Panic Signs

30. Disobedience and the Bear Hunt

punishment. Meanwhile, the other birds, subordinates, for sure, were quiet, perched very close to me, on a telephone post. I wanted to take a cigarette out of my pocket. “Don’t move,” shouted the first bird, sinking his beak into my side. I felt the fabric of my coat being ripped, my shirt torn, my flesh bristled and twitching. A blow to my arm, unexpected and treacherous from the second bird, made me drop the folder I was carrying with the originals of a book I was writing about the metaphor of zero and the Buddhist aesthetic . The handwritten papers, now dispersed and crumpled, flew onto the street, scattering in various directions. I felt a violent annoyance. I wanted to bend over to pick up the pages, but a peck from bird number two prevented me. Some of them had fallen in a puddle of stagnant water and they were getting wet, getting dirty with the mud and the residues that had accumulated there; since all the birds are assigned to control duties and vigilance, nobody worries about cleaning the streets. At that moment, I recognized the pink page I’d used to write down the information gathered from a rare book, whose only copy I’d been able to read in a archive burned down afterwards, swimming in the manure-clogged gutters along the curb. Nothing in the world—or perhaps only the death of my mother—could hurt me as much as seeing that page soaking in fine threads of sky-blue water, the detailed information that I could no longer obtain. And there was nothing I could do: while I looked desperately towards the curb, the stagnant water was gently, relentlessly, dissolving the group of symbols, signs, and ciphers that were so important to me. At the same time, another three or four birds of the same species appeared in the avenue, triumphantly dragging along a small group of people who, like me, had been detained at that time of night, in different circumstances, and placed at the disposal of the sparrow-hawk boss. I looked for the last time, in agony, at the pages of my book that I’d never see again, disappearing down the drain, and, like everyone else, I got into the police vehicle that was waiting for us, the dangerous trapeze artists. Inside the car there were no windows to look through and there was nothing to do except observe each other. We were five men, and two depressed women, who had the tired air of two old prostitutes. The men were silent, like me, and resigned. One of them was bleeding profusely from his nose and had a violent blue bruise around his eye. I caught on fast. When we arrived, they shoved us out the vehicle. The women complained a bit, and the blow made me lose a button from my shirt collar. “This one is a nobody,” one of the birds that had detained me shouted to the guardian eagle who had a rifle in his wing. Inside, I stood up against the oily green wall. There were people shouting, protesting, mentioning hypothetical rights lost one afternoon, —— 51 —— who knows where. They were demanding lawyers, laws, constitutions, they were naming well-known people, they were proclaiming their innocence . I kept quiet all the time, immersed in their activities. I felt pity for a man, visibly agitated, nervous, who seemed on the verge of a heart attack; he was sweating in silence, like me; I imagined for him something important was being lost at that moment, there or in another part of the city; perhaps, like me, he was losing a book that he’d written, perhaps his mother was very sick, and he, in a hurry to go to see her, he’d forgotten his documents, and for that reason he couldn’t arrive on time to see her, he would not arrive on time to kiss her before she died; if he ever came out (when they felt like letting him out) she would be buried, and nothing in the world could allow him to see her, nothing would allow him to look at her again, to keep the last vision of her in a jewellery box, mother dying in the darkened room beside the night table with all the medicine bottles and a glass of water in case she was thirsty, mother with her grey transparent eyes looking at the last dust of the room, looking at...