Blow-Up Read Free Page B

half-asleep, an enormous fish and not even that).
    Nora who says to fall asleep when it’s light, the hubbub already starting in the street in the middle of the urgent chronicles her sister tells half-undressed. How happy they are, I turn off the lights and the hands, take all my clothesoff to the cries of daytime and stirring, I want to sleep and I’m a terrible sounding bell, a wave, the chain the dog trails all night against the privet hedges. Now I lay me down to sleep … I have to recite verses, or the system of looking for words with
a
, then with
a
and
e
, with five vowels, with four. With two and one consonant (obo, emu), with four consonants and a vowel (crass, dross), then the poems again, The moon came down to the forge/ in its crinoline of tuberoses./ The boy looks and looks./ The boy is looking at it. With three and three in alternate order, cabala, bolero, animal; pavane, Canada, repose, regale.
    So hours pass: with four, with three and two, then later palindromes: easy ones like hah, bob, mom, did, dad, gag, radar; then more complicated or nice silly ones like oho Eve oho, or the Napoleon joke, “able was I ere I saw Elba.” Or the beautiful anagrams: Salvador Dalí,
avida dollars
; Alina Reyes,
es la reina y
 … That one’s so nice because it opens a path, because it does not close. Because the queen and … 
la reina y
 …
    No, horrible. Horrible because it opens a path to this one who is not the queen and whom I hate again at night. To her who is Alina Reyes but not the queen of the anagram; let her be anything, a Budapest beggar, a beginner at a house of prostitution in Jujuy, a servant in Quetzaltenango, any place that’s far away and not the queen. But yes Alina Reyes and because of that last night it happened again, to feel her and the hate.
    J ANUARY 20
    At times I know that she’s cold, that she suffers, that they beat her. I can only hate her so much, detest the hands that throw her to the ground and her as well, her even more because they beat her, because I am I and they beather. Oh, I’m not so despondent when I’m sleeping or when I cut a suit or it’s the hours mama receives and I’m serving tea to señora Regules or to the boy from the Rivas’. Then it’s less important to me, it’s a little more like something personal, I with myself; I feel she is more mistress of her adversity, far away and alone, but the mistress. Let her suffer, let her freeze; I endure it from here, and I believe that then I help her a little. Like making bandages for a soldier who hasn’t been wounded yet, and to feel that’s acceptable, that one is soothing him beforehand, providentially.
    Let her suffer. I give a kiss to señora Regules, tea to the boy from the Rivas’, and I keep myself for that inner resistance. I say to myself, “Now I’m crossing a bridge, it’s all frozen, now the snow’s coming in through my shoes. They’re broken.” It’s not that she’s feeling nothing. I only know it’s like that, that on one side I’m crossing a bridge at the same instant (but I don’t know if it is at the same instant) as the boy from the Rivas’ accepts the cup of tea from me and puts on his best spoiled face. And I stand it all right because I’m alone among all these people without sensitivity and I’m not so despondent. Nora was petrified last night, and asked, “But what’s happening to you?” It was happening to that one, to me far off. Something horrible must have happened to her, they were beating her or she was feeling sick and just when Nora was going to sing Fauré and I at the piano gazing happily at Luis María leaning with his elbows on the back of it which made him look like a model, he gazing at me with his puppy-look, the two of us so close and loving one another so much. It’s worse when that happens, when I know something about her just at the moment I’m dancing with Luis María, kissing him, or just near him. Because in the distances they do not love me—her.