Brodsky’s Overcoat

We went out to dance where the luxury was. She bought a very elegant overcoat at a low price from the catalogue, one of those coats that doesn’t cover even your thoughts. My wife and I have coats that were expensive, but we use them so much you can’t tell. I put them on hangers and in good places. She follows us and hangs hers up, doesn’t know if she should leave it there or not, she asks our other friend I think, I don’t understand what they’re saying. In the end she leaves the overcoat. We have a few drinks, she asks me whether she left her coat in a safe place. I say: yes (I don’t imagine anyone will steal it. Though it’s so cold, if I didn’t have a coat I’d take any one of them. Of course I didn’t tell her that).

We buy beer. She doesn’t feel well attended and calls the bartender: Hellowwwwww. My wife had already ordered, I think; she was embarrassed. She was very worried about her overcoat, almost couldn’t speak without mentioning it. She asks—yet again—whether it’s safe. I say: if your dead are telling you that it isn’t, go get it. She rises from her seat, blurts out, crap! Unsettled she goes off to look for it.

She returns with her overcoat and sits down. Already happy. My wife went on talking with the filmmaker, a friend to intellectuals sunk on the island and to those drowned outside it. I drank my beer, realized I was sitting on top of a black scarf, probably expensive. I ask if she wants it because my wife doesn’t wear that kind. She accepts it.

I imagine myself reading Brodsky; I think the poem says: from my window I see a woman with a filthy overcoat. I think, if she washed it, it wouldn’t look so bad. She crosses the street and enters the bookstore. Looks at one of the books by a poet named Joseph, I think, she reads a poem about a woman and her overcoat. She asks the price of the book, she says: with that much money I could clean my coat.

I don’t know really whether Brodsky is the poet.

I go down to the basement and wash my clothes, turn the machines on. I’m not an expert but at least I have some clue about how to do it. I go down because it’s a grim place for my wife to go (we know there’s a rapist at night, and a male neighbor who talks the whole time, and one should deal with those individuals with distrust).

The clothes come out dirty but give me the impression of being clean. I know I shouldn’t wash my overcoat in that kind of regular machine, but I only have to pay $1.75. I throw my coat inside. I can’t imagine Martí washing his overcoat, maybe some female party volunteer would do it for him, but I’m not one of those José heroes that history provides. I should wash it and wrap it up, then go out to the street with at least a nice scent. I ask myself whether Martí went to his meetings with the tobacco workers with a filthy nastysmelling overcoat. I should reread Martí.

In a good life I fly, one should rise without an overcoat that smells of filth, in the end the coat is a burden, I say, when your feet are on the ground your head should be in the sky, as long as you keep an eye on your own defects and those alien to you. The paranoia-logic that waits to attack me: she does it in disguise. I strike a blow, sometimes two, she offers her marijuana because she’s waiting for something. I distrust but I accept. Then I want to go down and look for my overcoat. I imagine the neighbor masturbating in front of his computer and wiping...