And at nights. In my filthy hotel. Lonely, Russian, dumb, I dream, dream, dream about you – who perished innocently, still a youth, beautiful, smiling, still alive. With scarlet lips – white-necked, tender. Scratched hands on a rifle strap, speaking Russian – Revolution, my love!
And it's a summer civil war
In a city hot as a dream.
And the head of the uprising, half-Latino, half-Russian Victor, and Rita, a woman with straight hair, and blue-haired, gay Kendall – all of them came to my room in the morning and stood by the door. Victor is threatening me with the muzzle of his gun because I've betrayed the cause of the World Revolution for the sake of the spider-thin arms of the fifteen-year-old daughter of President Alberti, for the sake of Celestina, her pink dresses, her smiles from the sea, her small child s peepee, and her always pinched ear lobes; for the sake of the porcupines in her papa's garden and the snails on the fence.
All this has lead me to this morning: my best comrade in arms and former lover Victor tells me, whispering, terrible words; the hysterical Kendall in a thin jacket doesn't look away; and there is Rita's precipitous face…
And little Celestina cried for a long time, shaking her naked breasts while her father, the honorable President, was entering the capital with a tank division. The loyal western outskirts were shaken up, and our comrades were being shot in the courtyards.
I'm so fucking horny today! Shove my prick in deep, deep into that slit the color of beat-up strawberries and then let you, the whole world, go to hell. But then what an abyss after the orgasm, how it gapes! How metallic, how cold the world is afterwards! It takes no effort then to sentence anyone to death; and if one is sentencing an angel, it will be even more exciting.
Yesterday, around 1 a.m. I ran into a fellow – white suit with a dark, nonchalantly half-undone bow tie. He had just rolled out of a restaurant, quite drunk (swaying), artsy. Seeing me, he came to, turned, and fixed his gaze on my bangs… But I had to pee real bad. I was in a hurry and didn't stop.
Later, having peed in an all-night accessible spot – known to me only – in the hall of a building on 58th street, I regretted it. What a blockhead! I should have gone with him and taken $54 and tomorrow morning I would have bought those white glossy boots on Broadway, I could put them on right in the store.
If it's May and you're sitting in a garden and crying, it's incredibly good. Someone close to you has died, and you're sorry.
An untanned, plump relative in a dark dress arrives, her eyes swollen from tears. And you take her by her white hand, you get closer, you embrace her and say: «Sally, dearest, how awful, what a loss!» You embrace you are overflowing with tears. And as you mourn and make body contact, you feel a terrible desire. It's embarrassing, illicit, and inappropriate.
And she feels it too, especially if she's the spouse of the deceased. And with closed eyes we both plunge headlong into that abyss…
And the casket with the deceased goes spiraling up into the heavens. It speeds away.
I love being an adventurist. It often saves me. Suddenly it rains and I am depressed, and poor, and want to cry. And then I think, «Hey, you're an adventurist. There are all sorts of things that happen. Don't give up, boy, you've chosen that road yourself, you didn't want a normal life, now you have to stick with what you have.»
That's when I re-adjust myself and start calling this one and that one, pretending that I'm a lamb, lying through my teeth and then, voila, in a couple of hours I'm strutting around in high society talking to famous people, grabbing beautiful women by the hand, talking rubbish in a penetrating voice. One word leads to another-the next thing, you greet the morning in a luxurious bed, the first rays tickle your face through the curtains, and they bring you coffee in bed. «I want vodka,» you say. It's unbelievable but they bring vodka too. You make a face but you drink it nevertheless – you did ask for it.
I love being an adventurist.
I'm a bitch. And it's sad that I'm a bitch and that I don't love anyone anymore. And it's no excuse either that I used to love. I keep smoking and thinking stubbornly, «Bitch, bitch, that's just it, you're a bitch.» And I look sadly out the window at the clouds a la Italia under the skyscrapers. They're called cumulus, I think.
A luxurious summer morning over the East River. It's me, sitting on a bench in the millionaire's garden. A young Italian, an itinerant laborer, envies me. He looks through the fence at the inaccessible garden. «There,» he thinks «this rich guy is sitting and drinking coffee. Why did this scum,» thinks the laborer, «get up so early, at eight in the morning, to look at the water?»
In fact, I don't have any right to be sitting in the millionaire's garden. I have no right to be drinking this coffee I didn't work for, or put my bare feet on someone's grass while touching, from time to time, the body of a twenty-one-year-old girl sitting next to me. A prodigal writer, a good-for-nothing foreigner, an FBI client, a poet with dangerous ideas. A millionaire's housekeeper's lover.
That water cruise in a small cabin with her will stay with me forever. In the morning I lugged the suitcase across that entire Southern town, the suitcase full of her pretty rags, her beloved fragrant essences. We barely found a car to take us to another town and careened along the mountain roads with a driver in a leather jacket. Wild flowers burst along the sides of the road, and a low sea flashed in our eyes during the turns, and life was like gunfire from a revolver, like random, terrifying gunfire from a revolver.
TV shows that no one remembers even half an hour later. Dumb actresses, familiar and boorish actors. Moronic movies, they're for slaves and for people with the brains of a cat. They respond to the five senses, forty work hours a week, air conditioners, conversations with pregnant women, strikes, commercials…
And the only time there's something dear and close and normal is when they show the rapist of an eleven-year-old girl. It turns out that only this kind of person still values freshness, beauty and authenticity.
Just break the window and jump into the store.
Take anything you want: the suits, these magnificent walking sticks, the compelling soft hats, the varnished boots and the affectionate scarves. Negotiate your way between flowers (your shoulders touching the palm tree leaves), and find a strong light and elegant suitcase and pile everything into it. Finally, don a cynic's dark glasses, cover your locks with a hat, and strut out of the display window. And let that obnoxious siren whine. It's quite possible that you'll have enough time to escape. Just don't fuss.
In the morning, in the Cairo airport, drink Turkish coffee, breathe in its aroma with the fresh cigarette smoke, and stare brazenly at the ladies. And their daughters discreetly wet their underpants from your forty-year-old stare.
Bare my chest and – sweet mother! Lenka! Parents!… «Go ahead, shoot, you bastards, my sweet ones!» On a fierce earth with the soft hips. What a blessed and important business Death is! He extends his hand, «Let's be off, Eddie!» – breathless. And you recall the slanting rain at the corner of Petrovka street and the boulevard. And sweet mother, Lenka, parents, Anna!… at my strange La tin-American land. With bare chest.