“Pay now, travel later.”
Rock of lamentation.
“I was more bored than an oyster. I don’t know what you’re going to tell.”
“Yes, Medea.”
Watched sea, guarded sea.
“Who told you?”
“Jason.”
Sea of pitch.
“You found our traveling world.”
“And opened its little drawers.”
Port of nocturnal daggers.
“You know everything.”
“Almost everything. As far as to where you wrote.”
Sea of bloody vines.
“We were on the ship almost three weeks, caifán. An eternity. We had to amuse ourselves somehow.”
“Yes, that’s the simplest answer. Why make life complicated?”
Sea of conquest.
“I don’t know if we foresaw everything or if it was that every time we wrote a scene that made us roll with laughter, and threw the page into the trunk, into the drawers of that world we traveled with, we condemned ourselves to live it out in real life sooner or later…”
“But there, then, there were only two characters. You and Javier. Remember?”
Sea of the rudder and sword of fortune.
“Yes, only two.”
“Everything could be written, Allah willing, everything could be foreseen, and then the actors failed. They couldn’t handle their roles.”
Tomb of star watchers.
“The plan was so perfect. Only he, only I. Living what we had written in the steam of the ship.”
“It wasn’t perfect at all. No one can play all the roles in a movie, not even Erich von Stroheim. You have to have supporting actors.”
“Promise me that you’ll never mention any of this again.”
Sea.
“Never again, Dragoness. I burned the pages. I had one hell of a time finding that trunk, let me tell you. I smelled my way through all of Mexico City. Finally one day I came across a place on Tacuba where an old Jew collected things people had given him or thrown away. So many Jews came to Mexico City during the war. And afterward, so many Germans. They never talk about these things, they’ve forgotten them, old trunks, suitcases, boxes tied with string, fetuses in alcohol, naked dolls, cellos, petticoats and hats, old picture albums, Nazi flags and armbands, old movie film, broken records, books without covers. Junk enough to write ten books about.”
“It’s funny. We would have liked to live our own novel, just the two of us, together.”
United only by your hands. You fell on your knees before him in order to give it its name. He standing before you, you kneeling before him, you embraced his legs harder and harder and moved your hands up to his waist as he reached down and held you by the hands only, you always lower, seeking the floor, he always higher. You rose, you sought him standing, joined together and sustained by your hands, then pushed backward without need for kisses or caresses, united and sustained, you over him and he beneath you, he pulling you upon him and you penetrating, imitating him, doing what he did, believing that you were possessing him in the way he possessed you, lying upon his thighs as he entered your thighs, saying to him: take my skin, Javier, take my breasts, learn to fulfill all your desires, sleep upon my breasts and don’t wake until the day is as warm as we are and Elena knocks at the door …
* * *
Δ The motor started and the car moved off with a growl of gears and Javier observed that as a boy he had often gone to the States by train with his father, who had been a businessman. But only to the border, to the other side of the Rio Grande, to Laredo. And he had used to return to Mexico with a feeling he could not define, shame, perhaps, or sadness. That was why a year ago he had traveled all the way to New York by train. He had wanted to remove the contrast with Mexico, to see the States not in relation to another country but isolated, a single canvas.
“There you go again,” Elizabeth groaned.
Only two or three clear impressions remained from that trip. The junkyards of old cars: the masses of twisted steel, the sooty air, the absolute rustiness of everything.
“You could also see them like modern sculptures,” you interrupted him, Elizabeth. “Like unforeseen, unexpected sculptures…”
No, said Javier. If Mexico is nature in ruin, the United States is machines in ruin. “In Mexico everything is a ruin because everything is promised and no promise is kept. In the United States all promises have been kept. Yet it is a ruin just the same.”
“What else do you remember?” asked Isabel.
“Negroes seated on their porches watching cars go by on the superhighways, just as if they were looking at cemeteries or the mountainous junk heaps. And then I saw some men standing behind a warehouse fence staring at the train as it passed, and I asked myself, ‘Who are they? Who can they be?’ I believe that’s all.”
“Because that was all you wanted to see,” you smiled. “As for me, I get a kick out of places like Terre Haute or Indianapolis. I like to read the big signs over the factories. ‘This is the home of Goodyear Tires.’ ‘Here Shredded Wheat is manufactured.’ Those are the monuments of this century, just as Gothic cathedrals were monuments of another century. Or am I wrong?”
No one replied and you turned on the radio and it sang: Help, I need somebody…”
“Some time I’d like to go back to Europe,” Franz said.
“How long have you been away?” said Javier.
“Since the end of the war.”
“Then why don’t you go back?”
“They won’t give me a visa.”
“Who won’t?” asked Isabel.
“The Czechs. When I say Europe I mean Prague. That’s my home.”
“Did you choose freedom?” Javier asked dryly.
Franz laughed. Isabel hummed to the music of the Beatles: Not just anybody …
“There you have an interesting thesis, Ligeia, if you want one,” Javier said after a moment. “Today the tone comes from England. Fashions, the times, everything. The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. Petula Clark. Agent 007.”
“Well, someone has to take revenge for the Thirteen Colonies.” You yawned.
Isabel fell asleep with her head on Javier’s shoulder. Franz tried to see her in the rearview mirror.
* * *
Δ You stretched out like a lizard on Franz’s body, supporting your face on the open palms of your hand, and looked at his face.
“Tell me a new story, Franz, a true one. One about youth and young love. What you used to like to do, how you were, where you went. Anything, everything, so long as it’s true. What did you study?”
“You know already, Lisbeth.”
“That doesn’t matter, tell me again. Where did you live? Who did you love? What was Prague like?”
Franz laughed and squeezed your shoulder and pulled you down on his chest again. He rubbed your head and said quietly, “I think sometimes that cities don’t exist. If you love a city as I loved Prague, you can come to believe that it is your own creation and that when you leave it, it disappears. It stops.”
“Why?”
“It’s another way of saying that cities are kept alive by love. No, not quite that. I don’t know … Well, if a city were a human body, and we could open it with a scapel…”
“Hold it. That scares me a little,” you laughed.
“A city is a place where people are together. That’s all. Think about what it conceals and what it allows to live. The rubbish, the sewers, the garbage cans. The places where the things we eat come and go. The things we drink and love. The cemeteries.”
You curled up. “No,” you said. “I don’t see it like that.”
“How then?”
You shook your head. “I can’t explain it very clearly. But it seems to me that cities have an unconscious too, just as we do, an unconscious that is joined to ours. I believe that we try to defend ourselves against that unconscious. The songs, the neon lights, the advertisements in windows, the touch of the people we pass in the street or stand next to in the subway. Do you see what I mean? I am what I am because I lived in New York and carry inside me a song that says any time at all and an ad that says don’t be this way when you can be that way. Contacts I neither wanted nor consciously accepted with someone’s sweaty skin, someone’s jacket or blouse. All that.”