Zone (23 page)

the path changed, the ruts were full of corpses and the shadows of corpses, the road no longer follows the same bends, the sky seems
heavier as if the clouds were still grinding and chewing on who knows what ideas, ideas that want nothing more of us, with Estrella a long time ago, her fingers closed over my wrists like handcuffs made of flesh, the smoke-filled air of the crowded café didn’t even make her eyes cry, not one tear, nothing, just that aquamarine clarity that you know promises more than it can fulfill, Miguel and Inés were there too that night, we had decided not to reshape the world but to add a few absurdities to it, spots of incongruity so as to shade its cruel leaden color, my pockets were full of bills that were no longer in circulation, I walked around with one finger over the flame of tenacious little candles, Estrella spoke to me about that illness that had almost made her into a little frozen body slipped under the earth, about the drunken doctor who had succeeded, by no one knows what chance, in diagnosing her ailment and giving her the means to recover from it, and as I listened to her I couldn’t prevent myself from feeling each of her illnesses, from following the moving curve of her pain, I became the memory of each of the drops of sweat that appeared on her skin, I was the fever, her fire fed from the ice in her eyes, all this Estrella told me by half-hints, between sips, between sighs light as feathers, everything always being done in the space between, a parody of twilight, I understood then that I would spend the night in Estrella’s arms, that it was not a question of either choice or desire, the city was bathed in an implacable glow, you heard engines growling and drunkards yelping, as if the city were dreaming it was the country, at night certain squares could have been fields, and suddenly Estrella got up, an ascension, a miracle, her chin showed me the door, Inés and Miguel followed us for an instant then disappeared, they stopped existing or returned to a state before existence, everything seemed to dissolve then Estrella’s breathing became more irregular and I knew we were running, not really, but in our hearts, in our flesh, a staircase presented itself to us and ten minutes later she threw me on a bed, the city had the delicacy to absent itself behind the windowpane, all noises contracted into an infinitesimal echoing fist, I wanted to forget the seconds as they unfurled before my eyes, I couldn’t have endured it if they’d accumulated, formed a deposit, conspired against me, I wanted to stay fragile and volatile, but Estrella was like mercury, she rolled over me, twisted around me, I couldn’t manage to unfasten her clothes, my fingers got bogged down in the countless buttons on her sweater, my eyes were closed and I felt as if I could see the inside of my body, a landscape in constant transformation, peopled with panting machines and frightened monsters, it was the alcohol, of course, but also the exhaustion of a man dedicated to losing himself in the beauty of the other, there was a moment when I felt her taking me inside her, and the blood in my temples sang like a drumroll, my nails dug in, my teeth sought her bones, somewhere in a neighboring room a gramophone liberated an opera aria, a woman’s voice conquered but furious began to speak to us, about what we would become if we made the mistake of changing these gestures into habits, these cries into promises, space into time, then everything shattered, everything stopped, I was by the harborside and I was smoking a cigar, I was old, very old, people passed in front of me floating, there were two suns in the sky, I think I had just
perfected such a powerful bomb that even the seas would catch fire, a telegram told me at the last instant that my evil project had been found out, I had to give myself up to the authorities, but instead of that I tried to jump-start a stolen car, the starting crank refused to turn, children were making fun of me and anxiety ended up snatching me from that bad dream, Estrella was sleeping right up against me, she was smiling in her sleep, both her hands rested between her thighs, it must have been 5:00 in the morning, I went out without leaving a word, the seal of her lips on my neck, more whole than the day before, a little older, too, as if there were still unsuspected virginities to abandon to life,
said Boix, five years after Mauthausen remembering Barcelona today a pearl of the Mediterranean capital of triumphant Catalunya full of the arrogance, the haughtiness of the new nationalist conquerors, proud of their economic victory over Castilian oppression, where the
good ones
finally triumphed, obtained the posthumous revenge they wished for: hand in hand with Stéphanie we would stroll on the beach and the seafront that had been recently remodeled, modernized, rid of their greasy spoons, planted with palm trees, torn away from George Orwell and Francesc Boix, hustled towards Cannes Genoa or Nice with huge tourist investments, ready to receive the masses of Scandinavians coming to thaw on the sand, around 7:00
P.M.
the Ramblas was covered with an inexorable wave of bikinis and beach towels wrapped around exhausted flesh red from the sun, hurried buses released their clouds of amateur photographers in front of the Sagrada Familia, tons of paella were defrosting in ovens, Stéphanie bought herself shoes, dresses, costume jewelry—I managed to convince her to go to the end of Diagonal Avenue, when it meets the sea so dear to promoters and modern town planners, to see an immense worksite, a vacant lot strewn with bulldozers and cement mixers, at the base of elegant buildings, with a view, among the most expensive and modern in the city, this lot swarming with workmen used to be called the Campo de la Bota, Boot Camp, and the Falangists picked it out for an execution place, where people were shot, 2,000 innocent men, anarchists, union members, workers, intellectuals, massacred under the windows of today’s luxury apartments, summarily condemned by a distraught and overworked court martial, then handed over to a distraught and overworked firing squad, before their memory was once and for all buried by distraught and overworked immigrant workers: at the scene of the carnage with the 2,000 corpses the Barcelona town hall built its Forum of Cultures, Forum for Peace and Multiculturalism, on the very spot of the Francoist butchery they raised a monument to leisure and modernity, to the
fiesta
, a giant real estate operation supposed to bring in millions in indirect revenue, tourism, concession stands, parking lots, and once again to bury the poor conquered ones of 1939 forever, the downtrodden, the ones who can only resist the excavators and backhoes with the endless list of their first and last names, Stéphanie was suddenly indignant, but there’s no monument? no plaque? I replied don’t worry, a brilliant architect will find a way to hide a vibrant homage inside his work, even if it means putting a few false bullet holes in a concrete wall, today the Forum of Cultures is used mainly for concerts, they dance on corpses as in Beirut, as in BO18 on the Quarantaine in Beirut, but instead of a dance of memory it’s that dance of oblivion that only state-controlled memory allows, which decides where it is good to remember and where it is better to put a parking lot, much more useful to a European city than cumbersome remembrances of people who are dead, in any case, dead today from old age, bedridden, insane or sick, their children and their grandchildren are happy, they have motorbikes tramways and bicycle paths, beaches to put tourists on, a few thousand Francoist bullets aren’t going to change things, you can’t live sitting there sniveling over corpses, it’s the way the world turns, I thought about the cheap buildings that clutter the former Bolzano camp today, they don’t beat their wives any more there than elsewhere, I suppose, ghosts unfortunately do not exist, they don’t come to pester the tenants of the housing projects in Drancy, the new inhabitants of the ghettos emptied of their Jews or the tourists visiting Troy, they no longer hear the cries of children burned in the ruins of the city: in La Risiera in Trieste I passed a group of high school students on a field trip, in the middle of the barracks near the crematorium they were very busy murmuring sweet nothings to each other, furtively smoking, elbowing each other, under the severe gaze of an emotional history teacher, here so many people have suffered, she said, and this sentence had no meaning for them, or so little, that’s normal, it will come to have less and less, just as today the monuments to the dead of 1914 in France don’t affect anyone anymore, the
poilus
sit enthroned on flower-covered roundabouts in squares opposite solemn churches, leaning on their stone Lebel rifles their haversacks beside them their helmets on their heads a curiosity a decorative item, just as the Marathon column no longer wrings the heart of any tourist, no more professional mourners at Thermopylae in front of Simonides of Ceos’s epitaph,
stranger, go tell the Spartans that we died to honor their laws
, Leonidas the Spartan is a Belgian brand name today, I’d happily devour a chocolate bar to the health of the king killed by the Persians, a little sweetness melting in the train that’s approaching Bologna

XI

like train tracks at night straight lines infinite networks of relays and us, usually silent, strangers who don’t open up to each other any more than we do to ourselves, obscure, obstinate, lost in the countless tracks that surround the inextricable railroad knot of the Bologna station, endless shuntings, circuits, sidings, a station divided into two equal parts where unlike Milan the gigantic size of the building is replaced by the profusion of the tracks, the verticality of columns by the number of crossties, a station that has no need of any architectural excessiveness because it is in itself excessive, the last great crossroads in Europe before the Italian cul-de-sac, everything passes through here, bottles of Nero d’Avola from the slopes of Aetna that Lowry drank in Taormina, marble from the quarries of Carrara, Fiats and Lancias meet dried vegetables here, sand, cement, oil,
peperoncini
from Apulia, tourists, workers, emigrants, Albanians who landed in Bari speed through here on their way to Milan, Turin or Paris: they’ve all come through Bologna, they’ve seen their train slip from one track to the other according to the shuntings, they didn’t get out to visit the basilica, they didn’t take advantage of any of the charms of a pleasant bourgeois city, suave and cultivated, the kind of city where you like to settle, the kind that offers you an early retirement and where you awaken, without anything particularly special having happened, on the threshold of death forty years later, a city like Parma, a nice place to live, a place where you die pleasantly and in a civilized way, with enough distractions so that boredom becomes the habitual caress of a mother putting her child to sleep, a city whose labyrinthine train station protects you from the uncertain world, from outside trains from the throb of the irregular from speed and from foreign places, a station I’m entering now the platform is sliding by in an orangey light, the pneumatic locks wheeze, the doors open, my neighbor a little surprised a little sleepy gets up picks up a little suitcase takes his magazine and goes out, ciao now I’m alone, wondering if someone’s going to sit down opposite me or if, when the loudspeaker announces a three-minute stop, I’ll be left to myself for ever and ever, like the little medieval wooden crucifix that somehow survived the twelfth century lost in an obscure chapel in San Petronio the magnificent basilica not far from here, solitary in the midst of flamboyant suffering Christs, this one has a little half-smile, the first time I saw it it was pouring out the rain was coming down in buckets it was the deluge and the church was full of people taking shelter from the rain, including a group of Senegalese sellers of fake Versaces looking towards the door at the rain coming down without a care in the world for what there was behind them, the splendor of the Church and the magnificence of its history were nothing to them and they were right they were selling bags to tourists and African statues
Made in Indonesia
, what could this pagan temple overloaded with figurines possibly do for them aside from shelter them for a while from the storm, like me, who knows, probably I went into the temple so as not to get soaked, or out of curiosity, or out of idleness, I was in transit, I was headed for Bari to board one of those Greek tubs that crisscross the Adriatic, when the storm broke I found shelter in the cathedral facing the little polychrome wooden crucifix so simple and so contrite it looked like the fetish from Tintin’s
The Broken Ear
, what did I do to see it, in that dark corner where you couldn’t even turn a light on for a 500-lire coin, those light-up fixtures typical of Italian churches must pay all the electricity bills for all the churches including the Vatican, back then only about half of them worked, the length of time the light stayed on was in inverse proportion to the fame of the work of art, two minutes for a Caravaggio, five for a somber Virgin with or without Child, but my little crucifix stayed in the dark, it has the beauty of primitive things, the thick face, the almond-shaped eyes, and the craftsman I sense behind it—a cobbler, a carpenter—must have cherished this little magical being in the same way a child adores his doll, with devotion and tenderness, like the anecdote about Moses and the shepherd by Rumi the mystic from Konya: the little shepherd was singing for God, he wanted to caress Him, comb Him, wash His feet, cuddle Him, make Him beautiful, the severe bearded horned Prophet hooked on His transcendence scolded him for his disrespect before he in turn was reprimanded by the Lord Himself,
let the simple worship me simply
He said and I imagine the medieval sculptor scrubbing his little crucifix to paint it, singing hymns, smelling the red odor of the wood that’s more alive than marble, God at that time was everywhere, in the trees, in the cabinetmaker’s chisel, in the sky, the clouds and especially in the dense chapels dark as caves that you entered with terrified respect, where the thick incense penetrated a real curtain of smoke masking the beyond, and when you went home you were ready to have your feet nibbled by the devil in your bed, you were ready to be cured by a saint and blinded by the apparition of an angel, in San Petronio Basilica in Bologna the Italians not long ago thought they could avert one of the strangest Islamist attacks ever, an artistic one, the alleged terrorists supposedly wanted to destroy a fresco by Giovanni da Modena, painted in the early fifteenth century and representing hell according to Dante, a horrible demon devours and tortures sinners in it, and among them, in the ninth trench of the eighth circle, Mohammad the prophet of Islam, lying suffering on a rock, under Dante’s eyes, as he tells it, in I forget which canto in the
Inferno
, “
cracked from chin to where it farts, between his legs hung his entrails; his heart and all around it showed, and the sad bag that makes shit from whatever is swallowed
. . .
He looked at me, and with his hands opened his chest, saying ‘See how I rip myself apart. See how mangled is Mahomet,’”
poor Prophet, and the painter from Modena has represented him thus, his chest open, which must have aroused the wrath, almost 600 years later, of the so-called Islamists whom the zealous carabinieri had arrested in the noble basilica, sincerely believing they were thwarting an attack of the most odious kind, against Art and civilization—once again the Italian alarm was false, the terrorists were simple tourists they had to release a few days later, the church hadn’t blown up, the impious fresco was still in place and the torn-apart Prophet still prey to demons, until the end of time in the Christians’ hell, and now the train is starting off again from Bologna, little by little the train advances along the platform headed for Florence, the longest part is over, the longest part was crossing the long plain of the Po just as in the war you had to cross the open space between two hills, chased by the shelter you’ve just left, hurried on by the one you’re going to reach, running all the while expecting the bullet that’s going to stop you or the shell that’s going to hurl you head over heels launch your limbs your things your guts into the skies split you in half like the Prophet in the shifted earth that dirt of reddened clay where here an eye stuck out, a stray, gelatinous ball, useless in its skull, bound to the mud to nothingness by an absurd filament a trace of brain, there a hand the chance of the explosion left it three whole fingers but not its arm not its shoulder not the head and this extremity with its vanished ring finger lay near a gurgling torso and still as you ran you wondered stupidly what use could a hand be without an arm to jerk off with and without a face to shave, in those leaps of unexpected male humor that make you survive, and yet you ran hard enough to shit in your pants the shells the tanks on your heels just as now the train runs in the dark barely a thousand kilometers away from the slopes that I hurtled down with the Serbs and then the Bosnians hard on my tail: soon the civil gentleness of Tuscany, soon Florence then the
direttissima
line straight to Rome, the suburbs of Bologna stretch out, long grey intestines pierced by the tracks and the train as if by a spear, Dante understood men,
sacci merdae
forever, just as you see them in hell, cut up, dismembered, opened up by an explosion in war, spread apart, in pieces, scattered like an infantry man by a grenade—like the grenade I exchanged in Trieste in 1993 in a bar for three bottles of vodka, I had a grenade in my bag, I don’t remember why I’d taken such a risk at the border, the bar owner had talked to us about the “Yugoslav conflict” and what with one thing leading to another we made a deal, he was very happy to have the little khaki object, a deadly pear of a pretty green color and we, we were delighted to have obtained three transparent bottles, we were going to open ourselves up and spread our souls rather than our entrails, Andi and Vlaho and I drank straight from the unhoped-for bottles, we got completely plastered, the alcohol made me lose my balance in the violent wind, in Trieste they affix ropes in the streets so that children old people and drunkards can hold on to them when the bora blows, and it blows from the very mouth of the devil up to a 120 kmh, no kidding, that night despite the improvised handrail I fell down in the force of the gale, I fell down, down, down and Vlaho and Andrija along with me, we laughed like anything when Andrija threw up in the wind and splattered us, Vlaho, me, and a female passerby who wondered for a fraction of a second what these wet smelly drops could be that were suddenly speckling her jacket, before she saw, understood, retched and began running and stumbling away, Andrija didn’t need to wipe himself off the wind was so strong, he was a Triton, a fountain spitting out a huge spray of puke that flew back and lapped all over the walls, all over us as we laughed, all over our friendship well-sealed in all fluids, in the stupidity of fluids, in our souls and bodies torn apart by alcohol and war, in blood the debris of life against death like throwing up against a wall, a wall of rifle bullets and Orthodox knives our enemies at the time and now I’m heading towards Rome the Catholic, Rome that Andrija and Vlaho have never seen, never have you seen the chains of Saint Peter in Monti or Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain, neither you Andrija farmer from Slavonia even though you’re an ardent believer, nor you Vlaho from Split, nor the little clean-shaven crazy Muslim I killed with my own hands with a knife, with pleasure the way you have a drink, I recognize him, in a rage after unbearable injustice, between the shaky noises from the train, my bayonet an improvised knife in his young Bosnian throat, the joy of his innocent blood bubbling onto my hands, just as Andrija vomited in Trieste in the wind, so vomited the blood of the Serbs eaters of children, or not, what do the reasons for killing matter they’re all good reasons in war, after that over-the-border drinking binge between two fronts we went back to Croatia to go to Bosnia, came back to the Slovenians who had made such trouble for us on the way out, much more than the Italians whom we could soften up with my French identity papers and a few pretty banknotes, German of course, from the standpoint of the Europe to come, sitting on weapons and currency like a grandmother on her savings, I was being paid to fight I forget the salary, there are things you didn’t do for money, not for the price of a train ticket or the distance in kilometers, I fidget in my seat it’s time to go to the bar time to stretch my legs time to take a break in these travels, maybe the only advantage of first class is that the restaurant car is often quite close, I get up, the countryside is still just as dark you can’t see a thing outside that’s all the better these landscapes say nothing important to me—the little decapitated Muslim, Andrija killed by the shore of the Lašva, Vlaho the easygoing cripple, all of us lined up in our terrible shirts that might as well have been brown, neck cut but no sun, no Apollinaire’s
soleil cou coupé
, my pleasure as I sliced the flesh that palpitated with despair of an innocent madman, that salutary vomit on the coat of the haughty lady in Trieste, last acid trace of a disappearing man, that camouflage outfit that brings together soldiers and chaplains, I’ll drink them all in one gulp between Bologna and Rome, on the tracks that are so straight, guided, constrained by the rails to another fate, or my own, like the locomotive engineer the only kind of driver who can’t decide the route of his machine, forced by metal like one’s hand in war towards the victim’s throat, he can’t deviate, he knows his job, he knows where he has to go, I stumble in the train, with the blade you ignore the slight resistance on the cartilaginous rings of the trachea, asphyxia in blood, the pink and red bubbles of air in his bubbling spray and that reflex of the condemned man, that movement of hands to neck, followed by that contortion of the whole body, it overjoys the one cutting that artery and that vena cava, that pleasure of the executioner, content, he observes the immense puddle grow even bigger beneath the inert head I’m passing through another first-class car, the train seems to have emptied out in Bologna, the restaurant car looks like a provincial brothel, the same red velvet, in Muslim villages I saw handsome male virgins have a sudden rapist’s rage in their dark eyes, after coming they would have massacred anyone approaching their prey like hyenas, they wanted to keep for themselves the woman they’d just tortured, giving love in pain a Biblical gesture of an infinite childlike solitary beauty, some cried as they finished off their own victims, who knows where their mothers’, lovers’ remains were hidden to whom they sent telegrams just as ardent as my own, they wrote letters that no one can ever read since they contain the disappeared gazes of those farm girls torn apart in the mud, sometimes it was funny, Andrija was a champion at making us laugh he had no equal to put a daisy in an ass dripping with cum, shouting
Za dom spremni!
as with an inspired look he penetrated a resistant vagina, sometimes bloody, sometimes scabby, but usually neat, as he said socialism has done a lot for intimate hygiene, thanks be to the devil, still he managed to catch crabs, but it’s hard to say if they came from a body, from the straw or from generalized filth, impossible to determine, the louse comes with the soldier and the prisoner, precocious parasites, organisms foretelling the putrescence to come, the real creatures that will truly eat you and that can’t be treated with any ointment: bacteria, fungi, larvae, or dogs foxes and crows if you have the bad luck to fall in an out-of-the-way place where no one comes to bury you, to limit to something slow and minuscule the eraser-effect of carrion feeders, which make up the majority of the living organism, just like soldiers, the traveling bartender has a uniform too, he’s alone behind the shaking bar that’s crossing Italy at full tilt, what’ll I get drunk on, how many mini-bottles will I have to gulp down, whiskey would smack too much of a depressed tattletale, of the barracks, I’ll choose something more bucolic, some gin, closer to herbal infusion and hence to nature, hedges, thickets, the shores of the Lašva, of Vitez, the plum or grape brandies they make there, like Xoriguer of Minorca terrible juniper concoction of British ancestry, I’ll have a gin, dry and warm with a halberdier on the label, in a transparent plastic glass, to the health of Great Britain, to the health of its Queen and of the black horses of Minorca, to Saint John patron of the city of Ciutadella in Minorca, patron of eagles and lost islands, Saint John the Evangelist the Eagle of Patmos first novelist of the end of the world, the bartender is sizing me up, what kind of madman can swallow gin neat with no ice, in a train what’s more and I’d be the last one to argue, it’s disgusting, it burns and leaves a taste of potion in the mouth, a remedy prescribed by Bardamu himself to cure who knows what somber disease of poverty, we’re entering a tunnel, my eardrums are blocked, I feel as if I’m in a cage, I need air, if I could I’d open a window, I’d stick my head out to have my hair tousled by the icy December wind—Stéphanie the brunette her Céline under her arm would lecture me if she were here, she’d say you’re not going to drink now, you’re not going to get inebriated again, she used the term