Kiki is smiling, she knows those moments, the talking just to keep talking. What this or that person said when no one knew how things would go on at all. She strokes Lua’s head. The rain is now running down the large windows of the SoHo Grand Hotel, Kiki puts her black shoes next to my white ones on the armchair and signals to the waiter for the bill. Stop? I ask, but Kiki says, keep going! Your story is a good story, still no flags or structures or morality, just uncertainty and clarity, it sounds like something out of a book. Lately, I say, I haven’t been sleeping much, lately I’ve been waiting for the appropriate words. Then I finish my drink and pay the whole bill. I hold on to Lua’s leash as we drift along Canal Street in the greasy Chinatown rain, from shop window to shop window, from awning to awning, plucked and smoked chickens on display, electrical appliances and videos, as we lean on garbage cans, as we look into Kiki’s camera and then end up in Kiki’s hotel room, where we take off our wet clothes and hang them on a few hooks. Where we don’t touch each other as Kiki takes pictures of us under the fluorescent lights, the green paint of the walls behind our pale bodies, the light on her sad breasts, on my tired cock. And finally Kiki tells me that this hotel was once the flophouse on the Bowery where Hurstwood suffocated himself out of hopeless love in a gas stove at the end of Sister Carrie. Then she takes Lua’s head in her hands and he closes his eyes. Animals are the hearts of people, I say, Lua is breathing heavily, and I can go to sleep.
August 7, 2005
(Ping-Pong)
Dawn lasts forever (the house drags itself into the day). On the narrow mattress in the corner of Svensson’s study I’m trying to distinguish between sounds and thoughts: the wooden beams, the bedsprings (the ivy is growing). Actually my work could have been done a long time ago, but yesterday toward evening Svensson set plates and glasses and a candle on the kitchen table and between his words and his chewing left no room for questions. He talked about the village on the other side of the rock shelf (Osteno), about the water and about the mountains. He was busy with a knife in the candlelight, I sat at the table and searched for somewhere to start while Tuuli spoke Finnish with the boy. Svensson boiled water for noodles on a gas stove and explained that he’d had no electricity since Friday, a tree had fallen on a power line. There was only water and leftover wine, he wasn’t prepared for guests, not for a personal visit and least of all for journalists (why am I here?). Svensson cooked a tomato and sage sauce, he served an earthenware bowl of radicchio and white beans (his laugh conciliatory). The boy grimaced and dropped his fork on the floor, under the table the dog panted. Svensson, said Tuuli, cutting the noodles into little pieces, no child can twirl spaghetti and no child eats radicchio (not conciliatory). Yes, he knew that. I ate silently and therefore too much, drank some red wine and tasted Elisabeth in it. Tuuli ate and smoked, the boy on her lap fell asleep (half a tomato in his hand dripped on her leg and fell to the floor). As Tuuli finally put the child with his smeared mouth to bed, I remained seated. For a few more minutes I tried to start a conversation with Svensson, but because he was speaking incessantly without talking about himself, I excused myself too (fatigue). Elisabeth’s annoying assignment brought me as far as his kitchen, and I didn’t manage even to ask the routine questions. For the interesting things there was no time (the owner of the suitcase, the boy, Svensson and Tuuli). Later I sat in Svensson’s study and heard Tuuli’s voice in another room singing a Finnish lullaby. I pictured her sitting on the edge of the bed and brushing the boy’s hair from his forehead, I tried to write, but lost my image of her in my words. I fell asleep on Svensson’s mattress and didn’t wake up again until late at night. The cicadas were noisy. I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know where the others were sleeping (I didn’t know who I was).
Lugano — Chiasso — Malpensa
Now it’s Sunday morning, a rooster is crowing, scattered birds and insects. I wait for the dog’s coughing and the boy’s crying. Nothing. I’m still in Svensson’s house, but no one seems to be aware of me. On the Swiss side of the lake I could have woken up in my own hotel bed, a Sunday newspaper on the terrace, the first game day of the Bundesliga soccer season, etc. My return flight to Hamburg leaves today in the late afternoon, I have to go back to Milan (Lugano — Chiasso — Malpensa). Elisabeth would have tried to discuss my leaving with me, but I’ve made myself unreachable. I should notify the hotel, but I remain lying in the half-light of the study and don’t touch anything (journalistic scrupulousness). I’m expecting Svensson’s footsteps, I’m expecting his knock at the door. Apparently the only way to leave this place is with the boat. Svensson is a mysterious man: he wouldn’t live alone at the end of the world and not want other people around him for no reason. Svensson must not like people. I sit back down at his desk and take notes, so as to retain the important things (the slosh of the water against the dock).
Hotel Norge
In a dark, cheap double room in the Hotel Norge near the Christuskirche, I lay on my back and listened to the surge of the early traffic. My 30th birthday, Elisabeth was already 36, a few weeks earlier we’d met again. This evening we’d first eaten solemnly (loup de mer) and then kept drinking so as to stop time, we drifted through the night. When it began to rain toward morning, we were standing outside the hotel’s glass revolving door (time refused and passed more swiftly). We could go to my place, said Elisabeth. We could also stay here, I said (I don’t know what held me back). The hotel room was five hundred meters from her apartment. At the reception desk I showed the night porter my identification, and Elisabeth searched in her purse for her credit card (our names on a bill together for the first time). The porter is even younger than you, Daniel, she whispered, at least two years. We were drunker than we thought. In the elevator she kissed me as if I belonged to her. She wanted to fuck me right now, she said. (Elisabeth has long talked straight. She has her reasons.) But then she disappeared into the bathroom and stayed there for an unusually long time. I was torn about whether I should open the door, whether we knew each other well enough. I turned the hotel television on and off and wondered whether we could love each other. Later Elisabeth’s retching woke me. She was kneeling over the toilet and vomiting. Would I stay with her anyway, she asked between two regurgitations of fish and wine and bile (please, Daniel?).