Just like at Alicia’s party, where we saw each other much later on, I raised my glass — full, immediately empty — to protect myself from the light and to see, through the glass, your face glowing in two distinct ways. Then I had to touch you, to be sure that the radiance emanated from your skin and not from the surface of my eyes. At the professor’s house, unlike at the party, I set the glass down on the table with great care and began reading the poem that you’d handed me by Our Young Poet: stanzas that told, almost without verbs, the story of a beggar who knocks on the door of a mansion where a Decadent party is being thrown; the host, an enormous fat man, was describing the dinner’s obscure dishes to his guests: octopus with purple cabbage and beans, oxtail soup, eggplant in toasted sesame sauce, roasted legs of lamb with caviar and dried mushrooms, beet flan, blackberries, seaweed, and chocolate. For a few seconds, in the enormous fat man’s ostentations, I could see the tricks of the professor, smoking on his sofa, belt unbuckled, legs crossed, eyes half-closed, one inert hand, pointed in my direction. He Who Is Writing the Novel ran his fingertips down my neck, the enormous fat man was getting dressed to specially welcome the intruder who, according to the acrostic formed by those verses—“AWAITING ANOTHER GUEST”—was coming to infiltrate his party, while the whiskey, like the anxiety, was making me sweat, seeing the movements of the host as he stretched a silk sock up over his adipose left leg, bent in front of a burnished old bed, where five naked adolescents were drawing near to lick his spine, mine; the votive candles on the tables had consumed themselves down to their pearl holders when the lovers’ muscles contracted in front of the ash and the wax that a very tall woman, veiled in lace, standing at the foot of the bed, let fall from the cigarette and the white candle that she held in her hands. Then the enormous fat man adjusted his perfumed, blond wig while wrapping each of his fingers, voluptuously, around the knob of the front door. The heavy wood opened slowly and, suddenly, with the cold of the late night, a set of claws clutched the edge of the door, which the enormous fat man attempted to close with mock terror. In that moment, He Who Is Writing the Novel was talking about the poem’s lack of synesthesia, about how it was impossible to feel the stench, the filth. And the professor corrected him, without taking his eyes off me: the purulence, the pages and pages describing those filthy men whom the poem calls beggars; their flirtations with the exclusive guests on mattresses in dozens of bedrooms, the bleeding who cried out for mercy in the hallway, with open arms, smiling. The final stanzas, more concise and lyrical, stayed with just one of the beggars: one who advanced through the flames that at dawn were consuming the mansion, until he came to the door of a room that was still intact: when he entered he could scarcely see anything, every vase, every table, every chair shone brighter than gold. Almost falling down, blind, he was able to comprehend that it was an optical illusion caused by hundreds of mirrors and one candelabrum. He blew out the candles with a single breath and, although the fire had reached that room too, he paused, enraptured in front of a canvas that hung on one walclass="underline" it was the portrait of a large group of filthy men under a bridge. The poem ended with a dialogue between the beggar and the tall woman with the veiled body in the middle of the fire. The beggar managed to take down the canvas and roll it up while telling her that this was the final work of a painter who’d gone mad, who’d disappeared from the art salons after putting the finishing brush-stroke on the canvas that the beggar now held under his arm, revealing to the woman that he was himself this very painter and that he’d come back to reclaim his work: he’d had a vision of his future once, he’d decided to paint it though he remembered little, and yet he couldn’t bear what he saw emerge from his own two hands. The woman let the lace fall from her body and approached: but now you’re with me, inside a mansion in flames; this wasn’t the image of the future that appeared to you. The beggar covered his eyes with one hand, clutched his painting with the other, and ran. Until he tripped.
I looked up from the book, I saw that the hands of He Who Is Writing the Novel were far away from me, clutching the chair. But how can you not understand that this is what’s most important? He shouted, furious, the guy decided to put his resolution in writing! The professor offered him money to keep something a secret and He Who Is Writing the Novel fumed that a time was coming when those who write would be able to defend that something. I don’t remember exactly what they were talking about, because I found myself somewhere else, on my balcony, looking out toward the port of Neutria, seeing myself in the light of a boat, in the night; I was leaving and Alicia was waving goodbye to me from a distance, her hand high in the air, leaning on the railing of the beachside boardwalk. I know that later He Who Is Writing the Novel was singing the praise of Corporalism and its founder, Our Young Poet, while I climbed up on the sofa to remove the painting from the wall and take it. The professor was so scandalized that he demanded we leave his house immediately.
Days later, He Who Is Writing the Novel buzzed the intercom at my apartment and asked for me. I heard Alicia’s laugh, she didn’t want to tell me who it was until he was already standing in my door, moving his hands up and down, nervous. I didn’t want him to come in my room, so I led him out to the balcony so Alicia could observe us calmly from the living room, while we turned our backs to her.
He Who Is Writing the Novel looked haggard. He took out a notebook and pen, sat down in one of the chairs, and told me he was about to fall down from sleepiness, because he could only write at night and in the morning he had to work and to study in the afternoon. He chose one of the chairs facing the sea. I already wrote this: I’m exhausted too, the words are leaving me behind, I can’t stop myself and the place where I come from, the place of the first lines of my letter — the simple story of my love for you in Neutria — is behind me; so I turn around — because it isn’t just movement that exists here, but the obligation to write “so I turn around”—and I delay in picking up the pen and again the words are behind me, like trying to touch something at the center of my own spine, unattainable yet mine alone. Alicia lost patience when I began to digress: better to get yourself two mirrors, put one behind you and one in front, open your eyes, my God. I got angry too: so why was she there, then. More than once, I’d held a hand mirror in front of me, turning my back on the big mirror in my grandmother’s bathroom, without success: behind me I always saw Alicia, never the nape of my own neck.