Panic Signs

26. The Acrobats

—— 33 —— In the ghetto of my womb I was keeping a seed still. A seed, a seed. And the seed started to shout because it was helpless. Helpless, like half the world, half of humanity. The seed wanted to emerge, terrible is the seed’s instinct Unremitting, like the instinct of each thing. I let it dry out. I’ll let it slip through so it won’t sprout any more The seed will dry out. 21 —— 34 —— I dreamt that I was at the edge of a plate, barely holding on with my hands (or was it with my teeth?) and it was so difficult to get up on the plate, on to the smooth, white surface of the china. 22 DESERTION At dawn, there was a woman hanging from the roof. From a distance it looked like a statue, but up close you could see that it was a desperate woman. He called to her from the ground. “Come down from there,” he told her. He tried to sound authoritative, because he was scared and he had a horrific fear of what was about to happen. From a distance it looked like a statue, but up close you could see that it was a desperate woman. She was looking down from the cornice, and swaying in the air above, like the shadow of a palm tree, leaning a little against the side of the terrace roof, she seemed to be stuck to the wall and a bit twisted, like those adornments that old builders placed on friezes, as decorations. “Think about it. Nothing is going to be achieved with your death,” the man shouted without conviction. She stayed there, quiet, hanging on with her two arms to the edge of the terrace roof, her whole body in the air, about to fall. She wasn’t shouting , she wasn’t crying, nor was she saying anything; she was just waiting for her arms to get tired and then she would fall. “This is horrible,” the man said, in a softer voice. Horrible was what both were waiting for: she holding onto a piece of wall, and he imagining how she would fall, how her body would go through the air till it shattered on the ground, like a bag of flesh splattering the tiles and then he would run, run or pick up whatever, perhaps a shoe or one of her eyes that had popped out or some other part of her body that had come loose, and was wandering down the street. “You can’t make me do this,” shouted the man. She continued, unperturbed, still hanging from the cornice of the wall which ended at the terrace roof. Her two arms surrounded the small mass of mortar and brick, but surely they wouldn’t be doing that for long. —— 35 —— 23 “Think it over some more. You can’t subject me to this,” the man still went on. The woman said nothing. Maybe she couldn’t hear either. At any rate, he considered it best not to insist. He moved nervously along the edge of the street darkened by the stain of the woman’s shadow projected on the ground. He walked two metres, coming and going, looking up once in a while, but most of the time, murmuring as he walked to and fro in desperation. “Consider the opportunity of doing it,” shouted the man. “You’re not going to achieve anything better than this,” he insisted. The woman let go of one hand, and kept hanging on with the other one. The man trembled, broke out in sweat, shouted, ran in one direction, came back, ran in the other, started to make a quick move and then stayed in suspense the woman slowly began to use her arm to hang on again, the arm she’d had to let go to take a hair from her forehead. “For sure you’re going to regret this,” proclaimed the man, now red and trembling, shouting at her, shouting at the air, at the space, at a lone tree, at the one cloud that lingered above the Cathedral. He would bring a ladder and rapidly climb the ten floors, until he grabbed her by the waist and he would force her to come down, even though she might try to slip away and her eyes might become blurry because of the white dress with purple dots...