Panic Signs

34. I started to feel your absence

woman really naked, so I felt very happy to be contemplating each other in full daylight. Not only that, I also noticed that she felt very pleased to be able to look at me. We would have tried dancing, as it occurred to us right there, in spite of all the decrees that prohibit it, if it weren’t for the police, who burst into the crowd at that moment, carrying out strict orders given them by the feudal lords, and they started, from very favourable positions, to shoot their rifles and guns at our naked bodies. It was a violent explosion of white flesh, a tremendous din of body parts that went flying, separated from their trunks, breasts floating, utterly terrified , truncated legs. The last image I kept in my eyes was of that young woman whom I saw completely naked, a sight so pleasant for me. P.S. A final transgression has been verified . After being irrefutably killed by the police, all the protesters refused to attend their own funerals, so that, in each case, the wake was held with empty caskets. Some relatives, afraid of causing indignation and retaliation amongst the judges, the police, the government men, the feudal lords, the bankers, the industrialists, the executives , the military, the Falangists, the young democrats, and the sovereign state, replaced the mutilated corpses with cloth dolls. Without success: those dead people can’t deceive anybody. —— 68 —— THE STATUE Your husband came to question me and I stuttered out some disconnected explanations in reply. He asked me what your favourite colour was and I told him red; if indeed you liked music and I replied that you used to sing an aria at night (“There once was an old king, King Thulé, and follow him to the grave, I will; to his memory and sorrow, faithful I will be; full of kindness was he, and him forever will I love”) and you knew almost by heart (I mean at the piano) a short piece by Satie, all of which didn’t confirm your love of music but for certain vibrations that moved your soul. “That’s a devalued term” answered your demanding husband, who had no idea, however, of how my soul had been hurting for several days. “It’s a low pain”—I explained—“like a low do on the organ. Deep, low down and might be located at the bottom of the pharynx.” “What may have caused this?” I remembered the love affair with my sister, but maybe it wasn’t that, nor the memory of my sister coming out of the bathroom shower, nor his wife, nor my sister looking at me at dinner time while the cat crawled up on the chairs and they were as black as her dress, perhaps its wasn’t the memory of our games around the chimney, nor the surreptitious way of reaching for an open book which sat waiting beside the bed, but it was something else. Something else, which I couldn’t ascertain or investigate. “I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m sleepy,” I told your husband who was poking around the ashtrays, looking for traces of cigarettes that would accuse you. In half an hour he had turned over all the ashtrays and sunk his hands in all the wide-mouthed vases, which, curiously, did not blink. “Her favourite actor,” he continued interrogating me, while he searched the house like an inspector. —— 69 —— 31 “Peter O’ Toole,” I repeated, from memory, I, who had studied you, and had learned as a much-loved lesson which teaches us to speak, to sleep, to walk, to recite, to walk around the house, to sit down at the table, to take a breath of fresh air, so that when one yearned to dream, so that when one went out to walk through the parks, to feel the wind in one’s face, so that when one wanted to sit down at the table, one was to carry you on their lips, you the prayer, you the password, you the verb, you the alphabet, you my steps, you the window of the house that I left open, to see if you come. He was looking for proof. He interrogated me with the precision of an investigator. “The sun?” “Red. She likes to take it like a magnificent lizard sprawled out on the beach. All her pores tremble, they open...