The scorn of the beautiful is a cunning poison. From a high window, to look out across a snow-covered city, to lose faith in all but this moment of recorded snow. Eyes close and memory makes it welcome, pearl falling through space. The wind lifts a page from the desk, down the hall a door closes on a voice singing with pure happiness. One can ask or one can choose to never know. For now, at least, the balance holds, the world’s axis like an icicle to spike the spin from day to night. the static blistered his sign off and she was left not knowing if he had gone to pee or pray. She tapped her finger against the glass-fronted photo and concluded it didn’t much matter. Looking outside she watched the snow blowing sideways over the seaward wall. Could he have chosen a more inconvenient time to declare his love?
She has labored in her cave of woe, turfed out a small world so that such choices must announce themselves at the front gate, not come swimming moonlit and satin-tongued to blindside her with the chimes let off their leash. He has come to dwell among you, this killer of many Jews, dreaming his dream of New Nuremberg at the jungle’s edge. She was certain this was the breakthrough. The only love she wished to serve was wide as mountains and drifting like a gulf of ashes over the plains of Mittel-Europa.
At night the flare-lights from the industrial park tint the river a fleeting red. If the dawn brings the predicted rain what little evidence there is will vanish. No one, however, speaks or moves with any discernible hurry. It could all be a study in tone of voice, a slow motion chess game. His new friend, the detective, winds up the makeshift second degree. The security guard who called in the body is toeing the wire of damn or be damned. He would like to be helpful, he really would, but the possibility of a scolding from either side is making him a man of few words. There’s the second child on the way, the new girlfriend reminding him he’s still a man despite what all the world might say. Two footprint trails: one leading down from the wire fence, the other up from the river. They met halfway and one became a corpse. The detective smiles and it isn’t pretty. If I could get more than a grunt and denial, imagine my delight. Even his socks are a contradiction. And dawn, and rush hour, and predicted rain: the makings of another depressing day. The detective and the tourist stop outside the Lady Hamilton Bar, calle La Plata Minor number 17, and the detective allows himself a paternal word. Every question you ask brings your vacation nearer its end. Diplomat manqué, falling as he does, midway poet and thug. Don’t get too interested, okay? Believe me, no one else is.
The river is too wide to ever sleep. It conveys an underworld of cargo from one sad place to the next, the trivial and the lightweight what it chooses to reveal to distracted passersby, the occasional professional watcher. Like a woman whose pregnancy is measured in brand new hours, the river hurries on, troubling the city it moves through and past. He looks down and sees the moon, domed and fraying on black water, wills himself to gaze into the depths behind it, a failure so disorienting he might weep if left alone much longer. He imagines the neighborhood submerged, the stones whitening like death, the rest withering like the glide of oil from some unseen rupture. Old men are young again, their trophies line the paneled walls, a dolphin noses at a drowning bear, something in the eyes it recognizes but cannot understand. Painters go mad in these nights, and the river calls them to their windows so they might see how short they’ve fallen, how much remains that no gift of time and sacrifice can conquer. Despair begins with silence, with the false promises made to oneself, that one will spring and thrash to wakefulness before the river notices it has you, midstream and fathomless.
Across the river Buenos Aires is showering with her eyes closed. Like a child in an old-fashioned convent school, bathing in the sin-repelling sheath of a soap-drunk nightgown. Blind and numb to pace oneself to heaven, merely to graze past the citizens vigorously arresting one another on morals charges or a stray thought left loughing too long, dipping its provocative toes in the martial fountains. As grim as Madrid under the Philips, furnaces and faggots, and sunlight banned as far as Dover or the lost worlds of contested pillars, windmills at the ocean’s very edge. Dead hair under a guilty crown, gold on gold. Combed and plaited or hammered and cut into a shadowbox skyline of minarets and fletchery. Motorcycle boots stomp down the latched door, stumbling into one of Clio’s many passages, this one not so cunning as to escape detection. In Lisboa a mad young king made mad by grief and loveloss and forty decades on, the resurrection of the love, the grief, the madness. The passage links them, melds the colors of their ghosts, a lightshow fluid over the lacework of the hedges, the weeping fracture of underground walls. The one a meddling saint, a troublemaking angel, the other a champion cock-swallower, sometime chanteuse and yes, in the purr of the wintry ‘40s, another meddling saint. Everyone pays for the mistakes of the mighty and revenge and gratitude are equally suspect.
Does he care enough, he asks himself, to stop making trouble for his friends? Let the dead bury the dead, let the stars brighten the alleys down to the harbor. What man in his right mind would choose Montevideo for a winter’s getaway? Plenty do, so rephrase the rhetorical. The fog seeps through the heaviest macintosh, clings like cobweb to the sweater’s weave, licks its chill to the very bone. Ones options present themselves like worn out Furies. Fuck, drink, suicide (or the leisurely contemplation of all three). Philosophy prowls the restaurants and bars like a shipwrecked survivor, tossed up by the coldblooded Atlantic, and falling in love with every new phantom. The detective and the tourist dine on gigantic steaks. Mushrooms, garlic, and onions swimming in their glaze, the carafe set sparkling with candleflare each time the kitchen door swings open. On the wall an outsize photograph of the establishment’s founding partner, refugee from Calabria sometime between 1902-08, fleeing a murder he barely committed to a future as cattle baron, with a few more killings piled up beside his fortune. The wine, the heavy meat, the morbid lights outside, time for a turn along the bridge. The detective dabs his chin, says goodnight with a bit of observation. I know what they say about Chilean women, but the real heartbreakers are all right here, in my own hometown.
Despair, amnesia, hope. The railway runs past the cattle ranch, and one passes the time as much with fifteen stapled pages of Marx & Engels as with a comic book homage to the Blue Division, the boys of Galicia or Asturias freezing their balls off outside the Stalingrad tractor factory. Who is She? Which She is our she? Does it sound or sense any better in Castilian? Are we any less men if we trip over our shoelaces on the steps down to hell? Stream the latitudes, let the weights drop off at the end, shave the minutes, the degrees, till any record stands to be broken. A wasp’s nest in the map room. Orderlies continue about their business, any delay requires a filled-out form and best policy dictates the doling out of trauma, otherwise the whole operation would be sandstormed by every minor apocalypse. To turn away from gold is an admirable thing.