The Return (14 page)

(The guy hangs his head and nods, his eyes scan the walls of the room
down to the finest crack.
His sweat begins to flow again like a fickle
river—or is there a kink in time?—and droplets gather in his eyebrows
and hang ominously over his eyes.)

“You don’t know anything about painting, Max, but I get the feeling
that you know a lot about solitude.
You like my Catholic Monarchs, you like
beer, you like your country, you like respect, you like your soccer team, you
like your friends or buddies or pals, the gang or group or crew, the bunch that
saw you stay behind to talk with some hot chick you didn’t know, you don’t like
disorder, you don’t like blacks, you don’t like faggots, you don’t like being
treated with disrespect, you don’t like getting pushed aside.
There are so many
things you don’t like, in that way you’re a lot like me.
We’re approaching one
another, you and I, from opposite ends of the tunnel, and even though all we can
see are each other’s silhouettes, we keep walking resolutely toward our meeting
point.
In the middle of the tunnel our arms will be able to intertwine at last,
and although the darkness there will be complete, making our faces invisible, I
know that we will step forward without fear and touch each other’s faces (the
first thing you’ll touch is my ass, but that too is a part of your desire to
know my face), we will feel each other’s eyes and perhaps pronounce one or two
words of recognition.
Then it will be clear (it will become clear to me) that
you know nothing about painting, but you do know about solitude, which is almost
the same.
One day we will meet in the middle of that tunnel, Max, and I will
feel your face, your nose, your mouth—which generally expresses your
stupidity better than anyone else’s—your empty eyes, the tiny folds that
form on your cheeks when you smile, the false hardness of your face when you get
serious, when you sing your hymns, those hymns you don’t understand, your chin
that is sometimes rock-like, but more often, I guess, like a vegetable,
that chin of yours, Max, which is so typical, so archetypical that now I suspect
it’s your chin that brought you here, that was your downfall.
And then you and I
will be able to talk again, or we will talk for the first time, but before that
we’ll have to roll about, take off our clothes and furl them around our necks,
or around the necks of the dead—those who live in the motionless
scroll.”

(The guy is crying, and it looks like he’s trying to speak, but in
fact he’s just whimpering: the movements of his cheeks and his covered lips are
spasms produced by his crying).

“As the gangsters say, it’s nothing personal, Max.
Of course, that
statement contains an element of truth and an element of falsehood.
It’s always
something personal.
We have come through a time tunnel unscathed because it’s
something personal.
I chose you because it’s something personal.
Naturally I had
never seen you before.
You never did anything to harm me personally.
I say that
to put your mind at rest.
You never raped me.
You never raped anyone I know.
It’s even possible that you never raped anyone at all.
It’s not something
personal.
Maybe I’m sick.
Maybe all this is a nightmare that neither you nor I
is having, although it’s hurting you, although the pain is real and personal.
And yet I suspect that the end will not be personal.
The end: extinction, the
gesture that will bring all this irreparably to a close.
And personally or
impersonally, you and I will enter my house again, and look at my pictures (the
Prince and the Princess), drink beer and get undressed, and I will feel your
hands again clumsily stroking my back, my ass, my crotch, looking for my
clitoris perhaps, but not knowing exactly where it is, I will undress you again,
and take your cock in both hands and say, You’re so big, when in fact you’re not
so big, Max, and that is something you ought to know by now, and I’ll put it in
my mouth again, and suck you like I bet you’ve never been sucked before, and
then I’ll take off all your clothes and let you take off mine, one hand busy
with my buttons, a glass of whiskey in the other, and I’ll look you in the eyes,
those eyes I saw on television (and will see again in dreams), the eyes I chose
you for, and once again I’ll tell you, I’ll tell your sickening electric memory
that it’s nothing personal, and even then I’ll have my doubts, I’ll feel cold as
I do now, I’ll try to remember every word you said, even the most insignificant,
but none of them will be any consolation.”

(The guy jerks his head again, nodding.
What is he trying to say?
Impossible to tell.
His body, or rather his legs, are subject to a curious
phenomenon: sometimes they are covered with a sweat as abundant as the sweat on
his forehead, especially on the inner sides, sometimes the skin seems to be
cold, from the groin to the knees, and takes on a bumpy texture, if not to the
touch at least to the eye).

“Your words, I admit, were kind.
Nevertheless, I fear that you did not
give sufficient thought to what you were saying.
And even less to what
I
was saying.
You should always listen
carefully, Max, to what women say while they’re being fucked.
If they don’t
speak, fine, there’s nothing to listen to, and you’ll probably have nothing to
think about, but if they do, even if it’s only a murmur, listen to their words
and think about them, think about their meanings, think about what they express
and leave unexpressed, try to understand what it is they really signify.
Women
are murdering whores, Max, they’re monkeys stiff with cold watching the horizon
from a sick tree, they’re princesses searching for you in the darkness, crying,
examining the words that they will never be able to say.
In misunderstanding we
live and plan the cycles of our life.
For your friends, Max, in that stadium,
which is shrinking in your memory now like a symbol of the nightmare, I was just
some weird kind of hooker, a spectacle after the spectacle, reserved for a few
spectators who had danced a conga with their tee shirts furled around their
necks or their waists.
But for you I was a princess on the Gran Avenida,
shattered now by wind and fear (so that in your mind the avenue has become a
time tunnel), the trophy reserved specially for you after a night of collective
magic.
For the police I will be a blank page.
No one will ever understand my
words of love.
And you, Max, do you remember anything I said while you were
screwing me?”

(The guy moves his head, clearly signaling assent, and his moist eyes,
his tense shoulders, his stomach, his legs that jerk and jerk whenever she looks
away, struggling to get free, his throbbing jugular, all say yes.)

“Do you remember I said
the
wind
?
Do you remember I said
the
underground streets
?
Do you remember I said
you are the photograph
?
No, you really
don’t remember, do you?
You were too drunk and too busy with my tits and my ass.
And you had no idea, otherwise at the first opportunity you’d have been out of
here like a shot.
You’d like to get out of here now, wouldn’t you, Max?
Your
image, your double, running across the garden, jumping over the fence,
disappearing up the street, striding away like a middle distance runner, still
half undressed, humming one of your hymns to bolster your courage, and then,
after running for twenty minutes, turning up breathless in the bar where the
rest of your group or club or squad or gang or whatever it’s called are waiting
for you, drinking a mug of beer and saying, Guys you’re never going to believe
what happened to me, I nearly got killed, some fucking whore from the suburbs,
from the far side of the city and time, a whore from the fucking beyond who saw
me on TV (we were on TV!) and took me home on her motorbike and sucked my dick
and spread her legs for me and said words that were mysterious at first but then
I understood them, no, I felt them, this whore said words I could feel in my
liver and my balls, at first they sounded innocent or like she was hot for me or
moaning because I was nailing her hard, but the thing is, guys, after a while
they didn’t sound so innocent, what I mean is, she didn’t stop murmuring or
whispering while I rode her, and that’s normal, isn’t it, but this wasn’t
normal, there was nothing normal about it, a whore who whispers while she’s
being fucked, OK, but then I heard what she was saying, I heard her fucking
words plowing like a boat through a sea of testosterone, and I’m telling you
guys, that supernatural voice made the sea of semen shudder and shrink away, the
sea disappeared, leaving the sea floor exposed and the coast all dry, just
stones and mountains, cliffs, ranges, dark crevices moist with fear, the boat
sailing on over that emptiness, and I saw it with my own two eyes, my own three
eyes, and I said, It’s all right, it’s all right, honey, shitting myself,
petrified, and then I stood up, trying to look normal, all jittery but trying to
hide it, and said I was going to the bathroom to siphon the python or take a
dump, and she looked at me like I’d recited John fucking Donne, guys, or Ovid or
something, and I walked backward keeping my eyes on her, still seeing that boat
sailing on imperturbably through a sea of nothingness and electricity, as if
planet Earth was being reborn and I was the only witness to its birth, but who
was I witnessing for, the stars I guess, and when I got to the corridor, beyond
the range of her gaze and her desire, instead of opening the bathroom door, I
crept to the front door and crossed the garden, saying a silent prayer, and
jumped the wall and started running up the street like the last runner from
Marathon, bringing news not of victory but of defeat, the runner nobody listens
to or congratulates or greets with a bowl of water, but he gets there alive,
guys, and learns his lesson: Don’t enter that castle, Don’t follow that path,
Don’t venture into that territory.
Even if you’re singled out.
Even if
everything is against you.”

(The guy nods his head.
It’s clear that he wants to express his
agreement.
The effort is making his face redden noticeably; his veins are
swelling, his eyes are bulging.)

“But you didn’t listen to my words, you couldn’t distinguish them from
my moaning, those last words, which might have saved you.
I chose you well.
Television doesn’t lie, that’s its only virtue (that and the old movies they
show in the small hours of the morning), and the sight of your face, against the
wire fence, after the conga that everyone cheered, prefigured (and hastened) the
inevitable ending.
I brought you home on my motorbike, I took off your clothes,
I left you unconscious, I tied your hands and feet to an old chair, I put a
sticking plaster over your mouth, not because I’m scared that your cries might
alert someone, but because I don’t want to hear you beg, I don’t want to hear
your pathetic stuttering apologies, your weak insistence that you’re not like
that, that it was all a game, that I’ve got it all wrong.
Maybe I’ve got it all
wrong.
Maybe it’s all a game.
Maybe you’re not like that.
But the thing is, Max,
no one’s like that.
I wasn’t like that either.
I’m not going to tell you about
my pain, it’s not as if you caused it; on the contrary, you gave me an orgasm.
You were the lost prince who gave me an orgasm; you can be proud of yourself.
And I gave you an opportunity to escape, but you were also the deaf prince.
Now
it’s too late, it’s getting light; your legs must be numb and cramped, your
wrists are swollen; you shouldn’t have struggled so much, I warned you when we
started, Max, this was bound to happen.
You’ll have to make the best of it.
Now
is not the time for crying, or remembering conga lines, threats or beatings;
it’s time to look inside yourself and try to understand that sometimes,
unexpectedly, people just walk away.
You’re naked in my chamber of horrors, Max,
and your eyes are following my knife as it swings, as if it were the pendulum of
a cuckoo clock.
Close your eyes, Max, there’s no need to go on looking; think of
something nice, think of it as hard as you can .
.
.”

(His eyes, instead of closing, open wildly, and all his muscles wrench
in one last desperate effort: the shock is so violent that the chair to which he
is securely tied falls over.
He hits his head and his hip on the ground, he
loses control of his anal sphincter and bladder; he is seized by spasms; dust
and filth from the flagstones stick to his wet skin.)

“I’m not going to pick you up, Max, you’re fine like that.
Keep your
eyes open or close them, it doesn’t matter; think of something nice or don’t
think at all.
It’s getting light out but, the way things are, it might just as
well be getting dark.
You’re the prince and you’re arriving at exactly the right
time.
You’re welcome whenever you come and wherever you come from, whether
you’ve come on a motorbike or on foot, whether or not you know what awaits you,
whether you were tricked or came knowing that you would meet your destiny here.
Your face, which until recently could express only stupidity or rage or hatred,
is reconfigured now and can express what can only be guessed at inside a tunnel
where physical time and verbal time flow into one another and mingle.
You
proceed resolutely through the corridors of my palace, barely pausing for the
few seconds it takes to look at the pictures of the Catholic Monarchs, to drink
a glass of crystal-clear water, to touch the mirrors’ quicksilver with your
fingertips.
The castle only seems to be quiet, Max.
Sometimes you think you’re
alone, but deep down you know that you’re not.
Your hand raised in salute, your
naked torso, the tee-shirt furled around your waist, your warrior hymns
about purity and the future, you leave all that behind.
This castle is your
mountain, and you will have to spend all your strength climbing and exploring
it, because after that there will be nothing more; the mountain and the climbing
will demand the highest price you can pay.
Now think about what you’re leaving,
what you could and had to leave behind, and think about chance, the greatest
criminal that ever walked the earth.
Free yourself of fear and regret, Max,
because you are already inside the castle, and here there is only the movement
that will bring you ineluctably to my arms.
Now you are inside the castle and
you hear the doors closing behind you.
Deep in the dream you walk on through
passages and rooms of bare stone.
What weapons do you carry, Max?
Only your
solitude.
You know that somewhere I am waiting for you.
You know that I am naked
too.
Sometimes you feel my tears, you see my tears flow on the dark stone and
you think you have found me, but the room is empty, which distresses and yet at
the same time excites you.
Keep climbing, Max.
The next room is dirty and
doesn’t seem to belong in a castle.
There’s an old TV that doesn’t work and a
folding bed with two mattresses on it.
Someone is crying somewhere.
You see
children’s drawings, old clothes covered with mold, dried blood and dust.
You
open another door.
You call someone.
You tell them not to cry.
Your footsteps
show in the dust on the floor of the passage.
The tears sometimes seem to be
dripping from the ceiling.
It doesn’t matter.
The way things are, they might as
well be spurting out the end of your dick.
Sometimes all the rooms seem the
same, the same room devastated by time.
If you look at the ceiling you’ll
imagine you can see a star or a comet or a cuckoo clock sailing through the
space that separates the prince’s lips from those of the princess.
Sometimes it
all goes back to the way it used to be.
The castle is dark, enormous, cold, and
you are alone.
But you know there is another person hidden somewhere, you feel
the tears, you feel the nakedness.
Peace and warmth are waiting for you in that
person’s arms, so you keep going, drawn on by hope, stepping around boxes full
of memories that no one will ever look at again, suitcases full of old clothes
that someone forgot or didn’t want to throw away, and from time to time you call
her, your princess—where is she?—your body stiff with cold, your teeth
chattering, right in the middle of the tunnel, smiling in the darkness, free of
fear for the first time perhaps, and with no intention of inspiring fear,
spirited, exultant, full of life, feeling your way through the dark, opening
doors, following passages that bring you closer to the tears, in the dark,
guided only by your body’s need for another body, falling down and getting up
again, and finally you arrive at the central chamber, and finally you see me and
cry out.
I remain silent and cannot tell the nature of your cry.
All I know is
that we have finally come together, that you are the zealous prince and I am the
princess without pity.”