— I want Visor—I said.
— Visor it will be.
And then he published his own book, not mine, and never told me.
— My mother always said two artists cannot live together. Infectious rivalry.
— I told him:
— Just remember that I am the poet. People should know what they are so they don’t take the places of the people who they are not.
— As if you were the only one.
— That’s exactly what he said.
— Don’t compare Jabalí’s lies with my financial situation. The thanks I get. I did the best I could.
— You promised me $60 roses. I received $5 roses almost dead from the Korean grocer.
— A rose is a rose. The thanks I get. You picked a fight in front of Makiko for nothing because Yoko brought you long-stemmed beauties, thorns and all.
— If you don’t promise, I won’t expect. He stole my publisher. I’m sure he didn’t even take it to Visor. The same with my dissertation. He promised he’d get it published when I finished it, but he didn’t take it anywhere. Did he or didn’t he deserve a beating like the one Repolido gave Cariharta? He was losing in a card game and needed 30 reales to win. But she sent him only 24 reales. And because she did not send him what he expected, he beat her senseless.
— But she did the best she could. She sent him all the money she had.
— But not what he expected.
— Doesn’t justify the beating.
— How do you think he felt, depending on a whore?
— Like the thieving pimp he was.
— You want me to be grateful for withered stubs when I was set on velvety blossoms. Cariharta had the money. Repolido depended on her. That’s why he was so riled, he was depending, and she made him conscious of that by sending him less than he expected.
— That does not excuse his beating or your insults in front of Makiko. You should thank him. He did you a favor.
— Thank him because he broke my spirit.
— Your spirit is not broken.
— It’s crushed.
— Be grateful, you would have been bored always analyzing other people’s work without creating your own.
— I would have been a great critic.
— I would have been a great poet if you didn’t break my spirit.
— Whadaya think?
— You write like me, but you have nothing to say. Not now anyway. Maybe, if you start living vital experiences, maybe later, you’ll become a novelist, but definitely not a poet.
— I couldn’t believe you tattled to your father.
— He said:
— She must see a tidy sum of talent or else she wouldn’t try to bury a beginner. Keep your eye on her and back away from her, ever so slowly.
— Why didn’t you?
— I was mature enough to give you the benefit of the doubt. Although it’s true, I never wrote another verse.
— Then your desire was not genuine.
— Then you were not going to be a critic. Nobody breaks what people are. They can hurt your feelings, yes. Verlaine broke Rimbaud’s heart, but nurtured his poetry by unleashing his emotions.
— He made him despise poetry.
— He broke his heart, not his art.
— And this is why a rose is a rose is a rose. Because there are roses that are not roses. You know when you meet a rose. You know it by its scent. But people don’t know. And that’s the problem. But what bothers me, and this is my dilemma, if I didn’t have an editor picking apart my poems, I would have already finished my book. Because it’s true, you refine the language, but when I have an idea that is not fully developed, you say:
— It doesn’t work, but it’s a great idea.
That’s how you kill my idea. I won’t continue working with it if it doesn’t already work. If it were a great idea, it would work.
— If you work with it, you can make it work.
— All I want to know is whether or not it works.
— Just this paragraph that I’ve had to rewrite from scratch. In other words: palimpsest. What would you do without me? What you’re writing is immature. I make it serious.
— What matures, rots. I’d rather be green. I’m still hopeful that I’m going to be.
— If you say, Never. Listen. I’m not in love. I’m an echo, echoing, I’m in love — in love. I love you — love you.
— It’s torture to have to hear the opposite of what I negate. I say, I don’t love you.
— I say, I love you — love you.
— It breaks a person’s spirit. Don’t you think?
— You think. You think.
— So I always have to hear your back-talk.
— It’s your own voice contradicting you.
— I’m not in love.
— I’m in love — in love. I love you — love you.
— It’s true. Echo is an original. She copies Narcissus’s last words but projects a new meaning. Imagine. Once he emerged from a cold black cloud, arm in arm with another woman, and called my name. Not knowing where the voice was coming from, I looked around, disconcerted, alone as I was, and torn, and used my hands to shield my eyes from a glare in the agonizing haze and looked both ways. Suddenly through the haze, the crowds, and the sunlight, I saw him coming toward me — smiling with swollen bags under his sleepless, drunken eyes — with a tick inside — sun-streaked, crow’s feet, like a map of the world — travails on a flying trapeze of needles twitching, like icicles dripping — and he came over to say:
— Hello. How are you?
My eardrums nearly burst. How am I? The nerve of him. It’s only been a week since we broke up. He, it seemed, was fine indeed.
— Fine indeed, thanks. And yourself?
— Divine.
I stared him down — divine, eh? What’s a cross-eyed fat bitch like her doing with him? Why is she looking at me with that attitude? He must have warned her when he saw me coming:
— That’s her. Keep walking. Right past her.
That’s when the skunk stopped to say hello, and the bulldog did what she was told. She knew who I was. She had listened in on my phone calls, and now she saw me in flesh and blood. Bam-boom-pow-wow-auu, I figured it out — she was the bitch who stole him from me — the one who used to listen in and laugh at my pain. Of course, they were both degenerates. They were naked, and she was sitting on his lap with the phone cord wrapped around her neck like an onyx choker — too bad it didn’t choke her — I swear, I heard her cackling when she saw me begging Jabalí to come back.
— Degenerate.
— You don’t know how many times I had to hear Ingrid Bergman reciting Jean Cocteau’s monologue of a woman talking to her lover on the phone before she commits suicide.
— Jabi gave you that record.
— Yes, until one day, he came home with Edith Piaf and told me he found her at Rizzoli. I later learned it was that bitch who gave it to him. I sensed it.
— How callous.
— He ran off with Edith Piaf and left me with a scratched record of Ingrid Bergman bidding her lover farewell. We never hear his voice, just her desperate responses. With me it was different. I saw his lover seated on his lap, naked, eavesdropping and squealing with pleasure, deep pleasure, more pleasure, the sum of more and more pleasure, thinking she had him eating from her sweaty palm — and they were swilling scotch and soda on the rocks, and I heard the icy ice, his voice choking with pleasure when he said, so easily, with no emotional regret, no sensitivity, cold and distant: