People who are alone but wish to keep a certain composure treat themselves with a kind of sleepwalking decorum. He arranges everything as carefully as if he were sharing it with someone else. One of them must cast the reddish glow he sees at night. ![]() There is an intimate glow to them suggesting sheltered spaces, bedrooms tucked away in the back of apartments. On the building opposite just two or three windows are lit on different floors. The inner courtyard is still dark outside the kitchen window. He makes breakfast, but he only turns on the radio when everything is on the table. He has taken refuge in silence and distance as in a monastery. He knows the time, the day, though not quite-not yet-who he is. The insidious voice that used to perch in his ear whispering a black virulence seems to have lost his track, as well as the circling shadow that was closing in on him again. The written voices, the ones he overhears, even the ones that speak to him in dreams. He is enclosed in it when he goes out and he reenters it when he comes back to the apartment, as he shuts the door and draws the safety latch. It is the silence more than anything that lets him know how early it is: the same silence that was all around him when he fell asleep, the same in which he now spends so much of his time. Out in the street the day is breaking, but in the bedroom it is still night. He opened his eyes feeling very alert, and he saw gray strips of light between the shutters. Then he plunged again, never quite awake, sometimes picking up the thread of a dream he will probably fail to remember later. Occasionally, during the night, he surfaced from sleep and glanced at the red numbers on the clock. He had set an alarm to be safe, but there was no need. ![]() He rose before dawn because today is the day of the journey. The Way You Move Can Say a Lot about You. Then he would be in Granada, in an old house somewhere in the AlbaicĂn. Or he may hear the bell on the watchtower, and then the one that rings the hours in the cathedral, and almost simultaneously the low tones of the Chancery clock. ![]() The scrape of a shovel on the sidewalk will reveal that he is in New York, where it snowed all night and the doormen are busy opening paths outside their buildings. ![]() As the first morning sounds become audible, they will provide him with further clues. As it grows brighter, it will be possible to tell if the sky in the window is a flat gray, which could mean Paris in the winter or Berlin. He may be opening his eyes in a room of whitewashed walls inside a boarding house in Ibiza or in Portbou. He could be waking up from a drunken stupor or an opium dream in a hovel crammed with books, manuscripts and old newspapers somewhere in Edinburgh or on a tavern floor in Baltimore, his mouth pressed against the filthy boards, a thread of blood or spittle at the corner of his lips. He could be in Madrid, in London, in Paris or in Lisbon. There is no clear boundary in his mind between sleep and waking, just as there is none between his shadowy limbs and the still black shapes in the room or the very darkness of the air. Presently he has no name, no face and no biography. He opens his eyes in the dark, and hearing nothing but silence, he cannot tell where he is, or the time, the day, the year, the period of his life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |