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Twelve Nights
- University of Ottawa Press
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Ramón De Elía 61 Twelve Nights “Boom! Boom!” exclaimed Leopoldo onomatopoeically, grasping an imaginary pistol and aiming it at the middle of my forehead. After the virtual shots, the weapon slowly disappeared from his consciousness and his hand came to rest calmly at the side of his plate. His gesture was troubling, especially since it had been conceived as a metaphor to explain the love he felt for his newborn son. “I’d kill you right here if my son’s life depended on it,” he’d told me a few seconds before. The scene left a disagreeable taste in my mouth, but I was able to follow the conversation as if nothing strange had happened. Understandably , after his apology for paternal love, he went on to confess his fears for the immediate future to me. As we finished our dinner in a cheap Portuguese restaurant, the conversation gradually slipped from the material worries of the future to more metaphysical concerns, the ones that can’t be solved either by winning the lottery or the advent of the socialist state. I never would have allowed myself to dip into such a miasma in front of the father of a newborn child, but my old friend dragged me into it, knowing full well whom he was dealing with. The descent surprised me, too, given his customary disdain for my attachment to unproductive machinations. At one point, when our navigation through the lowest and most turbid waters of the soul was softened by the mixed aromas of fried sole and grilled chicken, Leopoldo took on a particularly grim look and said that he had something to tell me. Slowly, and zigzagging a bit, he launched into a rather confused discourse that he abruptly cut short, proposing that we leave the restaurant. We paid quickly, stepped out into the cold autumn night and began walking east, a direction in which I didn’t think either of us was headed. We took the Rue Marie-Anne and crossed Saint-Denis in complete silence, helped along by the wind that blew at our backs. Cloudburst 62 After a few seemingly interminable minutes, Leopoldo again began to expand on what he had to tell me. As I was making up my mind on whether or not to put on my gloves, he suddenly asked me what I thought of oracles. Seeing how serious he was, I immediately understood that he wasn’t searching for my opinion on the prophecies of Ancient Greece, and I decided to respond with a certain amount of caution. At that moment his “boom, boom” to my forehead and his earlier erratic discourse combined to suggest that our rather infrequent friendship had now become irretrievable, and that every minute of time after ten o’clock that night was going to be lost. Perhaps because of the feeling of freedom we experience after making a decision, I continued our conversation as if someone else was there walking along and I was already out of danger, observing two strangers’ odd behaviour . Leopoldo now began to speak at length and confided that he had begun to believe in those things, and that he believed there were deep reasons for doing so unashamedly. I gave no sign of hostility, but instead showed the expansiveness of someone ready to believe in anything reasonable, and perhaps even a bit beyond that, just like any self-respecting intellectual who finds scientific positivism suspicious or bordering on the intolerable. After this welcoming attitude on my part, the details of his line of thought weren’t long in coming. He spoke to me of “a tree that grows at the eastern end of the island on which we stand,” through which he had had wonderful experiences. He began to warm to his subject, or perhaps just to the walk, and took off his scarf. He told me, looking at me intensely, that he had to show it to me that very night, doubtlessly suspecting that this was his only chance to convince me. I argued that it was a bit late and that Pointeaux -Trembles at night was the refuge of riffraff and dregs of the worst sort. “We’ll go by car,” he interrupted, dismissing my objections, “and take along a real gun.” His words sounded artificial amid the silence, and the way he pronounced “gun” made me realize that the word was [35.175.172.94] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:29 GMT) Ramón De...