Antwerp (3 page)

On the wall someone has written my one true love. She put the cigarette between her lips and waited for the man to light it for her. She was paleskinned and freckled and had mahoganycolored hair. Someone opened the back door of the car and she got in silently. They glided along the deserted streets of a residential neighborhood. It was the time of year when most of the houses were empty. The man parked on a narrow street of singlestory houses with identical yards. She went into the bathroom and he made coffee. The kitchen had brown tiles patterned with arabesques, and looked like a gym. She opened the curtains, there were no lights in any of the houses across the street. She took off her satin dress and the man lit another cigarette for her. Before she pulled down her underpants, the man arranged her on all fours on the soft white rug. She heard him look for something in the wardrobe. A wardrobe built into the wall, a red wardrobe. She watched him upside down, through her legs. The man smiled at her. Now someone is walking down a street where cars are parked only next to their respective lairs. Above the street, like a hanged man, swings the spotlit sign of the neighborhood's best restaurant, closed a long time ago. Footsteps vanish down the street, headlights are visible in the distance. She said no. She listens. There's someone outside. The man went over to the window, then came back naked toward the bed. She was freckled and sometimes she pretended to be asleep. He looked at her from the door with a kind of detached sweetness. There are silences made just for us. He pressed his face against hers until it hurt and pushed himself into her with a single thrust. Maybe she screamed a little. From the street, however, nothing could be heard. They fell asleep without moving apart. Someone walks away. We see his back, his dirty pants and his downattheheel boots. He goes into a bar and settles himself at the counter as if he feels a prickling all over his body. His movements produce a vague, disturbing sensation in the other drinkers. Is this Barcelona? he asks. At night all the yards look alike, by day the impression is different, as if desires were channeled through the plants and flower beds and climbing vines. "They take good care of their cars and yards" ... "Someone has made a silence especially for us"... "First he moved in and out and then in a circular motion" ... "Her buttocks were covered in scratches" ... "The moon is hiding behind the only tall building in the neighborhood"... "Is this Barcelona?"...

Look at these pictures, said the sergeant. The man who was sitting at the desk flipped through them indifferently. Do you think there's something here? The sergeant blinked with Shakespearean vigor. They were taken a long time ago, he started to say, probably with an old Soviet Zenith. Don't you see anything strange about them? The lieutenant closed his eyes, then lit a cigarette. I don't know what you're talking about. Look, said the voice... "A vacant lot at dusk"... "Long blurry beach" ..."Sometimes you'd think he'd never used a camera before" ... "Crumbling walls, dirty terrace, gravel path, a sign that says Office"... "A cement box by the side of the road"... "Restaurant windows, out of focus" ... I don't know what the hell he's trying to get at. Through the window, the sergeant watched the train go by; it was so crowded there were even passengers on the roof. There're no people in them, he said. The door closes. A cop walks down a long, dimly lit hallway. He passes another cop with a file in his hand. They barely nod at each other. The cop opens the door of a dark room. He stands motionless inside the room, his back against the metal door. Look at these pictures, Lieutenant. It doesn't matter anymore. Look! Nothing matters anymore, go back to your office. "We've been consigned to an interval of silence." All I want is authorization to go back to the place where somebody took these pictures. Verbal authorization. Those cement boxes are for power lines, that's where the fuses go, maybe. I can find the shop where they were developed. This isn't Barcelona, says the voice. Through the foggy window he watched the train go by full of people. The woods are silhouetted against the light just so that halfclosed eyes can enjoy the show. "I had a nightmare, and woke up when I fell out of bed, then I laughed at myself for almost ten minutes straight." There are at least two other cops who would recognize the hunchback, but they're away right now, on special assignments, worse luck. It doesn't matter anymore. In a small photo, black and white like all the rest, you can see the beach and a scrap of sea. Pretty fuzzy. There's something written in the sand. Maybe it's a name, maybe not, it might just be the photographer's footsteps.

It's absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl who walks by. What do you think you are, a troubadour? The skinny adolescent whistled in admiration. We were on the edge of the reservoir and the sky was very blue. A few fishermen were visible in the distance and smoke from a chimney rose over the trees. Green wood, for burning witches, said the old man, his lips hardly moving. The point is, there are all kinds of pretty girls in bed at this very moment with technocrats and executives. Five yards from me, a trout leaped. I put out my cigarette and closed my eyes. Closeup of a Mexican girl reading. She's blond, with a long nose and narrow lips. She looks up, turns toward the camera, smiles: streets damp after the rains of August, September, in a Mexico City that doesn't exist anymore. She walks down a residential street in a white coat and boots. With her index finger she presses the button for the elevator. The elevator arrives, she opens the door, selects the floor, and glances at herself in the mirror. Just for an instant. A man, thirty, sitting in a red armchair, watches her come in. He's darkhaired and he smiles at her. They talk but their words don't register on the soundtrack. Anyway, they must be saying things like how was your day, I'm tired, there's an avocado sandwich in the kitchen, thanks, thanks, a beer in the refrigerator. Outside it's raining. The room is cozy, with Mexican furniture and Mexican rugs. The two of them are lying in bed. Small white flashes of lightning. Entwined and still, they look like exhausted children. Though they have no reason to be tired. The camera zooms out. Give me all the information in the world. A blue stripe splits the window in two halves. Like a blue hunchback? He's a bastard but he knows how to feign tenderness. He's a bastard but the hand on her side is gentle. Her face is buried between the pillow and her lover's neck. The camera zooms in: impassive faces that somehow, without intending to, shut you out. The author stares for a long time at the plaster masks, then covers his face. Fade to black. It's absurd to think that this is where all the pretty girls come from. Empty images follow one after the other: the reservoir and the woods, the cabin with a fire in the hearth, the lover in a red robe, the girl who turns and smiles at you. There's nothing diabolic about any of it. The wind tosses the neighborhood trees. A blue hunchback on the other side of the mirror? I don't know. A girl heads away, walking her motorcycle toward the end of the boulevard. If she keeps on in the same direction, she'll reach the sea. Soon she'll reach the sea.

I was silent for a moment and then I asked whether he really thought Roberto Bolaño had helped the hunchback just because years ago he was in love with a Mexican girl and the hunchback was Mexican too. Yes, said the guitarist, it sounds like a cheap romance novel, but I don't know how else to explain it, I mean in those days Bolaño wasn't overflowing with solidarity or desperation, two good reasons to help the Mexican. But nostalgia, on the other hand ...

Synopsis. The hunchback in the woods near the campground and the tennis courts and the riding school. In Barcelona a South American is dying in a foulsmelling room. Police dragnets. Cops who fuck nameless girls. The English writer talks to the hunchback in the woods. Death throes and an asshole from South America, on the road. Five or six waiters return to the hotel along a deserted beach. Stirrings of fall. The wind whips up sand and buries them.

Stray scenes kaput, longhaired kids on the beach again, but this time I might be dreamingtrees, dampness, paperbacks, slides at the end of which waits a little girl or a friend or a black car. I said wait for a movement of bodies, hairs, tattooed arms, choosing between prison and plastic (or aesthetic) surgery, I said don't wait for me. The hunchback cut out something that looked like a miniature poster and smiled at us from the branch of a pine tree. He was up in a tree, how long he'd been up there I don't know. "I can't get a fix on the frequencies of reality, they're so high"... "A girl, motionless, who nonetheless spins, pinned to a bed that's pinned to the parquet that's pinned, etc When I was a boy I used to dream something like this ' ... The straight line is the sea when it's calm, the wavy line is the sea with waves, and the jagged line is a storm" ... "I guess there isn't much aesthetics left in me" .. ."nnnnnnn" ... "A little boat" .. . "nnnnnnn" .. . "nnnnnnn"...

Photographs of the Castelldefels beach ... Photographs of the campground ... The polluted sea ... Mediterranean, October in Catalonia ... Alone ... The Zenith's eye...

They alternated. The straight line made me feel calm.

The wavy line made me uneasy, I sensed danger but I liked the smoothness: up and down. The last line was agitation. My penis hurt, my belly hurt, etc.

Hamlet and La Vita Nuova, in both works there's a youthful breathing. For innocence, says the Englishman, read immaturity. On the screen there's only laughter, silent laughter that startles the spectator as if he were hearing his own last gasps. "Anyone can die" means something different than "Anyone would die." A callow breathing in which it's still possible to discover wonder, play, perversion, purity. "Words are empty"... "If you put that gun away we might be able to negotiate"... On an average of three hours' sleep a night the author writes these threats by the side of a pool at the beginning of the month of October. Innocence, almost like the image of Lola Muriel that I'd like to destroy. (But you can't destroy what you don't possess.) An urge, at the cost of nervous collapse in cheap rooms, propels poetry toward something that detectives call perfection. Deadend street. A basement whose only virtue is its cleanliness. And yet who has been here if not La Vita Nuova and Hamlet. "I write by the pool at the campground, it's October, there are more and more flies now and fewer and fewer people; by the time we're halfway through the month there'll be no one left and the cleaning service will stop coming; the flies will take over until the end of the month, maybe."

We came softly forward. The place in his memory that's labeled immediat
e
pas
t
is furnished with mattresses scarcely touched by light. Gray mattresses with red and blue stripes in something that looks like a hallway or an overly long waiting room. In any case, his memory is frozen in i
mmediat
e
pas
t
like a faceless man in a dentist's chair. There are houses and streets that run down to the sea, dirty windows and shadows on staircase landings. We hear someone say "a long time ago it was noon," the light bounces off the center of immediat
e
past, something that's neither a screen nor attempts to offer images. Memory slowly dictates soundless sentences. We imagine that all of this has been done to avoid confusion, a layer of white paint covers the film on the floor
.
Fleein
g
to
gethe
r
long ago became livin
g
togethe
r
and thus the integrity of the gesture was lost; the shine of immediate past. Are there really shadows on the landings? Was there really a hunchback who wrote happy poems? (Someone applauds.) "I knew it was them when I heard their foot steps on the stairs"... "I closed my eyes, the image of the gun didn't match the reality"... "I didn't bother to open the door for them"... "It was two in the morning and a blonde who looked like a man came in" ... "Her eyes watched the moon through the curtain" ... "A stupid smile spread slowly across her face daubed with white"... "The gun was only a word"... "Close the door, I said"... "Shattering isn't real, it's blackmail"...

The only possible scene is the one with the man on the path through the woods, running. Someone blinks a blue bedroom. Now he's twentyseven and he gets on a bus. He's smoking a cigarette, has short hair, is wearing jeans, a dark shirt, a hooded jacket, boots, the dark glasses of a political commissar. He's sitting next to the window; beside him a workman on his way back from Andalusia. He gets on a train at the station in Zaragoza, he looks back, the mist has risen to the knees of a track worker. He smokes, coughs, rests his forehead on the bus window. Now he's walking around a strange city, a blue bag in his hand, his hood pulled up, it's cold, with each breath he expels a puff of smoke. The workman sleeps with his head resting on his shoulder. He lights a cigarette, glances at the plains, closes his eyes. The next scene is yellow and cold and on the soundtrack birds beat their wings. (He says: I'm a cageit's a private jokethen he buys cigarettes and walks away from the camera.) He's sitting in a train station at dusk, he does a crossword puzzle, he reads the international news, he tracks the flight of a plane, he moistens his lips with his tongue.

Someone coughs in the darkness, a cold clear morning from the window of a hotel; he coughs. He goes out to the street, pulls up the hood of his bluejacket, buttons all the buttons except the top one. He buys a pack of cigarettes, takes one, stops on the sidewalk by the window of a jewelry shop, lights a cigarette. He has short hair. He walks with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, the cigarette dangles from his lips. The scene is a closeup of the man with his forehead resting on the window. The rest is tiny passageways that hardly ever lead anywhere. The glass is foggy. Now he's twentyseven and he gets off the bus. He heads down a deserted street.