Elvira is in the dining room. “Will you eat now?” she says. I tell her to leave something out, that for now I’m not hungry. Elvira disappears into the kitchen. “Bring some ice to the study,” I say. I hang up the raincoat and the hat on the rack in the bathroom, urinate, and go into the study. The curtains are open, so I close them again. Now the only light, a bright circle, comes from the desk. I pick up the briefcase from the sofa, take out the dictionary, the notebook, the novel, and the pens, and put them on the desk. I drop the empty briefcase on the sofa, pour myself a large whiskey, and sit down at the desk, glass in hand. I take a short drink. Then I open the notebook to the first page and study the black handwriting of the manuscript, which is full of strikethroughs and markups in various colors, green, red, blue. Elvira knocks at the door and then comes in with the ice bucket. “I left you some sandwiches in the kitchen,” she says. I ask if she has gone shopping for tomorrow, and she says she has. Then she says goodnight and disappears. I put ice in the whiskey and take a slow drink after swirling the glass, making it clink. Then I leave the glass to my right on the desk, within reach, and open the novel to the first page — it’s covered in marks in three or four colors. I read from the notebook. The first word, in capital letters in the center of the page, reads PREFACIO. Below this is a line in regular script. It reads, El artista es el creador de cosas bellas. The word El is in parentheses. I pause a moment and then pick up a red pen and cross out the word El, then superimpose an uppercase A over the lowercase a of the word artista. I’m left with, Artista es el creador de cosas bellas. The second line reads, Revelar el arte y ocultar el artista es el fin (propósito) (finalidad) del arte. I pause a moment and then cross out the word fin, to avoid any sort of misinterpretation.
I cross out and correct, line after line, in various colors, green, blue, red, over the black handwriting. The marks, crosses, circles, lines, and arrows are superimposed on the marks made during the first draft. At ten after twelve I get up from the desk, take a last sip of whiskey, and go to bed. I undress slowly and put on my pajamas. The sheets are warm, and the light on the nightstand casts a long cone over the white wall. I cover myself to my chin with the sheets and stare at the ceiling. Then I stretch out my hand, keeping the rest of my body still, and turn off the light. It doesn’t start right away. The common thoughts come first, the memories, the pieces of visual or auditory sensation lingering on the retina or the ear drum, the slow, weak murmur, growing more confused, the vast diurnal sound extinguishing. Then the actual murmur begins. For an immeasurable period it blends with the previous sound. The combination of the two is disorienting. At this hour the gorillas begin to undress and slither toward bed. The female gorillas wait, their legs open like enormous carnivorous flowers, their eyes half shut and their hands open on the pillow, palms up alongside their faces. I’m in complete darkness, hearing the two murmurs blending. The real murmur will start to grow, while the other is extinguished, until it completely takes over the inside of my mind. Phosphorescent blurs will rise from the murmur, then pale, then phosphorescent again, until figures will begin to take shape around the murmur, momentarily focused in the dark camera. Fragments of the faces of long-dead gorillas, their furry hands, a meteorite, incandescent and expanding as it falls to the earth through the darkness. But the external murmur remains, extinguishing gradually. The wiper blades sweep rhythmically across the surface of the glass where the drops fall, and myriad brilliant lights decompose into violent shapes, while through the side windows the blurred facades of houses — repeated blurs, yellow, gray, white — slide slowly backward. Dark windows, pale faces. Newspapers in the street, trampled, covered in mud. An empty package of cigarettes, twisted, the silver rim of the inner wrapper sticking out. Dead leaves piled up into a damp blanket under the trees. Coins stacked on the night stand, a glass of water holding a teaspoon. Stacks of thick, dusty files in the courthouse offices, yellowed at the edges, with faded red covers, on the desks or in file cabinets, piled to the ceiling. The gray sentry box at the mouth of the suspension bridge, empty, glowing in the fog. Silent umbrellas, in every color, sliding rigidly, horizontally, in every direction. The solitary train station building, the illuminated lobby. A gorilla wrapped in a blue raincoat, coughing and then disappearing behind me. The green traffic light coming on. The tracks extending, crossing the street. The landscape, still, moving, still, the orange trees and the palms in the Plaza de Mayo receiving the ceaseless rain and glowing momentarily in the darkness.
As the murmur increases there comes a moment when the external murmur, extinguishing, and the internal murmur, growing, have the same intensity, the same quality, the same rhythm. They are the same. This stability of their intensity, their quality, and their rhythm holds, suspended, until finally the external murmur diminishes, but so slightly that it’s imperceptible, and the internal grows, suddenly, and like two passing cars superimposed momentarily and then separating in opposite directions, they reveal the distance between them. I’m face up, the sheets to my chin, in the darkness. My eyes are open, and they grow wider as the murmur grows. I see the phosphorescent blurs, the pale blurs, the brilliant, fleeting shapes accompanied by an inaudible shrillness, trying to make out an image that pulls the blurs from the pure fire, and the shrillness from the pure, senseless sound. But for the moment nothing happens, and I wait in the drift. It lights up, quivers, and disappears, and the inaudible shrillness swells and suddenly retreats, sensible yet remote. I step from the jetty to the vessel, unmoored, and as the vessel moves off, the jetty can be seen more clearly, more distinctly, until soon it can be seen completely. But then the images are called up to fill in the darkness and time that make up the black space.