a lot of good forgotten. Something gets lost in the translation from then to now. Something dilutes and becomes flaccid, something else now loudmouthed and staggering—homeward—toward a home that never was, a wandering in search of a bicycle you know you left here, someplace, somewhere around here, only it never existed, it was a horse, perhaps, already waiting in a stable somewhere. The kind of stable where the animals sink to the concrete floor to be extinguished by thirst, and the electric light bulbs, too, go out, one by one. The kind of place that exists in the world, waiting for the getting there you keep putting off with all your searching.
The room is an abandoned corner inside me. That’s the feeling I wake up with. And the sounds of the house are already mine, and the same. The house has a smell; it meets you head-on in the mudroom as soon as you go in; even before you begin to struggle with footwear; the sounds of the house. The rooms, swathing all movement with sounds of their own. All seven or eight rooms, swathing your thoughts.
The fact that you no longer exist for me doesn’t mean that the sound of your boots, that commotion outside the door, on the stairway on Marselis Boulevard, doesn’t exist. Some things remain, in the face, the body that remembers—the body that denies; the body, the least reasonable of all. A wish to barricade the body, to keep his hands away, hands everywhere; a celibacy, that wasn’t about denying myself, a lack of desire for something, as you suggested, a frigidity that was most of all, perhaps, always a simple fidelity toward a man I hadn’t found yet. A person I found—only then to not find at all. Restlessness in the evenings, the assault of love, restlessness in the mornings, sleep as violence. A mockery. And your eyes, the reproach, that waste of—well, what else, but a squandering of love.
I get up and it’s like unfolding a worn-out sheet of paper, long forgotten in the depths of a bag, rediscovered one day by the lake while searching for the apple you know you brought with you. The sun shining coldly, early in the day or late evening. My father potters about the kitchen, making sandwiches, stirring some porridge. The gas stove squeals, the light squeals. The sense of prelude, going out. My mother’s fingers poring through stacks and piles. They do not speak; the radio is on. The porridge bubbles beneath its skin, rising like a swollen lip, a finger jammed in the door, a boil fattening in the dermis; a living membrane, bursting, gasping, wheezing, and whistling. What am I doing here, I wonder, and know the answer at once. I came here for the apple tree, and because I remembered something like: we’re always here for you. And in no time I’ve realized it’s not enough.
I need to leave.
Only the apple tree keeps me behind, its branches turning to hands that clutch and grip, and I plummet: here I am.
HIS NARROW BED jars against the wall, next to the unreasonably large window. He is inside her, thrusting as if there were something there that needed dislodging. As if she and the bed are to be shoved through the window and out onto the balcony she never wanted him to buy anyway. She actually thought she had always been the sensible one; actually thought she had looked out of that window about a hundred times before.
No, she thinks now. I never did.
SHE CLIMBS THE hill, the light is the color of white cabbage; you should see me. She thinks back on a morning in Sweden when they were together there; she was wearing a straw hat. They argued about the cafés they passed, there was always something wrong. She, limping along behind after twisting her ankle one afternoon on the rocks. Shade or sun, prices, the feel of the place: always something not right, and they would go on. The sense of time running out while one is still on one’s way. An abiding state of not getting there, postponing arrival. Moving on, the mystery of destination—lack of completion, forever in motion, on our way there, on our way home, or just: somewhere else.
Direction in everything, movement toward.
Except then their patience ran out, and they sat down at a place called Selma and ordered breakfast. There was something about the way the S was drawn that reminded her of a circus. Too embellished by far, a mess of decoration. She rested her foot, keeping it elevated on a chair on which they placed their backpacks and a cushion. Her injured foot, throbbing in time to the flapping of the flaglines against the poles on the harbor. A woman was opening a little kiosk by the boats, struggling with a sign that wouldn’t stay upright; it was annoying her, her movements grew more abrupt.
He poured milk into the tea, said he loved traveling in that way, without a plan. She nodded and sipped from her cup; I only ever think about living there, she said. What she liked about this place, this trip, was the thought of living, having a life here, studying at the university with all the ivy crawling up its walls. A solid weight of ivy. She nodded toward the buildings. To wake up and go to sleep in this place, relieve the body of all its solemnity and expectation. No more expectation; the curse of it. Joylessness. He went inside again to get some salt. The sign tilted, the woman from the kiosk had disappeared into its octagonal structure and was now making coffee. Six, seven, eight measures of ground coffee. Is she beautiful, she wondered. The sign fell over; the woman didn’t notice, could hear nothing on account of the wind. One thing is what’s going on inside, the work taking place there; another is what happens outside.
THE BARK OF the apple tree is black; alone in the garden, black. It cuts into the winter like calligraphy. The winter paints white dogs yellow and makes the night luminous and in a way unreal, anesthetized sleep blowing through the streets, a flood of quiet, quiet.
The tree is a shadow of another, realer world. That’s what I think.
And the apples are still attached, too red, and certainly too late. Droplets suspended on black branches. They hang there today, they hang all night; not being able to see them in the dark doesn’t mean they don’t shine.
There is a small handful of images to which I keep returning. A hierarchy, belonging to the body and the mind, they are pictures of the emotions; they won’t let go. You go back to them, again and again. Wanting to get closer. Occasionally it happens, in spite of everything, in some way or another you manage to gain access. A moment: to reach them and show them, return them to the world. Then, perhaps, you’re able to recall. Everyone has these images; four, five or six of them. It’s all about coming closer; they are what you write toward, paint toward; they are what you want to say and to share with other eyes. Another’s gaze. You speak, and you point, though perhaps no one is there to see. Look, you say, perhaps. How then to hand the image on, to implant it within another, within you. That’s the issue. Whether you can even carry them alone. Whether I can; I need the eyes of another, another voice to share it with; it’s too much a burden, and I write with the expectation.
At the top of my hierarchy is the image of the apple tree with its bright apples.
There is an image of the bedroom window with light streaming in, a morning in summer, the panes in need of cleaning; cobwebs, and some leaves from the purple beech. There is an image of a pair of espadrille sandals on a bathing jetty; the sea that stretches out behind, a sleeping body; it is autumn, and no one in sight. An image of a stable after the animals have been put out to pasture for the summer.
The catastrophes you encounter in life may seem unreal, but they are: real. The alienation that makes you think that some people are more real than others is a construct; people are no more or less alien, no more or less real.
More people, as such.
And always impending: that slap in the face, for not having known; not realizing that particular unreality was just a matter of . . .
Of what. Of eventually swallowing one’s knowledge of the world—swallowing one’s own ideas about knowing anything at all.
We know so very little; so little that what we think to be knowledge is hardly worth reckoning with at all; instead we ought to settle
