Scarecrow & Other Anomalies (10 page)

“When she shut up, I got up quietly without thinking and took a few steps towards her. She gazed at me tenderly with her moist, limpid eyes and rubbed her muzzle against a fencepost. Then she stuck her neck through the barbed wire and puckered her lips to kiss me.

“Motionless, separated only by a narrow ditch, we stared at one another in silence. She could have dropped to her knees, but I gave a leap and broke into a run down the road. In the depths of my being swelled the certainty that the voice I had just heard was that of my mother.”

There was so much emotion packed into the last part of his story that I didn’t dare crack a smile. And, as his confidence grew, he added, after a silence:

“And the worst thing is that my mother, the cow, is right. I have never been anything but a cork. All my life long I have floated from here to there, without knowing anything but the surface of things. Incapable of attaching myself to anything or anyone, I have always drifted away from others before I could learn to love them. And now it’s too late. I lack the courage to put on my slippers.”

As if resonating inside an unfurnished room, his voice was marked by an inflection so cavernous that I reflexively scoured the surroundings for some gesture or facial expression that might accompany it. But I found myself completely alone. Between his forlornity and my silence was interposed a cloud that grew denser by the moment. There was nothing left to do but wait and see if the morning would dissipate it.

It wasn’t long before the slippery hour of dawn elapsed and brought on that instant in which things change consistency and size, so as to ground themselves, definitively, in reality.  Perched on one foot, the trees shook off their dreams and their sparrows, while from street to street the asphalt lost its sheen of undeveloped film. With a metallic yawn, businesses reopened their doors and relit their showcases. On the sidewalks, in the recently awakened entryways, noises acquired an adolescent sonority. From time to time, a somnolent car transported a lump of countryside to the city and, from all around us, wafted the odor of warm bread and of ink still wet from the press.

Side by side, we strolled along without saying a word. Head hunched between his shoulders, his walk wobbly and somnambular, he would not have surprised me if he had collapsed on somebody’s doorstep, the way his garments looked as if they might suddenly drop to the ground, as if slipping from a clothes-rack. His fedora, his overcoat, his trousers seemed so limp and baggy that for a moment I resisted admitting that those were his steps resounding on the sidewalk. While we were passing in front of a dairy, an old woman spied on us with myopic distrust; almost at the same time, a dog stopped to stare with the same insistence, so that my companion quickened his pace for fear that it would draw nearer and confuse him with a tree. I surmised that his shadow, being too heavy and too dense, had neglected to follow him. Was it repulsed by living with him, constantly suffering his presence? It occurred to me that some night, while crossing the street and rounding a corner, he would be left to go on alone forever. When we came to the front door of the rooming house, I capitulated to the heartlessness of custom and bid him farewell.

After that, I never saw him again. A while back, I ascertained that, upon returning to Paris, he published, with success, a book of poetry. Recently someone informed me that the Russian secret service had made him face a firing squad after sending him on a mission to China.

Which of these stories is true? I don’t think anyone can say for sure. It may be that, by now, there is nothing left of his person but a lock of hair and a set of false teeth. It’s very possible that, pursued by the fear of falling asleep, he can be found at these hours in some café, beset by the same weariness as always... with a few flakes of dandruff on his shoulders and the smile of an empty, worn-out wallet.

This last is the most probable. His mother, the cow, knew that well enough.

                        PROSE POEMS

NOCTURNE

THE FRESHNESS of pressing your forehead on a cool window pane. Lights through the night whose blinking out makes us feel more and more alone. The spider-webbed tracery with which the wires enmesh the rooftops. The hollow hoofbeats of passing nags that stir our emotions for no reason.

What recollections are revived by the bawling of these cats in heat, and what is the intent of the scraps of paper littering the vacant patios?

This is the hour in which old furniture takes occasion to pick out the lies and in which water pipes give off strangled screams, as if they were being asphyxiated inside the walls.

At times, while turning on a light switch, we imagine the fear the shadows will feel and want to warn them so they can muffle themselves up in the corners. And at times the crosses of the telephone poles above the rooftops have about them a sinister air, and one feels like slinking along the walls like a cat or a thief.

These are nights when we want a hand to pet us along the back and in which we suddenly understand that no tenderness can compare with fondling something that is sleeping.

“Silence!”—a hoarse cricket has hopped in our ear. The song of spigots poorly turned off!—the only cricket suitable for the city...

        Buenos Aires, November 1921

STREET SKETCH

ON THE CAFÉ terrace sits a grey family. A few cross-eyed breasts pass by, looking for smiles across the tables. The noise of the cars turns the color of the leaves on the trees. In a fifth-floor apartment someone is crucified opening a window all the way.

I’m thinking about where to store the kiosks, the street lamps, the transients that enter through my pupils. I feel so full I’m afraid I’ll burst... After all, some cement has to be left on the sidewalk...

While turning a corner, my shadow separates from me and suddenly throws itself under the wheels of a streetcar.

DEVOTION

        To the girls of Flores

THE GIRLS of Flores, they have soft, tender eyes, like sugared almonds at the Molino Coffee Shop, and they wear silk-ribboned bows that flutter about their buttocks with flapping butterflies’ wings.

The girls of Flores, they promenade arm in arm so as to convey their every trembling, and if someone looks them in the eyes they clench their legs from fear that their sex will drop onto the sidewalk.

Towards evening, they dangle their still-ripening breasts over the iron lacework of the balcony, so that their gauzy gowns blush to feel their nudity and, late at night, in the tow of their mamas—who are rigged in more netting and mesh than battle cruisers in full regalia—they strut through the plaza, so that men may ejaculate words in their ears, and their phosphorescent nipples blink on and off like fireflies.

The girls of Flores, they live in dread that their buttocks will wither like apples that haven’t been picked, and the desire of men suffocates them so much that at times they want to get out of it like a corset, but they can’t quite bring themselves to chop their bodies into little pieces and sprinkle them on all who pass along the sidewalk.

        Buenos Aires, October 1920

ANOTHER NOCTURNE

THE MOON like the luminous clock dial on the face of a public building.

Jaundiced street lamps! Street lamps in tough-guy caps, smoking cigarettes on the corners!

Humble and humbled singing of the urinals tired of singing! Silence of the stars twinkling above the humid pavement!

Why at times will we feel a sadness come over us like that of a pair of stockings thrown in a corner, and why, sometimes, will we take such interest in the ball game created by the sound of our footsteps echoing off a wall?

These are nights in which we skulk beneath the shadows of trees, afraid that the houses will suddenly wake and see us passing, and in which the only consolation is the security of our waiting bed, with its sails set for a better world.

        Paris, July 1921

PEDESTRIAN

AT THE BOTTOM of the street, a faceless building inhales the bad odor of the city.

Shadows break their backs in the entryways, lying down together to fornicate on the sidewalk.

With an arm propped against the wall, an extinguished street lamp has a convex view of the people passing in their cars.

The glances of transients soil the wares displayed in the showroom windows, thinning the ranks of legs dangling beneath the victory bonnets.

Next to the curbstone a kiosk has just swallowed up a woman.

Passing by: an English woman exactly like a lamppost. A streetcar that is a college on wheels. A stray dog with the eyes of a prostitute that makes us ashamed to look at it and let it pass.

(You can always tell a dog that has lost its master by the way it lifts its paw as if about to play a mandolin, by its sagging skin, its hoarse, alcoholic voice and its propensity for stretching out on doorsteps, where it is swept off along with the refuse.)

All of a sudden the night watchman on the corner, with a blow of his baton, quells all the tremblings and shakings of the city, so that there remains a single, solitary whisper: the whisper of all the breasts gently rubbing against one another.

        Buenos Aires, August 1920

MEMORANDA

NO CRITIC can compare with our desk drawer.

The only arms within which we could contentedly spend a lifetime are the arms of the Venuses who have lost their arms.

It’s time to expose another kind of onanism: that of hoisting the flag every five minutes.

We impose certain norms on ourselves so as to experience the ingenuous smugness of violating them! The rehabilitation of infidelity demands just such candor. We blush at not being able to embarrass ourselves and reinvent the prohibitions that suit us, before freedom comes to enslave us completely!

Some poets are too inflammable. Does a pair of recently budded breasts pass by? The poet’s brain is ignited by them. You can tell by the smoke pouring out of his ears!

Reinforced concrete affords us the same satisfaction we feel when passing a hand over our face after a shave.

Art is the worst enemy of art... a fetish before which can be found officiating, on their knees, those who are not artists!

The most annoying thing about Cezanne is the obstinacy with which, in front of a cheese, he insists on repeating: “This is a cheese.”

The breadth of Rabelais’ buttocks explains his optimism. A vision like his requires ample padding to block the skeleton from giving a foretaste of death.

Arabic architecture succeeded in providing light with the sweetness and voluptuosity that light acquires in the half-open mouth of a woman.

Until the advent of Hugo, no one suspected the splendor, the amplitude, the sweep, the sumptuosity that the genius of “the comical” could attain.

One should not confuse poetry with hair oil, vigor with a sweaty shirt.

The hemlock with which Socrates poisoned himself was called “Know thyself.”

Mona Lisa is the only living woman who smiles like some women smile after they’re dead.

The most serious problem Goya solved while mixing the paints for his tapestries was hitting upon the right dose of sugar; a dab more and they would have been good only for the tops of boxes of chocolate.

We approach the portraits of El Greco with the idea of surprising the leeches that hide in the ruffles of their collars.

A book must be made like a watch and sold like a sausage.

Critics forget, all too often, that it’s one thing to cackle, and another to lay an egg.

If most of our poets could only learn that stuttering is preferable to plagiarism!

It’s the same with poetry as with women: the moment comes when the only respectable thing to do is to lift up the petticoats.

Transpose to the level of creative endeavors the fervid voluptuosity with which, during childhood, we broke all the street lamps in the neighborhood.

How can we help but admire the prodigality and perfection with which the majority of our poets achieve renown by producing an absolute vacuum?

We are so perverted that the clumsiness of the naive seems to us the “summit” of artistry.

Instead of having recourse to whiskey, Turner got drunk on twilight.

No Stradivarius is comparable in form or in resonance to the hips of certain college girls.

The wonder is not that Van Gogh cut off an ear, but that he kept the other.

Poetry is always something else, something everyone ignores until they discover a genuine poet.

Although they themselves deny it, no creator writes for others, nor for himself, nor, much less, to satisfy a vehement desire for creation: he writes because he cannot stop writing.

Certain they know where poetry lives, there are always multitudes who impatiently scurry about in search of it but, whenever asked the precise location of its lodgings, they invariably answer: It’s moved.

Only after heaving everything overboard are we capable of reaching our own nothingness.

The Chinese don’t paint nature, they dream it.

Before the appearance of Rembrandt no one suspected that light could produce the drama and inexhaustible variety of conflicts of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

The dissection of Monet’s eyes has proven that Monet possessed the eyes of a fly: eyes compelled by innumerable micro-eyes to distinguish with perfect clarity the most subtle shades of a color but that, as befits autonomous eyes, perceived those shades independently, without involving a synthetic vision of conjunction.