Panic Signs

38. Such apparent senselessness

There was a young woman who would do a striptease, while keeping a white butterfly poised on one of her breasts, and after she finished she would go home to put her baby to sleep, and another one who would give herself only against the wall, and if you were fast, tearing apart her dress, and those who went there only to drink and play, and smoke and talk to friends as drunk as they, and they would leave just as day was breaking, strange thing that, to go in at night and come out at dawn to sleep in the room and a certain fraternity of the condemned, ghetto solidarity, ferociously repelling the foreigner. I found out that those had been your friends of the night, of smoke [and dance and drug-addict sleep and days spent in the dark cave. A swimmer told me that you used to go to the beach on winter days, to walk I don’t know how many sands in order to keep your figure; the coast was very long, the waters washed up to shore an infernal caravan of dead fish, and among their corpses, I imagined you, dressed for winter, passing your foot over the blue contour of the open scales with a funereal lust of sensual cemeteries; passing your bare foot over the blue scale, and the open mouth; in between the long rows of dead fish I tried to find your footprints intertwined with the delicate imprints the [birds leave in the sand; on my walk, I’m sure, I must have gone on a pilgrimage after one of [those sea birds that alight on the beach only when it’s empty and the smell and the man’s muttering have drifted away; follower of fish and birds, I found neither your shadow nor any other woman’s, only a half-sunken piece of wood its dog-like face pointing towards the first buildings and an old boat—abandoned—full of lichens and water where a little fish genty floated. I stopped looking for you at the beach and in the brothels. Sometimes, asleep, I believed I could hear the sound of your steps on the stairs —— 79 —— ...