They ended up in front of me in the line for international departures. They were bound for Portland, a city the ticket agent had never heard of. The couple seemed surprised, they regarded Portland as a western capital. All three laughed at this, loudly and frankly; all three stopped laughing in the same breath and stiffened. The ticket agent directed a shy, defeated glance my way. I dipped my head in salute, leaning on the silver poles connected by moire nylon ribbons, sky blue. The couple hauled their matching strawberry-covered luggage toward the gate entrances, and the red, achene-pricked forms continued to burn among the carbuncles, stars, and assholes.
In the back pocket of Klemperer’s pants was his wallet. I planned to use his credit card — issued by the University’s own bank and the same sky blue as the departmental uniform — but had no idea of its limit, or if the authorities were aware of his death and had alerted banks and other commercial bodies to watch out for transactions made in his name. If this plan failed… yet it didn’t matter. The ticket agent was nodding me forward. I swallowed another copious mouthful of my own blood and obeyed. But the swallowing, this time, made me cough. The red streak my cough painted across the agent’s round, whitening face resembled, I thought, my friend’s letter L in minuscule.
But my head was now bouncing mildly against the cool floor tiles. I coughed up another vivid chevron of blood. Shoes and ankles darted and dodged across my visual field, among the reddish occurrences. Primate voices cried out above me. I could no longer distinguish the words. The beating of my heart, sevenfold, seventyfold. Questions arose. Was this death, “Pasternak” wanted to know. Pasternak murmured and whimpered. And I myself? Well, I had nothing to say.
16.
GRASS-BLADES PENETRATED SO DEEPLY into my nostrils that I leapt up in terror. They carried the scents of: dust, dandelion pollen, loam, and human corpses. Also marble, the rubber soles of shoes, rainwater.
I leapt up and fell back on my side at once, simply because the movement I attempted — to “leap to my feet” — failed. True, my legs locked and prepared to support my thorax and head, but my back would not straighten. The sunset blinded me, so I tumbled back to the grass. I tried to cry out. A desert dryness consumed and degraded the sound.
I tried again to spread my palms on the grass and force myself at least to my knees, and this worked, though I was not on my knees; I was “standing,” a bodily voice whispered. My head and chest pointed forward and my abdomen pointed earthward, my genitals (to my amazement naked) swaying ponderously in the warm breeze. The need to urinate stung my bladder (my soul) and my right leg rose, without effort, from the grassy earth. The urine streamed and sputtered, I heard it, but I could not see it, and my burgherly training seized hold, crept over and crawled over, shouting that I must stop pissing, at once, at once, but I could not stop, I trotted in a tight circle attempting to see my own urination, and my right leg, it is true, participated, but I could not see it, I could not see it, and it ended before I asserted myself over the secret strength of my bladder (again: my soul).
Pistarini: gone. As if consumed by mighty, motionless fire. And the endless white tiles, these were gone as well. No thicket of pampas grasses enclosed the lawn I was trotting in mindless circles around. Klemperer and Luxemburg? The invisible fire had taken them, too. Their absence prompted me to fill my lungs and shout. This time, a cry did emerge, a single, curt, meaningless, fluid monosyllable. To my east, my west, my north, and my south, monuments. Gray marble, white marble, concrete. Cruciform. Some stood at the heads of brick borders demarcating oblong plots, some stood in naked grass, and some on raw earth. Among them larger constructions, spires and plinths, and even (occupying double or triple the land) white and gray stone mausolea. The setting sun visible over the brown wall, not far but not near, like the mouth of a furnace. Or even an eye, Pasternak, don’t forget you can always compare the sun to an eye. In the nothing that flowed between the monuments, the nothing the monuments combed, comb of the so-called hecatomb, dozens of dogs were waking up. They followed the same protocol. They stood, they pissed or even shat, they circled their own axis, and they began to trot southwest, toward Warnes, I realized. Where the gap in the cemetery wall was. These dogs ignored me, as they had during my long excursion among them on my first night in the southern capital. As they passed, their muzzles stayed on the same level as my own face, and their blank, mildly phosphorescent gazes met mine. As the first dog approached me, an obese rottweiler with foamy ropes of saliva dangling from her jowls, I panicked, yes, Pasternak panicked and tried again to rise up, to assume the primate stance of supremacy. I fell once more onto my flank, and the rottweiler let her glance slide over me as I struggled in the damp grass.
I knew where I was. La Chacarita. More dogs rushed between the gravestones, more dogs slipped past me. I lay there, and I attempted to cry. I felt no sadness, I felt nothing at all. But one “ought” to cry over such abrupt transformations. Yes, yes, because of my intelligence (and please recall its true definition) I knew what had happened. The sole possible outcome. A great loss, an irreplaceable loss, all cultural authorities tell us. We humans stand atop the world, the world exists only as our extension, in fact as our extended extensiveness. And now, this loss. So I tried to cry, I failed. Weeping is forbidden to dogs.
The others, my new colleagues, well, they didn’t care that I was just lying around doing nothing. They trotted on past me over the tall, rich grass. The worst was that Fulvio had been correct. He refuted me from the beginning, and pedants suffer refutation as pure torment. Still no weeping, not even a dry, forced sob. I was panting, drooling; my nose snuffled up the mingled and maximal scents the graveyard earth supplied. My colleagues had no difficulty walking. I could not be the only new one, I could not be the only man who had died in Buenos Aires the previous day. So get the fuck up, Pasternak, I thought, get the fuck up.
I got “up.” I walked. On four legs, on my “arms” and my legs, my fore- and hind legs. My “hands” and my “feet” spread at each step against the cooling grass. It took no real effort, my limbs knew what to do, and they bore me along among the other dogs, quiet and direct. I could not believe my fate, yet it had descended. That’s the trouble with fate, it descends. The need to shit seized my bowels (my soul) as the need to piss had seized my bladder, and I stopped to squat and defecate, my legs searching out the correct, most sturdy position. The dogs still trooped past me as two, then three hot turds slid from my asshole. What pleasure, to defecate in ease and security, no straining or meditative life allowed, merely to shit and to leave the shit behind you as progress toward the gap in the wall. Through which the sun glares above the toothed roofline. As the glowing, pink sky floated along above me, I recalled my days of higher stature. But so what? Those days had ended, as surely as my transformation had sealed the wound in my side. And I’d never been this at ease among humans — never, not once. Though by definition this anxiety would have remained hidden during my human life. Yes, I felt at ease among my new colleagues, even eager. No querulous doubts, no endless speculations. Speculations lie rooted in envy. Pasternak = dog. Dogs possess no envy. QED. I pushed through the press of my colleagues at the hole and crossed the railroad tracks on Warnes. They didn’t speak and they didn’t interfere. More than I can say for my academic colleagues, more than I could have said for any other human. The dogs were running. Which is to say, Pasternak, that we were running, we, we, we. And no one else. We ran and ran, the cooling pavement touched the rubbery, sensitive pads of our feet, of my feet. Night breezes curled into our ears, along our backs. All around me, beneath raised tails, assholes rubious or black, and the greener, yellower blackness of the city night. Now I smelled meat, now saliva poured down my throat, fell from my bouncing jaws, now I smelled the incomparable smell of clean tap water in a clean bowl.