Agua Viva Read Free Page B

brightness, and I, blood of nature—
extravagant and dangerous caves, talisman of the Earth, where stalactites,
fossils and rocks come together, and where the animals mad by their own malign
nature seek refuge. The caves are my hell. Forever dreaming cave with its fogs,
memory or longing? eerie, eerie, esoteric, greenish with the slime of time.
Inside the dark cave glimmer the hanging rats with the cruciform wings of bats.
I see downy and black spiders. Mice and rats run frightened along the ground and
up the walls. Between the rocks the scorpion. Crabs, just like themselves since
prehistory, through deaths and births, would look like threatening beasts if
they were the size of a man. Old cockroaches crawl in the murky light. And all
of this is me. All is weighted with sleep when I paint a cave or write to you
about it—from outside it comes the clatter of dozens of wild horses stamping
with dry hoofs the darkness, and from the friction of the hoofs the rejoicing is
freed in sparks: here I am, I and the cave, in the very time that will rot
us.
    I want to put into words but without description the
existence of the cave that some time ago I painted—and I don’t know how. Only
by repeating its sweet horror, cavern of terror and wonders, place of afflicted
souls, winter and hell, unpredictable substratum of the evil that is inside an
earth that is not fertile. I call the cave by its name and it begins to live
with its miasma. I then fear myself who knows how to paint the horror, I,
creature of echoing caverns that I am, and I suffocate because I am word and
also its echo.
    But the instant-now is a firefly that sparks and goes
out, sparks and goes out. The present is the instant in which the wheel of the
speeding car just barely touches the ground. And the part of the wheel that
still hasn’t touched, will touch in that immediacy that absorbs the present
instant and turns it into the past. I, alive and glimmering like the instants,
spark and go out, alight and go out, spark and go out. It’s just that whatever I
capture in me has, when it’s now being transposed into writing, the despair that
words take up more instants than the flash of a glance. More than the instant, I
want its flow.
    A new era, this my own, and it announces me right away.
Am I brave enough? For now I am: because I come from the suffering afar, I come
from the hell of love but now I am free of you. I come from afar—from a
weighty ancestry. I who come from the pain of living. And I no longer want it. I
want the vibration of happiness. I want the impartiality of Mozart. But I also
want inconsistency. Freedom? it’s my final refuge, I forced myself to freedom
and I bear it not like a talent but with heroism: I’m heroically free. And I
want the flow.
    What I write to you is not comfortable. I don’t impart
confidences. Instead I metallize myself. And I’m not comfortable for you and for
me; my word bursts into the space of the day. What you will know of me is the
shadow of the arrow that has hit its target. I shall only vainly grasp a shadow
that takes up no room in space, and what barely matters is the dart. I construct
something free of me and of you—this is my freedom that leads to death.
    In this instant-now I’m enveloped by a wandering
diffuse desire for marvelling and millions of reflections of the sun in the
water that runs from the faucet onto the lawn of a garden all ripe with
perfumes, garden and shadows that I invent right here and now and that are the
concrete means of speaking in this my instant of life. My state is that of a
garden with running water. In describing it I try to mix words that time can
make itself. What I tell you should be read quickly like when you look.
    Now it’s day and suddenly again Sunday in an unexpected
eruption. Sunday is a day of echoes—hot, dry, and everywhere buzzings of bees
and wasps, cries of birds and the distance of paced hammer blows—where do the
echoes of Sunday come from? I who loathe Sunday