A whole day writing a single word.
Feelings, heart, everything in strange condition.
Beginning to take on the air of an ascetic and to neglect his appearance.
Wasn’t just that he grew a beard or stopped shaving regularly; he didn’t seem to care if the sole of his shoe came loose.
Heels tapped across the wilderness of the city.
Would sit for hours on the steps of abandoned buildings or next to puddles.
Dreamed I was far down in the depths.
At midnight he would wander through the roistering singers.
Looked keenly at everything, but he felt half blind.
The spark of life within flickered and went down. It was nearly out. He felt strangely numb.
Stood in front of the mirror, absently feeling the week-old stubble on his face.
The frailty of everything revealed at last.
A state of dulled inertia from which he tried helplessly to rouse himself.
Retreated into his private world, going through his old notebooks.
Maybe the story I’m looking for doesn’t exist.
Poke my forefinger through him and would find nothing inside.
Only he could stop thinking, completely negate his own will power, he, too, might be sucked towards that place.
Finish with this arseness, you hear.
One grim winter evening when it had a kind of unrealness.
Fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur.
Roaming the powdered streets.
Reached that point of exhaustion and sleeplessness which produces a series of incandescent fantasies.
Sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his.
Face was youthful but the perceptive observer could distinguish in it the traces of sorrow and experience.
Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game.
Always be stoppages, blockages, siltings, unsuccessful attempts at conduction.
You can write something and every sentence in it will be a fact, you can pile up facts, but it won’t be true.
Search out the place where fact ended and imagination took over.
Door into a world of dreams.
Don’t you see — he was simply the one who was to come.
Will serve me as a pilot.
Rose, unsteady, long, pale, indistinct, like a vapour exhaled by the earth, and swayed slightly, misty and silent.
Simply do what we always do in such cases: we tie a rope to the dog and let it walk and it will lead you.
11
Sunday in the eastern districts.
Feet had brought him back here of their own accord.
Moving through crowds.
Standing in doorways.
Scans the streets.
Face I see.
Touched him on the shoulder.
Pulled a dirty and wrinkled newspaper from the inside pocket of his greatcoat.
Did you ever know a young man?
Eyes lock for a second then dart away.
Talked to thin air.
Like someone throwing gravel at a street lamp.
Pen scratching at the silence.
Slumped in a doorway.
Slanting grey rain like a swung curtain.
Imagined the boy crouching down like a wild animal in the darkness.
Saw a small dark figure.
Brought the crouching shape up front in my mind.
Slipped out after him and followed him down the street.
Hood that overshadowed his face.
Lost in his clothes.
Stops in the shelter of a stairwell to light a cigarette.
Eyes blinked behind the swirling smoke.
Approached and stood still.
Sign of peace.
You’ve been following me around.
Don’t guess I know you.
Looking for somebody.
Thought maybe you’d been seein’ him.
Show him the photo.
Nuthin’ t’say, officer.
Nothing to do with the police.
Huntin’ my chap that’s about all.
Considered that with some care.
Took the photograph.
Ain’t seen him for quite a spell now.
Not since in the spring.
Sizeable world to set out huntin’ somebody in.
Not exactly hunting.
Bones lay in the cemetery.
Searching for traces.
Eyes almost disappeared between the suddenly narrowed lids.
Lips went back against his teeth.
Don’t know nuthin’ about the dead.
Living when he passed by.
Not here for trouble.
Maybe you’d still know a thing or two.
What he was doing.
Thought about it, breathing slowly.
Can tell where he stayed.
Place his ma worked.
Where he worked.
He worked in the launderette?
Threw his cigarette on the cement floor.
Beckoning gesture.
Clanging stairs to the empty roof.
Rain had stopped.
City was a sea of lights.
See the place.
Four aluminium towers rise.
Skyscrapers with thousands of windows.
Cranes like straws.
Never did give me the straight of it but he liked it up there.
Painting those walls.
Did he say why he left? Did he mention any plans?
Dying ain’t in people’s plans, is it?
Maybe he met him a gal and went off.
Maybe have some other unknown future.
Further than that I do not know.
12
Does go to the laundry.
Fast closed and mouldering away.
Walks round the back.
Cobbled, stepped alleyway with its gutter in the middle for the mules’ urine.
Rubbish bins with cheese rinds, greasy paper.
Little lattice window about five feet and a half above the ground.
Climbed to the barky lip.
Slipped my hand in and twisted the knob.
Crawled within.
Feet creaked and crackled over the bare planking.
Machines like the relics of some antique rite.
Old works of stone.
Wall from which the paper was hanging in ribbons.
Mould feeding on the plaster.
Small room at the back where someone appears to have been sleeping at some time past.
Bed of flattened cartons.
Gently recessed.
Knelt and placed his hand.
Dust has settled.
Droppings and mute prints.
In a corner some chewed wrappings and a tattered copy of a bible.
A leetle pocket-size one.
Also chewed into by some creature in search of nourishment.
Shape of its body in the layers.
Takes the book and his next day in the prison shows it to the chaplain.
Could be the one he gave the boy, but can’t be sure.
O lord how manifold are thy works.
Seeks out also the painting instructor.
One who could know an answer.
Didn’t deny it.
Telephoned this man about a job.
Good reliable worker he’d be prepared to take him on.
Off the books, of course.
Think it’s easy to find legitimate employment?
Recent prison release order in my pocket.
Sorry the vacancy get filled.
Not asking for the sun or the moon.
Only want to get by.
Little food, a little place to sleep.
Writes down the number and in the evening he calls.
Looking for an employee of yours.
Former employee.
Don’t talk to me about that boy.
Regular fool of a youth.
Had to let him go.
Slept on the premises.
Hide in the clothes closet.
Could have cost me the contract.
People in this world don’t know how other people does affect their lives.
Hung the phone in my ear.
Morning he was standing by the side of the road at daybreak with a clean shirt and a pair of socks.
Brown woollen suit.
Homme marche dans la ville.
Cluster of tall buildings.
Interminably and hungrily going up.
Show apartment on the thirty-sixth floor.
Punched the roof button and the elevator silently rose.
Door came open on a small red-headed man who wore a tan suit.
Mouth snaked up as he chuckled.
Sky village.
New mode of life.
Radically new environment with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance.
Floor was covered with green and grey linoleum.
Contemporary furniture in the G-plan.
Arching above him the ceiling and upper walls.
Could be reconstructed to fit the expectations and particularities.
Contents arranged for the eye.
Look around a little.
Wondering as he does so what had drawn the boy to this place.
Opulence of human fantasy.
Comes to the edge.
Vast plate-glass window.
In front of him a tower still in construction.
Gleaming skeleton of a building going up, from which came the busy beat of hammers.
Beams hung from the cranes.
Dizzy drop into empty air.
Below the city laid out like a puzzle.
Wilderness of bricks and mortar.
Streets like the floors of valleys or dry river beds.
Rough and rudimentary like an artist’s initial pencil sketches.
Something stirs in his heart.
A greatness and a vastness.
The way a bird must feel, free and loose.
One fine morning you find that the sky is light blue and there is nothing to weigh you down.
13
Own journeying began to take upon itself the shape of a tale.
Like a vagabond from place to place.
South, then east, then north.
Through the vastness.
The streets according to the pull and the feeling.
Labyrinth of dark narrow courts.
Little step-down taverns panelled with rum-soaked timbers.
Can I help you?
Just waiting for someone, I said to the bartender.
Ferreting around in every weird underworld he could find.
Winding alleys.
Dead ends.
Residence of none but low ruffians.
What you doin’ sneakin’ at the door?
Who are you looking for?
Guy who’s spent five years in jail.
Diminutive in stature.
Unsociable and solitary like the true leopard.
Mother being a washerwoman.
In the evening, when I was at home, I wrote it all down in a notebook.
Till two or three o’clock in the morning.
Piled desk.
Head outlined by a halo of light.
Climbing the gulley between the mountains of books.
Take down another and again turn the pages.
Make a note in pencil in the margin.
Look long and earnestly at the curious figures.
Secret messages in literature.
Writing in a small notebook.
No doubt that those jottings contained a description.
Each one in its proper place in the puzzle.
Could only find the right path.
Two, three weeks go by.
Damp streets after the rain.
Feet slithered on the sidewalks.
Neighbourhood at the edge.
Came to a hall in ruins.
A place where hobos had drawn up crates to sit over fires.
Pipes black with soot.
Stout old gentleman, rather lame in one leg.
Features cracked and crazed.
Sit on this blanket. Have a smoke.
Lifted a wrinkled paw.
Gestured toward the fire.
Lost peoples that were never talked about in the newspapers.
Unable to separate their own identities from the cities where they had spent their lives.
Condemned to wander forever in an inner desert.
Gaze had become steady.
Pose of a buddha.
Not all those who wander are lost.
Ways of living in that vast city.
Outside the normal world of time and place.
Beyond a line of his own making.
Obey his own law.
Glimpse one’s own true nature.
See the world the wolf saw.
This is the heart of the matter, everything else is only a shadow.
Esto es la verdad.
14
Not what you look at but what you see.
Go over things again.
More to the root of things.
Library’s basements where the incunabula were kept.
Old newspapers.
Something he had missed.
Number to contact with information about the boy.
People who knew him or were acquainted with him.
Dialled the operator and when she came on the line I asked her for long distance.
Voice at the other end of the telephone line sounded like wind.
Cool hardness of a cop.
Don’t think anything.
Investigation has been called off.
Which the crime had been committed?
Wasn’t used to this part of the world.
Not thought of such cold weather and was surprised to see it come.
Meteorology is not superfluous to the story.
Geographical features.
Where he was found is desolate even on a good day.
Grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya.
Accidents in life and he met with a bad one.
Theories to the contrary are the merest moonshine.
Voice grew icicles.
Like I told you case is closed.
Didn’t find his clothes because we didn’t look for them.
Don’t get the idea all police are stupid. Some could take the shoes off the likes of you and you’d be walking barefoot.
Why anyone goes to the hills.
Escape from the commonplaces of existence.
Stayed with someone he met inside, perhaps.
Scoundrels of the north.
Village borders where the lepers and the lunatics, the horse thieves and the prostitutes live.
Our little country crimes.
Logged a few calls if I remember rightly.
File stored among countless others at the prefecture of police.
Send you the transcripts if I can dig them up.
No pleasure out of a corpse.
Just don’t say where you got them from.
Hush, hush, confidential.
Keep your nose clean and everything will be jake.
15
Policeman’s words lay inside me.
Detective instinct to tie everything that happens into one compact knot.
What’s in the books.
Point very straight to one thing.
But if you shift your own point of view a little.
Story of something more — exactly what I couldn’t tell.
Depends on the glass we see through.
Events narrated in the last chapter were yet but two days old.
Letter, umfundisi.
Creased manila envelope.
Opened it slowly and carefully.
20 ruled pages (9” x 12” approx) roughly torn along left-hand margin.
Collected extant data.
Name, an address, a neighbourhood, a background.
Yes I knew this young man.
Know him from the photograph.
Remember the first time I saw him.
Standing by a lamp post.
Walking up a cobbled street.
One night in the alleys of the old town.
The second-hand bookstore district.
Village churchyard sitting on a mossy gravestone.
Narrow little creek the blades of sunlight falling through the foliage.
Stumbling down into the rainy dark.
The lone clay trail.
North across the flat bleak landscape.
Westward into the jungle.
The Arab trading routes to the interior.
Boy with sleepy eyes.
Eyes were endlessly searching.
Like a dog.
A strange lank bird.
Old cap that was brown one time.
Bunch of grass in his hand.
Said he had a beautiful singing voice which spellbound all the senoritas.
Said he kept notches on his gun.
Said all sorts of things.
Way he walked on the outsides of his feet.
Love for his mother.
How the kid escaped.
Warn’t ever murdered at all.
Became a jockey in Colombia.
Was with the Guatemalan guerrilla fighters.
A mythic figure.
A rumour in the city.
See only in the middle distance, in the hazes of heat, moving on his little green chariot, or wandering on foot.
Small toiling figure, head down and determined.
Ring a ding dillo.
Thousands of truths in the world.
Million decisions.
Who will live or die, who will fall in love or be unfaithful, who will make a fortune or make a fool of himself.
Felix Culpa Page 3
