The Man of Feeling Read Free

responsible for creating whatever emerged from them.
    "And what if I die first?"
    "Anything is possible," I replied at once. But I think I did so in order to disguise or to postpone a little (I did it to gain time) the only other normal and admissible answer that immediately followed, the one she was waiting for, as would any mortal lying as she was, at that moment, on that bed: "But your death would also be mine." "But your death would also be mine," I said to this same woman and, just as happens in opera, I repeated these same words several times in this morning's dream.
     

 
    M Y PROFESSION OFTEN OBLIGES ME to lead a very solitary life in the great capitals of the world, and four years ago, Madrid, the city in which I spent much of my childhood and much of my adolescence, was no exception. Indeed, after a long period without visiting it, few cities I have been to on my numerous trips abroad have seemed to me sadder or more solitary. More even than English cities, which are the worst in the world, the most miserable and the most hostile; more even than those of East Germany, which are so disciplined and so deadened that to walk down the street whistling has a cataclysmic effect; more even than those of Switzerland, which are at least clean and quiet and give free rein to the imagination precisely because they say nothing.
    Madrid, on the other hand, seems in a hurry to say everything, as if it were aware that the only way it can win over the traveler is through unchecked noise and vehemence. It does not, therefore, allow for any long-term expectations, any reticence or reserve, nor does it allow the visitor (not to mention the perpetually harassed resident) the smallest imaginative or imaginary hope that anything more might exist—hidden, unexpressed, omitted or merely contingent—than what is brazenly offered to him as soon as he steps out along its dirty, suffocating streets. Madrid is rustic and talkative and lacks all mystery, and there is nothing so sad or so solitary as a city with no apparent enigma or even the appearance of an enigma, there is nothing so dissuasive, nothing so oppressive to a visitor. I, both in my dream and four years ago, was a visitor to this city despite having lived in it and in its environs when I was no more than a child and entirely dependent on my godfather, who took me in and moved me there from Barcelona when my mother died. (I was for many years what is known as a poor relation: I was quite literally that, and it was then that I lived in Madrid. On the other hand, at the time, four years ago, I had long since ceased to be a poor relation and was making a good living, but, given my prolonged absence and the minimal contact I had had with my former benefactor since my emancipation, I was just as much a visitor to Madrid as I had been to Venice and Milan and Edinburgh a few weeks earlier.)
    As I said, I was taken there and am still taken to all these cities by my profession, which, contrary to popular belief, is one of the saddest and most solitary of professions—people only ever see us on stage, on record covers, on posters and in the occasional televised gala performance: that is, always in full make-up. The truth is that, in essence, we are not so very different from traveling salesmen, except, of course, that profession is slowly dying out and is in danger of disappearing altogether, doubtless because the people in charge of large companies, though, on the whole, highly pragmatic individuals not known for their humanitarianism, have realized that no one can lead such a hard, disparate life. I have known traveling salesmen who have ended up in mental hospitals, or have murdered a would-be customer, or committed suicide in a luxury hotel, knowing that their unusual excesses (indoor swimming pool, sauna, massages, cocktails, but, above all, the dry-cleaning bill) would be vainly deducted from a posthumous salary that they had taken good care to overspend and which no one would notice