February 19

The live dark garden has grown still. A sort of imperceptible injunction on specific ground. The safety of the outskirts threatened. This blurred image of the clumsy seated figure begins to darken, the contours in a glass of tea, head bent to the mysterious voices like a black tower swaying like the movements of a compass. Wounded and dead gone down together during the idle moments of existence.

The capacious boundaries of pain. Dreariest and most useless of virtues. Our unbroken will. Its instincts, its vices, its follies, untiringly, the lines without respite, with hysterical insistence, suffused with tears grown cold like an ailing heart. Persisting in the rythmn of contempt for the decisive sentence. The daily apotheosis, faithful until death to the horizon. To run in front of the engine. A response forestalled. Such preemptive phantoms. A bleached shell or a piece of broken glass. Nothing but the sun and silence, looking down the stairs with the same indifference at the already hard blue of the morning sky. The world, worn out, the notes and chords, the flowers strewn, nurses lying in the grass, singing softly under cloudless afternoons, their syllables not weighted by meaning, by the fabric of their good intentions.

Movement all over the country as though nothing had happened. The same unending day unfolding among others from the same world. Ignorance of the general situation applying the healing knife, the reign of monotony, sleep, memories, the alternation of light and darkness, a lesson in arithmetic: that the blood is not the girls’.

Bones left over from dinner, dampness shining in the black hollows. The smell of singed rags in the sacred republic, the stale atmosphere of all prisons. At home, in these surroundings, unbound, the entire family still busy in the kitchen gardens perjuring the whole of a positivistic past united forever by the miracle of fire, coming to a standstill in a field so deeply ploughed. Standing, because deprived. Immobility of the present. The quickening moisture of its twilight, the sounds of evening rising up in a small room that smells of darkness knocking four times on the door of unhappiness, to hear the murmur of its water again, and in so doing become like a child and drink the wine you won’t be given. Singlehanded, seeking death.

Who had as not yet suffered (in her body) would long ago have found a pretext. The barren soil, dented, out of muteness the secret sound. Shame for the word that had escaped. Immaculate, economical. Only the unknown one used to see everywhere. Spellbound, and rejoicing.

Whole lifetime. The burglars.

Folly enough, despondency. Axis of a mysterious rapture of first possession. The sky flowering overhead, little by little, straining towards the light. The dying sun, with vague, soft voices. Murmuring, shouting, stretching far away into the distance, to the pasture to wag their tongues, romantic gestures of that sort, to recover from the everyday brutality. Dawn and its bitter treacheries over all the world, and the sky above. A lot of nonsense for a long while in the busiest quarter of the city will go on burning, by the body and by the throat for whole days and nights, singing, weeping, into a kind of stupor in winter, and all night long, justice without limit. Gold rings and necklaces and decorations, cold earth and marionettes awaiting this hour fired with enthusiasm and the ringing of spurs, burning to serve the common cause like the passion of machinery. To come into the heritage, ransack the vaults of perished emperors, all through dire necessity (soup and hunger) violating the sad purpose of having opened the planks of the coffin. Icons defiled with excrement. The hollow onomatopoeia scattered from a lugubrious carnival, the familiar salt in our hands, mere faded schemata of misfortune. All the mysterious stagnation of memory, floating chalky white against the torment of daily servitude, the flesh of dead animals and the greed of live ones. Gotten used to our new lives, all circumstances overestimated and pored over: the business, the property, the house, acts without apparent logic, that have no more rational causes than sunsets, blood, mud and ashes. It grinds lower than any earthly depth, while the sun follows through the morning air, less distinct, as after a drowning. A target, a bait, this savage gold. Days when nothing passes by, glorified without interruption. Now so submissive under this new rule, the psychiatrist, deeply concerned with the future, by the regular turning of drugs from their strange boxes. Anything other than those rare moments, spaces which separate something down below that bends dangerously, without regulation. Less trigonometry and a bit more ardour.

Hearts of varying sizes abandon the cemetery, make their way along the mouth, and so on, completely transparent but unable to compose one word. Reduced to sitting riveted and motionless, the long, drawn-out siege. Long enough to live through, maybe.

Half-asleep, taking the distant sounds with them.

A touching transience and then a settled and sublime evocation, spirit detected within this guise, a kind of pedigree described and pictured in books, becomes the model for the unexpected. Sparrows in every gutter. To celebrate the limit, the false memories planted like a nail in the reddening sky, the half-curtains and the breath. So far as to deprive the dead of their silence and immobility.

One last time the echo repeats, women’s voices, a little out of tune, old and intent on fatality, instantly widespread. Insisting on intelligence, the infernal obscene pride in every sort of entertainment, dementia and adventure, beast without heart and without restraint. An obsession with civilization in their interminable wanderings, insisting on impressive machines and contraptions, for all origins are fire and steam.

Delirium finds no difficulty getting back there to this tangle. Succumbing to old habit, brooding on the terrestrial globe.

The streetcars cluster, bringing back logic, which is really no help in the conversational vacuum.

As a last resort, reluctantly, melancholics assembled for the purpose of constructing effective scarecrows to get through certain nights by stubborn silence. The usual dwelling-place of the heart.

In the end the streets become softer and softer under unhealthy white clouds, the death-song of iridescent prophecy. As a consolation, this making of figures, this game beyond words. Anonymous, nothing signified. Slowly the denizens end by believing in it. Death, the devaluation. Every possible device to scatter the birds.