the path changed, the ruts were full of corpses and the shadows of corpses, the road no longer follows the same bends, the sky seems heavier as if the clouds were still grinding and chewing on who knows what ideas, ideas that want nothing more of us, with Estrella a long time ago, her fingers closed over my wrists like handcuffs made of flesh, the smoke-filled air of the crowded café didn’t even make her eyes cry, not one tear, nothing, just that aquamarine clarity that you know promises more than it can fulfill, Miguel and Inés were there too that night, we had decided not to reshape the world but to add a few absurdities to it, spots of incongruity so as to shade its cruel leaden color, my pockets were full of bills that were no longer in circulation, I walked around with one finger over the flame of tenacious little candles, Estrella spoke to me about that illness that had almost made her into a little frozen body slipped under the earth, about the drunken doctor who had succeeded, by no one knows what chance, in diagnosing her ailment and giving her the means to recover from it, and as I listened to her I couldn’t prevent myself from feeling each of her illnesses, from following the moving curve of her pain, I became the memory of each of the drops of sweat that appeared on her skin, I was the fever, her fire fed from the ice in her eyes, all this Estrella told me by half-hints, between sips, between sighs light as feathers, everything always being done in the space between, a parody of twilight, I understood then that I would spend the night in Estrella’s arms, that it was not a question of either choice or desire, the city was bathed in an implacable glow, you heard engines growling and drunkards yelping, as if the city were dreaming it was the country, at night certain squares could have been fields, and suddenly Estrella got up, an ascension, a miracle, her chin showed me the door, Inés and Miguel followed us for an instant then disappeared, they stopped existing or returned to a state before existence, everything seemed to dissolve then Estrella’s breathing became more irregular and I knew we were running, not really, but in our hearts, in our flesh, a staircase presented itself to us and ten minutes later she threw me on a bed, the city had the delicacy to absent itself behind the windowpane, all noises contracted into an infinitesimal echoing fist, I wanted to forget the seconds as they unfurled before my eyes, I couldn’t have endured it if they’d accumulated, formed a deposit, conspired against me, I wanted to stay fragile and volatile, but Estrella was like mercury, she rolled over me, twisted around me, I couldn’t manage to unfasten her clothes, my fingers got bogged down in the countless buttons on her sweater, my eyes were closed and I felt as if I could see the inside of my body, a landscape in constant transformation, peopled with panting machines and frightened monsters, it was the alcohol, of course, but also the exhaustion of a man dedicated to losing himself in the beauty of the other, there was a moment when I felt her taking me inside her, and the blood in my temples sang like a drumroll, my nails dug in, my teeth sought her bones, somewhere in a neighboring room a gramophone liberated an opera aria, a woman’s voice conquered but furious began to speak to us, about what we would become if we made the mistake of changing these gestures into habits, these cries into promises, space into time, then everything shattered, everything stopped, I was by the harborside and I was smoking a cigar, I was old, very old, people passed in front of me floating, there were two suns in the sky, I think I had just perfected such a powerful bomb that even the seas would catch fire, a telegram told me at the last instant that my evil project had been found out, I had to give myself up to the authorities, but instead of that I tried to jump-start a stolen car, the starting crank refused to turn, children were making fun of me and anxiety ended up snatching me from that bad dream, Estrella was sleeping right up against me, she was smiling in her sleep, both her hands rested between her thighs, it must have been 5:00 in the morning, I went out without leaving a word, the seal of her lips on my neck, more whole than the day before, a little older, too, as if there were still unsuspected virginities to abandon to life, said Boix, five years after Mauthausen remembering Barcelona today a pearl of the Mediterranean capital of triumphant Catalunya full of the arrogance, the haughtiness of the new nationalist conquerors, proud of their economic victory over Castilian oppression, where the good ones finally triumphed, obtained the posthumous revenge they wished for: hand in hand with Stéphanie we would stroll on the beach and the seafront that had been recently remodeled, modernized, rid of their greasy spoons, planted with palm trees, torn away from George Orwell and Francesc Boix, hustled towards Cannes Genoa or Nice with huge tourist investments, ready to receive the masses of Scandinavians coming to thaw on the sand, around 7:00 P.M. the Ramblas was covered with an inexorable wave of bikinis and beach towels wrapped around exhausted flesh red from the sun, hurried buses released their clouds of amateur photographers in front of the Sagrada Familia, tons of paella were defrosting in ovens, Stéphanie bought herself shoes, dresses, costume jewelry — I managed to convince her to go to the end of Diagonal Avenue, when it meets the sea so dear to promoters and modern town planners, to see an immense worksite, a vacant lot strewn with bulldozers and cement mixers, at the base of elegant buildings, with a view, among the most expensive and modern in the city, this lot swarming with workmen used to be called the Campo de la Bota, Boot Camp, and the Falangists picked it out for an execution place, where people were shot, 2,000 innocent men, anarchists, union members, workers, intellectuals, massacred under the windows of today’s luxury apartments, summarily condemned by a distraught and overworked court martial, then handed over to a distraught and overworked firing squad, before their memory was once and for all buried by distraught and overworked immigrant workers: at the scene of the carnage with the 2,000 corpses the Barcelona town hall built its Forum of Cultures, Forum for Peace and Multiculturalism, on the very spot of the Francoist butchery they raised a monument to leisure and modernity, to the fiesta, a giant real estate operation supposed to bring in millions in indirect revenue, tourism, concession stands, parking lots, and once again to bury the poor conquered ones of 1939 forever, the downtrodden, the ones who can only resist the excavators and backhoes with the endless list of their first and last names, Stéphanie was suddenly indignant, but there’s no monument? no plaque? I replied don’t worry, a brilliant architect will find a way to hide a vibrant homage inside his work, even if it means putting a few false bullet holes in a concrete wall, today the Forum of Cultures is used mainly for concerts, they dance on corpses as in Beirut, as in BO18 on the Quarantaine in Beirut, but instead of a dance of memory it’s that dance of oblivion that only state-controlled memory allows, which decides where it is good to remember and where it is better to put a parking lot, much more useful to a European city than cumbersome remembrances of people who are dead, in any case, dead today from old age, bedridden, insane or sick, their children and their grandchildren are happy, they have motorbikes tramways and bicycle paths, beaches to put tourists on, a few thousand Francoist bullets aren’t going to change things, you can’t live sitting there sniveling over corpses, it’s the way the world turns, I thought about the cheap buildings that clutter the former Bolzano camp today, they don’t beat their wives any more there than elsewhere, I suppose, ghosts unfortunately do not exist, they don’t come to pester the tenants of the housing projects in Drancy, the new inhabitants of the ghettos emptied of their Jews or the tourists visiting Troy, they no longer hear the cries of children burned in the ruins of the city: in La Risiera in Trieste I passed a group of high school students on a field trip, in the middle of the barracks near the crematorium they were very busy murmuring sweet nothings to each other, furtively smoking, elbowing each other, under the severe gaze of an emotional history teacher, here so many people have suffered, she said, and this sentence had no meaning for them, or so little, that’s normal, it will come to have less and less, just as today the monuments to the dead of 1914 in France don’t affect anyone anymore, the poilus sit enthroned on flower-covered roundabouts in squares opposite solemn churches, leaning on their stone Lebel rifles their haversacks beside them their helmets on their heads a curiosity a decorative item, just as the Marathon column no longer wrings the heart of any tourist, no more professional mourners at Thermopylae in front of Simonides of Ceos’s epitaph, stranger, go tell the Spartans that we died to honor their laws, Leonidas the Spartan is a Belgian brand name today, I’d happily devour a chocolate bar to the health of the king killed by the Persians, a little sweetness melting in the train that’s approaching Bologna