A mile ahead, the ambient light of the U.S. is a phosphorescent murk, tinctured purple. From afar, to a man wandering the desert, the two cities must look the same. San Rafael and El Paso, glowing like conjoined twins and annihilating the desert’s infinitude. In his worst dreams he is alone in the desert at night, and the stars are frozen like futile maps drawn by those before him. An atlas of those perpetually lost in that mortifying labyrinth of empty space. All the poems in the world could not save him from such boundless terror.

A small, shameful piece of him yearns for sleep, to plunge into such nightmares.

His father once tried to teach him to navigate by the stars. He must have been twelve or thirteen, and by then he had decided the man was crazy and he ignored him. He masturbated in his sleeping bag and dreamt of city girls with their makeup and their heels, told his father how ugly and plain the mestizo women were.

Someday you will appreciate a woman of natural beauty, the old man had said. Like your mother. The first time I saw your mother unmasked, I knew I would love her. Someday you will understand.

~

Avenida Emiliano Zapata traces the river like a man‘s tongue tracing his lover‘s spine. The tawdry cacophony of the border falls away, the desiccated drunks and the maundering whores, the gargantuan bellied truck drivers with their caffeinated visions of home. Men who know there is desert in all directions, men who feel in their veins that they are marooned. The border strip is like an all night truck stop. The florescent light will peel off your corneas.

They enter the convivial din of Colonia Canto de los Pajaros‘ cafes. The aroma of cigarettes and fried eggs wraps him like a shawl.

“Have I told you what I plan on asking Suarez?“ Octavia asks. There is a raw, ursine quality to her face sometimes, something ravenous that causes him to recoil, that causes him to doubt even the most basic tenets of his sexuality. Maybe what the others whisper about her is true. Maybe she is an angel. Perhaps she is here to devour him. Perhaps he is presenting himself to be rejected and destroyed. He wonders what it would be like to put a knife into the flimsy structures of her neck. To feel the skin yield, to feel the tendons snap.

“I want to ask him about our country. About how I realize that our country, and really the entire Latin American culture, has a very rich literary history. I understand this. But today, here and now, I wonder what is the point of writing fiction? Or of poetry, for that matter? And Suarez has written a very bracing book, the kind of book we need. And while reading it, I thought to myself: how paltry my verses are. How paltry even the greatest works of fiction are in comparison to the muck of what is true. Except in a lot of his interviews, he’s talked about the necessity of fiction and poetry, and about how while writing this, this profoundly important book, he had to fight the urge to abandon it for fiction. And it’s just that, really, fiction or poetry seems monumentally superfluous in the face of this book.”

He imagines the hot thrash of muscle and blood.

“I just don’t think there’s the same desperation that there once was to develop a unified Latin cultural voice anymore. That need has passed. All his revolutions have fizzled out. What we really need now, I think, is truth. And that’s what this book of his is. So why undermine its power with nostalgia for the old forms? I guess, what I’m saying is, I want to ask him what worth do those old forms have anymore?”

Through his pocket, he adjusts his dick; he’s gone hard. He tries to focus on her question; which actually seems more like an accusation than a question.

He thinks it begins with responsibility. He’s always considered writing as no different than football or music, or any other far-fetched pursuit. He thinks of a young, gifted footballer, the best on his local team. He’s gifted enough that all his peers and coaches tell him, ‘You’ve got a gift. You’ve got something special here.’ But the truth is that there are a hundred thousand gifted kids all over the world hearing the same seductive thing. So ultimately, it’s a question of is this kid willing to abandon the prospects of a normal life to find out how gifted he really is. Because he doesn’t really know for sure, does he? He thinks he could be supremely gifted, that he could be capable of creating this very pure form of beauty. But, naturally, he has his doubts. And the only way to find out for sure how gifted he really is, is total dedication. Dedication to the point of ruin, if he fails. And what no one tells him is that he is almost certain to fail. Because the kind of beauty he is pursuing is the very extreme edge of beauty. Failure in the pursuit of this beauty has to be almost a certainty; if it weren’t, that extreme form of transcendent beauty would be cheapened. So the ultimate question is this: if you have any gift at all, are you obligated to pursue that gift to its very end? Obligated at a basic human level to fail, to ruin your life for the very small chance that you might achieve something at its highest, most beautiful level? So that you might function at the very extreme of human possibility? It’s why mediocre writers and footballers and musicians are so important. They’re playing out the possibility that they could possibly be transcendent, that they might remind the rest of the species what we, as humans, are capable of. That we aren’t just capable of awful forms, but that we can build beautiful things, too.

It’s a romantic idea, sure. But great fiction and great poetry and great music and great football is essential stuff because it reminds us that the truth of humanity is not just exposing the ugly brutality of modern life. Of course, that is essential, too. But what is more essential is to remember that we, as a species, are capable of grace, too. Great fiction and great poetry? That’s the stuff of grace, or at least grace of a certain sort. It’s someone standing at the brink of poverty and loneliness and ruin to show us beauty. To show us that ugliness and violence aren’t our only currencies.

Do we have a responsibility to pursue grace, however transient and impermanent it might be in the face of war and murder and famine? Yes. Yes yes yes.

Yes.

That’s what he would tell Octavia if he could stop thinking about her naked and bleeding and writhing on the ground.

~

She tells him a breathless story about Beethoven and Napoleon, a very sad story about a genius desperately clinging to his withering power. She cannot remember where she heard the story, or who told her, but it has stuck with her like a parasite. It is the kind of story that seems mostly improbable, an apocryphal parable about human fragility. This thread leads to another story, this one about Freud and Niagara Falls. Again, it is impossibly sad. But it is not sad in the totalitarian sense. Instead, it is sad in the affirmative - the universal sadness that binds humanity to its brothers.

We are mortal and we fail.

Her hands are like a slow, lugubrious breeze. Like he imagines leaves shiver in autumn as they flutter and fall onto the surface of a creek.

“We’re going through here,” she says suddenly, redirecting him with her voracious hands. She is the kind of woman who knows every shortcut. She leads him into a bustling diner. He stumbles on the worn threshold, nearly tumbling into a table of young women sipping coffee. The elongated, shallow hall is full of students congregating for dinner, devouring eggs with chili peppers, eggs with beans, eggs with sausage. The diner’s soft dissonance fells him, the sorcery of a dozen conversations blending into one soporific din. He wants a booth and a cup of coffee. He could listen to her rant for a night and stumble home slack-kneed with gratitude.

She knows people here, of course. Tables of young men, their eyes alcohol glazed, beckon her with adoring catcalls. She greets them all with matronly kisses on the forehead. A dozen rapacious gazes follow her as she wends wantonly through the greasy, florescent discord.

She reaches back and twines her thumb and forefinger with his.

“Come on, come on,” she urges, “we’re late.”

And the look she lavishes on him? Well he cannot begin to chart its tortuous, primitive beauty. It brings him nearly onto the divine’s littoral/shore. Some ancient luminescence that moves softly through and between people like a desert creek, rending them with its strange, clear grace. Her pleading, lonely vulnerability flashing like heat lightning for an accidental, ephemeral second.

He wants to fall on his knees and beg: Come back to my room. Leave these adoring fools behind. Could even one of them appreciate the depth of the look you just gave me? Come sit naked in bed with me. Come sweat in bed with me. What can all these lecherous looks possibly be worth? Time is too short to be spent out here in the feasting world.

He has forgiven himself for wanting to slit her throat, forgiven both of them.

She tacks past the diner’s owner with a pirouette and a kiss on the cheek.

“I can’t talk darling, but soon, soon! Your coffee is the finest in this entire gluttonous country,” she says, eliciting an uproarious cheer from the gorging denizens. She is the insatiable kind of woman, consuming lust as provender.

She busts through the festering, fetid kitchen. The skillet crackles like a dying transformer, grease coats the air. Slovenly middle aged men lave her with their eyes, their whetted lips, their soiled armpits. A whistle and a sneer, they’re out the backdoor into a shock of silence.

~

They are late. The group is gathered in the diner’s basement. They cheer sarcastically when Octavia enters, takes a bow, does a pirouette, and glides to the front of the room.

He did not know she was reading.

~

“Thank you, thank you, my loves.”

~

Suarez is a sumptuous faced man with bloodshot eyes. He looks like the kind of man who subsists solely on protein.

He swallows Octavia whole with one methodical ascent of his eyes. He smiles with half of his face - the left half.

~

When dusk first bruised the western sky,
the flames ascension of blight and black
blooded soot roused the mules, their
besotted yowls, their fear drunken dirge
to the abused horizon. The settlers rose
and their wagons contracted around the pyre,
bits of flesh flung wide, pyroclastic and
smoldering, the souls stirred and the souls
stalked. The birds have fled in fear. The iron
workers have pounded their swords. The
blacksmiths have readied their flint. The
panther of night slips round, an obsidian fish,
his asymmetrical fangs burning white.
Mothers smother their babes, a silent mercy. In
the labyrinth of the panther’s bowels beat the
agrestal drums. They boom and they bombast.
For three days they have been stalked by the drums
of the deep. They have been flayed and plucked
by the solitude of terror. The roads home are
strewn with imperial corpses. The general calls
to his men, in a voice shaken by exhaustion and fear.
Assume the old formations! He bellows but they
cannot understand. Assume the old formations!
He cries as the panther devours his intestines.
Formalism is dead, old man, he purrs. What have we
to show for your manners and decorum?
The great beast is not slaked by hollow organs.
And when dawn first blinks in the east, he
is lost in feast of his countrymen’s flesh and blood.

~

She opens her eyes, her audience rapt.

~

Suarez inches to the edge of his chair, primed to begin. A book is closed in his lap and it shakes ever so slightly with the neural quavers of his hands. Can they see the book’s instability from the back rows? He does not believe it is nervousness. No, just the quiet spasms of a body alive. Nerves sending synapses to the far ends of their universe. The heart electrified.

Suarez sits alert but silent.

His right sclera is bloodshot, and this small army of capillaries muddies the entire eye, making it grim and intense in the way of the religiously fanatic or the clinically deranged or the desperately insomniatic.

What underappreciated miracles are eyes. There was a man with no eyes amongst the nomadic blanket weavers to whom his father would proselytize. His sockets were shallow pits, mottled and scarred, and they looked perpetually the way skin looks when pressed against a flashlight: diaphanous and bloodied, as if some light was still trapped inside; a miner holding out hope though all the tunnels have caved in around him. His father claimed the man’s ears and nose were so prodigiously gifted that he smelled his wife’s particular odor from a mile off, and could predict storms a day away. He could hear the ocean’s tumult.

The old man believed such things. Or he pretended to.

Suarez’s mostly bald head is the color of extremely well cooked bacon. A few platinum wires jut out in electrocuted disarray.

Still he perches.

A few feet jangle against chair legs. Hands rustle. They are expecting him to read to them about their city. They are waiting for him to swing the hammer of external judgment, to render them destitute and squalid and almost beyond salvation but not quite. They are waiting, everyone is waiting, always waiting for recognition and reassurance and judgment and salvation. And for death to render all before utterly null. All of them congregated in the vast waiting room, mouths agape, aging bodies humming the gentle distractions of impatience.

Suarez has fat fingers that were once long, and a flabby jaw that was once sharp, and straight, dun teeth that were once luminous, and deeply veined forearms that are hairless and youthful. He does not try to hide or suck in his ample gut, instead allowing it dominion over the waist of his khakis. It hangs and sways grotesquely; an adipose pendulum of comfort and wealth. He was once an attractive man.

“I miss very strange things about all the places I’ve lived,” he begins, the book still closed. “I think this is a common thing, to remember the unexpected. You visit Paris or Rome or Mexico City and expect to remember the grandiose and the monuments. And then all you remember is a pretty English girl taking photos of students in the Louvre, how she crouches and sneaks up on them. The skin beneath her shirt, how it was the same alabaster as the statues the students were drawing. Or you remember the way the city sounded from a fire escape while smoking a cigarette. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s just particular to me, this odd nostalgia.”

~


One summer when Xavi and his father were staying with the blanket weavers, his father had corralled a wild dog and taken it to the eyeless man. The man slit the dog’s throat, his hands working precisely. His father had washed his hands in the fountain of blood while the dog yelped and whimpered pathetically. Then his father had walked over and made a cross on Xavi’s forehead.

~

“From all my days in Paris, the only ones I can conjure a passion for are the ones when I was deathly ill. The cold nights when I’d been banished to the streets and I couldn’t stop shaking. I’d drink beer anyways, my liver aching, sitting along the Seine and waving madly at the tourist boats. Or I’d sit in Notre Dame. My body would be shaking so hard I’d think my heart was going to seize up and stop.”

He smiles concavely, a wasted smile. His lips are like two worms, drowned in a sudden downpour, their corpses baked and wizened in the sun.

“I miss the children chasing starlings in Siena.”

“And how during winter in Philadelphia, the trees would go naked as bones. They would reveal these secret vistas: ravines or creeks, hidden neighborhoods. At night: new lights, whole new universes.”

“Time, for me, mostly bends and collapses. I am dying in Paris and the little Italian boys are wheeling after the little pistoned birds in the great brick arena of the horses. And I am inundated by the morning traffic of Mexico City.”

The students are spread out alluvially, sitting at varying degrees of attention. Diego Flores - a painter, and Octavia’s first suitor - lingers near the back, akimbo, plunging cigarettes automatically between his lips, one upon another. He’s sporting an unseemly, cadaverous pallor. Since Octavia, sis paintings have veered towards the indecipherable: spattered and isolated genitalia, helixes of light and spirals of shadow. His latest painting is scaffolding erected in the figure of an incredibly buxom woman - but the space at the scaffolding’s heart is empty. (Xavier actually likes it quite a lot). A complex, nuanced structure built around nothing but empty space. Diego is not one of the artists who visits Xavi at home and feigns interest in his writing while staring at Octavia’s aquiline feet. They’re the most feminine thing about her body, possessing the clear asperity of a dancer’s feet. Sometimes, when Xavi is at a café with Octavia, he will spot Diego Flores sitting alone across the room. Smoking in a booth by himself, spectral, and watching.

“What is most Philadelphia in my memory isn’t the few women there I loved. I can’t remember their faces, or even their last names, or what their tits looked like. Time obliterates that, it’s so very glacial in that sense. What is Philadelphia are the trees silhouetted against the nighttime winter sky. How they were stark and black against the immensity. And the sky was immense in winter, so much more so than in summer. I loved winter more than those women. I still dream of winter. And the skeletons of the trees reminding me of nerve endings or the little boughs that make up the insides of your lungs. Their thatched shadows sketched by the moon.”

Diego makes a show out of noisily lighting his cigarettes. He fidgets and clears his throat obstreperously, contagiously so that others in the room begin lighting their own cigarettes in obnoxious, escalating displays of boredom. Jose Ramirez, who pursued Octavia after she had spurned and ruined Alejandro Cueto (who had waited for Diego Flores’ failure with all the tact of a hyena, and had never been much of a writer or artist of any sort - he occasionally wrote and directed ‘experimental’ films that were mostly just extraordinarily raunchy pornos with embarrassingly heavy handed religious imagery (I.e., a Catholic girl of questionable legal age witnesses her father fucking a whore and starts rendezvousing with various unsavory types - beggars, lechers, sickly old men - in very public spaces, though she refuses straight vaginal sex - choosing instead anal or oral sex, all in the name of preserving her purity - before, rather inevitably, losing her vaginal virginity to her father one Sunday morning (bread and wine - lots of wine - were involved; there was also an alarming amount of biting that hewed more closely, on the biting scale, to chomping instead of nibbling); another film involved a young woman, dressed in white, fucking an, ostensibly, dead man for nearly three hours until he was ‘resurrected.’) - before Octavia agreed to share coffee with him (Cueto) in the late, lean hours of the morning, whereupon he almost immediately began writing the most insufferable, blunt, and formless poetry anyone had ever read), and who (Ramirez) writes treacly, overly-symbolic short stories about extinct birds befriending guerrillas and medicine men in the South American jungle, goes so far as to throw his lighter under the seat in front of his, necessitating he stand, walk to the end of his row, barge his way down the next row, apologize loudly and profusely to the (lovely) young woman under whose seat his lighter has come to rest, then finally re-trace his steps before settling, with much fanfare, back into his own seat.

“The only thing I can remember of the women is words. Not images but words. A mottled freckle in the soft skin where thigh meets ass. Opalescent eyes. Broad, planed shoulders. I’ve committed the words to memory, almost as a ritual. But I don’t see.”

Jose Aredondo, who courted Octavia after she’d returned from a mysterious, three month disappearance (where she went, no one could answer; Alvaro Veracruz, the homosexual sculptor, reported seeing her in a dingy bar outside of Cananea, but his stories were notoriously unreliable due to his heavy consumption of hallucinogens; Jorge Lindavista, Diego Flores’ best friend and ‘agent,’ claimed Octavia was in El Paso, where he had heard, through sources unknown, she had a husband and a little boy), taps his feet in a disruptive, arrhythmic cadence. It’s redolent of hail falling on linoleum. Aredondo is a waif and a sort of renaissance man, writing impeccably structured sonnets, sketching the most evocative and provocative nudes north of Mexico City, and starring as the father and the dead man in Alejandro Cueto’s films, despite sporting a cock that could be only described as short, fat and ugly. He also designed the costumes for both films, and edited them.

“Of course, all I wanted, for all those years, was to get back to Buenos Aires. Even after I could have gone back, I’d sworn to my friends I’d never return. All of them were now dead, of course. I studied maps of the city. I conjured its avenues and cafes and butcher shops in my dreams. All of my friends were long dead, what could they possibly care? I was alive, and I yearned for my home. Its memories tarnished everything.”

“That city…that city is a funeral dirge that will not cease playing in my heart. And the campo, Bariloche: those are my haunted dreamscapes.”

Octavia coughs, inadvertently, and quickly uncrosses her left leg from over top her right leg, stretches skyward the way other women often do after making love or waking up, before crossing her right leg over her left leg.

“The way you cross your legs reminds me of a girl in Siena. She had a friend she was in love with, and I was in love with the both of them. We would walk the city after everyone else had gone to bed, the three of us would. We did this for most of one winter. And then we’d return to her friend’s house and sit in the kitchen drinking stale coffee and eating stale homemade bread with heaps and heaps of melted butter.”

There is a brief but noticeable cessation of twitching and tittering and tapping and cigarette lighting. The boys concentrate their scorned lust, transfiguring it into a captivated, silent disdain.

“I would stumble home drunk with happiness, smiling like a drunk.”

He readjusts himself noticeably, pats his prominent belly like an over-sated man digesting.

“It was in Siena I started talking to ghosts. And if you have ever conversed with ghosts, you’ll know that, pretty soon, they’re the only people you can talk with. What happened to the girls? Whatever happens to lovers when things run their course, when reality encroaches inevitably on the bubble you’ve erected around yourselves. We saw each other less and less, and then the ghosts became my companions.”

The boys’ malice wanes, dissipates into coughs and yawns and agitated finger strumming.

“Enough nostalgia old man! What about us?” Diego Flores shouts from his seat in the back of the room. An affirmative murmur builds and crescendos, crashing towards Suarez.

Suarez's beard finally parts in a smile, a gaping crimson wound of wrecked teeth and a tongue sheathed in bacterial film.

“In my year of ghosts, I discovered the poetry of a ghost. It was one of those fortuitous discoveries. I missed a bus to Florence. I don’t even remember why I was going to Florence. But I missed my bus and somehow found my way down to the square behind the campo. There were often flea markets there. They were crowded, undisciplined things. My Italian was still mediocre. So I liked to find English books, because I could manage English better. And somehow, I found this copy of a book by Milos Szymborska. ‘Shadowed Earth,’ it was called. And it was in English. It’s one of those accidents of life that I think about. All the events that had to transpire for that book to be in that flea market, for me to be in that city, for me to miss that bus on that very day, to wander to that very stand.”

Octavia finds Xavi. She does not smile at him. She transmits a very precise longing that he feels on the verge of placing; the way one grasps hopelessly for the details of a dream. Her eyes are indelible maps of terror and grace, they are histories of yearning. Inside them are the inscrutable answers to the questions he does not even possess the language to ask.

“It seems miraculous to me we ever find anything.”

Aredondo grabs his chubby cock and lewdly gestures in Xavi’s direction.

“But I found the book and I couldn’t stop reading it during that year of ghosts. I was possessed. Milos had been a Hungarian Jew. He spent the war in labor camps, separated from his wife. He died in the war’s final months on a forced march. After the war, some of the men who’d survived and worked with Milos sought out his wife. They had poems Milos had written. Poems they’d copied down themselves. And they had something more important: news that Milos had kept a notebook of poems in his jacket. That he’d been buried still wearing the jacket. That the poems might still be alive, beating against his chest beneath the cold earth. That, maybe, they could be saved.”

“His wife spent a year locating the mass grave where he was buried. She found his body and had it exhumed. And inside his jacket pocket, there was a notebook of poems. Poems that he had dedicated to her.”

“Those poems became ‘Shadowed Earth,’ the book I read night after night during the year of ghosts. Soon it became the only book I could read, the only book that seemed honest in a world of artifice and shit. I used to care about the term honest, what it meant in a relative, impermanent world. I stopped caring. This book was the answer.”

“Somewhere in the middle of that year I determined I would find Milos’ wife, if she was still alive. But I knew she was still alive, the way you know some things in your heart. She was alive because I had determined I would find her.”

“I spent nearly a year searching. How did I search? I barely remember. I went to the library, I searched family records. I called complete strangers. I mustered all the guile I had.”

“I finally found that she was living outside a small village in Central Hungary, not all that far from Lake Balaton. I forget the village’s name, somehow, after all these years. But I remember it was small and mostly in shambles. There was a beautiful little church, and it was there, on a Sunday morning in July, that I asked around, in humble English, until I finally found someone who knew the poet’s wife, and knew where she lived. He agreed to drive me there that afternoon for a relatively small price, though at the time it was most of the money I had.”

“She lived in a decrepit little farm cottage on the edge of a poplar wood. Distantly, there was a ruined castle keeping watch over the valley. Vestiges of old empires. There was a meadow of wildflowers, a woven fence. It was idyllic in this melancholy, antiquated way. She wasn’t home when I arrived. My ride had left me, and I didn’t know when she was going to be home. But it was summer, the kind of summer day that only comes true in very old memories of childhood. Warm and dry and gentle, with just a wisp of wind.”

“Of course I remembered Argentina. I thought: I am halfway around the world, and here I am, in the middle of a summer day on the campo. I was overwhelmed with sadness, then, to be so far away from home. It was one of those immense lonelinesses. What am I doing? I wondered, what am I doing here in this overgrown and wild field in a small, forgotten village, in a minor, irrelevant country, searching vainly for the wife of an obscure, tragic poet?”

“I spent the night sitting against the stone fence of her garden. It was crumbling, overgrown with lichens, terribly uncomfortable. It was one of the saddest nights of my life, but also very beautiful. There were fireflies in the field of flowers, blinking like a universe of their own. I thought of all the invisible life in the world. I stared at the stars, which were the clearest I had seen in years. Since my childhood, honestly.”

“I thought of the great wars. I thought of their silence, and that even in their midst, these fireflies formed their galaxy and these stars still came out, unbowed. That these lights shone before my life and that they will shine after my life, and that somehow I was a part of these vast, continuous lights.”

“The poet’s wife woke me up the next morning. She was very kind, though she treated me curiously. Not that I could blame her. After some trial and error, we settled on Italian as the language we shared best. She took me into her kitchen - it smelled of hay, of milk, of earth - and sat me down at her table and made me a cup of coffee. I explained to her why I had come. When I told her, she gripped her heart and slunk to the floor in the exact way a lover of mine from Buenos Aires used to slink, a lover long since dead. A lover who would forever bar the gates to my beloved homeland. This ghost poet’s wife, old but still nimble, slunk to the tiled kitchen floor in exactly the same way. She did not cry, though I was terrified that she was going to die. After a long silence, I sat down beside her. What else could I do?”

“’I thought everyone had forgotten about my husband,’ she told me. ‘I didn’t know anyone still read him. I thought his writing had been forever lost.’ I remember that the window over the sink was open, and that motes of pollen and dust fell softly into the room that was thatched in the melted sun and shadow of mid-morning.”

“She talked to me about Milos. She told me that it terrified her because she forgot so much of him, and that it made her doubt their love. If she could not remember his voice, the way his face looked making love, the way he danced with her during their adolescent years, how could she possibly have loved him? She said that losing him made her stop believing in God. That even during the war, witnessing the horror, she had believed, that even after his death she had believed, and that she only stopped believing when she realized how much of him she did not remember.”

“’What can we make of love?’ she asked me. ‘Is it anything more than absence? That the absence of such facts, and that the pain of this absence, is what proves love? I sometimes do not believe that Milos was ever real. I sometimes do not believe that our time together was ever real. How could it have been? Nothing remains of it but memories that I do not trust. And what is memory but the self? What he felt in those memories is lost. How can it have been real without both of us here to tell the truth of it? The only reality is continuity. When it breaks, what is left?’”

“I did not ask her about discovering his body, about the stench, about holding his bones in her arms. I didn’t ask her anything.”

“’The war was not the hardest part,’ she told me. ‘At least it wasn’t hard after a time. You got used to its rhythms and its indignities. The squalor became mundane. Eventually even your terror went to sleep. You, or at least I, stopped fearing death. We worked and we marched. The rhythm made the time go quickly. You learned to be invisible. You found that you created a world within yourself. You found that you could still appreciate beauty. That seems improbable now, doesn’t it? But some of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed are from the war. I witnessed daughters holding their mothers with such tenderness. I witnessed women who endured rape and torment because they refused to die because they had children to return to. And when those children were dead? Somehow they kept living. I appreciated the beauty of the sun and the beauty of the wind. I fell in love with the wind. It sang to me. I sang to it.’”

“’What was hardest was coming home after the war. Was coming home and having to remember how to live without the war. Can you imagine that, my boy? Can you imagine coming home and finding your home mostly as you left it? Covered in dust, sure, and the town mostly in rubble. But your home mostly preserved. How do you begin to live again after that? Where do you even begin? We did not know how and where to start rebuilding. How could we just start milking cows again? How could we just start cooking meals again? The framework of my life was back, but I didn’t know how to resume filling it with life. That first night home after the war - a night I had spent years dreaming about, a night that had sustained me - was the worst night of my life. I felt like a stranger. I felt like there was no place on this earth that was my home.’”

“We sat in silence for a long time. The pollen and dust continued their dance, and some birds were singing disparate, meaningless melodies. She took my hand in hers then, and I remember how cold it was, even in the warmth of the summer. She started to talk again: ’Then, not long after I returned, a man showed up. He gave me a few sheets of paper on which he had written poems. He said they were from Milos. He said there more, too. He said Milos had carried a notebook in his jacket. He said that Milos never separated from that notebook. He was a thin man, as they all were then. He was thin and sunken, as if his insides had collapsed but he somehow continued to live. He did not remember where he had died. He tried to remember but he couldn’t. It tormented him. He told me, ‘We loved your husband. His poetry gave us hope. I am sure it saved many of our lives.’”

“’Two weeks later another man arrived. He carried more papers, more poems. And after that, a third man came. I found out he’d been killed somewhere outside of Abda. After a few days where I was frozen with fear and loneliness, days where I didn’t eat and thought of dying, I decided to go to Abda. It wasn’t easy. The trains had all been bombed out. The roads were in ruins and there were checkpoints everywhere. I hitched ride after ride, most of them with soldiers. I think the only thing that kept some of them from raping me was my stench, and how sickly I looked. I was barely a skeleton. I watched the lust in their eyes wither when they smelled me, when they saw me up close. But they drove me anyways. And finally I reached Abda. I spoke to a general there. They were in the process of exhuming the mass graves in the region. I begged and pleaded and offered favors until he let me go with them. I watched them unearth thousands of bodies before they unearthed Milos. I recognized him, even in death. His slouch was the same. War had not cured it. I recognized his jacket. I had sewn it for him. And in its breast pocket were the poems. I didn’t think they were real. How could they be?”

“’I couldn’t read them for a long time. They went everywhere with me. I was utterly terrified of losing them somehow. I only broke down and read them when the inn I was staying in caught fire and half burned to the ground. The terror of losing them became my entire life. So I read them and transcribed them. And then I contacted his publisher.’”

“’I thought that after I had found his body and found the poems, there would be some peace. I thought there would be some completeness returned to my life. Instead, I was once again filled with the same emptiness as on that first night after the war. What would I do now? Would I ever fill that void? But now I knew that I could pull myself out of the emptiness. Now I knew I was strong enough to survive. So what did I do? I learned, very slowly, how to live again. How to complete one small task. What is mopping the kitchen floor when compared to the horror I endured? What is milking the cow? I had to relearn the language of ordinary life.’”

“’For many years, I felt guilty. Not for having lived, but for having not done more. I know Milos had died with this guilt. We debated it with friends into the late hours of the night before the war, as the fascists began to consume Europe with their fear. Should we write? Should we speak openly and honestly about their horror and inhumanity? Milos wanted to, more strongly than anyone. I did, too, of course. At least part of me did. I wanted that moral satisfaction. But we didn’t, ultimately. We were too afraid. They would have killed us. There would have been no camps, just a quick death. For a long time I thought that would have been better. Milos died, anyway, didn’t he? He died without ever speaking the truth. He died a dog biting his tongue as his master beat him. He died kissing their feet, doing their bidding. So many of us died without even the dignity of having spoken the truth.’”

“’Eventually I remarried. A nice man, a schoolteacher from a good family. He was not attractive and I did not love him. But I liked his company. I knew I would never love again, not in the same way. I wouldn’t do better than this schoolteacher. And then we had a son. I hadn’t intended on being pregnant. It was an accident. I had a son and when I held him, I knew that I loved him more than I had loved Milos. How? I don’t know. But I did. And for the first time, I was glad I’d been a coward. Life was the important thing. We all did things, some of them cowardly, some of them monstrous, for this: more life, to love so thoroughly. And for the first time, I was grateful Milos had been silent. He’d had the gift of four more years, and those years had given us his greatest poems. His silence had given us that beauty. I realized that the important thing was to survive. Was to wade into the absolute darkest depths imaginable, and to pray for survival so that, when you emerged from those depths, you could speak clearly. And not just about death or inhumanity, but also about love. To report that love survives, even if it does not triumph.’”

“She rested her head on my shoulder. We were silent again for a very long while. She rubbed the tips of my fingers with hers. Then, it was as if a spell broke. She sat upright and looked at me. ’My boy,’ she said, ’you must be hungry.’ I had not thought about it, but I was. So she sent me out back to the henhouse, where I fetched a few eggs. She had a steak that she fried for me, and she cooked the eggs with rosemary.”

“Whenever I smell rosemary, even after these intervening years, I am still sitting in her sun splashed kitchen, if you will excuse both clichés.”

“While I was eating, and eating ravenously, she sat across from me and watched. I could see the former beauty in her, especially in her eyes, her eyes like gleaming obsidian. Everyone says that, I feel like: the youth was in her eyes! But it was. And I admired those eyes, and I scarfed down my food like a goddamn wolf. When I was finished, she smiled. ‘I did not ask you yet, my boy, what it was you hoped to learn from me. What made you come all this way to find an old woman. Most men cross oceans for young, beautiful women. For love. But you have done it for an old, hideous crow. What did you hope to find?’”

Suarez smiles the broad, fulfilled smile of an old man who does not, at least for the moment, regret his life.

“I chose not to tell her that I had crossed the ocean for a much younger woman, and for love, and in fact had only crossed the Alps for her.”

There is belly laughter for the first time.

“And now I come to you. Now, I ask all of you the same question. What do you hope to learn from an old man like me? What do you hope an old man like me can tell you about your city?”

He nods, and he is clearly finished. The agreement is that he will sign books, too. He pulls a pen from his shirt pocket and he leans back in his chair.

Do they applaud? Do they boo him out of the room? Do they bombard him with questions? Do they laugh hysterically? Do they stand up and march out and boycott his signing? They sit like chastised children, all of them flipping through their orderly, pre-prepared mental folder of questions and responses, remarks they’d practiced a dozen or two dozen times on the walk over, or in the shower, or on the shitter, remarks they’d refined down to the preposition to impress and awe, remarks that would elicit respect from the author and jealousy from their peers.

These readings were always games of one-up-manship, and in their fantasies, each of them got the last, best word.

He was no different. Octavia was no different.

Suarez has beaten them all.

~

She is lighter than ether, and less substantial. She becomes the penumbra of light that exists on a hazy night, the last luminescence before the precipice of darkness. She guards the boundary or she flirts with its edge.

They approach Suarez reluctantly. Their hard, exquisite bodies lusterless and defeated. Some of them form groups, smoking and talking in funereal hushes. Most are in a hurry to escape, like witnesses fleeing the scene of a massacre. They’ll reconvene at the Ticker Tape or the Sonatina to air their grievances, to read ostentatiously from their newest projects, to eviscerate Suarez’s bumbling poetry and his heavy-handed novels.

“The man can speak, sure, but what worth are words spoken if you can’t translate them into prose or verse?” he hears from a huddle that includes Alejandro Cueto and Diego Flores.

Suarez is stoic but his eyes are full of pity and sorrow. They speak plainly: You kids are all literary dreamers. Great, monumental, unwritten novels float like semblances in your eyes. Hulking velleities that will eventually crush you beneath their exponential weight. Not a one of you has any idea what I have endured. Not a one of you can imagine the torment of those nights I could not write. The voices of the forgotten dead rang like church bells in my gut. You think writing is a passion. No, it is a compulsion, unimaginably difficult, a death sentence. An American poet once said it was like a white elephant - horrific to care for, but worse if neglected. If you do not write, you will die, and not a one of you understands that yet.

Or, you write badly.

(And I have written very badly.)

That is a pain worse than losing lovers, worse than losing family. Worse, I imagine, than to be disemboweled.

“His non-fiction? No no no. No. There’s no creation involved in non-fiction. I didn’t know you felt this way, I thought your opinions were a bit more refined. I thought you understood that non-fiction is absolutely the most bankrupt, hackneyed literary discipline around. If you can even call it literary. It’s barely better than photography.”

Octavia drifts between groups with the ease of fog.

The city sounds infiltrate the basement as people leave. Snippets of cars, music, nothing concrete. The evening has begun its senescence. The room takes on the sad air of abandonment: Styrofoam cups strewn about, wrappers dolloped like cheap confetti, chairs tossed askew by impatience or excitement. The stale odor of cigarettes will linger long after they have all gone home.

Who is he sitting with? Distended faces, detached limbs. There is Arturo Bolano, professor emeritus of the university’s nascent poetry and ethnicity department. His melted face bears the elongated sadness of an ex-pat and a man whose promise long ago vanished. He smokes aggressively and mostly ignores Sophia Rincon, his lover. There is a pugnacity in his mannerisms - how he stabs the air with his cigarette; the perpetual, lupine smirk while he listens to someone that is not himself speak; his truncated, cruel laughter - that betrays his ego: he believes his work will be vindicated, and his reputation refurbished, upon death. He is the kind of man who kills himself for art instead of a woman. He views his continued survival as a moribund joke.

“Is Octavia still being silly and wasting her time?” he inquires to no one in particular. He watches her wisp around the room, his knotted hands and slate eyes steady and rapacious. He smokes diffidently, dismissively, almost flamboyant in his disdain. If one did not know Arturo, they might mistake him for a homosexual. “Anyone? Anyone?”

The girls on campus call him the python. Those who have been with him whisper of mysterious scars on his back, a serrated wound across his chest. The rumor is that he’s a Chilean, and was once a priest, and that Pinochet’s lackeys had gotten a hold of him. How he’d escaped, no one knew.

“Mendoza, you tell that little girl when she wants to stop playing foolish, silly games with you boys that she should stop by my office and we can have a real discussion about poetry.”

When has a man crossed the murky threshold from promise to failure? One day he knows, with certainty, that his life is ruined. But that is not the crucial moment of transgression. His awareness of reality is always lagging and being forced to recalibrate. The world has changed without him, and he stumbles upon acceptance the way Scott discovered the South Pole. One day he awakes and knows, with finality, that fame will not be coming, that his great unfinished tome - the tome that was to make his reputation and revolutionize literature in his country and finally deliver to him his father’s long withheld respect - will be forever unfinished. It is like a world being extinguished: the vast universe of his imagination obliterated. In that universe, the abstracted fragments of his tome are unified, beautiful. His entire, incomplete life has been devoted not to creating a masterwork from nothing - because the text exists, as wholly as Jupiter exists, within the archaic dimensions of his imagination - but to translating the alien language of this other world.

He holds onto one faint, sliver of hope: How can a man cross something that does not exist? The threshold is not tangible or tactile. Even in hindsight, it cannot be pinpointed. One cannot say: it was the third Tuesday in May of my fifty-third year. Even in hindsight it is an oblique, amorphous boundary, a parable that one believes in at great peril.

This dim hope becomes his entire life.

But the truth cannot be changed. Both worlds are in ruins and they are not salvageable. He can no longer envision his fame, or he is too old to relish its spoils. He is consumed by a new obsession: that death is the only force powerful enough to make him famous. Some men would rather be famous in death than anonymous in life.

There is also Tomas Ibanez. Tomas gets obscenely smashed at the most inappropriate times, he accosts and gropes and sometimes fucks the wives and girlfriends of his generous hosts, he pisses himself and he vomits everywhere but the bathroom. Xavier would never leave him alone with any woman, let alone one he were dating. He is a man ruled by his libido, a man to whom the fulfillment of immediate desire is the primary and only concern.

His right foot is dangerously close to Sophia Rincon’s naked ankle. Octavia, still meandering like fog or a stratus cloud, has Bolano lustfully transfixed. His bald, cloudy pallet is rippling sweat. His hands are groping for cigarettes, for a pen, for anything to hold.

Liquor is exhumed from Tomas’ callow skin. He’s leering and wobbling like an embittered winter scarecrow. Aside from Octavia, he’s the only person with whom Xavier will share his writing.

“Do you know who writes pastoral poems,” Tomas says as his foot slinks slowly across the few inches of open space between it and Sophia Rincon’s shapely ankle. “Faggots! That’s who. Do you know why, huh? Because they’re booo-ring. Because they’re pretty and boo-ring and they don’t say anything, and because only self loathing faggots would waste their own, and somebody else‘s, time with such trivial horseshit.”

Tomas is by the far most successful artist under thirty in the room. He worships Rimbaud, prays at the altar of Baudelaire. His poem “Flower of the Desert” got him into the Paris Review, and this, in turn, coaxed a European publisher into extending him a book deal, and this granted him the opportunity to ride a bike around France and read his morally flaccid, sexually decadent poems in cafés and poetry houses and bars, and this wonderful pompousness - the homeless Mexican with his bike and his tattered notebook and his tent (God knows when he last showered) - won him a solid following amongst the bored French youth, and this affection garnered him another book deal and a moderate financial advance.

Bolano, who understands Tomas’ reputation - literary and otherwise - better than anyone, has taken a sudden interest in Tomas’ shoes, studying them with the attentiveness of an archaeologist.

Tomas returned from France to find his name on the lips of every woman, single or not, at the University, and blew most of the advance on a ridiculously lavish party in his own honor. Suddenly broke, he called his father for the first time in two years. Dad had been some sort of power broker for the PRI, and had since gone into relative seclusion. Everyone was certain he was into something shady with the cartels, be it money laundering or consulting or simply introducing them to the right people. He was able to get Tomas a job as night manager at an automotive parts maquiladora. Tomas had taken to his new career with ferocious glee: firing workers at will in the name of efficiency, luring employees to snitch on their peers with promises of bonuses that never materialized, leveraging his position of power into more than a few sexual liaisons. He’d quickly been promoted to manager of the more prestigious morning shift, and by his own admission, had not written a line of poetry in at least a year.

As for the publisher in France? He sent them a compendium of limp dick poems he’d once deemed far too embarrassing for the light of day; most of them had been composed before the age of twenty. They were reluctantly released, with a note of apology from the editor for their rough quality, and, of course, became wildly successful. Tomas, blithely unaware, was being compared to Rimbaud on the continent.

“You know what I’ve found about artists in Mexico?” Bolano says. “The one thing I’ve learned about your entire rotten assortment of painters and filmmakers and poets?”

“What’s that, sir?” Tomas says, ignoring the old man’s hawkeyed stare, allowing his foot free agency over Sophia Rincon’s ferally beautiful ankle.

“That you have no soul.”

There is a poignant sorrow in Bolano’s eyes. It exists for less than a second before tumbling into the abyss of forgotten sensuality. An ephemeral, perhaps accidental glimmer unexpectedly shared. The old man transfigures into flame, ossifies again. Xavier is sundered by the desire to level Tomas and embrace Arturo. To sing a lament for all of them; because here they are in a dreary basement drinking shitty coffee, mostly broke, bickering about the most recondite and irrelevant pursuits known to man. And outside there is this: a city shredding at its seams. A city of starving wolves who think their famishment will be slaked by steel in their hands and blood on their shoes.

“I didn’t take you to be metaphysical, Arturo.”

Sooner or later, Tomas will become Arturo, or he will become Suarez; a failure or a man obsessed with his lost youth. Or, he’ll be dead.

To what in life do we cling so desperately?

“Of course, Tomas, my observation doesn’t apply to you, does it? Nepotistic foremen are not poets. I’m sure your soul is intact. Let me ask you: have you been following the American economy, like any good O’Brien Auto Parts employee should be? Did they give you a stock option, I wonder.”

Xavier’s father rests his hand on the small of his mother’s back, grips her so tightly he rips holes in her blouse, leaves incisions that become infected and take weeks to heal. Across the room, Octavia dips her head to whisper something to Diego, a gesture redolent of the lowest boughs of a willow tree weeping over a creek. Diego looks temporarily delivered from his torment, his ravaged form buttressed by the gracious curvature of Octavia’s silhouette.

He envies the water that lives beneath such a tree. Its ceaseless flow knowing nothing of reticence or fear.

“Not recently, Arturo. I’ve been preoccupied.”

A word comes to him as Octavia straightens and Diego once more deconstructs, crashing onto the dilapidated shore of solitude: the ruined pyramids, the unrecognizable languages of those before him being scrubbed away by wind.

Aphasia.

She moves towards him now.

The language of this life will abandon him.

“Well the word is rather grim, I fear. Rather grim. Do you think, in these dire, dark economic days, that the Chinese might not be willing to make auto parts cheaper? Or the Vietnamese? And I suppose, more pertinently, my good friend, do you think that Americans are really going to be buying many new mufflers? Or catalytic converters?”

Tomas produces a flask from the pocket of his jeans. He relishes in his messy swill.

Suarez corrals Octavia by bluntly sticking his leg out and grabbing her by the hips.

“I hadn’t thought about it much, Arturo.”

When the publisher tried to send Tomas a royalty check for the unexpectedly robust sales of his second collection, it took them nearly a year to find him. Fearing their wrath, he’d changed his address and telephone number. By the time they finally did locate him, the size of the check had swelled exponentially. They’d pleaded with him for another tour, to strike while the iron was still hot.

“What a typical Mexican you are. You’d rather swaddle yourself in their sty of money and shit than to create something of your own. Do you want to know what the problem is with this Godforsaken land? Do you want to know why you’re all lapping at the feet of these cartels like molested dogs? Because deep down, you know you’re shit, and you know that anything you build will be shit. They’ll pay you better than the Americans to be exactly what you are.”

Tomas had politely demurred. He’d sold his bike and bought a used Ford expedition.

“What would a Chilean know about Mexicans? And what would you, Arturo, know about creating anything?”

He re-produces the flask. Another luscious swill, and then he holds the flask out for Bolano, who greedily accepts. Bolano takes a long draught. In fact, he starts to chug; his intent to finish the thing is clear. Tomas jolts from his seat and tries to wrestle the cold steel from Arturo’s hands. They struggle like children fighting over a toy, and the porcine muscles of Bolano’s neck flex and strain.

Suarez’s ribald right hand is recumbent on Octavia’s inner left thigh.

Bolano has spilled liquor all down the front of his jacket. He victoriously empties the flask, ripping it out of Tomas’ hands and throwing it loudly to the ground. Suarez and Octavia look over as if hearing the rise and roll of gunshots.

“Suarez, let me ask you: did your dick shrink when you fled for Europe?,” Bolano demands. “If you return to Argentina, are you afraid they’ll cut off your balls? Is that what keeps you running? Anyone who remembers the dirty war is dead, buried in the ground or in the illusion of comfort. No one cares about your cowardice anymore. Those heady days are over! Courage, what venues are left for us to prove its existence?”

“Are you the Chilean?” Suarez asks.

“The revolutionary spirit is dead,” Bolano says, closing his eyes. “It’s been murdered in the night by cowards like you, by the capitalist bitches and babes like Tomas suckling at their bloated tits.”

“Let me buy you a drink,” Suarez suggests. “Let’s see if that revives the spirit.”

Bolano opens his eyes. “Mescal,” he says, “I know a place nearby with the most ferocious Mescal in San Rafael. If you can drink with me all night, perhaps I‘ll believe there is some courage in you.”

He pivots to face Tomas.

“And you, you faggy little piece of shit. The author is buying us drinks. Come with us. Don’t think I haven’t seen your foot on Sophia’s leg. Come drink and then we’ll fight to see who gets to fuck her tonight. Suarez can fight, too, if he’s not too much of a perfect faggot. It‘s never too late for a coward to redeem himself.”

Tomas, who has retrieved his flask, throws an arm around Bolano and keeps the old man from falling. He helps Sophia Rincon to her feet and finds a light for her cigarette. Suarez assumes responsibility for Bolano’s other side. Together, he and Tomas guide Bolano up the steps and into the alleyway behind the diner.

~

In the instant before the lights go out - and of course, he does not know the lights are suddenly going to die, has not the faintest intimation that the two of them will be plunged into complete darkness - Octavia looks up, almost by accident, and catches him watching her the way he sometimes does. And for that limnal moment before the lights unexpectedly die she crucifies him with sorrow. Because it is a flimmer of lilac in her eyes: their whole lives apart, and she wishes it would be different (but the world is too overwhelmingly sad).

There are shouts from outside, shouts of confusion and surprise, shouts of reality being recalibrated. The lights die with the same whimper as a large dog dying.

They descend into a vast, incomprehensible chasm.

Outside, gunfire. More shouting. A separate gunfire, responding to the first.

It is he who seeks out her in the dark. He finds her standing and grips her forearm.

“Octavia,” he says.

“Shh.”

“Octavia, what the fuck is going on?”

She puts a hand over his mouth and he does not breathe for what seems like an eternity.

~

And of course, how could he possibly know any of that - the stroke of lilac, the eternal regret? An actual moment is an impossibility. Epiphanies develop only in hindsight, beauty already evanesced. So maybe none of it happened at all. Narratives are invented to fill absences and appease egos.

~

“I’m going to go out there. I’m going to see what’s going on."

“Don’t, please. Octavia, don’t go. Don’t leave me here.”

~

“Soy hombre: duro poco / y es enorme la noche. / Pero miro hacia arriba: / las estrellas escriben,” she whispers. “Soy hombre: duro poco / y es enorme la noche. / Pero miro hacia arriba: / las estrellas escriben.”

“My mother would sing that to me as a child.”

“Mine, too.”

The gunfire has ceased.

“Read me a poem,” she whispers.

“One of my own?”

“Any. Any you can remember.”

A finger vellicates the gnarled lower knuckle of his middle finger, right hand. Or, maybe it was a shift in the air, a wobble of exhaust grazing the calloused skin of the lower middle knuckle on his right hand, a knuckle gnarled from a fight with his father in the moon glazed Sonora in the summer of his thirteenth year.

All he can remember is a poem by an American, of all things.

Then the breeze or the finger circumnavigates the smaller knuckle of his ring finger.

“I came back from the funeral and crawled around the apartment.”

It traces the corpuscles and tendons that lined the back of his hand like the tributaries of a great river delta.

“Crying hard.”

It caresses the delicate inner skin of his wrist. It wraps its thumb and index finger around the same wrist.

“Searching for my wife’s hair.”

He feels her heart methodical and steady in the dimpled webbing connecting her forefingers.

“For two months got them from the drain.”

His own heart begins to gallop and he can hear her smiling.

“From the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator, and off clothes in the closet.”

She let go of him.

Why?

Come back, please, he thought, come back or I will die here alone in the dark.

He hears the soft susurrus of clothing on skin, of clothing being removed from skin and crumpling on the floor, a sound which he could never quite describe, a sound analogous to nothing.

Again she circumnavigats his moist wrist.

“But after other Japanese women came…”

She led him around the lower circumference of her left breast. Her pulse beat steadily, slowly against him.

“There was no way of knowing which were hers, and I stopped.”

Her nipple was goosefleshed and large, erect against the foreign cold of his hand.

“A year later, repotting Michiko’s avocado…”

She pulls him gently through the channel between her breasts, guided him over the brittle slats of her ribcage. She let him linger a moment on her hipbone, let him circle it twice, and then allowed him to fall into the depressed river bed of her pelvis.

She tows his fingers across her waist’s horizon, the imprinted flesh where her panties had been.

Then he felt it, and his fingers went stiff. The mottled meridian bisecting her stomach. She drags him first across it, then brings him back to it, lets his hand sit there hot and inert and sweaty, dumb with lust suddenly transfigured.

“You didn’t finish your poem,” she says.

His hand going cold on the scar across her belly.

“This is Danses au Clair de Lune,” she whispers, her lips grazing his ear.

“Sur l'herbe molle, dans la nuit, les jeunes filles aux cheveux de violettes ont dansé toutes ensemble, et l'une de deux faisait les réponses de l'amant. Les vierges ont dit. Nous ne sommes pas pour vous. Et comme si elles étaient honteuses elles cachaient leur virginité. Un aegipan jouait de la flûte sous les arbres. Les autres ont dit. Vous nous viendrez chercher. Elles avaient serré leurs robes en tunique d'homme, et elles luttaient sans énergie en mêlant leurs jambes dansantes. Puis chacune se disant vaincue, a pris son amie par les oreilles comme une coupe par les deux anses, et, la tête penchée, a bu le baiser.”

They sit in silence, listening. All he can hear is the steady wetness of her breath, the insistent cries of his heart.

This is a truth: poems can save you.