*
The door opened. A grimy old woman in a headscarf. Everyone moves with deliberation. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he says. ‘Giving up is cowardly. So is carrying on.’
‘Silence please.’
*
They are in bed, windows open to the morning coolness. Analysis of the passions, a definition of love. Faith, she thinks, is more mechanical than doubt. The wild light in her eyes. Or rather, almost wild.
‘Great minds are very near to madness.’
*
A photograph on a mantelpiece: his future wife. The light was better then. ‘Nature can hardly be forgiven.’
Goes over to the table where the American woman is sitting. ‘In Barcelona I turned thirty.’ ‘Yes, I remember perfectly.’ Slowly the light changes. Old surfaces of the town. They walk on to a balcony. ‘It’s hopeless.’ ‘This is what you wanted.’ Season follows season, world without end. ‘We have known each other for ever.’ ‘It isn’t enough.’
*
I was alone, as if face to face with a blank rock. Traders and pedlars in the sunshine, the major marketplace. No one stands still under that dome, in dim shadows. ‘If it smells like shit, it probably is.’ I won’t see her again, he thought. Spends her years making propaganda like someone stirring a burnt-out fire. She was more beautiful than –
In the morning, a little lucidity and few illusions left. Hotel melancholy. Now she goes out to the coast for the summer, in a caravan, where the estuary becomes tidal. A feeling of eternity. Black hair, an open window. It is already afternoon. The Volkhov River.
*
Asians wearing European labels. Hotels erected on the shore. A whale’s skeleton at the base of a limestone cliff. The last race, all colour and fire. Instead of dreams, memories. ‘I have returned to Europe and its struggles.’ The Russian ballerinas, they dance very well. Red stone buildings, copper pagodas. The fragility of those shacks. ‘They used to run this place like clockwork, but now. .’ The church square is rather sad. Love is possible, but unlikely. Young men with fine features and cold, knowing gazes. People who seek to be useful (not us, my love). ‘A book is a postponed suicide,’ mutters the tramp as he slumps in a doorway. Even in a large city, the streets at night are relatively still. How lonely it is to be alive.
*
In a Genoa hotel room, hears the ringing of bells resound through quiet streets at dusk. I leave the world as I found it.
This Is the Ritual
Face covered against the pollution, she fumbled in her bag for a coin. The entire ritual had been tainted. ‘If I had children, I would strangle them here and now.’
Under a metallic sky, composing music far away from the war. Valiant but vain attempts to find a common language.
*
Sex detached from any genital processes. He goes back to bed and lies down. She is too old for him.
‘Kiss me.’
‘I never thought my mother would become my mistress.’
*
I was watching television on New Year’s Eve. The demons were getting worse. (‘It’s a long trip. We are the only riders.’)
*
When she arrived at the Greyhound station she understood that something was different. Sound of gunfire. . Funeral processions. . Atrocity footage in black and white. . ‘This is the ritual.’ She drinks coffee from a Styrofoam cup and looks over the crumpled sheet music, puts it away again.
*
Dusk, the lights of windows in high-rise blocks. ‘Take me there.’ A bullet shattered the pane in the lift. For a few days the girl seemed to lose her mind. ‘You have to live your life, that’s all there is to it.’ Suddenly the voice of a human being becomes a towering edifice. ‘I can’t stand it any longer.’ She turned to those who deny all taboos, all shame. ‘Again and again I am engulfed by it.’ She died miserably. Windy city outskirts.
*
I was drinking whiskey with two French friends. City outskirts. Smell of used condoms, excrement. Conversation revolved around sick dogs and a viable home. I thought of Claudel. (My erect cock seeking his testicles, his scrotum.) All my previous conditioning disqualifies me from what we face now. The city is a cemetery, the tramp used to say. Graffiti I saw in a Métro station: I am come to destroy the works of women. Realising then that her fears were real.
I endure myself.
*
Nothing in his face reveals suicidal tendencies, she thinks. An advertisement for whiskey. The four provinces of Ireland. Flecks of snow in the sea air. They rarely speak. She has always associated sex with the sea. Our Lady of the Dark Interstellar Spaces.
Onward. Landscapes seen through train windows. No one is expecting to be thanked. ‘I love your ferocity,’ she says. Snow in the sea air. Windy city outskirts. ‘Swear I will also be your victim.’ Smell of condoms, excrement. They travel widely. A young male lover, known to pick pockets and carry a knife. Lost a fortune. As if from a distance, sadly but gently: ‘The triumph of death and pain.’
*
The canteen was all but deserted. An elderly woman scribbling a mathematical equation. ‘We live in a climate of exhaustion.’ Outside the window the sky is darkening. Night after night I had passed these houses. ‘There are bodies by the pool.’ ‘Non.’
My salary ran out in Paris. ‘I’m no longer capable of rage.’ ‘I’m still young, I need sex. It’s normal.’
Late at night there would be older people at the tables, sometimes couples. Habit dulls intensity and marriage implies habit. ‘That was just poetry.’ Buses that don’t arrive. A café that is closed for the summer.
‘Needed you, Claudel.’
*
She fantasised about picking up a hitch-hiker. A couple of strangers, their faces seemed familiar. Windy city outskirts. Psychopaths preserved in a nature reserve. Unmade beds that smell of excrement. ‘All the same she was a good-looking woman, in a common, feral way.’
*
She watched him with a faint, sceptical smile. He was sitting on the bed, drinking a beer. There subsists in man a movement which always exceeds the bounds, that can only be partially reduced to order. He lay down. She shook her head, a faraway gaze. The transgressive side of marriage often escapes notice.
‘I never thought my mistress would become my mother.’
*
Long shadow of the corporation. In a late-night shop she buys a bottle of gin. . Scattered factions near the border. . That bar, always full of smoke and drunks. . Late-evening sun. . The estates. . ‘We must have a formula, if only to give a façade to the void.’
I leave the world as I found it.
2
The Outer Sites
We drive in silence. Fox eyes flash in the headlights and she curses under her breath. Corroded, like everything in our marriage. ‘Answer me, you fucking bitch.’ ‘If you’re going to do it, just fucking do it.’ Moment of weakness, like many before. Both of us fantasise, both of us are tired. These streets are decomposing, he thinks drowsily. Cocktails at the weekend with the Herriots.
*
The orgasm came quickly, powerfully. A chubby boy in an anonymous hotel. Desert highway, far from any need for conversation. Not creating a life, not changing for anyone. I never said I was lost. Later, the boy stands in the moonlight like a god or a phantom. ‘But you disappeared years ago!’ Wind across the plains. In the distance a coyote whines. A man devoid of hope, with no investment in the future. ‘No one lives for ever, therefore no one is alive.’ ‘A banal assertion.’ Fires burn along the mountain.