He gets up. He turns out his completely empty pants pockets. And he starts to walk with his feet pointed out, as in some silent movie comedy bit. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel faced by this figure. He keeps going with that pathetic walk, making people turn to look. He keeps going, his obdurate parsimony has no logic, his antics are more extreme than of any other English person. He keeps going, like a clown, a drunk, a madman. As if the pockets of his seemingly impeccable suit have holes in them. I start going after him. I keep a bit of distance so no one suspects any connection between us. We walk along the bank of the Thames and the wind is freezing. I see a heap at the foot of a bench. I don’t know why the thing catches my eye so strongly that it pulls me over to see what it is. A piece of cloth. I open it. I feel it in my hands—a cloth full of patches and stitchings, studded with buttons here and there. A quilt—no, a cloak. Yes, there is a gold button to close it at the base of the neck. Did someone throw a theatrical costume in the trash? I wrapped myself in the cloak. It smelled like a chest of drawers…just that. I put my hands to my chest; I looked at the river and I pretended that it was actually just a branch of a small creek. I remembered the little Englishman behind me, and suddenly he was stumbling toward the new pedestrian bridge over the Thames. It was suspended by white bars. There are two, by the way: the Golden Jubilee Bridges. I quicken my step. He doesn’t look back once. He’s no longer imitating the silent movie walk. I am literally shuffling, but I need to keep moving. I draw near. I take off the cloak and put it around his shoulders. I button it. The golden button was clearly made by a first-rate craftsman. I tell him: Go, you are the king, the sovereign, the bishop. He climbs up onto the first of the bridges, scales it and goes. The day is gone in the blink of an eye. It’s night again. There’s nobody close by. I applaud, shout loudly, and salute him. But then I stop…a sign that I can’t go beyond this rite of passage. I don’t know if he’s still listening to me, but he stops in the middle of the bridge, as if he’s just remembered something. Remembered what? He climbs onto the bridge’s white iron structure then throws himself over. I will never forget the noise he made upon impact. It was not a noise meant for the world to hear. It was profound, cavernous; and as quickly as it came, it went. I was struck by the speed with which the day had passed by, this day in which we both inhabited the very same space, between that bench on the stone platform and this bridge. When someone kills themselves in public, even if it’s dawn and there’s no one around, the curious always seem to appear, as if out of nowhere. More and more people gathered. That’s what happened. I stayed close. Those who had been taking in the scene from afar came snooping; they were the first witnesses: and they saw that yes, it had been a suicide. So I stayed close by; I had nothing to fear. A helicopter followed, firefighters. Ropes were unfurled from above. It was already day again. And now his body emerged from the water, tied with a rope, without the king’s cloak. No shirt or jacket. Just his pants. His back was very white. It had the tone of wax as it hovered above the Thames. The right hand was injured. One foot was bare. The foot appeared to be the most alive area of his body: the bluish veins still seemed to want to keep going for some decisive moment when they would spread and reach farther than that little body and finally blend with the sky. I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. I just kept thinking: and now, what will I do now? And he didn’t even pay me what he owed me. The first thing that came to mind was once again the thought of escaping into the English countryside, not drawing attention to myself, and continuing to avoid mirrors. If they come to speak with me, I’ll answer, but I’ll only say what is necessary for my survival—I know…I’m not great at conversing, since all I know is how to write books, you know? I looked at my hands as the police covered the body. They were also pale, from playing the piano too much in my childhood and adolescence. I was lucky, I never left the scene of the death, but no police officer had come to talk to me as a potential witness. Me? Witness to what? I witnessed the cloak he preferred to leave behind: the cloth that was now rising to the water’s surface, which no one would ever connect to the suicide. Were they related? I didn’t even know, so large had been the laconic combustion of the last hours. I smiled widely at the river’s gray waters: I was a survivor in bloom. As the police van drove past with its deafening siren, clearing the way, I looked at the golden friezes on the towers of Parliament and felt like I was some responsible underling. Another glance at the river, which was carrying the cloak away at such a speed that it was almost out of my sight now. Soon it would be evening again and so on and so on, and maybe I had no choice in my destiny; I didn’t need details about where in England I needed to go, and what to do there… Perhaps, I might simply let myself be carried away, and thus manage to live for many years with some relative semblance of health…nothing too grim, maybe even interesting at times. So let me keep standing here on the edge of the Thames—or no, not that at all, for I was in danger of following the path of the Englishman who had invited me to London; there were plenty of reasons for this guy here to follow in the steps of his old boss. So I left the wall by the river. I farted. I needed to shit, take a good piss. Direction? The National Gallery, since they have good bathrooms there, you can dry your hands well with hot air. And as a bonus I could take a good look at Cézanne’s bathers, I could get cozy in the museum’s warmth, watching the Dutch, Caribbean, and Japanese paintings pass before my eyes. Time almost seems to be saying: Stay a while, don’t go yet. That’s what I was thinking as I sat on a toilet in the basement of the National Gallery. I pulled up my pants, which hadn’t been washed for more than a month, and asked myself: Should I go stand in front of the bathers? Or Van Gogh’s sunflowers? As I dried my hands under the hot air, I noticed a guy looking at me in a way that was more suggestive than one might expect from a decent gentleman. I looked at him, too. I winked. And I could have kept flirting with him, but another more urgent matter occurred to me. I was beginning to think that the guy who had stayed in bed at Bloomsbury Hospital had finally returned, that he had been reborn back inside me. But no, I didn’t want to look at myself in the mirror—this was not something to be played around with. The bathroom was empty again. People stare, smile, flirt, but when push comes to shove, they don’t want to kiss, they don’t want to fool around. Climbing up the stairs to the ground level, the guy turned around, looking at me as if he wanted to do stuff. Then I was the one who didn’t want to; I was so tired from the very recent death in the family, which had happened in such a devastating manner. I shook my head, and the man certainly thought my nod was an act of condescension to his willing gaze; and he laughed until I heard the tone of his laughter. But I didn’t want any of that. I wanted to sit in front of the bathers—I hoped the bench was still vacant so it would be all mine—and wait for the museum to close so the painting would also rest, get some sleep. I woke up with a museum guard whispering to me, Sir, sir; Yes, I replied, straightening my crumpled coat. The arm I had been using as a pillow to support my body was completely numb. The guard wouldn’t take his eyes off me. Detail: I was not sitting in front of Cezanne’s bathers or Van Gogh’s sunflowers; random luck had brought me to choose a vase of flowers by Gauguin as my painting to contemplate. Indeed, Gauguin’s vase was the most beautiful painting of the three. The guard kept staring at me. The museum was closing…before descending the stairs outside the museum, I still had time to see Trafalgar Square framed by the museum’s columns. I moved between different pairs of columns; I leaned on the railing, and admired new framings of the square in the darkening afternoon. Once again, I had needed time to decide. I went down the stairs thinking that I wouldn’t go back to my dungeon in Hackney. I was a prisoner of nothing but time, and time urged me on, as always. I had to kill it, time. I had to kill it by walking around until I decided what train to take, what English town to go to, or even if I should rest in a little hotel still in London, but as far away from Hackney as possible. Doves, doves were closing in on me. Suddenly they descended and I needed to protect myself as if
facing a catastrophe. Everything is a matter for consideration when deep down what you’re trying to do is to postpone some thorny decision. Here are doves, there is a beautiful woman trying to guess my nationality, farther ahead a tourist surrounded by suitcases, involved in the process of boarding his special bus. A police siren. The city’s hasty drizzle. All deserve extreme attention when you’re treading water. I put my hands in my pockets. I see I still have cash for a coffee or two, maybe a little something more. Who knows if the Englishman had a few pounds in the jacket he discarded in the confusion of his death, gifting the money to the Thames. That asshole only showed me his pants pockets. I went into a porn store. About seven, eight men in a tight room surrounded by videos with covers such as one white cock entering a cunt while a black cock is already in the ass. I looked at the clock as if I had to be somewhere and left. At Charing Cross, an old man looked at me intently. Why not sleep in one of these cheap hotels with this old man and spend a night lying in bed thinking for a few more hours? He’ll pay, of course—I’ll be very clear from the start. This many pounds. You want to? That way I could, perhaps, buy a train ticket. I stopped in front of a store, pretending to admire some postcards of London. The old man stopped at the edge of the sidewalk. He turned slowly, looking at me. Was he English? No, he was an Indian man, and had some money in his pocket. Dark skin. Hair still black. Small body. Good health. Maybe I could even save some money. Spend a month fucking the old man, serving the old man. Then I’d figure out where to go, what to do regarding my painful situation. I grabbed a postcard of Piccadilly Circus, or whatever, and my anxiety was such that I tore it—up and down, right to left. I shredded it all to pieces. The Turkish owner of the gift store said he was going to call the police. I said he didn’t need to, and gave him my coins. Then I started walking in the opposite direction of the old Indian man. However, he stayed on my mind, but as something that didn’t translate exactly into sex anymore, but just as a meager piece of flesh that could at least support me: from a tiny olive pit on the sidewalk seemed to emanate the true compassion I had lost somewhere, I don’t even know where anymore. I was a man without compassion and he, this small old man, would teach me how to have it again. My daily, carnal contact with him—I repeat, with a man who was as tiny as a flower—would temporarily restore my physicality, like bankrupt tenants still occupying their home. But the old man, oh: he could even pay me for my already worn-out body. What he was doing on the curb was calling me to join the occult practices of old age, when two people can, at last, pay the long-overdue debts of their bodies and soul. Someone next to me asked me the time and I jumped, scared; I thought it was the old man and that I’d have to actually go with him. I looked back, imagining he was following me. But I had lost the old man in the crowd. So I had to keep on going alone—which was already my addiction; I was like someone who doesn’t realize he has an addiction because it has become his natural state. To have someone next to me all the time, someone to talk to, to express opinions to, to discuss the landscape with, notice the events around us, and the distant ones too, to sacrifice emotionally in order to save the relationship, all of this represented a sacrifice, not of myself, but of the perspective that had taken me over completely, and maybe I won’t get even more lost. What perspective could be so zealous, so self-absorbed? That’s when I stopped at the corner, took off my cap, and summoned the devil. I called the evil thing two, three times, to come rescue me. Then I stepped back and leaned against the building. I held the cap upside down in the air, as if to ask for a few cents from the passing crowds of young people. If someone looked at me, I’d disguise myself and shake my cap. No one was watching me. I’d get into position to beg again, beg for help. In the blink of an eye I could be anyone. It was bewildering to me; it made me go into a sort of trance of heat and night sweats, I fell into vertigo, a cloud took me away. I managed to keep holding on to people’s woolen sleeves; I sat down on a step. They asked me how I felt—voices, many voices. I begged for forgiveness; unfortunately, only for forgiveness. Suddenly, I had become a saint, feeling that my body looked like a blasphemy in Charing Cross, disturbing the rushing pedestrians by its mere presence. I looked at the variety of faces trying to help, and the deepest regret descended upon me. What have I done? I was the one asking. And they all responded, almost in unison, nothing, nothing, you’re good. The more I tried to console myself, lying on that corner, the more the city opened up my abscess. I asked myself, silently, if I’d be able to survive the night. Would London know how to finish me…? Or not…? And I decided to keep going. I got up, unrolled the sleeves of my shirt, quickly put on my jacket, and walked away, asking not to be bothered anymore… I’d had enough. I looked through the glazed windows, at what was inside the cafes. I looked…I looked so much that I wished I could blind myself for a few hours, lie in bed, under the blankets, without worrying if sleep or whatever would come; it was like a desire to masturbate, anything that would distract me for at least a second from my solitary obsession to see, okay, to see the distance I still had to go, willingly or not. I swore I would leave that bed knowing, step by step, what I had to do on this holy day. At least on that holy day I would not be walking as I was now through Charing Cross, thinking about the restorative power of a bed and a blanket and the blessed blindness available between these two elements. Hold me! I want to ask a stranger passing by. Hold me! Because I’m going to fall and never rise again. Hold me! Ma’am, hold me, you brat, because this man you see here is going to levitate, hover, fly over the city until he lands at a train station that will take him away. That will take me…where? Where will they welcome me as the prince that I deserve to be? I went into one of those large London bookstores, which are everywhere, and I searched for translations of my books. I found them. What do they mean, if I don’t even know where to go now, where to sleep, what money I would use to eat and survive? In those intervals I didn’t give a damn about writing a single line, what work was I doing? Incidentally, from now on, what work will I do, since my indifference to the written word becomes clearer each day? Sweep…to sweep cafes was the answer. To fight with specks of dust that don’t want to leave their corners. To find my way with a broom until the dust finally comes off the floor and I get a little relief from having to curse at things. To fight earnestly with the dust, and to have a bed to sleep in, in some rented room. A newspaper whose content lasts a week. To set aside change for next week’s paper. I was in the bookstore, holding two copies of my own books, and wondering if the solution really was to leave London. Dust, bed, newspaper—none of that was lacking here. Whom to ask? If I spent a sleepless night walking through the city, I would have the answer by the next morning; it would come as if it had slipped from my own mouth…
So that’s what I did. I changed direction. I turned back toward Trafalgar Square. But I’d be lying if I said I walked back through those places I had just passed. I was as alone as a man wandering in a sprawling forest, comprised of nothing but trees and the sounds of nocturnal animals. Sometimes I would squat and pick up chunks of dried leaves from the damp soil. They were so mulched into the ground that they affixed themselves to me with the glue of earth, without any effort, to my face and neck. I was camouflaged, so they wouldn’t recognize me, they, the ones who had given orders to the little Englishman who had just jumped off the bridge, discoloring himself even more—forever in the waters of the Thames. I had witnessed his floating body hanging from ropes, swinging over the city, and his skin had had a quick and devilish necrosis—it was covered with a whiteness unrelated to any mortal’s pigmentation. White like a blessed cloud or a virgin’s sheet. He could have been my saint that night with all that whiteness of his. I covered my skin with more and more leaves in that place that should still be Charing Cross or at least close by. I walked a little more. I saw a sudden flash. I stopped. Ah, a girl was taking pictures of an actor dressed in vintage clothes, sitting in the backstage doorway of a large London theater. It might have been between scenes and he was resting. I shook th
e leaves off and approached him. Please, I said, just a minute: I’m a journalist and I want to do a quick interview with you. I don’t have more than a five-minute break, he said. He believed me; he was paying attention. I don’t need more time than that. What’s your role? An eighteenth-century man who hopes to be reincarnated as his sister. He, this man I play, confesses his eagerness, but is taunted in the tavern. One day he steals his sister’s clothes and goes into the ladies’ room while wearing them. He joins a convent. The nuns all run away. He cuts off his sexual organs with a dagger and offers them to the goddess Maria. Goddess…that’s how the piece treats her. It’s by an author from Madrid. I tell him right away that none of that interests me. The girl continues with the photographs because the guy is handsome. The fact that I had said I was a journalist and what he had told me didn’t interest me, didn’t seem to disillusion him or even upset him. He rehearses a smile in a final pose for the girl. Tell me something, I ask him. I’m just thinking…what do you think of me going to live in Liverpool? It’s my hometown, I came from there, he responds a little enthusiastically. If you go, don’t hesitate to reach out to my mother. I’ll go back one day too, you’ll see. Yes, I’ll see, I answer. I burst out laughing as he goes back into the theater through the dark backstage. I try to look inside, but someone comes and closes the door. The girl with the camera laughs a lot too, joining me. People circle around us—the joyful couple in the streets of London. At the end of it I grieve ferociously, speaking through the door that is closed in my face: What about your mother’s address in Liverpool? How about the addresses of all the mothers in this country? Then I began to prowl, sometimes desperately, in search of a salvation from someone affectionate and kind, which had taken on the figure of the actor from Liverpool in that moment and who burned his own genitals as an offering to, according to the playwright from Madrid, that goddess above all other goddesses, Maria. I grew taciturn as if I deeply pondered the disgrace in where I might go, to some corner somewhere, to be lost to starvation or whatever… But I’ll never stop; if London wanted to expel me, then now was the time for that ritual—I would only stop to learn what station the train to Liverpool arrived at, and in fact, I stopped to ask a young Englishman. He had a face of someone from the countryside who finds themselves now in a post-punk stage, something like that, and the boy knew, as I had imagined, where to catch the train to Liverpool, having just come from there. I swear, he grew enthusiastic as he talked about the city, another sign that it was where I should go—and so I would! The train left from Euston Station. I needed to go through the Bloomsbury neighborhood, past Russell Square, and keep going on, always. No way to go wrong. I got it, kissed the English boy’s hand, thanked him, and went. Even if I had to cross desert and mountains I would get there; I would get to Euston Station, take a train, and in three hours, as the English boy had told me, I’d arrive—with my hands not in my pockets, letting them feel the pain of the icy wind that comes from the city’s piers, and waiting for the best to come my way. On a corner in Bloomsbury, a totally unexpected need to vomit hit me. I wiped myself with a sheet of newspaper that was fluttering by. But I couldn’t stop; I realized it was London I was throwing up, London with its ghosts and impossible missions, already entirely unsuccessful. Now, alternatively, I was not going to try anything in Liverpool, the conditions would draw me in by their own genius, nothing else. I stopped again for a little bit to see if any more spew would come from my mouth; I felt the onset of nausea… Hands to my chest, numb. But nothing came out, so I continued like lightning to Euston Station.
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