Solange

I

(She imagines herself gazed at by the ocean)

Solange had overheard him, whispering into the mouthpiece, thinking her fast asleep.
-Go to the airport. Get out. Don’t look back. Just go. Now.
When Arturo lay down beside her much later, she was still awake. He touched his fingers to her hip, and she sighed as though stirring. His breath was coming in low wheezes, as though his chest was thick with phlegm and swallowed tears. When she was certain he was asleep she slipped naked from the bed and went out onto the balcony. The night was pitch black and she could sit with her toes touching the railing, knowing she was invisible. Three stories down, the Avenue of Sighing Bears lit up briefly as a trio of armored cars sped by, shedding their holiday fluorescence.
She was thinking of his story about his sister’s accident and his remorse over his possible responsibility. The logic of his narrative had struck her as strangely reversed, methodically obscure. When he got to the part about the car in the lake she had frowned slightly, hoping he would stop to clarify. But he hadn’t noticed.

*****

Maidenly passions: zinc, oysters, nickel, eels. Deep readings revealed nothing. Being able at last to imagine it, she had then been overwhelmed with the desire to do it.
Her first brush with death.
Her first full-lipped, if tongueless kiss.
On the same afternoon.
Calling to her friends over her shoulder, she ran her bicycle into the back of a bus and came within inches of being decapitated. Dazed, she rinsed her skinned knees and the palms of her bruised hands in the public fountain at the entrance to the municipal sculpture garden. He had approached her and addressed her in the pinched polite accent of a foreign exchange student, his tourist’s map spread helplessly wide. When the rain began falling, some two hours later, young Spadafora bent and kissed her on the mouth. Together with the rain she steamed
his glasses with her cadet’s maidenly passion. Watching the raindrops, like teardrops, like lemmings, from the statue’s nose, she spoke the incantation:
-If you can imagine it, do it.

*****

At certain hours the river seemed to stand still, while the bridges drifted in slow measured progress towards the sea. Gazing down Solange began to lower the anchor of her memory. Latin foam seethed round her waist. Her cousin Luis, who had clipped first his own fingernails and then hers, who had sucked her thumb, who had acted out her nightmares under the Amsterdam coverlet. Buttoning her up, he had rested his hands on her knees and whistled sonata-soft. Scarlatti or Prokofiev? She remembered the one and mythologized the other. Love was love and her body was part of that, the one she looked at in the tall mirror, breathing in the perfection of what it shone back into the room.
Now, before she grows up, before the worms get at it.

*****

Above the bed the bucktoothed poster leered. Some sort of very local Christ. The rictus, the agony, universally recognizable as Roman Catholic, the savagery only partially diminished by the wounded pallor, taken overall. She knelt before the Monsignor. When Nestor touched his hands to her shaved head she could feel the disgust trembling from his fingers into her skull.
His courage wavered at the melody from her lips. Contrition this perfect reminded him of nothing he had ever heard before. He wished the music to end but her oval mask was a paralyzing beauty in the boxed-in gloom. He held his tongue. The sound of rain grew relentless, as though it were something other than a summer’s afternoon storm. He listened, leaning slightly to one side, and inclined his head, a parody of prayer. The wings of doubt beat above the balustrade, a flutter of the void.

*****

Solange was small and thus photographed neatly, even and often as a blur moving in a rush towards the lens, or halved as she moved off-camera, leaving behind the black and white of a ponytail, shoulder, arm, breast, waist, hip, leg and foot in perfect mid-air point. She was loyal as a dog, fickle as a cat, and when in bloom her beauty so outshone that of the nearest contenders that lovers were raised in their own estimation by the mere fact of knowing her, of suffering her gentle ridicule should they forget themselves and open a door for her to pass through. Of her beauty they chose to remember only this: her hair was black as anarchy ; her eyes glimmered ebony slitwise when she laughed ; her mouth was a mimic’s treasure.

*****

She was erratically well read but despised overt displays of second-hand knowledge and played dumb as much out of genuine modesty as to catch out the phonies with their misattributions and blurbfed quotations, the algebraic complexities of plagiarism adding nothing to the repertory.
Towards the end they had agreed that it was a mistake to have ever become lovers … but on the one occasion when Lazaro vexed his very real belief that be that as it may, he would not give back those days and seasons in her arms for all the tea in China, the look she gave him was loaded with such unspoken anger that it was a pain not easy to bear.
She forgave slowly but completely.

*****

Laughter echoing back through early morning river mist. The Assyrian dumbshow in the tubercular ward. ‘Come and get me’. How rare the person who can articulate the difficult grotesqueries of genius without incurring sneers and laughter. Solange thought it one afternoon and scribbled it quickly down, pleased at the words beginning with g.
Years later she asked Alfonso for the truth. He had been grateful for the chance and cheerfully confessed. Yes, he had often taken girls to the lowest level of the underground garage. Huddled together in the backseat, in the dark, they could hear and feel the deep waters rushing beneath them. Fairy tales at the time, though it was real enough. And now?
Returning to his rooms, he finds the concubine of the evening bent in quiet labor, vacuuming hairs from the bathtub. Hand in hand and face to face, let the truth be known. Come Ducky, it’s time for yum-yum.

*****

She turns the pages carefully. As yet she is uncertain what she hopes to find. She can only hope that she will know it when she sees it. In the photograph which takes up an upper quarter of the right hand page, Cardinal Gargola is shown sultry and whorish, quite pretty in a flimsy sort of way. Flirtatious among the barbarians, and to what end? The librarian has been helpful, his fingers sliding on the satin of her spine. As he answered her questions with erudite suggestiveness, she shrugged her shoulders with a regal chill. He had winced (it was ardor flaked with epilepsy), for she reminded him, or so he would choose to repeat several times later that evening, of his vanished wife …. or was it his dead sister? ….. or his remarried unfaithful aunt? When it came to the question of women, he knew damn well he had been banished, in perpetuity, to the wrong, the unlucky side of the tracks. Still, no harm in trying.

*****

Love, between bitterness and a frozen river stained pink with indigenous, with conscripted, with imperial blood. Amere, amour, Amur. A lonely professor’s private joke, foisted on … yes? The bookseller looks up to purr a price, imagining as he does so, what sort of man she would permit to probe the lively corners of her exotic hothouse mind. Solange smiles and relinquishes a half-nod, moving away towards the magazines. She flips and glances at random, her sadness a vergilian guide. Inexperienced lovers, bucking furiously to be let in and just as furiously to get back out again. She steps to the register, counting her steps, noiseless, on the greasy tiles. A gust of rain shudders the window and the horizon dims its lights.

*****

There are three words on the page. Leandro assumes she’s done this before. She says something about a game, responding to what she takes to be a mild flirt but he reassures her on both counts. Go ahead, he says. She turns the page sideways, her squint pure vanity but now she no longer cares, realizing he loves another. The word is ‘zone’. Headline: Zuleika Ogles Nude Essayist. He widens his eyes in exasperation. Please be serious. The word is ‘Yucatan’. Headline: You Unwrap Crisis And Take A Nap. Better she guesses and takes the opportunity. Humor me, tell me about your girlfriend. She, being whom? Oh, the one we speak of as Straw Girl? Who also speaks prose on the odd occasion? Lusts after the equatorial prize for bitchiness? Crimped with virtue, the trump-card of the swinging pole-axed pole-star? Likes her desolation straight from the dying bottle? The redhaired girl standing at the top of the stairs? He puts his arm around her to hold open the door and she leans, so that he notices it, almost right up against him. She feels the chance to throw herself on his mercy, she feels it slipping away.

*****

Time to wake up?
Solange fought off consciousness, slipping farther through the morphine hole. Torture my slaves or let me torture yours. The challenge echoed back unanswered, her enemies behind the closet door, awash in their relentless murmur and balled, like ineffectual spiders. If she did not wake, if she slept on through the outrage? Better to be branded on the belly, the palms, the soles of her feet, then be cast out naked into those halls. River mist again, the fungus smell of false nostalgia. Come back, little shithead! little angel! But no, Angelito had slipped down the rungs and scampered away, clutching the precious talisman of her diary. The next morning she had accused him, pausing during the squad’s first jog along the blue lane. She lifted her skirt and revealed the metamorphosis, like Alice fallen through the rabbit hole. Hauled up before the committee she pleaded with them to punish her, to correct her undisciplined ways. Sensing her sarcasm, the adults, veterans of purges and betrayals themselves, barked anger and filled their eyes with unaccustomed tears.

*****

In shade and out of the wind or on a station platform and stripped for all to see. Which, or what, was it? The command, the phrase, the nonsense-rhyme of power.
The illusion of every miracle-worker. An easy step from getting a drunk man sober to making a dead man breathe. Onscreen, the object of such baited breath. Five girls ; eyes closed ; hair bound up with clips and ribbons, disheveling into wisps of pretty marginalia ; white-shirted, cream-vested, black-tied, naked from the waist down ; their heads pillowed against a damask waterfall of changeable jade. One by one, they open their eyes. They watch Solange moving on the stairs and pierce her child’s tuneless ear with the counterpoint of Silling. It’s not a dream, not a fantasy scenario, it seems, however improbably, to be a memory.

////////// * \\\\\\\\\\

II

(The words made a mistake
Where I said yes
I should have said no
and each time
I say no
I should say yes

The carpenter, pencil behind his ear, is taking measurements
A helicopter buzzes the balconies
And now, soldiers with shaved heads are patrolling the streets)

Her first inkling that all was not well was the overnight influx of tourists into the warehouse district, a neighborhood traditionally shunned by all but the blear-eyed
pedants and the more desperate realtors. Riots had broken out in two parts of the city and the seeming spontaneity of the combustions was regarded by the authorities as a smokescreen, an illusion to mask what was evidently the conspiracy of every conceivable force of darkness currently available. Students, workers, and other sore losers. Order, the loudspeakers boomed, would be immediately and relentlessly restored. Nevertheless, fully a third of the city was now without electricity, the only functioning telephone service was in the hands of the military police, and vehicles appeared to be backfiring with sinister frequency. Solange listened with sympathetic anger to an intense young man who was asking to be addressed as Commandante Cienfuegos, his headband soaked in theatrical red dye. It seemed that when no white rag could be found for use as a flag of truce, one of the younger students had obliged with her kitty-cat rain-cape, fixing it to a borrowed tennis racquet and clambering to a point visible on top the barricades. She was promptly shot through the breast by a showoff marksman and fell to the wrong side of the barrier, eyes closing on the cloudless blue sky, heart beating out to the wisps of fading gunfire, gaudy funfire. At the end of the Commandante’s recitation she found herself less sympathetic but still angry.

*****

Behind the drinks cabinet a fading print caught Eduardo’s attention. A single sentry box guards a lumpen cathedral, the letters chiseled with a cartoonist’s hand:
F. I. N. A. N. C. E. In the background a showdown between a herd of cowering elephants and a roaring red tumescent mouse. He looked and found the signature.
Cruikshant? The name was as unknown to him as were the politics being satirized.
He refilled his glass and walked out onto the balcony. Below him, stretching away to the white-capped glimmers on the ocean, the city lights were beginning to burst
in cinematic chain reaction. An hour later he lay down beside the sleeping, murmuring girl and prayed that he might die in his sleep. That night, despite so much practice, no dreams came.

*****

On the soft radio a government spokeswoman was describing the effects of a live grenade thrown onto a moving, crowded escalator. Sitting up in bed, the curtains drawn and the lights out Solange watched the commotion in the harbor. A yacht, caught in the latest rain squalls, had rolled over onto a sandbar. Earlier, returning slowly home at what should have been rush hour, she had not been prepared for the horizonless carpet of bayoneted communards. And still it wasn’t ended, the radio pronounced softly. Mercury was rising. She turned over and lay still, eyes open, lips dry.

*****

Mimi singed his wrist and apologized, hauling the criminal cigarette lugubriously up to his lips and seething out the words around his suck of the damp filter: speak rubbish or forever hold your. She whispered an okay it’s alright and they resumed their vigil before the television. Searching the outside chance. A last supper of rogues, time-servers, ass-lickers, trapped like vermin in the camera’s public eye. A well-known name, intoned by heavy little pirate: he’s died of self-induced concussion in his holding cell. Just like Gina, he said. Gina who defied gravity by hanging herself with her dancer’s underpants while in custody. She caught him as he fell, his forehead inches from the corner of the coffeetable. He laughed, coughed, attempted a recovery, discovered a sob and moaned an impotent fuckfuckfuck as she crabwalked him to the bed. She turned off the lights, leaving the television on, and the radio at the lowest subliminal hum she could manage. Vanish, don’t vanish, stay, now, there. She let her own silent rage bleed out, a fuck fuck fuck against the lilywhites and olivedrabs, against the men with the hyphenated names which streamed behind them like holy banners on the wind. On the bed a full-length mirror and a Kodak. From where? From when? She sponged, traced, joked, giggled, only half-remembering. Wild-eyed, the detective sliding from the couch to the floor. As she hits him again. Asking for it. His assault on her vanity had been frontal, explicit, deliberate. Look, they’d said over the telephone, look this is something you’ll be able to tell your children. You will be able to tell them that you were there! That you saw the last gleaming DeHavilland buzz the city! And a sweating Patigonian necrophile unbuttoning his vest. Something’s been going
around. What have you been hearing. Take it as it comes. You only go round once.
I can’t believe it. It’s okay. What is? To let go. To let go? To let go, period.

*****

The teargas lingered in the Plaza of the Martyrs of 18– something or other. Gilberto jogged easily along, then turned into the quiet garlic-heaven of Callejon Alcibiades. Here, at least, the windows remained unshuttered. He found it as he had left it. Kinema Kino Katty. He paid without asking what was showing. The auditorium, as he had suspected, was quiet, packed and crowded with couples, quartets, and many many singles, a good number of them desperately disregarding the no-smoking signs. The credits rolled. And juttered to a stop. A newsreel came on and the Pavlov-ballet began, as singles, couples, and quartets rose and made for the exit. Fear hung like a cigar-fed fart in a crowded elevator. He lit a cigarette and sat where he was, his eyes watering relentlessly as the newsreel reeled. It was the usual dress-up. The Chief of the Naval Staff rumbled and cajoled, padding his speech as though paid by the word, each syllable pronounced with convincing resignation. A half an hour later he stood in the shade, listening to the sirens wheeling, blocks away. He’d paid for a ticket for a film by Noriko Yoshitsune. He laughed aloud, gazing at the stub, realizing he’d read the comic book, a graphic splash and splutter of punctilious nipples and cloud-devouring squid. What had been the heroine’s tear-jerking and relenting ambiguity in the penultimate chapter?
-…’fat monkeys arbitrate the snow, Keiko’s mournful flute gone with the morning mist…’

*****

The events of the day, lavish as any she could remember, with cut-aways to ceremonies all around the country, were solemnly enacted on every television station. Solange and Ignacio sat with the volume on, occasionally touching each other’s wrist or hand in response to this or that snowflecked image. On the coffee table between them they had the heavy little black radio, tuned cautiously low to the newest pirate station.
Onscreen the cortege penetrates the fog, moving with geriatric stealth. A train emerges from its reflection on the wintry lake, the ice sheen a flattered crystal of chemical blue. The faces were grotesquely familiar, familiar also with a sweetness which, held, tongued, hovered over and internalized, made that sweetness bitter. Shady public servants, beating down the prices of sick ponies. Out of her intoxication a long speech on the erotic character of butter. She had learned to distrust those who made their living by ceaselessly warning against sin. A sudden static-ridden voice, harsh, sentimentally touchy, discussing the finer points of the uvular grip. After a station break, a cavalry parade and the students’ string quartet.

*****

Television on, sound off, pirate radio providing disrespectful voice-over. A member of the official ‘reprimanded ones’, with his hilariously notched gun and his clear lack of remorse. This was how it was? You propose to tell me how it was? I fucked this many? I drank this much? I killed this many? The jagged sound of distance.
That high-pitched wailing, so visceral and immediate when it came to being a stranger. And the matter of fact, overly-modulated voice, describing the lowering of the caged baby prostitutes into the rainy street. There was always some corner of the world that was having a rougher go of it than one’s own backyard. And there was nothing saccharine in the comfort this information provided. If one chose to believe it it was not merely because gargoyles told you so.

*****

Solange turned towards the television again, fever basking behind her eyes, throat sore and head aching from coffee, cigarettes, alcohol. All the young cadets reminded her of the ineffable boy, hurtling single-mindedly towards his own immolation. Julio had wrinkled his nose, pushed her hair behind her ears, and dropped to his knees to fasten his mouth on her surprised thigh. She laughed and put her hands on his shoulders but he held on, sucking like a leech. On the radio a pirate girl foamed at the mouth. Slowly, slowly, the cadet moved towards her center, straining to reach the burning underneath her kilt. His had been a natural talent. Love, or lust, or simply being kids together, chums, playmates, gathering up the shreds the grown-ups had tired of.
-Come and get me, cross the ice with your baggage-train.
She started up from her stupor laughing.

*****

She’s seen it, the great worm that burrows out the vacant face of God. The old woman, in the grocery store on Calle Castor, not even stylishly dressed to suggest some bourgeois alliance to the Powers That Be And Which Must Not Be Mocked. The old woman in the grocery store who said:
‘The sooner they shoot the ‘skis and the ‘steins the better off we’ll all be.’
Prospero spins the dial, placing a call to the heart of the city. Onscreen, tanks do an elephant dance, swerving this way and that with unsuspected grace. The military police, waistbanded in white, line up, saluting and to action, no messing around, the city’s courtesan bridge straightening its sanitary ribbons. Holding hands with Mateo on the balcony, earlier in the week. They should have known. A taxi backfired, starting up a covey of doves and they had both jumped. So long. It had been so long. An eternity, as long now as she could remember. And now she found herself fascinated by the sighs of wounded birds, the frightened singing of those nearest death.

*****

The pirate voice weaves its commentary with outlaw delight, tempered by the knowledge that it really really isn’t enjoying all this. Solange watches as grizzled, uniformed axe-murderers kiss the milk-white cheeks of infants. She was replaying one of their conversations of the previous evening, when they had both been drunk, but not yet wasted to the vicious maelstrom.
-Your eyes speak to me, Roberto said, of deeps and wonders and lovely, fantastic, morbid things.
-And you, she said, needn’t try so hard.
Outside, a bottle exploded on the curb.

*****

The mist of the morning’s teargas could still be felt in the upper leaves of the sad polluted birches. A slight sense of goodbye. Despite herself, or, more specifically, despite the soft-voiced government spokeswoman on the radio, she had woken with a vague remembrance of hope. Dawnlight queering the street, unpricking lonely windows to a lazy nostalgic fade. The first cup of coffee brought with it the warmth of her father’s war stories. Her love for him, her long-buried contempt for them. What did you do in the war, Daddy? Stories he’d read, stories he’d heard from his brothers-in-law, Uncles Eufemio, Carmino, Jackie, stories they’d heard from someone’s friend who’d known the sister of the original teller of the tale. And so on. Five years of latent, hot-housed war, followed by decades of whining and fingerpointing and resentment and covering up. And, most of all, misplaced bravado. But the stories still floated, knocked silly from their frames but there, like teargas in a windless morning’s air. The painter who had cut his throat above the washbowl. Five years later the porcelain still pink. So yes, she whispered, only half and that not the better half. She had, she supposed, incorporated the dreams of a battalion of others. And Daddy’s dying words. Gone out of himself, gone out, but not out, but not back in, quoting himself quoting himself quoting his mother. Her grandmother’s anguished last: ‘make the pain go away’. The radio strived towards a non-ideological sing-song. Not Mendelssohn, certainly, but nevertheless, the oblivious conductress patted her trimmed glory, planting her silver heel till it shrieked.

*****

Where the public park dipped gently in like a goddess’s navel, Solange sat on one of the many benches and watched the schoolgirls playing field hockey. Her girlhood had not been nearly so rough, she could not recall ever having shrieked with an enthusiasm as startling as theirs. Every ten minutes or so a triad of helicopters
passed overhead on their way between the hospital and the stadium. She did not look up as the overdriven air roared like a shattering of stars. Behind her a taxi slowed to a crawl. From its radio a saxophone honked: an evil ascending creep creep hiss. Turning around she examined the driver. His mirrored shades swiveled slowly from the schoolgirls to her and then back again. The crawling taxi lurched as it bumped the curb. Sparks flew on the public road.

*****

The first day without curfew. On the sidewalks, in the rambling out-of-doors markets, ravishers cried their sunny ‘Duce! Duce!’ No one broke the joyful noise with arch, prescient, indefensible questions such as: how many pins does it take to hold together the head of a socialist angel? Solange stood and watched, listening to the tourists, pretending to be jaded as they attempted to translate among themselves: I think this is what they’re singing? ‘I met a priest coming from a something / lamenting the something of the Lord’s tum-tum-thing / when questioned as to Paradise / he drank the scotch … but not the ice’ I think that’s what they’re singing. A television set, deposited upon a barstool and extension-corded from out the bar to the public sidewalk, blared and flashed, the violence of its images made incongruous by the sheepish milling. She felt only mild surprise when the severed head uttered out of its damaged mouth the clear syllables of her name.

////////// * \\\\\\\\\

III

(Then he went, without saying goodbye, perhaps on tour, but never to return I believe; perhaps much later to dangle from some whore’s rafter or at the end of a silken parachute illustrating some mysterious law. But his undertow haunted her body for a season, celebrated in absinthe and funereal silences; many profited from this experience, many coupled through her with the wiry loins and loafing smile)

In the crowded, rain-steamed café opposite the bookstore Felipe sat and waited. He sipped from a small bottle of carbonized sun, with an antibiotic chaser. ‘The more there is of you, the less there is of me’. The Sphinx had returned his message. Peering into the vortex of implausibles, couched in the ponderous words of epistolary love, the ultimate sacrifice: denuding himself of the security of lies. He had lost track of time. He had stepped from the gangplank into the midst of the abstract town. Looking outside, he unbeclouded the window pane with his jacket sleeve and watched with detached interest, as a well-dressed young lady slipped on the wet grass and vanished rapidly down the slope and out of sight. He listened for the sound of brakes, clarified his order to the cheerful waitress. He glanced around him, through cigarette smoke, at the near-tangibility of dank perfume and deodorant. Behind the folded newspapers, a gun, a fondled nipple, a braindead priest gargling his specificity of pain, a budding fascist, a runaway wife. Across the street Solange moved along the sidewalk. She paused at the crosswalk and scratched the dog’s ears, dropping a coin into the cup of pencils hung round its neck.

*****

Things seemed, despite the silence’s implication of deliquescence, things seemed to be lurching rapidly up and out of control. She had seen, or thought she had seen, from the grimeladen window of the overhead express train, something weird.
Two children, sixish, sevenish, brother and sister perhaps, were prodding a small fire with sticks. A shape began to form in the dancing flames. It writhed in and out,
trapped in what appeared to be doll’s clothes. Each time it approached the blackened perimeter the children would prod it back into the smoking orange pyre.
She tapped her nails along the hollow metal railing as she walked from the Meridiano Station, the line from Faludi’s operetta whining over and over in her head. ‘Sun-hating fire-eater’. With its engine running and the circular spin of its red and blue lights occulting rhythmically off glass and rain puddles, an ambulance hulked large among the yellows and greens of the taxi stand. Death’s white shell, waiting. Its siren was turned off and so Faludi went on burbling in her head as she crossed through the taxis and headed for the steps of the bank, her prowl crossing at the pre-determined angle.

*****

Sitting up late with her mother, she pored over the clues from an unremembered life. Her eye-color, according to her newly-issued Youth League papers, was ‘fatal amber’. She peered through the gloom at her mother, half-hidden in a fortress of bottles and cigarette butts, where she sat, nursing her arthritic knee and editing the letters of her dead friends. Solange stopped her ears to the generator’s drone. Outside they could hear the crowd returning, at peace with itself, having burnt down the nearby castle. She slipped her hand inside the leg of her loose woolen shorts and caressed the baby leech between her thighs. The courtship of her mother had ceased to be an emotional pogrom. From day to day, as though forever in pursuit of a temporary visa.

*****

Miguel sinks his teeth into her glove. He purrs between her urchinette’s fetching wastrel knees. He swallows silk and strokes her blond engine, with just a touch of serrated metal to cure her ignorance, prime her knowledge. She uses the word ‘folly’ without irony, chiding the saxonisation of her invisible surroundings. She is no great admirer of Dante’s theology of lechery. She can only pat Miguelito’s submissive head, wondering without much emotion what has possessed him.

*****

The blind racket of the seagulls, blind racket of the subway cars. Daydreams shot through with interruptions from those Solange sincerely regretted regarding as her inferiors. Her first love affair successfully concluded, she reveled in the pointless beauty of bad weather. The sheltering doorway reeked of a dog’s wet fur, the loosed Germanic perfume of her rainwet hair. In a tea room, flushed and giddy in the aftermath of the triumphant audition, she spent her last two bills on a reward of champagne. On the other side of the room a blue-chinned playboy doted on the quarterhorse girls, before turning his attentions to her.
-Why don’t you come home with me?
-Because I don’t know you.
-Why don’t you sleep with me then?
-Because you are too well known.
-Well pun me biblical, sweetheart!

*****

In the bar, the handful of customers watched the slow motion replay of the accident across the ocean, televised and archived with momentous good timing. Overhead the balloon veered wildly in and out of the steadily rising fireball, expelling small gobbets of flame which hurtled towards the earth with a decidedly human shrieking.
Despite herself, she felt put out by so much attention being directed at the flickering box.

*****

She waits for Carlos near the shrimp and pepper-roll stand, her mind turned inwards like a cinema: ‘Ten Days That Shook The World’ with a cast of dozens.
She unzips her purse and fishes, glassy-eyed. She is looking for her compact,
wishing to spy on those she suspects of spying on her. She is self-conscious to a fault
(and wonderfully so, Roberto is fond of gushing). She has an easy blush and is forever finding reasons to fill her cheeks with roses. The eyes she peers into are those any Narcissus would love, revealing the junksick journey through the morning’s difficult hours. Behind her the dormouse girls are all a-squeal,
slaughtering their native language with glib atrocities. And a block from where she stands, which is two blocks from the harbor, three blocks from the Independence monument, five blocks from the site of the vanished temple, Bernadette, the grieving bibliographer looks up from her desk, and out the rainwashed third-story window,
listening to the flutter of unread pages above the waterlogged courtyard. Her lover, she has just been informed, will not be visiting her that night. Was taking some time off, was in the process of ‘reconsidering’ her offer.

*****

Only he could have driveled such a bad patch of poetry and insisted on seeing it vanity-pressed under the title ‘Ballad of the Seasons: a love story’. Immediately Solange said:
-I’m drunk, I shouldn’t have said that. Forgive me.
From the other side of the turnstile Bartolomeo smiled and struck out at her. Reacting to the breeze of the stopping train she hit back with her purse. The catch, with its uptown modish slide, jammed shut on his hand, pinching and releasing. He yelped and stared down at his index finger, oozing a pearl of red. Neither of them moved. They were different categories of the same thing. The train clattered to a wheeze, the hiss of vacuum sucking at the automatic doors.
-I, he began.
-Love’s a dangerous word, she shushed, leaning, putting a finger to his parted lips.
Lovers strolled quickly past them, up the getaway tunnel. Beyond the lit exit a siren started up. He leaped the turnstile as she swayed backwards and away from him.
He stumbled, glassy-eyed. The station echoed with rapid, methodical footsteps.

*****

The first words from her lips to his ear: You waited so long I was starting to think you were just the latest in a long line of sissies. Bernardo woke with a jolt from a deep hum of cetaceous sleep, and rose to the level of dreams, this one forming briefly on the tableau vivant of grizzled old veterans of La Guerra Sucia and the domino table, hawking up dust in the chicken wire cantina and lying through cracked lips about their days of starlit pussy.

*****

Finding himself alone in a crowded room once more Tonio examined his conscience. The sudden afternoon darkness had led to a single discharge by the turret. It was less a question of being inclined towards darkness than of being disinclined towards light. Someone called out his number but he stayed where he was, leaning against the back wall, smoking. They would call him again, for he was one of the chosen. The brothel had borrowed its hierarchical structure from the Vatican, though its rubric remained strictly cabaret. Holding out her withered stump and proffering it for adoration the moonfaced singer held the crowd back with a limp authoritative fling of her good hand. Yes, he smiled to himself, Solange did resemble her sainted namesake, stainglassed in the next room.

*****

Putting his hand to his face in pursuit of a wayward lock of hair was when he first realized that his hand and sleeve were drenched in blood. An unnoticed, unremembered wound. He lay back on the couch trying to guess what portion of his arm was supplying the bitter liquid throb. He had been with someone. Gay, and in-season, and running at the mouth. In a street he’d forgotten the name of, dismissed out of a novice mind. They had been standing on the curb watching a torchlit procession, a demo of some kind. He had been half-hoping something dramatic would happen. Thinking this he quickly looked around for a less-exposed vantage point. Globules of fat exploded as the light rain hit the torches, letting off plumes of leathery smoke and a stench like princely darkness. If recklessness was a great waste, then playing it safe was the greater stupidity. Horacio huffed and puffed to himself. He must remember to write that down.

*****

By the seventh day there was still no let-up in the rain and it seemed as though entire districts had lapsed into silence. Less the silence of abandonment, of resignation, than that of watchful, mute apprehension. Alejandro read through his mail on the screened-in patio of Swan-Dive-Terrace. The waiter Leonidas, his longtime friend, had fallen ill and it was his handsome sullen son, Yvan or Cesar, who was busying himself with the coffees and teas and juices. After a prolonged hypnosis of his tomato juice he lit a cigarette and stirred milk absentmindedly into his coffee. As cigarette smoke hazed the already drenched and blurred horizon he fell into a dream of Solange. He imagined their next meeting. With his first sentence, jaunty yet reproachful, witty yet cruel, her composure would be left lying in tatters. When asked, tearfully, vibrato in a windmilled stillness, why precisely he wished to storm the gates of heaven he would smile and say.
-To torch it, to burn the palace down.
-And then?
-Oh, that would be enough. I shouldn’t wish to stay, you see. All those red crosses, all those drawn blinds.

*****

The first time Alvaro followed her she was leaving a diplomatic reception in the lobby of San Anselmo’s Hotel. Things had taken an ideological turn and various factions, tuxedos in streamers, were now slugging it out on the dance floor. Keeping an eye on her as she slid through the revolving doors he measured her gait, her direction, then turned back for another look at the soiree’s progressive chaos. Several vice consuls, attaches, intelligence operatives, cultural flunkies and their opposite numbers had lost it at the far end of the bar and had gone careening into mirrors, beneath tables, across barstools, and down the fatal black hole, blinking stoically its red ‘exit’. Outside, it was raining again, the city seeming to weep out its exhausted carnal uproar, a prevailing white excess sagging to a sogged closure. Following her, a complex of overlaid emotional labyrinths compelled him to an alien exposure. She did not seem to be aware of his puddle-flogging quickstep, or his low unmilitary humming. He followed her at a distance of thirty feet, into a church. It was one he passed often enough during the day but not one he had ever particularly noticed before. He did not particularly notice now. He watched her sleepwalking to a pause just beyond the enameled and ivoried 6th Station of the Cross. She crossed herself, bending quickly to touch one knee to the aisle, and stepped into the confessional booth. He followed her inside, knelt in the narrow space. Standing in the darkness of the closet she felt his breath upon her knees and whispered over his head:
-Assassinate me.
He could not bear the thought of her sullen beauty in the grip of another. He lifted her skirt.

*****

Bagged with rain the canvas sagged its dripping cradle. The stain on the metal table
spread as she backed away. A moment later Joaquin was coming up the stairs from the garden, calling out her name softly.
-Darling! Solange laughed, not moving.
-it’s been ages! What are you up to? In town for a convention of rapists?
As he stepped in under the umbrella his smile was guarded, but his sharpshooter’s eyes spoke volumes.

*****

In the shaved grass at the edge of the runway a large rabbit looked up with refugee’s eyes. Bars emptied as the sirens sounded, motet for guitar, strings, and an hysterical falsetto, like a gorgeous lobster of silk, shrieking in its furious bath. Stuck in a cage, one extreme was as good as another. Muttering platitudes beneath his breath, Pirata zipped his pants with priestly dignity. He unfastened her from the bedpost with a serenity she hoped would last and led her by the hand through the incipient doorway, down the premature corridor, past the pernicious malice of his tony parlor, and into a waiting light reflected off the sandbags, canned goods, and the pre-slung drip-dry hammock.

*****

She told herself she deserved it. She had had a nasty shock and needed a calmative.
The letter had been waiting for her when she returned the next morning. Reading her young friend’s accelerating words she experienced it as the worst moment of her life. Petra had, she wrote, found God and having found Him, she would follow. She was joining a commune of likeminded ‘brothers and sisters’, and a sprinkling of sinister-sounding ‘elders’, located not so very far away in the deceptively narrow,
one-way of Calle Calvino. The morning was sunny, but promising storms. Intermittent thunder shook the nails from the wood. It had been a nasty shock. She told herself she deserved it, as she stood in the small shelter alone. Her eyes betrayed an insular goldshot green. Secluded from the world, in pursuit of a private calendar of sin, she felt at home in the grove of copulating deer, ambivalent towards her in their musk and rain, indifferent even to the binocular shock of her snapped garter, her fiery plumage.

*****

And one night, drunk in Reinaldo’s arms, she wept and laughed and confessed. Fresh lemony light in the Starchart Bar and from beneath a cirrus-ferris of menthol smoke and from behind a glass of ferrous pain, some booze-bruised, blotchmasked, washed-up hard man squinted and snarled.
-Ah-ha … I think I sees the her I heard of. The one they call the ‘Genocidal Triple Orifice’.
After sharding a handy bottle (Chateau de Silling, 1793) over that graystoke crown, now bloody on its sawdust pillow, she baffled back a hiss that limped the assembled quieter than silence.
-I much prefer ‘Quintuple To The Gods’.
As always, a simpleton, a jackanapes, a roaring bravo struck only briefly dumb and not content to leave well enough alone sneered up like poofter Thersites (or well-read Caliban) and preened.
-There’s a nice girl, sing us a song?
And she, cool one moment, ice the next, smiled down at him, eyes welling and that soft spittle-suckled sob pulsing once or twice round the goldblack freckle where her breasts touched, started to sing.

The moon’s as frightened
as a tyrant’s spouse
with a hungry rat
in a little house

*****

In a bar on the Street of Blinded Nightingales, Solange listened to Vicente’s whispered, coded, politics. Pirates of the cancerous antipodes, fighting out their updated religious wars in the frigid affluence of airports and casinos. Be careful, she said. Please be careful. Do I frighten you? he whispered, his comforting fingers
tracing the pentagon of her wristwatch. And if you do? Then I say to myself that if I love life more than I love you, than I love you far more than I fear death. She thought this the most beautiful lie he had yet told her, and her eyes watered, hungering for something equally as lovely to say in return. But her ‘this and that’ was a catch-all of imperial proportions and he smiled absently, pouring carefully their refill. Huddled at the bar, they waited with the others for the evening news bulletins. She slipped her arm through his and caught the eye of a well-dressed, foreign-looking woman at the other end of the bar. Sunk into a morbid marriage of rules and hidden breakages and meaningless unforgiven errors. In any event, the ‘other woman’ remained the one in the mirror.

*****

Fresh from a brisk browse in the Monsignor’s personal library Rafael settled into the steam of the bath and thought: pink diphtheria. Soaping up, he caressed the taut veins along his neck, so unlike the ravaged network of his knees and calves. Less omen than fond remembrance, the horse syringe loomed nightly in his dreams. When her image faded, there was always something there to replace it. He could hear the phone ringing in the next room and he counted happily to himself. His male secretary cracked its squealing in mid-third and after a few moments, lowed his precise lisp through the keyhole. The board meeting had been cancelled for that evening. Instead, he had been invited to dine at the club of Senor Sorrentino, newly-released from a foreign prison and pestilent with business propositions. Very well. The gray suit will do. Thank you.

*****

The sun had come up cursing, and hung now, pale wafer, behind the rain’s beadscreen. Abelardo stared out unblinking towards the harbor. In the grip of a motion sickness only partially brought on by drink and humidity, he allowed his soul to retire to its banker’s hours. Seated at the stark and scrupulous order of the large desk he rolled an unlit cigarette back and forth across the photograph of Solange. According to the one failsafe source, neither witness would be there. Blood was thicker than water, breeding an opaque dishonesty. He must find which crime of hers was most deserving of his punishment.

*****

Like a medieval motif at the upper edge of the mirror a benign angel tsk-tsks: it seems her story is to blame. How she had freed the pair of marmosets. How they were waiting for her to choke. How Octavio had dumped her in the freezing fountain and thrown her robe in after her. How she had rattled the gay night. How she had trespassed the richness of the city, where the alleys separating one palace from another beggared La Reforma, Las Ramblas, the Champs Elysee. How, nightblind and snowblind and drowned in a dominion of diamonds, she was made love to by portly bankers and their emaciated greyhound girlfriends. Why then had her philosophical isolation endured for so long? She was very tired of the quill, simple as that.

////////// * \\\\\\\\\

Note: the fragments in parentheses which begin each of the 3 sections are as follows:

from Her Hair Is Reddish And Her Name Is Sabina / by Julietta Campos
Errata Slip / by Jose Manuel Arango
from Solange / by Lawrence Durrell