Antwerp (5 page)

The girl weighs 60 pounds now. She's in the hospital and it seems she's losing ground. "Destroy your stray phrases." I didn't understand what she meant until much later. Doubt was cast on my honesty, my reliability: they said I slept while I was on guard duty. Really, they were after someone else and I happened to show up at the wrong time. The girl weighs 6o pounds now and she probably won't leave the hospital alive. (Someone applauds. The hallway is full of people who open their mouths without a sound.) A girl I knew? I don't remember anyone with that face, I said. On the screen there's a street, a drunk kid is about to cross, a bus appears. The prompter said, "Sara Bendeman?" Still, I couldn't understand anything at the time. All I remember is a skinny girl with long freckled legs, undressing at the foot of the bed. The scene continues in a dimly lit alley: a woman, forty, smokes a cigarette on the fourth floor, leaning on the windowsill. Up the stairs comes a panting cop in civilian clothes, his features like mine if I'd overdosed on cortisone. (The one person who applauded closes his eyes now. In his mind something takes shape, something that might be a hospital if the meaning of life were different. In one of the rooms the girl is in bed. The curtains are open and light spills into the room.) "Destroy your stray phrases" ... "A policeman climbs the stairs"... "In his gaze there is no hunchback, no Jewish girl, no traitor" But we can still insist"...

Nothing lasts, the purely loving gestures of children tumble into the void. I wrote: "a group of waiters returning to work" and "windswept sand" and "the dirty windowpanes of September." Now I can turn my back on him. The hunchback is your guiding light. White houses scattered across the mountainside. Deserted highways, the screech of birds in the trees. And did I do everything? did I kiss her when she'd stopped expecting kisses? (Miles from here people are applauding, and that's why I feel such despair.) Yesterday I dreamed that I lived inside a hollow treesoon the tree began to spin like a carousel and I felt as if the walls were closing in on me; I woke to find the door of the bungalow ajar. The hunchback's face shone in the moonlight ... "Lonely words, people walking away from the camera, and children like hollow trees"... "No matter where you go"... I stopped at the fucking "lonely words." Undisciplined writing. It was forty men, more or less, all working for starvation wages. Each morning the Andalusian laughed uproariously when he read the paper. Waxing moon in August. In September I'll be alone. In October and November I'll pick pineapples.

The only rule that exists is a redheaded girl watching us from the end of the fence. Bruno understood this the same way I did, he just cared about different things. The cops are tired, there's a gasoline shortage, and thousands of unemployed youths roam Barcelona. (Bruno is in Paris, playing sax outside the Pompidou, they say, and without a girlfriend now.) With oily steps, four or five waiters approach the shack where they sleep. One of them used to write poetry, but that was a long time ago. The author said: "I can't be pessimistic or optimistic, everything is determined by the beat of hope that manifests itself in what we call reality." I can't be a science fiction writer because my innocence is mostly gone and I'm not craz
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yet ... Words that no one speaks, that no one is required to speak ... Hands in the process of geometric fragmentation: writing that's stolen away just as love, friendship, and the recurring backyards of nightmares are stolen away ... Sometimes I get the sense that it's all "internal"... Maybe that's why I lived alone and did nothing for three years ... (The man hardly ever washed, he didn't need a typewriter, all he had to do was sit in that shabby armchair for things to flee of their own accord) ... A surprising evening for the hunchback? Policemen's faces an inch from his nose? Did the rain really wash clean the windowpanes?

Screen of blond hair. Behind it the hunchback draws swimming pools, commuter towns, empty streets. Tact or courtesy stems from proper behavior in each situation. The hunchback draws a person with a kind face. "I lay there on my back in bed, I heard the crickets chirp and someone recite Manrique." Under the parched trees of August, I write to understand stillness, not to please. A kind person! Whether it's art or a fiveminute adventure of a boy running up some stairs. "My departure escaped the author's eye." An ah, and an oh, and postcards from whitewashed towns. The hunchback strolls down the empty pool, sits in the deep end, and lights a cigarette. The shadow of a cloud passes, a spider pauses next to his fingernail, he expels smoke. "Reality is a drag." I suppose all the movies I've seen will be worth nothing to me when I die. Wrong. They'll be worth something, believe me. Don't stop going to the movies. Scene of an empty commuter town, old newspapers blowing in the wind, dust crusted on benches and restaurants. I have long had this war inside me, which is why it doesn't affect me internally, wrote Klee. Was it in Mexico City that I saw the hunchback for the first time? Was it Gaspar who told stories about cops and robbers? They put the gun to his mouth and pinched his nose ... He had to open his mouth to breathe and then they shoved the barrel in ... In the center of the black curtain there's a red circle ... I think the man said shit or mama, I don't know...

The foreigner stayed here. That tent you see there was his tent. Go on in. He spent a long time under that tree, thinking, though it looked like he was dead. From where we're standing you could see his face covered in sweat. Big drops formed on his chin and dripped onto the grass. Here, feel, he slept for hours in the weeds here, like a dead man. The guy came into the bar and had a beer. He paid with French money and put the change in his pocket, not counting it. He spoke perfect Spanish. He had a camera that the police took as evidence. He walked on the beach in the evening. In this scene, the beach looks pale, pale yellow, with fading golden splotches. He dropped onto the sand, like a dead man. The only soundtrack was the dry obsessive cough of someone we could never see. Big silver waves, the guy standing on the beach, barefoot, and the cough. A long time ago were you happy in a tent too? In some corner of his memory there's a scene where he's on top of a thin brown girl. It's nighttime in a deserted campground, somewhere in Portugal. The girl is on her stomach and he moves in and out of her, biting her neck. Then he turns her over. He lifts her legs onto his shoulders and both of them come. An hour later he's on top of her again. (Or as a Conde del Asalto pimp says: "wham bam wham bam times infinity.") I don't know whether I'm talking about the same person. His camera is in some evidence locker now and maybe no one's thought to develop the film. Endless hallways, nightmarish, along which strides a fat tech from the Homicide Squad. The red light is off now, you can come in. The policeman's face relaxes into a smile. From the end of the hallway the silhouette of another policeman approaches. He crosses the space that separates him from his colleague and then both of them disappear. Empty now, the gray of the hallway quivers or maybe it swells. Then the silhouette of a policeman appears at the other end. He advances until he's in the foreground, pauses. In the background another cop appears. The shadow moves toward the shadow of the cop in the foreground. Both disappear. The smile of a tech from the Homicide Squad keeps watch over these scenes. Fat cheeks drenched in sweat. There's nothing in the photographs. (A stifled attempt at applause.) Nothing we can see. "Call someone, do something" ... "A fucking, cough echoing across the beach" ... "The tent full of spiderwebs"... "Everything is wrecked"... "Faces, stray scenes, kaput"...

Imagine the situation: the nameless girl hiding on the landing—it's an old building, poorly lit, with an opengrille elevator. Behind the door a man of about forty whispers, in a confessional tone, that he, too, is being chased by Colan Yar. The brownandblack opening shot vanishes almost instantly, giving way to a deep panorama— stores with multicolored roofs. Then: dark green trees. Then: red sky with clouds. Was a kid asleep in the tent just then? Dreaming of Colan Yar, police cars parked in front of a smoldering building, twentyyearold criminals? "All the shit in the world," or: "A campground should be the closest thing to Purgatory," etc. With dry, trembling hands he pushed back the curtains. Below, the motorcyclists revved their engines and took off. He whispered "very far away" and clenched his teeth. Fat blondesyoung women from Andalusia confident of their appealand among them the nameless girl, with her guillotine mouth, strolling through the past and the future like a movie face. I imagined my body tossed away in the countryside, just a few yards from the town's first houses. A camper, out for a walk, found me, he was the one who alerted the police. Now, under the cloudy sky, I'm surrounded by men in blue and white uniforms. The guardia civil and tabloid photographers, or maybe just tourists whose hobby is taking pictures of dead bodies. Gawkers and children. It isn't Paradise, but it's close. The girl goes slowly down the stairs. I opened the office door and ran downstairs. On the walls I saw furious whales, an incomprehensible alphabet. The street noise woke me up. On the opposite sidewalk a man yelled and then wept until the police came. "A body just outside of town"... "The motorcyclists are lost on the highway"... "No one will ever close this window again"...

I remember one night at the Merida train station. My girlfriend was asleep in her sleeping bag and I was keeping watch with a knife in the pocket of my jacket. I didn't feel like reading. Anyway ... Phrases appeared, I mean, I never closed my eyes or made an effort to think, the phrases just appeared, literally, like glowing ads in the middle of the empty waiting room. Across the room, on the floor, slept a bum, and next to me slept my girlfriend, and I was the only one awake in the whole silent, repulsive Merida train station. My girlfriend breathed calmly in her red sleeping bag and that calmed me. The bum sometimes snored, sometimes talked in his sleep, he hadn't shaved for days, and he was using his jacket as a pillow. His left hand shielded his chest. The phrases appeared like news on an electronic ticker. White letters, not very bright, in the middle of the waiting room. The bum's shoes stood next to his head. The toe of one of his socks was full of holes. Sometimes my girlfriend shifted. The door to the street was yellow and in some places the paint had a bleak look. I mean, only slightly, but at the same time absolutely bleak. I wondered whether the bum was dangerous. Phrases. I clutched the knife, still in my pocket, and waited for the next phrase. In the distance I heard the whistle of a train and the ticking of the station clock. I'm saved, I thought. We were on our way to Portugal, and this happened some time ago. My girlfriend breathed. The bum offered me cognac from a bottle he had in his bag. We talked for a few minutes and then we were quiet until morning.

What's yet to come. The wind in the trees. Everything is the projection of a forlorn kid. He's walking alone along a back road. His mouth moves. I saw a group of people opening their mouths, unable to speak. The rain filters through the pine needles. Someone is running in the woods. You can't see his face. Just his back. Pure violence. (In this scene the author appears with his hands on his hips watching something offscreen.) The wind and the rain through the trees, like a curtain of madmen. The wind blows like a ghost on a deserted beach: lifts his pajamas, pushes him across the sand until he disappears in the middle of an asthma attack or a long yawn. "Like a rocket sliced open"... "The poetic way of saying that you no longer love back streets lit up by patrol cars" ... "The melodic voice of the sergeant speaking with a Galician accent" ... "Boys your age who'd settle for so little" ... "It's too bad" ... "There's a kind of dance that turns into lips"... Wells of clear water along the way. You saw a man on the ground under the trees and you kept running. The first wild blackberries of the season. Like the screwedup eyes of the excitement that rushed to meet you.

In the railroad car a girl on her own. She looks out the window. Outside everything splits in two: tilled fields, woods, white houses, towns, suburbs, dumps, factories, dogs, and children waving goodbye. Lola Muriel appears. August 1980. I dream of faces that open their mouths and can't speak. They try but they can't. Their blue eyes stare at me but they can't. Then I walk along the corridor of a hotel. I wake up sweating. Lola has blue eyes and she reads Poe stories by the pool, while the other girls talk about pyramids and jungles. I dream that I'm watching it rain in neighborhoods which I recognize but have never visited. I walk along an empty passageway. I see faces with eyes that close and mouths that open, though they can't speak. I wake up sweating. August 1980? A girl, eighteen, from Andalusia? The night watchman, madly in love?

Silence hovers in the yards, leaving no pages with writing on them, that thing we'll later call the work. Silence reads letters sitting on a balcony. Birds like a rasp in the throat, like women with deep voices. I no longer ask for all the loneliness of love or the tranquility of love or for the mirrors. Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore. Silence is love just as your raspy voice is a bird. And no work could justify the slowness of movements and obstacles. I wrote "a nameless girl," I saw a radio by the window and a girl sitting on a chair and in a train. The girl was tied up and the train was in motion. The folding of wings. Everything is a folding of wings and silence, from the fat girl afraid to get in the pool to the hunchback. Her hand turned off the radio ... "I've seen some happy marriages—the silence builds a kind of double victoryfoggy windowpanes and names written with a finger" ... "Maybe dates, not names" ... "In the winter" ... Scene of policemen rushing into a gray building, sound of gunfire, radios turned all the way up. Fade to black. The tenderness of an old whore and her cloak of silvery silence. And I no longer ask for all the solitude in the world, but for time. They shoot. Phrases like "I've lost even my sense of humor," "so many nights alone," etc., remind me of the meaning of retreat, a folding inward. Nothing's written. The foreigner, motionless, imagines that this is death. The hunchback trembles in the empty pool. I've found a bridge in the woods. Lightning flash of blue eyes and blond hair... "For a while, never alone again"...