(The guy shakes his head, his eyes seem to fill with tears, his shoulders tremble. Is there love in his gaze? Has his body sensed what will certainly happen, while his mind is still lagging behind? Both phenomena, the tears and the trembling, could result from the effort he is making at this moment, in vain, or from a sincere regret tearing at all his nerves.)
“So, I take off my clothes, I take off my pants, I take off my bra, I take a shower, I put on perfume, I put on clean pants, I put on a clean bra, I put on a black silk top, I put on my best pair of jeans, I put on white socks, I put on my boots, I put on a jacket, the best one I own, and I go into the garden, because to get out into the street, first I have to cross that dark garden, which you especially liked. All in less than ten minutes; normally I’m not so quick. Let’s say it’s your dance that is speeding up my movements. While I get dressed you’re dancing. In some other dimension. Another dimension and another time, like a prince and a princess, like the eruptive call of animals coupling in springtime, I get dressed while, inside the television, you dance wildly with your eyes fixed on something that might be eternity or the key to eternity, except that your eyes as you dance are flat and empty and inexpressive.”
(The guy nods repeatedly. What were gestures of denial or desperation are transformed into gestures of affirmation, as if he’d been suddenly seized by an idea, or a new idea had just occurred to him.)
“Finally, even though I haven’t got time to look at myself in the mirror and check that my clothes are exactly right, and in fact I probably wouldn’t want to see my reflection even if I did have time (because what you and I are doing is secret), I go out, leaving just the porch light on, get onto my motorbike and drive through streets where people stranger than you or me are setting out to enjoy their Saturday night, a Saturday to match their expectations, a sad Saturday, in other words, one that will never give life to what they have dreamed and meticulously planned, a Saturday like any other, aggressive and grateful, stocky and affable, perverse and sad. Awful adjectives that aren’t my style at all, they make me baulk, but, as always, in the end, I let them stand, as a farewell gesture. My motorbike and I roll on among those lights, those Christian preparations, those baseless expectations, and we come out in front of the stadium, on the Gran Avenida, which is still empty, and we stop beneath the arches of the bridges that lead to the entrance gates, and this is the really strange part: when we stop, I can feel in my legs that the world is still moving, as I suppose you know it does, the earth is moving under my feet, under the wheels of my motorbike, and for a moment, for a fraction of a second, whether or not I find you doesn’t matter, you can leave with your friends, you can go and get drunk or take a bus back to the city you come from. But the feeling of abandon, as if I were being fucked by an angel, without penetration—or actually no, penetrated to the core—is brief, and just as I begin to doubt or analyze it in amazement, the gates swing open and the people start coming out of the stadium: a flock of vultures, a flock of crows.”
(The guy hangs his head. Lifts it up. His eyes try to smile. His facial muscles are seized by a spasm or a series of spasms that could mean many different things: We’re meant for each other, Think of the future, Life is wonderful, Don’t do anything stupid, I’m innocent, Spain rules.)
“Finding you is a problem. Will you look the same five yards away as you did on TV? Your height is a problem: I don’t know if you’re tall or of medium height (you’re not short, I know that). Your clothes are a problem: by now it’s starting to get cold, and your torso and the torsos of your companions are once again draped in tee shirts or even jackets; some are coming out of the stadium with scarves furled (like sails) around their necks and some are even using their scarves to cover their mouths and cheeks. My footsteps on the cement are lit by vertical moonlight. I search for you patiently, and yet at the same time I am anxious like the princess contemplating the empty frame in which the prince’s smile should be shining. Your friends are a problem compounded: they’re a temptation. I see them and am seen by them, I am desired, I know they’d pull my jeans off without a second thought; some no doubt deserve my attentions at least as much as you do, but in the end I resist, I remain faithful. Finally you appear, surrounded by conga dancers, chanting the words of a hymn that prefigures our meeting, with a serious look on your face, charged with an importance that no one but you can measure and appreciate precisely; you’re tall, quite a lot taller than me, and your arms are long, just as I imagined after seeing you on TV, and when I smile at you, when I say, Hi, Max, you don’t know what to say, at first you don’t know what to say, you just laugh, not quite as stridently as your friends, but you laugh, my prince of the time machine, you laugh and you stop walking.”
(The guy looks at her, narrows his eyes, tries to calm his breathing, and as it becomes more regular, he seems to be thinking: breathe in, breathe out, think, breathe in, breathe out, think . . .)
“Then, instead of saying, I’m not Max, you try to catch up with your group, and for a moment I’m seized by panic, a panic that in retrospect seems closer to laughter than to fear. I follow you without a clear idea of what I am going to do next. But you and three others stop and turn and size me up with cold eyes, and I say, Max, we have to talk, and then you say, I’m not Max, that’s not my name, what is this, are you joking, are you getting me mixed up with someone or what, and then I say, Sorry, you really look like Max, and I say, I want to talk with you, What about, Well, about Max, and then you smile, and you finally decide to stay behind and let your friends go off; they shout the name of the bar where you’ll meet to set off home, No problem, you say, see you there, and your friends shrink away like the stadium behind us as I drive my bike at full throttle, confidently, and the Gran Avenida is almost empty at this time of night, there are only the people leaving the stadium, and you sit behind me with your arms around my waist, I feel your body against my back like a mollusk clinging to a rock, and it’s true that the air on the avenue is cold and dense like the waves that push and pull at the mollusk; you cling to me so naturally, Max, like someone who senses that the sea is not only an inhospitable element but a time tunnel, you furl yourself around my waist the way your tee shirt was furled around your neck, but now the conga is danced by the air that pours like a torrent into the streaky tube that is the Gran Avenida, and you laugh or shout something, maybe you saw some friends among the people sliding past beneath the canopy of trees, maybe you’re just yelling insults at strangers, oh Max, you’re not shouting Good-bye or Hi or See you, you’re shouting slogans that are older than blood, but surely not older than the rock to which you’re clinging, happy to feel the waves, the submarine currents of the night, sure that you will not be swept away.”
(The guy murmurs something unintelligible. It looks like saliva dripping from his chin, although perhaps it’s only sweat. His breathing, in any case, has settled down.)
“And so we arrive at my house on the outskirts of town, safe and sound. You take off your helmet, you touch your balls, you put your arm around my shoulders. The gesture betrays a surprising degree of tenderness and timidity. But your eyes are still not tender and timid enough. You like my house. You like my pictures. You ask me about the figures that appear in them. The Prince and the Princess, I reply. They look like the Catholic Monarchs, you say. Yes, the thought has sometimes occurred to me too, Catholic Monarchs in the confines of their kingdom, Catholic Monarchs spying on each other in a perpetual panic, a perpetual solemnity, but for me, for the person I am at lea
st fifteen hours a day, they are a prince and a princess, a bride and groom who journey through the years, and are wounded, pierced by arrows, who lose their horses on the hunt, or never even had horses and must flee on foot, with only their eyes to guide them, and an idiotic will, which some call kindness and others good nature, as if nature could be qualified, good or bad, wild or tame, nature is nature, Max, that’s a fact you have to face, and it will always be there, like an irresolvable mystery, and I’m not talking about forests catching fire but neurons and the left or the right hemisphere of the brain catching fire and blazing for centuries and centuries. But, blessed soul that you are, you think my house is pretty, and you even ask if I’m alone and then you’re surprised when I laugh. Do you think I would have invited you here if I hadn’t been alone? Do you think I would have ridden right across the city on my motorbike, with you pressed against my back, like a mollusk clinging to a rock, while my head (or my figurehead) plunged through time, with the sole aim of bringing you back safe and sound to this refuge, the real rock, the rock that rears magically from its foundations and breaks the surface, do you think I would have done all that if I hadn’t been alone? And just on a practical level, do you think I would have taken an extra helmet, a helmet to protect your face from prying eyes, if my intention hadn’t been to bring you back here, into my purest solitude?”
(The guy hangs his head and nods, his eyes scan the walls of the room down to the finest crack. His sweat begins to flow again like a fickle river—or is there a kink in time?—and droplets gather in his eyebrows and hang ominously over his eyes.)
“You don’t know anything about painting, Max, but I get the feeling that you know a lot about solitude. You like my Catholic Monarchs, you like beer, you like your country, you like respect, you like your soccer team, you like your friends or buddies or pals, the gang or group or crew, the bunch that saw you stay behind to talk with some hot chick you didn’t know, you don’t like disorder, you don’t like blacks, you don’t like faggots, you don’t like being treated with disrespect, you don’t like getting pushed aside. There are so many things you don’t like, in that way you’re a lot like me. We’re approaching one another, you and I, from opposite ends of the tunnel, and even though all we can see are each other’s silhouettes, we keep walking resolutely toward our meeting point. In the middle of the tunnel our arms will be able to intertwine at last, and although the darkness there will be complete, making our faces invisible, I know that we will step forward without fear and touch each other’s faces (the first thing you’ll touch is my ass, but that too is a part of your desire to know my face), we will feel each other’s eyes and perhaps pronounce one or two words of recognition. Then it will be clear (it will become clear to me) that you know nothing about painting, but you do know about solitude, which is almost the same. One day we will meet in the middle of that tunnel, Max, and I will feel your face, your nose, your mouth—which generally expresses your stupidity better than anyone else’s—your empty eyes, the tiny folds that form on your cheeks when you smile, the false hardness of your face when you get serious, when you sing your hymns, those hymns you don’t understand, your chin that is sometimes rock-like, but more often, I guess, like a vegetable, that chin of yours, Max, which is so typical, so archetypical that now I suspect it’s your chin that brought you here, that was your downfall. And then you and I will be able to talk again, or we will talk for the first time, but before that we’ll have to roll about, take off our clothes and furl them around our necks, or around the necks of the dead—those who live in the motionless scroll.”
(The guy is crying, and it looks like he’s trying to speak, but in fact he’s just whimpering: the movements of his cheeks and his covered lips are spasms produced by his crying).
“As the gangsters say, it’s nothing personal, Max. Of course, that statement contains an element of truth and an element of falsehood. It’s always something personal. We have come through a time tunnel unscathed because it’s something personal. I chose you because it’s something personal. Naturally I had never seen you before. You never did anything to harm me personally. I say that to put your mind at rest. You never raped me. You never raped anyone I know. It’s even possible that you never raped anyone at all. It’s not something personal. Maybe I’m sick. Maybe all this is a nightmare that neither you nor I is having, although it’s hurting you, although the pain is real and personal. And yet I suspect that the end will not be personal. The end: extinction, the gesture that will bring all this irreparably to a close. And personally or impersonally, you and I will enter my house again, and look at my pictures (the Prince and the Princess), drink beer and get undressed, and I will feel your hands again clumsily stroking my back, my ass, my crotch, looking for my clitoris perhaps, but not knowing exactly where it is, I will undress you again, and take your cock in both hands and say, You’re so big, when in fact you’re not so big, Max, and that is something you ought to know by now, and I’ll put it in my mouth again, and suck you like I bet you’ve never been sucked before, and then I’ll take off all your clothes and let you take off mine, one hand busy with my buttons, a glass of whiskey in the other, and I’ll look you in the eyes, those eyes I saw on television (and will see again in dreams), the eyes I chose you for, and once again I’ll tell you, I’ll tell your sickening electric memory that it’s nothing personal, and even then I’ll have my doubts, I’ll feel cold as I do now, I’ll try to remember every word you said, even the most insignificant, but none of them will be any consolation.”
(The guy jerks his head again, nodding. What is he trying to say? Impossible to tell. His body, or rather his legs, are subject to a curious phenomenon: sometimes they are covered with a sweat as abundant as the sweat on his forehead, especially on the inner sides, sometimes the skin seems to be cold, from the groin to the knees, and takes on a bumpy texture, if not to the touch at least to the eye).
“Your words, I admit, were kind. Nevertheless, I fear that you did not give sufficient thought to what you were saying. And even less to what I was saying. You should always listen carefully, Max, to what women say while they’re being fucked. If they don’t speak, fine, there’s nothing to listen to, and you’ll probably have nothing to think about, but if they do, even if it’s only a murmur, listen to their words and think about them, think about their meanings, think about what they express and leave unexpressed, try to understand what it is they really signify. Women are murdering whores, Max, they’re monkeys stiff with cold watching the horizon from a sick tree, they’re princesses searching for you in the darkness, crying, examining the words that they will never be able to say. In misunderstanding we live and plan the cycles of our life. For your friends, Max, in that stadium, which is shrinking in your memory now like a symbol of the nightmare, I was just some weird kind of hooker, a spectacle after the spectacle, reserved for a few spectators who had danced a conga with their tee shirts furled around their necks or their waists. But for you I was a princess on the Gran Avenida, shattered now by wind and fear (so that in your mind the avenue has become a time tunnel), the trophy reserved specially for you after a night of collective magic. For the police I will be a blank page. No one will ever understand my words of love. And you, Max, do you remember anything I said while you were screwing me?”
(The guy moves his head, clearly signaling assent, and his moist eyes, his tense shoulders, his stomach, his legs that jerk and jerk whenever she looks away, struggling to get free, his throbbing jugular, all say yes.)
“Do y
ou remember I said the wind? Do you remember I said the underground streets? Do you remember I said you are the photograph? No, you really don’t remember, do you? You were too drunk and too busy with my tits and my ass. And you had no idea, otherwise at the first opportunity you’d have been out of here like a shot. You’d like to get out of here now, wouldn’t you, Max? Your image, your double, running across the garden, jumping over the fence, disappearing up the street, striding away like a middle distance runner, still half undressed, humming one of your hymns to bolster your courage, and then, after running for twenty minutes, turning up breathless in the bar where the rest of your group or club or squad or gang or whatever it’s called are waiting for you, drinking a mug of beer and saying, Guys you’re never going to believe what happened to me, I nearly got killed, some fucking whore from the suburbs, from the far side of the city and time, a whore from the fucking beyond who saw me on TV (we were on TV!) and took me home on her motorbike and sucked my dick and spread her legs for me and said words that were mysterious at first but then I understood them, no, I felt them, this whore said words I could feel in my liver and my balls, at first they sounded innocent or like she was hot for me or moaning because I was nailing her hard, but the thing is, guys, after a while they didn’t sound so innocent, what I mean is, she didn’t stop murmuring or whispering while I rode her, and that’s normal, isn’t it, but this wasn’t normal, there was nothing normal about it, a whore who whispers while she’s being fucked, OK, but then I heard what she was saying, I heard her fucking words plowing like a boat through a sea of testosterone, and I’m telling you guys, that supernatural voice made the sea of semen shudder and shrink away, the sea disappeared, leaving the sea floor exposed and the coast all dry, just stones and mountains, cliffs, ranges, dark crevices moist with fear, the boat sailing on over that emptiness, and I saw it with my own two eyes, my own three eyes, and I said, It’s all right, it’s all right, honey, shitting myself, petrified, and then I stood up, trying to look normal, all jittery but trying to hide it, and said I was going to the bathroom to siphon the python or take a dump, and she looked at me like I’d recited John fucking Donne, guys, or Ovid or something, and I walked backward keeping my eyes on her, still seeing that boat sailing on imperturbably through a sea of nothingness and electricity, as if planet Earth was being reborn and I was the only witness to its birth, but who was I witnessing for, the stars I guess, and when I got to the corridor, beyond the range of her gaze and her desire, instead of opening the bathroom door, I crept to the front door and crossed the garden, saying a silent prayer, and jumped the wall and started running up the street like the last runner from Marathon, bringing news not of victory but of defeat, the runner nobody listens to or congratulates or greets with a bowl of water, but he gets there alive, guys, and learns his lesson: Don’t enter that castle, Don’t follow that path, Don’t venture into that territory. Even if you’re singled out. Even if everything is against you.”