with no short circuit of communication, as it was impossible to short-circuit because it had surged from the pleasure of a night when the drunkenness and its hangover had freed her from her anxieties of feeling clenched in her own jaws or fists, bound to her body at the hips. But it was necessary to feel the heaviness and the bitterness of her body, to feel the whip and the bar, in order to later soar like birds and sing as she had never sung before, in perfect tone with the color of the music, which, emerging from her mouth full of feverish illusion, would communicate the splendor of her agony set free. She had to sustain the note, hold it firmly, loving it, but resisting and pushing it so it would keep rising and surging up through the elbows of the imagination and down through the armpits of the earthquake, and trembling in the vibrant, divided measure of the tone, and she had to conduct it with the baton while resisting its invasion from afar, and control her emotions, and be the producer, the motor, the speed, as well as the ear listening to the rise of emotion and interrupting the imbalance, disharmony, tone-deafness, and be the hand holding, grabbing, lifting, and encouraging it, and causing the pain of pleasure as her blood rises. And she had to do all of this, not only with the flight of her hands, but with slow and deliberate movements, and by lowering her eyes intensifying the movement of her hands, and by following the movement of silence and the pause of her finger, allowing her hips and shoulders and breathing to be moved by her hands, and by conducting the measure and the diapason, making her neck arch back and her brows furrow, maintaining the emotional current running throughout her body, while her feet are tapping to the beat in her head, her eyes are feeling the tremble, and she opens her mouth uttering certain mute words, and then lowers her tone and submerges it in a balanced effervescence that lowers the voice even further until it vanishes, down the hatch, and then it rounds out the corner of her lips mouthing a round O, and then a vibrant, half-open E, to dot the aggressive, divided i that precedes and interposes another gracious figurative note laughing like a goat, which is an E that comes before a white, open A. Proud and distant, a minor climbs the scale of A major and from there looks for E and tells it what to do with bountiful U, and O is too self-absorbed, it’s like a closed ball, assuming it can’t join E or i because they’re always together or mingling with other fertile couples, but O is the motor of O, of the exclamation OH-OH! It closes its mouth slowly, but the yawns dawns again — and opens its desire to see the sky cloudy — yawn falling from the sky — open, open your mouth wide, never close it, even a yawn, like a prayer, can turn into a replica, a replica — of the same, the very same thing when the open mouth opens the open mouth O, it becomes the exclamation OH-OH! And it awkwardly balances on its two swings, on its two hips, moving, holding, and enclosing it in the claustrophobia of a whole orange, a full moon, or the sun in its highest permanence and splendor, the other vowels of the alphabet are making their pilgrimage wigwagging, zigzagging toward the closed O, toward its obscurity and silence, musically rendering their desire to be loved or joined at last to O, imagine U’s fury when it almost touches it, but U feels like it’s missing a few hairs on its head or it’s missing a hat to cover its bounty and protect it from the burning sun. And by now, A, standing tippy-toe on the top step, arches its leafy branches covered with herbs and bouquets that make it feel so important in the power of the music and the ladder, and all of them, each and every one at its own level, feel so potent and vigorous and fulfill their mission of exalting the production of her name, in complementing and developing all her vigor, from the tip of O’s big toe to the weedy crop on top of E, they are formed by forms that have formed forms, have tightened the measure of her forms, exercised her muscles, heard the grumbling in her belly, the rumbling of her ribs, the knuckles and joints in her fingers, the underarm hair, the counterbeat, the countersweat of the smell, the sulfur and the sopor, the white steam of black breath, the black steam of white breath, and the intense soporific contractions, the warm breath of the open mouth, closing and opening, opening and closing in the slow and deliberate movement, mindful of the movement it makes when opening and closing, supreme control of herself over her own death, watching it while closing her eyes and falling silent as they close, listening to the gentle tremble of her eyelids and gently trembling with them in the splendor of this gentle tremble, in the union of the body with the body, dying and opening, contracting and fading, dividing and closing itself off from everything, on all sides, full of permanencies.
II. Blow-Up
— You open it.
— Why me? You’ve got the keys. I gave them to you. Besides, I left mine inside.
— Why did you leave them inside?
— Because I knew you had yours.
— Why do you depend on me?
— Just open it, and make it fast. And the worst is when you get up in the morning and leave the door open on your way out. With money scattered across the kitchen counter, right next to the entrance. Mindless of the danger you put me in. I sleep until ten. And when I get up and throw some clothes on, I go to open the door and find it’s already open. How careless. To leave the door open. Somebody could walk in and rob me and rape me. And you don’t give a rat’s ass.
— Of course I do. That was careless of me.
— Yeah, what about now? Scratch the knob and I’ll kill you.
— What about now? Let me do it my way.