Be he born or dying, he was Pollo; he was baptized Pollo and would be buried Pollo; the young cripple, the employee of the Cafe Le Bouquet, the sandwich man; Pollo from A to Z. Here … look … where could that book of poems be? Where does it say my name is Pollo? Written by an old madman who confused all symptoms with all causes. The Poet Libra, a Venetian phantom, Pound, exhibited in a cage, a recluse in an American asylum. Gray eyes, eh? The gray eyes of this girl recognized him; but her lips formed, soundlessly, a different name: “Juan … Juan…”
Who was being born? Who was dying? Who could recognize a cadaver in one of the newborn infants on the quays of the Seine? Who is it who’s survived to remember me? Confused, Pollo asked himself these questions; he had only one possible recourse in deciphering the enigmas. He would try to read the words written on the sandwich boards and thus find out what the girl had been reading with such intensity: but the words were written so that the public could read them, not he, and as he twisted his head to try to decipher them, fighting against the whirling wind that blew his long hair into his eyes — twice blinded, by wind and hair — fighting the threat of being engulfed in that odor of burned fingernails, fighting the tactile memory of grease and placenta, fighting against the meaningless words he had uttered, words dictated by a memory of resurrections, ego baptiso te: Iohannes Agrippa … Pollo slipped and lost his balance.
And the girl, through whose eyes had passed the same questions, the same memories, the same survivals — as detailed in her memory as generic in his — reached out to steady Pollo. How was she to know the boy had only one arm? She grasped empty air, her hand scratched by the pins of the empty sleeve … and Pollo fell.
For an instant, the sandwich boards seemed like the wings of Icarus, and a soaring Pollo saw the flaming Paris sky, as if the struggle between light and clouds were resolved in an explosive conflagration; bridges floated like ships in the fog, the black keel of the Pont des Arts, the distant stone sails of the Pont Saint-Michel, the gilded masts of the Pont Alexandre III blazing corposant. Then the blond and handsome youth plunged into the boiling Seine; his shout was muffled in the implacable, silent fog, but for an instant his only hand — white, emblematic — was visible above the water.
With one hand the girl clung to the iron railing of the bridge, and with the other she tossed the sealed green flask into the river; she prayed that Pollo’s hand would grasp the ancient bottle; she tried to peer through the almost motionless mist to the water; she hung her head.
She stared down at the river for several minutes. Then she returned to the center of the bridge and sat down again, legs crossed, straight-backed, letting the wind and rain play with her hair as her spirit drifted into indifferent contemplation. Then through the storm a pale white light descended toward the bridge; the girl raised her head but immediately buried her face in her hands. The light, a white dove, settled upon her head. But the moment it alighted, its white plumage began to fade and streak in the rain; as the dove revealed its true color, the girl repeated silently, over and over:
“This is my story. I want you to hear my story. Listen. Listen. Netsil. Netsil. Yrots ym raeh ot uoy tnaw I. Yrots ym si siht.”
AT THE FEET OF EL SEÑOR
It is told:
Since the previous night his alguacil had been installed in the mountain shelter with all the accouterments. Huntsmen and hounds, carts and baggage, pikes and harquebuses, hangings and horns, lent a festive air to the inn. El Señor arose early and opened the window of his bedchamber to enjoy better the radiant sun of this July morning. The village nestled in a forest of6 live-oak trees, extending into a cool glade that disappeared at the foot of the mountains. The sleeping valley lay in shadow, but the rising sun shone between the knife-edged peaks.
Guzmán entered to tell El Señor that the plans for the hunt had been made. The hounds had been to the mountains. The tracks and signs indicated that a hart was somewhere on the ridge, a stag that had been hunted before. El Señor tried to smile. He stared at his chief huntsman, who lowered his eyes. Satisfied, El Señor placed his hand on his hip. When this man — who was both his lieutenant and his secretary — had previously come to tell him, prudently and respectfully, what game was in the forest and where the chase would lead, El Señor had found no need to feign a haughtiness that was natural to him — although it is true he used hauteur to conceal his true feelings for the sport: a mixture of aversion and indifference. But when the deputy told him they would be hunting a hart that had been run before, El Señor did not hide his feeling. Calm, and secure, he could look Guzmán in the face, smile, even sigh with a touch of nostalgia. He recalled his youth in this country. The heat would lead them, hart and hunter alike, to the most beautiful parts of the mountain, where water and shade alleviate to some degree the harshness of the sun on the open plateau.
El Señor ordered that more dogs be readied, for the summer day is long and it is the beasts that tire most quickly; he said, too, that water should be loaded onto the mules, that they should calm the ardor of the dogs and run them through the coolest, greenest places. The chief huntsman, still facing El Señor, bowed his way from the room; the Liege, as he again approached the window, immediately heard the horn summoning the gathering for the hunt.
Following the storm, the day will be clear. The receding tide laps at the shoreline. A brigantine has for a long time lain in the cleft where a dry stream bed leads to the sea. A tattered standard catches the wind and flutters between the rocks. Motionless fog lies over the water, blurring the horizon. The only beacon along the coast has been extinguished during the storm. They say its keeper embraced the dog who is his usual companion and that the two lay down beside the howling fire in the chimney.
When the horn sounded the departure for the mountain, El Señor, on horseback, joined his huntsmen. Dressed entirely in green and wearing a short hooded cape of Moorish style and making, he arrived at a light trot. His company followed on foot and on horseback, the servants with tent, spade, billhook, and pickax, should it prove necessary to spend the night in the field. El Señor told himself that all would go welclass="underline" the brilliant dawn promised a swift, sure hunt, and a return to the mountain pass with the first evening shadows, followed by a well-deserved nocturnal celebration at the inn where his alguacil had already set out several kegs of red wine, and where they would sing ballads and consume the savory entrails of the hart. In their game bags his personal servants carried flint and tinder, needles, thread, and diverse curatives. In accordance with custom, El Señor murmured a prayer, and looked with affection at his favorite dog, the large white mastiff Bocanegra, who preceded the ten huntsmen. Each of the men carried a lance in one hand and with the other checked the straining dogs chained to wide iron collars displaying gleaming heraldic devices and the dynastic motto Nondum. When they reached the foot of the mountain, El Señor stopped and looked sadly at the dried vines and the surrounding basalt hills. He remembered his hopeful anticipation of the morning, the imagined ride through the green lands of his youth. It is true that every mountain has four faces, and one tends to know but one. And the saying says that even the best of leaders can lose his way, but El Señor did not dare protest in the name of nostalgia, or countermand an order under the guise of being misled; his chief huntsman was not the kind of man who made mistakes; clearly, the hart had chosen the arid face of the mountain, not the rivulets and bosky groves of El Señor’s childhood. His vision, that of the flowering landscape, was superseded by another: an arduous ride under a burning sun across the bluffs and gulleys of the mountainside, hoping that time and strength would permit them to reach the higher vantage point that promised a third prospect: a refreshing view of the sea.