked even older than his. The trunks of the pine trees were covered in brown scales, but when a ray of light fell on them they turned yellowish. In the distance, where the pines ended, there was an abandoned car motor and a few crumbling cement walls. His nails were big, and ragged because of his habit of biting them. He took out matches and lit a cigarette. The Englishman had opened his eyes. He flexed his leg and then smiled. Yellow. Flash of yellow. In the report he's described as a hunchbacked vagrant. For a few days, he lived in the woods. There was a campground nearby, but he didn't have enough money for that, so he only went every so often to the restaurant for a coffee. His tent was near the tennis and handball courts. Sometimes he went to watch people play. He came in through the back, through a gap the children had made in the tall grass. There's no information on the Englishman. Possibly he invented him.

An obsessive boy. Actually, what I mean is, if you knew him you couldn't stop thinking about him. The sergeant went up to the fallen shape in the park. He noticed people looking out their windows. Behind him came the medic's footsteps. He lit a cigarette. The medic blinked and asked if they could finally take the fucking body away. He yawned, putting out the match. "I have no idea what city I'm in"... "It's always the picture of that idiot boy on the screen"... "Always clowning on the brim of hell" ... "Always tapping my shoulder with his skinny fingers to ask if he can come in" ... The medic spat. He felt like farting. Instead, he knelt by the body. People, undressed, leaning on their elbows in the dark windows. It had been a while since they felt any real sense of danger. The writer, I think he was English, confessed to the hunchback how hard it was for him to write. All I can come up with are stray sentences, he said, maybe because reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences. Desolation must be something like that, said the hunchback. "All right, take him away"...

I'm walking in the park, it's fall, looks like somebody got killed. Until yesterday I thought my life could be different, I was in love, etc. I stop by the fountain, it's dark, the surface shiny, but when I brush it with the palm of my hand I feel how rough it really is. From here I watch an old cop approach the body with hesitant steps. A cold breeze is blowing, raising goose bumps. The cop kneels by the body: with a dejected gesture, he covers his eyes with his left hand. A flock of starlings rise. They circle over the policeman's head and then disappear. The policeman goes through the dead man's pockets and piles what he finds on a white handkerchief that he's spread out on the grass. Dark green grass that seems to want to swallow up the white square. Maybe it's the dark old papers that the cop sets on the handkerchief that make me think this way. I decide to sit down for a while. The park benches are white with black wroughtiron legs. A police car comes down the street. It stops. Two cops get out. One of them heads toward where the old cop is crouched, the other waits by the car and lights a cigarette. A while later an ambulance silently appears and parks behind the police car. "I didn't see anything"... "A dead man in the park"... "An old cop"...

He used to make the rounds of the old city of Barcelona. He wore a long shabby trench coat, smelled of black tobacco, and almost always happened upon the most unusual scenes a few minutes in advance. In other words, the screen flashed the word unusual to make him appear. "I'd like to have a word with you in private," he'd say. The street parallel to the Paseo Maritimo of Castelldefels. A workman walks along the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, rhythmically masticating a cigarette. Empty houses, the wooden shutters closed. "Take off your clothes slowly, I won't look." The screen opens like a mollusk. I remember a while ago reading the pronouncements of an English writer who said how hard it was for him to keep his verb tenses consistent. He used the word
su
ff
e
r
to give a sense of his struggles. Under the trench coat there's nothing, perhaps the faint whiff of a hunchback lost in contemplation of the Jewish girl, of trashed apartments on Calle Tallers (skinny Alan Monardes stumbles down the dark hallway), of heroes of winters that gradually fade into the past. "But you write, Montserrat, and you'll get through this." He removed his coat, took her by the shoulders, and then hit her. Her dress dropped in slow motion onto her fur coat. Just like that she got down on all fours and offered him her rear. I saw it all from the next room through the hole someone had drilled for that purpose. He rubbed his flaccid penis on her buttocks. Carelessly he glanced to one side: rain was sliding down the window. The screen flashes the word "nerve." Then "grove." Then "deserted." Then the door closes.

She was eighteen and she was mixed up in the drug trade. Back then I saw her all the time but if I had to make a police sketch of her now, I don't think I could. I know she had an aquiline nose, and for a few months she was a redhead; I know I heard her laugh once or twice from the window of a restaurant as I was waiting for a taxi or just walking past in the rain. She was eighteen and once every two weeks she went to bed with a cop from the Narcotics Squad. In my dreams she wears jeans and a black sweater, and the few times she turns to look at me she laughs a dumb laugh. The cop would get her down on all fours and kneel by the outlet. The vibrator was dead but he'd rigged it to work on electric current. The sun filters through the green of the curtains, she's asleep with her tights around her ankles, face down, her hair covering her face. In the next scene I see her in the bathroom, looking in the mirror, then she says good morning and smiles. She was a sweet girl and she didn't avoid certain obligations: I mean sometimes she might try to cheer you up or loan you money. The cop had a huge dick, at least three inches longer than the dildo, and he hardly ever fucked her with it. I guess that's how he liked it. He stared with teary eyes at his erect cock. She watched him from the bed ... She smoked Camel Lights and maybe at some point she imagined that the furniture in the room and even her lover were empty things that she had to invest with meaning ... Purpletinted scene: before she pulls down her tights, she tells him about her day... "Everything is disgustingly still, frozen somewhere in the air." Hotel room lamp. A stenciled pattern, dark green. Frayed rug. Girl on all fours who moans as the vibrator enters her cunt. She had long legs and she was eighteen, in those days she was in the drug trade and she was doing all right, she even opened a checking account and bought a motorcycle. It may seem strange but I never wanted to sleep with her. Someone applauds from a dark corner. The policeman would snuggle up beside her and take her hands. Then he would guide them to his crotch and she could spend an hour or two getting him off. That winter she wore a red kneelength wool coat. My voice fades, splinters. She was just a sad girl, I think, lost now among the multitudes. She looked in the mirror and asked, "Did you do anything nice today?" The cop from Narcotics walks away down an avenue of larches. His eyes were cold, sometimes I saw him in my dreams sitting in the waiting room of a bus station. Loneliness is an aspect of natural human egotism. One day the person you love will say she doesn't love you and you won't understand. It happened to me. I would've liked her to tell me how to endure her absence. She didn't say anything. Only the inventors survive. In my dream, a skinny old bum comes up to the policeman to ask for a light. When the policeman reaches into his pocket for a lighter the bum sticks him with a knife. The cop falls without a sound. (I'm sitting very still in my room in Distrito V, all that moves is my arm to raise a cigarette to my lips.) Now it's her turn to be lost. Adolescent faces stream by in the car's rearview mirror. A nervous tic. Fissure, half saliva, half coffee, in the bottom lip. The redhead walks her motorcycle away down a treelined street ... "Disgustingly still" ... "She says to the fog: it's all right, I'm staying with you"...

It's a scene of squares, nothing else. They sit on the screen all day, like a still photograph. It gets dark. In the distance there's a cluster of houses with smoke beginning to trickle from the chimneys. The houses are in a valley surrounded by brown hills. The squares grow damp. From their edges seeps a kind of cartilaginous sweat. Now it's definitely night; at the foot of one of the hills a workman buries a package wrapped in newspaper. We can see the article: in a suburb of Barcelona there's a playground as dangerous as a minefield. In one of the photographs that accompany the story, a slide is visible a few yards from an abyss; two children with goosebumps wave from the top of the slide. Back to the squares. The surface has changed into something that vaguely reminds us, like Rorschach blots, of offices in a police station. From the desks a drooling man, breathing with difficulty, stares at the squares, trying to recognize the houses, the hills, the footsteps of the workman fading into the brown and sepia darkness. Now the squares flicker. A plainclothes policeman walks down a narrow, deserted hallway. He opens a door. Before him spreads a landscape of launch ramps. The policeman's footsteps echo in the silent yard. The door closes.