Gasoline

December

He is dreaming of a swimming pool like the one he is sitting beside: white, spotless, blurred as if drawn in pencil and watercolors; or like a Hockney: lots of colorful awnings and tables with tall glasses. A woman with dark glasses is lying in a white hammock, sunbathing. It’s Helena. When she realizes he’s watching her, she smiles, raises her sunglasses until they are resting on the top of her head, looks back at him, and opens her mouth as if she were speaking, without emitting any sound. And, even though her voice can’t be heard, she is saying: “I’m upset you don’t want to make love with me.” “Make love!” Humbert snorts, and dives into the pool, where everything is warm and light blue, and he can swim for ages and ages underwater without having to come up to the surface for air. It was so easy to breathe underwater. . You just had to open your mouth like a fish out of water, but unlike a suffocating fish (for whom air is a foreign medium), he can breathe perfectly. “What a shame,” he thinks, “that this pool is only a drawing, so the sounds from above can’t reach me. Though sound wouldn’t reach me in a real pool, either.” When his head comes to the surface, Helena, who is sitting on the edge of the pool and splashing her feet in the water, is looking at him from behind her dark glasses, set against a desert background filled with singing Berbers. She has a straw sun hat on. “Do you love me?” she asks. In response, Humbert simply bites her foot, and everything goes into slow motion. Helena says, “Sometimes I think you’ve never loved me, and I mean nothing more to you than that diving board.” “What a great image,” Humbert thinks, “the diving board. As if it had all these different registers and levels of meaning. .” He hears someone laugh. He looks at the diving board, but the sun hurts his eyes, and he is now back in the water, his lungs full of air. He contemplates the bubbles that come out of his mouth. He thinks, “When I get out now, there’ll be a beer by the side of the pool.” When he gets out, a smiling Helena hands him an icy mug of beer with a snow-white head which drips and falls into the water, leaving patches of color that shouldn’t. . As he drinks the mug down, Helena kisses him on the forehead. “If only it could always be like this. .” He plunges back into the water and thinks, “When I get out, I want this house surrounding us, the house I live in, to be gone. I want to be on a beach.” He gets out and opens his eyes: he is on a beach. Wincing at the sunlight, he goes under again. “When I get out, I want to see the signature of the Hockney I’m in, in a corner somewhere.” When he gets out, in a corner of the sky (a cardboard sky right over his head) he sees Hockney’s signature, fading away as if written in smoke. Every time he gets out the sun pierces his eyes. If only he could always live under water. . “I could live there forever if it weren’t for the fact that every time I come up the sunlight hurts my eyes, and the longer and longer I stay under, and the longer and longer I take to come out again, the more it will hurt, until the times comes when I will bleed like a Christ figure, like a menstruating woman, like a wounded soldier, like a fish in a basket. .” A man jumps out a window and falls onto a tumbling mat. He runs down the street. Death is so sad. If he could only hide in a shadow. . To hide in a shadow is like not being there at all; he can only be touched or nabbed if he is in the sun, but then he has to stop, surrounded by the sands of a desert in the center of the world, under a red sun wearing dark glasses with frames the color of the girls riding down the highway on bicycles, on their way home, never arriving because they get lost on dirt trails, beyond the fences, rolling up the mountainside, those girls in the pictures of Helena as a teenager, sitting in meadows, wearing short skirts and high-heeled shoes, always smiling, wearing short pants and socks, with those flaming lips that scorch you as you die with pleasure.

•

Humbert wakes up when the rays of sunlight hit his face with such intensity that it hurts. He opens his eyes, looks at his watch (1:30), and jumps out of the lawn chair. He does some push-ups. He thinks, “I wouldn’t mind having an orange juice now.” He leans on the porch rail and looks toward the pool. “I would love to paint a pool. If only it hadn’t been done so often. .” He puts on shorts and thin-soled shoes. He goes toward the kitchen. He peels an orange. He eats it. He takes out four more, turns on the squeezer, and prepares himself an orange juice.

In the bungalow where he has his studio, he sits down at the table. Against the long wall rests a row of eight half-painted canvases. He gathers up the newspaper clippings, organizes them, and he reads snatches from them as he files them in different folders. The Times says, “Rarely in the history of contemporary art has there been a more meteoric rise than that of Humbert Herrera. We have certainly become accustomed, of late, to more or less rapid ascensions — a case in point being that of Heribert Julià, whose unfortunate accident is responsible for our making the acquaintance of Herrera, who, as Julià’s replacement, has produced his first, and definitive, exhibition. .” La Reppublica says: “With the exception of Miró, the most renowned Catalan artist to precede Julià and Herrera, perhaps not since Picasso’s death has an artist so exclusively captured the attention. .” Another, from O Globo: “After two solid decades of artistic disarray, of wave upon wave of pictorial fads, each superimposed one upon the other, finally one young man — and his youth must be stressed, for it holds out great hope for the art world — seems at last to have taken up the challenge of art as a totality, and has responded with a cohesive body of work which — though written off as a hodge-podge by envious pens — manages to make eclectic and unselfconscious use of elements taken from all the artistic trends of these years of confusion, from conceptualism to the new expressionism, to build an articulated body of work — perhaps the most coherent oeuvre of the post-modern aesthetic. Herrera plays all the chords of human sentiment and ratiocination, from tenderness to irony, to cynicism, thus taking up where the extraordinary momentum of Heribert Julià’s appearance little more than a year ago left off. Needless to say, the art world hopes that this new direction will be consolidated and not turn out to be, as has occurred on so many recent occasions, a mere promise, frustrated in the end. .”

He looks through his mail. A postcard from Tokyo: “Even before opening, almost everything is already sold. Ciao, Xano.” A package: the finished catalog for the Milan exhibition. He closes his eyes to daydream. He’d like to celebrate the opening of the exhibition by turning off all the lights in Milan for one night; the only lights on would be those of the gallery. On a white sheet of paper filled with notes he writes: “Speak with Milan City Hall.” And when they ask why? Humbert observes that the lack of a theoretical framework, common to all the latest generation of painters, while handy on occasions, is problematic at other times. He takes a notebook from the desk drawer and writes: “Smooth out the rough edges of the theoretical framework, particularly with regard to alterations in the routines of big cities.” Another postcard from Xano, dated two days after the previous one: “Paintings not sold before opening are now sold. Keep up the good work! Big hug, Xano.” A letter from an Australian museum requesting more paintings. He thinks: “Odd that I don’t have any in New Zealand yet.” On the sheet full of notes he writes: “Find out what’s going on with New Zealand.” He takes another notebook out of the drawer with the word paintings on the cover and jots down: “Do a totally disconcerting and false landscape and title it New Zealand.”

He feels happy. There’s so much to do! The notebook labeled paintings is full of notes. “So many paintings I’ll never get to. . Life is too short for all the work one could do. I ought to hire people, find a team of collaborators to assist me.” He takes out a notebook, the one where he wrote about smoothing out the theoretical framework — labeled ideas — and writes: “Find team of collaborators. Or commission paintings to others? Commission other artists to paint them? Would they be offended? How about selling them the ideas so that they can develop them, or use them as is?” He shuts the notebook and drops it on top of another one that says environments.

Helena is turning the gold doorknob on the bungalow door. Humbert jumps up from his chair and goes over to hug her. They kiss. Helena carefully spreads the contents of the bag she is carrying on the floor: cheeses, pâtés, spinach salad and cole slaw, apples, frozen yogurt, and a bottle of vodka. Humbert looks at the label, takes the paintings notebook out of the drawer, and writes: “Do fake labels.” Then he thinks better of it: he crosses it out, puts the book in the drawer, and takes out another one, labeled objects. He writes: “Do fake wine labels, fake jars, fake wrappings. Do cardboard boxes for liquid products: soup, wine. . Do plastic bottles with fine wine labels. Do tin cans for champagne.”

“I’m starved. .” Humbert says.

They eat the cheese, the pâtés, the salad and slaw, the apples, and the frozen yogurt. They open the vodka, drink from the bottle, and have sex on the floor. When they are finished, Humbert gets up, opens the paintings notebook, and writes: “Couples having sex, in many colors and extravagant positions.” He thinks for a moment and adds another line: “Totally black painting titled Love in the Dark.” In the environments book he writes: “A boxing ring completely covered over with a white sheet. Audience in bleachers. In the ring boxers fight unseen by audience.” He opens another notebook, labeled concepts, and writes: “A dictionary with all the ‘obscene’ entries crossed out and replaced with ‘proper’ entries. And vice-versa. Two dictionaries, then. Possible variations: rewriting of political, urbanistic, botanical, and psychological terminologies. .” He shuts the notebook and looks at it. Though Helena didn’t see eye to eye with him at all on this, and thought that he would be better off tossing notebooks titled concepts and environments into the fire, he believes that those, shall we say, “objectual” styles of the previous decade, done with a little bit of flair, would not have passed under the art-business radar without a trace.

“Don’t you think conceptualism would have been more fruitful if it had been done with a little more style and wit?”

Helena doesn’t answer. She’s fast asleep. He looks closely at her, stretched out face down on the floor of the studio, amid the salad bowls and wine glasses. Two men burst through the door and, just as she is lying, face down, they use her sexually (use her sexually?), like animals. Not two men, three. He takes out the paintings notebook and jots down: “Variation on the theme of the painter and his model, as done above all by Picasso: the model with two or three men, and the painter watching and painting, or with a video camera.” He takes out the videos notebook and “Reflect on pornography in video.” Then he does a couple of sketches of Helena in soft pencil on sheets of paper. He also takes out his camera and photographs her. He takes advantage of the time she is asleep to finish up three of the half-finished paintings, plan five new ones, and read a brief guide to Jamaican art that he had picked up at the airport when they landed. When Helena wakes up they have sex again, and afterwards he dashes right down to the swimming pool and dives in.

He puts on a pair of shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. He combs his hair in front of the mirror. He walks slowly down the steps. The reporter is waiting for him next to the pool. He is disappointed that he is not wearing a fedora with a press card sticking out of the hatband. His showing up in that Texan shirt, those dark glasses, and that can-do attitude were all annoying details that denoted a certain disregard. The reporter gets up from the lawn chair he’s been sitting on, comes over with his hand stretched out, and thanks him for agreeing to the interview. Ms. Sorrenti already informed them that he turned down other interviews. He is aware, he says, that the artist can ill afford to waste time. They think it will be better to do the interview there instead of waiting for him to get back, because, at poolside, in that gorgeous Caribbean sun a stone’s throw from the beach and the palm trees, the photographs will come out much better. From behind the palm trees, a bearded guy is approaching, wearing a khaki safari jacket; a couple of cameras dangle from his neck. He waves with one hand and buttons the last button of his fly with the other.

“This is the photographer. Would you mind sitting here in this lawn chair? Would you mind just wearing your swimming trunks? What made you choose Jamaica for your vacation?

•

“. . Ever since he was a child, he had known he would be an artist. When he was four years old they used to find him drawing in every nook and cranny of the house. In the dark, on any old scrap of paper. He would draw chairs, tables, stacks of dirty dishes, his father, his mother, the maid, and then he would show it all to his sister. At school he would draw (out of the teachers’ sight, in the back of his notebooks) medieval battles, or scenes from World War II, or aliens. Once a teacher had caught him sketching a Martian instead of following his math class. When he was fourteen, he had registered at the Escola Massana. .”

“The municipal art school, in Barcelona.”

“He did two years there. Then he took a year off from studying. On Sunday he would go to town squares and to spots around Montjuïc to paint, with a folding easel and a box of oil paints. He worked in a technical studio, as a draughtsman. The following year, when he came back from vacation, he tried to register at the Massana, but he was too late and couldn’t get in. He went to the Llotja. .”

“Another school. Picasso went there as a young man.”

“Picasso!”

“He studied there for a year. He painted still lifes, plaster sculptures, live models. He dreamed of having a show. He sent a drawing, which was rejected, to the Ynglada-Guillot competition, and another to the Joan Miró competition, with the same result.”

“Those are two drawing awards. You’ve never heard of them?”

“The following year, he continued studying, but now on his own. He submitted another entry for the Joan Miró award and, this time, he came out forty-second on the list of entries. This had delighted and frustrated him at the same time: so close to an honorable mention, and yet not quite there. . In desperation, he convinced a friend (whose father had a bar in La Sagrera). .”

“A neighborhood in Barcelona.”

“He convinced a friend (whose father had a bar in La Sagrera) to talk the man into letting him hang his paintings on the walls of the bar. They did the show, which no one but the habitués of the bar attended (and all they noticed and mentioned to the proprietor of the establishment was that they didn’t care for those somewhat stylized paintings of nudes; they preferred the girls on the Damm beer calendars). .”

“Damm is a brand name.”

“The shows he saw at the gallery of the Architects’ Guild, across from the Barcelona cathedral, led him to ponder the issue of the artist in relation to his surroundings at length. He then went through a fervent period of abstraction. Thanks to the articles Alexandre Cirici Pellicer wrote in. .”

“Alexandre Cirici Pellicer was an art critic. Serra d’Or is a monthly magazine, published by the monks at the monastery of Montserrat. .”

“?”

“No. Not the Caribbean island. The mountain outside Barcelona. .”

“Thanks to the articles Alexandre Cirici Pellicer wrote in the section on art in Serra d’Or he learned about the existence of minimalism, conceptualism, happenings, earth art, arte povera. He went through a radical transformation. He abandoned abstraction, canvas, and acrylic (in his latter abstract period he had finally, not without regrets, switched from oil to acrylic) and, in light of the sheer expense of other media, had opted for photocopies. His first photocopy was of a package of Avecrem Chicken Soup, which he titled Homage to Andy Warhol.”

“Avecrem is a brand of instant soup mix. .”

“Pleased with that experiment, he had done photocopies of a package of Maggi garden vegetable soup, and of a package of Knorr chicken noodle soup, titling them respectively, Homage to Andy Warhol 2 and Homage to Andy Warhol 3. He cut out a strip from El Capitan Trueno. .”

“El Capitan Trueno means ‘Captain Thunder’. It was a very popular comic book. .”

“He cut out a strip from El Capitan Trueno and enlarged it on the sly in the photo lab of the advertising firm he worked at (a subsection, as a matter of fact, of the most important printing house in the city, which specialized in labels). Then he stuck a one-pesseta stamp with Franco’s face on it in a corner, made photocopies of it, and titled it Homage to Lichtenstein. Just as he had done on feeling so pleased with the result of the photocopy of the concentrated soup package, he now repeated the operation with a strip from Roberto Alcázar y Pedrín and another from Pequeño Pantera Negra (likewise enlarged at the photo lab of the studio where he worked).”

“Two more comic books: Roberto Alcázar y Pedrín were the names of the characters, like a local Batman and Robin, and the other one means Little Black Panther (no relation to the American Black Panthers). .”

“He christened them Homage to Lichtenstein 2 and Homage to Lichtenstein 3. Having done these photocopies with the stamp in one corner, he repeated the Roberto Alcázar y Pedrín one but now placing the stamp over Alcázar’s face in such a way that this time it appeared to be Franco who was slugging the evildoer. He considered the work original enough not to warrant the ‘Homage’ epigraph and (after much back and forth between Good Guys and Bad Guys, Comic Book Heroes, and even Comic Book Hero) he decided on the latter. All that year he devoted himself to producing photocopies following this new plasticity (becoming ever more conscious of the value of art as a political tool), and the next time the Joan Miró award period was announced, he submitted a photocopy of a drawing by Joan Miró, juxtaposed with a photocopy of the ‘Help Wanted’ section of La Vanguardia Española.”

“A Barcelona daily, very establishment.”

“It did occur to him, though, that if he sent the photocopies tout court, they might reject the entry, as it was clearly stipulated that the award was for drawing, so no matter how open they were to modern materials and attitudes, there always had to be a minimum of drawing. Rather than take a chance, he added a few light strokes with Faber Castell pastels and Alpino pencils. For the first time he had had to face the question of the purity of the artist, and for the first time had decided that if a bit of self-corruption (vis-à-vis the aesthetic ideas he was under the sway of at the time) in the use of pencils and pastel meant that his work was to be contemplated by thousands and perhaps even receive an honorable mention (he didn’t so much as dream of an award), then a bit of corruption was worth his while. He ended up in eighteenth place, which he considered something of a success, despite the repetition of the frustration of the previous year, not even receiving a mention. Fortunately, he was able to show a series of his photocopies in the Granollers Art Show.”

“Granollers is a city close to Barcelona with an outstanding country inn and restaurant: La Fonda Europa. .”

“As a result of his participation in that Art Show, his name appeared (along with those of the other thirty-eight participants) in the review that appeared on the art news page of Serra d’Or. He immediately bought a plastic folder with transparent compartments, labeled it press clippings, and filed the article away in it, taking great care to make note of the name of the magazine, the number of the issue, and the date on which it had appeared. Right about then he learned about a series of scholarships for art students sponsored by a well-known brand of sparkling wine from the Penedès region. He applied. Doing this had entailed composing a resumé, a primordial step in the life of an artist, the successful completion of which required both a great command of the written word (to shore up weak spots and gloss them over) as well as considerable restraint (so as not to appear self-important). The years proved him to be a master.”

“He sent it off, with great anticipation, together with a year-long project to study art in New York. He had vacillated between New York or Paris because, despite his realization that New York had been the center of the art world for decades now, Paris had, shall we way, sentimental appeal for him. As his mother said, ‘We Catalans think of Paris as our second home.’ In the meantime, he continued working in photocopies and extended his field of interest to photography (non-realistic photography, of course). He had been particularly interested in Polaroids, which obviated the whole bothersome development process, and which seemed to him — in a certain sense, regrettably — to be one-of-a-kind pieces. Unexpectedly, one day they notified him that he had received the grant, and that the official award ceremony would take place at the Barcelona headquarters of the renowned brand of sparkling wine. He was so overcome with joy that he got drunk that night (for the first time in his life) with the friend whose father had a bar in La Sagrera, with whom he still maintained a solid friendship. Not everything was a bed of roses, though: Humbert’s mother was disconsolate at her son’s imminent parting, which (in conjunction with the recent decision of her daughter, Humbert’s only sister, to live with a group of friends in a commune) was the partial cause, it would seem, of her having a nervous breakdown. Despite his attempts to convince her of the benefits for his career of a sojourn in the capital city of contemporary art, the woman would suffer a relapse every time she was reminded that his destination was, of all places, New York! (Her notion of which had been formed by the films of the forties and fifties — which was when she had gone to the movies — and, more recently, by television.) What’s more, she couldn’t quite get it through her head that he could have preferred New York to Paris, Paris being, as it was, a second home to Catalans. Despite all these obstacles, at the age of twenty-three the young man had landed at an airport which he had had a good deal of trouble discovering how to leave. He had jettisoned his job, his studies, his family, and a girlfriend he had been sharing with a classmate ever since his year at the Llotja.”

“Before he knew it, the year was over. He had studied a little, met few people, and mostly spent his time wandering around the city. When his scholarship was about to run out, he thought about his next step. After long sleepless nights weighing the pros and cons, he decided to stay, not only because since his move to New York they had cited him twice on the arts page of the aforementioned Serra d’Or without his having done a thing, but also because he knew — and he wrote a letter to this effect to his sister — that if he went back to Barcelona he would miss New York very, very much. When the scholarship was down to nothing, he found a job as a dishwasher in a Greenwich Village restaurant. The mental confusion that his collision with American art had produced was so great that, ever since his student visa had expired (and he had joined the ranks of the illegal aliens), he had stopped painting. How could he — a stranger in the metropolis — make a place for himself? And how would he know what one ought to be doing at any given moment? From one year to the next, ideas changed, and one pattern of behavior was exchanged for another. . One day, up in arms, a painter friend of his (an ex-conceptualist who was currently a hyperrealist) told him about a book he had read on the so-called modern arts by the most prestigious practitioner of New Journalism. Humbert bought it and devoured it. He found it extraordinary. Where his friend had seen only a sterile send-up, Humbert discovered a critique of a variety of errors; where his friend had found ‘facile ironies without alternative proposals,’ Humbert saw a healthy study of certain excesses, laudable for opening the way for others — perhaps himself? — to correct them. It was apparent to him that if, from the early seventies on, galleries had ceased to sell as they had in the sixties, and if Americans had been basically unimpressed by the whole minimalist thing, the next step was to break away from all that. Confusion notwithstanding, he hadn’t shrunk from the task, and only once (after consuming a whole bottle of Kentucky bourbon with a stranger on the Bowery) had he considered abandoning painting and devoting himself to the jazz trumpet.”

“Video also fascinated him. He had seen a video camera at the Barcelona Institut de Teatre. Here, though, it was being used in a much freer way. Video’s the art of the future, he had declared in a letter to his parents, by way of justifying his third year in New York with his interest in this new medium. Through specialized journals he kept track of the activities of the foremost American video artists. At the end of his third year (now he was making his living as a busboy in a Soho bar), he decided he would just stay and, with the help of a lawyer friend of a friend, he initiated the process of getting permanent residency. At the same time, after all the qualms of those years, he began to paint again and, even more to the point, to paint on canvas. For two years he painted and painted every morning, and on Sundays from sunrise to sunset, before going in to work at the restaurant (the fifth year he had advanced to being a waiter in TriBeCa, which led him to believe that if he continued along this path, working in restaurants farther and farther south in the city, the following year he would be working at the World Trade Center, the year after that he’d sink into the estuary, and the year after that he’d surface in Staten Island. .). When the Mary Boone boom took off and everyone started talking about New Expressionism (or new wave, or new image, or maximalism. .), Humbert saw that he had not been mistaken in returning to the canvas. He studied the work of those artists. Schnabel seemed perfectly mediocre to him, a total bluff. And the rest of the pack were just more of the same. . He feverishly devoured the articles on postmodernism that appeared in the city magazines and newspapers. . He took notes. He made lists in order to derive needed constants. He knew he had to be patient. He thought: ‘It was logical for the canvas to have made a comeback.’ Wary of futile optimism, though, he knew that the return to the canvas must be undertaken with prudence, mindful of the advances achieved in other mediums. That was why he had begun to work again with all kinds of materials and diverse techniques, even when they seemed to contradict one another. He used fabric, wood, photographs, videotapes, cassettes. For the first time he tried his hand at sculpture. And once in a while, out of nostalgia, he would do a photocopy. Even though he had been told time and time again that using all those mediums, so different from one another, would seem tasteless and lacking in style, Humbert defended himself from such accusations by declaring that it was precisely that lack of style that constituted his personal style. How agents had loved to reject him! They had criticized him with the same ferocity with which now they were hitting themselves in the head for not having had the insight to see that in that ‘garish clutter’—as one gallery owner had dismissed his entire oeuvre — was the key to his style. How blind they had been! Impetuous, unprejudiced, pragmatic, and with a keen nose for the new, Humbert Herrera had sensed that an artistic moment in which — among many other trends — Jack Goldstein of the Metro Pictures gallery could get away with barefaced plagiarism, and take pride in it, was not only an interesting moment artistically, but also one in which things could happen. In Italy, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Sandro Chia were emerging. In Germany, Rainer Fetting, Anselm Kiefer, Helmut Middendorf. .”

•

What Humbert did not tell the reporter was that when Heribert Julià had burst onto the scene a few months later, establishing himself as the new star, breaking with and going beyond all those trends without belonging to any of the in-groups, he had decided to dig a bit deeper. The fact that Julià was also from Barcelona — though he had remained aloof from the so-called Catalan colony and had been an American citizen for many years — could only work to his advantage. Helena Sorrenti seemed to hold the key to the situation. Not only did she run the gallery that had launched Julià and established his dominance, she also seemed to be his wife. At the restaurant where he worked, Humbert asked to work only the lunch shift for a month. He followed her. He studied her habits. Sometimes she had dinner at The Odeon. Sometimes at Les Pléiades or Ballato. Once in a great while at Da Silvano. Every Tuesday, though, she had dinner alone in a plain old Blarney Stone, always the same one. That bit of simplicity touched Humbert to the core!

On the fourth Tuesday, he made up his mind. That morning he withdrew all his savings — a pittance — from the bank. At noon he swept his studio, dusted, put fresh sheets on the bed, and lined all his paintings up against the walls. That afternoon he showered, shaved, put on a clean shirt, a jacket, and tennis shoes. That evening, as he walked toward the Blarney Stone, he couldn’t stop thinking that maybe that night he wouldn’t be going home alone. Outside the restaurant, he stopped for a moment to work up his courage: he opened the door, crossed the room with determination, and sat down at the table where Helena Sorrenti was sitting, all by herself. He introduced himself, still not entirely sure she wouldn’t call the waiters over to send him packing, a possibility she did indeed entertain for a few seconds.

He looks at his feet and finds them to his liking. He wiggles his toes a little. Satisfied with the effect, he picks up a little notebook (which he always carried with him to jot down ideas he will later copy over into the big notebooks) and writes: “My feet. Self-portrait.”

Helena was doing laps.

“I don’t know why we’ve bothered to come here when we haven’t been to the beach once.”

To the beach. . But what if, suddenly, all the muses descended upon him and he is so far away from the studio that by the time he gets back they’ve all fled? The mere thought of such a possibility sets his nerves on edge. What if his greatest insights slipped away because he didn’t write them down fast enough? Or, even worse, if he is too slow to realize that the fleeting image in his brain is a stroke of genius? How many ideas must fail to materialize, hidden behind layers of veils, not quite able to penetrate his consciousness? What if everything he was able to portray was nothing more than the shadow of the residue of the great ideas that had died in his unconscious? Perhaps he should consult a psychoanalyst who would help him reach the inner world that was lost to him. What about the seconds in which he wasn’t thinking? Aren’t they, in effect, wasted seconds? Perhaps it is precisely during those seconds that the perfect notion, the greatest he could ever produce, may emerge? And all that thinking, about ideas and images. . Why think? Each second lost in thought is irretrievable. If, instead of lying there, he were face-to-face with a canvas, he wouldn’t have to rationalize at all: the only thing he would have to do would be to allow the image in his brain to secrete its fluid down his arm which, by means of the hand, would transfer it to the canvas, without rationalization, alive, passionately. .

He leaps to his feet. He goes to the bungalow he’s using as a study, next door to the one they are staying in. He drops his sunglasses on the table and finishes a painting he had started the day before, full of people pursuing one another or running around in every direction. He starts a new one: one man strikes another in the stomach and despite the blood that flows from his navel, the victim is laughing.

He finishes the painting, signs it, washes his hands, calls Xano. What a waste of time to have to dial so many numbers. Xano isn’t in the hotel. He isn’t at the gallery either. Humbert leaves a message. He goes to the pool and has a swim. Helena, who is sunbathing, joins him. Under the whitish-blue water, they play tag. One of those Mexican swimmers, who risk their lives diving into the water from the dizzyingly high cliffs of Acapulco, reaches the pool through a secret tunnel and drags Helena along the ground as she laughs, offering herself to him and resisting him at the same time, arousing him. He wonders: should he get out of the pool and write the idea down, or let the idea run its course. He decides to take a chance. He goes over to Helena and whispers:

“I was imagining you were with one of those Mexican swimmers who dive into the water from the dizzyingly high cliffs of Acapulco. .”

When they are done, Helena goes off to shower and dress. Humbert stretches out on the grass surrounding the pool. He dreams a dream that’s very similar to another he had had recently: it was so simple to fly, you only had to know how to make a certain motion while holding your arms bent, as if they were wings, and move them with the necessary precision.

The sound of the horn of the car that has come to pick them up awakens him. He gets up quickly, showers, and puts on his contact lenses. Every time he does this he remembers those green glasses that had made such an impression in the press at the time of his discovery. Had sticking them on one of the paintings he had done this fall, which would be seen in the Chicago show later this month, been too impulsive?

“Hurry up. They’re here to pick us up.”

As he put his clothes in two small carry-ons, an idea occurs to him: a woman wearing a raincoat and a skirt is going quickly down a flight of stairs, looking over her shoulder in distress. At the top of the stairs appear the shoes and cuffs of a man’s trousers. He takes the small pad from his pocket and makes a note of it.

Back in the bungalow he used as a studio, he sticks the notebooks into another tote bag.

“Tell them to be careful when they move the paintings.”

They get into the car. They shut the doors with a sharp click. They take off. Humbert is afraid that the painting of the woman going down the stairs will slip away from him. He should have stayed behind and painted it that same afternoon. Everything had its own precise moment of realization. .

•

Waiting for their luggage, all the passengers raised the collars of their overcoats and put on their woolen hats. A child is sleeping soundly in the arms of a man in a shirt and tie, with a small carry-on bag, his raincoat folded over his arm. Two Germans are looking at each other and complaining about the cold. A married couple and a twenty-year-old girl are trying their best to speak French to two French girls who don’t speak a word of English, even though they are getting in from a month in Toronto. A Santa Claus is picking up his suitcase.

As they go by the enormous cemetery that stretches out on either side of the highway, Humbert thinks he sees a figure draped in white wandering among the tombstones. He makes a note of it in his pocket notebook. He is quite pleased with the previous note he made as they approached the city: “The city, by night, as seen from the air: millions of tiny white, blue, and yellow dots.”

Back home, exhausted, they leave their suitcases unopened and get into bed. All at once they are very tired. They fall asleep in each others’ arms, and Humbert dreams that he slips from Helena’s embrace to go to the house where she had formerly lived with Heribert; this is a duty he has always avoided, though he knows he will have to face it some day. This is the moment, then, and (no longer able to put it off) he is finally on his way. There is something he has to look for (he doesn’t quite know what), and he rings the doorbell (not knowing if Heribert still lives there, or if someone else does, or if no one does). When Heribert himself finally opens the door, Humbert asks himself what he would have done if no one had lived there, as he certainly doesn’t have the keys. Heribert is a ghostly presence, almost immobile, who smiles at him from the threshold. Humbert is tense; he can’t stand Heribert looking at him that way, his mouth in a sarcastic curve, as he had always looked at him since their first meeting. He thinks: “I ought to get rid of him, once and for all.” But killing him seemed too awkward, though not half as awkward as he knew it must be in reality. Then he goes out into the inner courtyard of a country house with fig trees in the back, and then into a wheat field, where he runs around amid the tall wheat which is just about ready to be harvested, sticking his head out from time to time to see the bell tower of the town church, gloomy as a blockhouse.

•

“What I’m most interested in (and this is nothing new; what I mean is that it’s one of the mainstays of my discourse), what I’m most interested in, as I was saying, is the interrelationship between mediums. What I’d most like to do in this exhibition, you know, where I’m working, above all, in two different mediums (a photographic foundation and paint — and, in this regard, I’d like to stress that it’s been interesting for me to get back to oils, even if only to cast the contrast between such diverse techniques in starker relief) is to confront each work with total honesty, stripped of all prior notions, to discover that it is the work itself which has been carrying out its own process. I think this is important. Because what’s the point, unless the work itself is taking you where it wants to go, what’s the point, unless you are nothing more than the. . the. . high priest of. . well, the instrument of its creation. A play of opposing shades has taken place (I wouldn’t speak of light in this series: I would speak of shades, shades and color), opposed, but reconciled. Shades and textures. Think of the June exhibition, in São Paulo. Oh. That’s right, you weren’t able to go. Well, so, in that show what I was most interested in, what occupied my space, and my interest, was the background, and the backgrounds. They were the protagonists. Even unfinished, they were the center of my attention. I was interested in their being unfinished. Because even now, in the kind of painting we can say needs no justification, there is an excess of reality. Yes, yes; just think about it. This excess of reality, this reification of the excess of reality, holds no interest for me. No interest because it’s a step backwards and, at this stage in my artistic discourse, I can’t afford to take a step backward. I must go forward, continue forward however I can, because if I stop for a second, bam! the machinery of the discourse breaks down; and I find myself at an interesting juncture now. You know what? What I’m working on now. . Well, not working just yet, but considering working on, is iron plates, because what matters most to me is the support of the work: I’ve worked on paper, on canvas, on wood, on cardboard, on walls, on plastic, on photographic support (for the Chicago show), and now I’m interested in working on metal: on iron, on steel. . Because I’m interested in the dialectic between one medium and another, between the media. Some time ago (before the trip to Jamaica), I thought of working out a dream sequence, on iron. Just imagine it: dreams, the most ephemeral thing in the world, worked out in such a hard medium. . This is why I take such an interest in recording my dreams on tape as soon as I wake up, so they won’t slip away from me. I’d like to be able to retain them all, written or on tape, filed away. Can you imagine being able to keep a record of all the dreams of your lifetime? It would be like a parallel life. A parallel life that would explain the other life to us. Since we always forget some of them, there’s no way to know whether we’d have the key to something if we could remember absolutely all of them. Want some jam?”

“No.”

“I also get holistic ideas from them, unconscious reflections on the work I’m doing.”

“What have you gathered from today’s?”

“Nothing, yet.”

“It’s not good to tell people your dreams. Then everything is out there. I never tell mine to anyone. Just like certain peoples of Africa, who think you are stealing their soul if you photograph them. .”

“More coffee?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s easy to tell when what you’re saying is revealing more than it appears to; I don’t know if I’m being clear. .”

“No it isn’t. I learned that Heribert was going out with another woman precisely because of a dream he told me, and he told it to me without realizing exactly what he was saying. And it’s not the first time this has happened to me.”

“He was seeing someone else?”

“He was going out with a woman I knew because she was the friend of a friend: Hildegarda, Marino DelNonno’s wife. I imagine he went out with other women, too. Before or after her, or before and after her. But I found out about this one from the dream; I think she must have been the one he was most involved with. Mmm. No sugar in the sugar bowl.”

“I’ll go get you some.”

“Not for me, for you. You poured yourself another cup of coffee. I don’t take sugar in my coffee, remember?”

“Of course I remember. I don’t know what made me think you might want some now. I’m going to get to work.”

“Give me a kiss.”

•

In the afternoon, Humbert looks over the newspapers. He considers the space they devote to city politics excessive. He reads an article about the alarming spread of herpes, an article on Policarpo Paz García, an article on Fats Waller, an article on unhappiness. He comes across an interesting piece of news: a week before, a man had become a millionaire by playing the lottery. As soon as he collected the money, and before spending a cent on anything else, he went to a casino and bet the lot of it, right down to the last penny. “Surprisingly,” the paper says, “he won and multiplied his millions in such a way as to become one of the most notable multi-millionaires not only in the city, but in the entire country.” Humbert sees a very clear moral to the story: you should never be satisfied with what you have achieved. He also finds the word “surprisingly” out of place: “A thing could happen. If it did happen, that means it could. If it could, then, there was nothing surprising about it.”

He also reads a review of the Nina Hagen concert and looks for quite a while at a photo of Cherry Vanilla, who performed at the Ritz. He looks closely at an ad for the Mudd Club. Turning the pages, he comes across the ad for the Metropolitan Opera. Marino DelNonno was singing Madame Butterfly. It’s been ages since he’s been to the opera. . The music has never meant a thing to him, and he finds the libretti ridiculous, but he loves the sets. He calls to see if there are seats for that evening. There are.

Helena is in the living room, reading a book with illustrations by Folon: into a building that is nothing more than a windowless cube, a stream of men is entering through one door and leaving through the other, going on to enter another, similar building, and once again leave it, and once again enter another. .

“Would you like to come to the opera?”

“What’s got into you?”

“They’re doing Madame Butterfly.”

“What a bore.”

He phones again and reserves one ticket. He puts on his tuxedo. In front of the mirror that takes up an entire wall of the room, end to end, he combs his hair and, unhappy with the results, musses it up again. He puts on a white scarf, picks up his coat, makes sure he has the little notebook in his pocket, gives Helena a kiss on her left cheek, opens the door, closes it, goes out to the garage, takes out the car (a Chevy Malibu, full of dents), and, before going to the theater, stops at the gas station to fill up the tank.

•

The performance leaves him cold. He finds the scenery (the only thing he was really interested in) very unimaginative. He does take a lot of notes, though. He wouldn’t mind designing scenery, perhaps not so much for the opera as for classical theater. How can he tell if DelNonno has sung well or poorly? What’s it to him if he sang well or poorly? He had almost fallen asleep and had only stayed awake by sketching a view of the stage, the figures of some of the singers, a few profiles of the ladies and gentlemen surrounding him — whose expressions, on seeing him scribble so dutifully, lead him to think they must have taken him for a critic. He remembers it with amusement as he leans on a wall by the door Marino DelNonno will be exiting through.

Finally he comes out, escorting a slim woman with red lips, well-defined eyebrows, and a raincoat that hangs open to reveal an impeccable black tuxedo. She is wearing shoes with stiletto heels, an enormous black bow tie with her white shirt, and she is clinging to DelNonno with joy. They get into the black sedan that is waiting for them. Humbert is already in his own car, following them at a prudent distance. That woman must be Hildegarda. The black sedan drops them off in front of a luxury building in Midtown. Humbert doesn’t even consider waiting around. If this is where they live, they might not come out again until the following day, unless they are going to meet up later with friends. But at that time of night, if they are going to meet up with friends somewhere other than their own house, maybe they weren’t going home, and this is precisely the house of the friends. Before leaving, he takes down the number of the building and the street.

•

When Helena gets in, Humbert calls out to her from the studio. He has finished up a few canvases that he had left off in the middle weeks ago, and he’s painted two more, from the notes he took at the opera. Helena gives him a kiss, looks at the paintings, and asks him what he’s doing up at that hour.

“I was so engrossed in the painting that I didn’t realize what time it was.”

They go to bed, and, even though at first Helena isn’t quite sure at the beginning she’s in the mood, they have passionate sex. They turn out the light, and four hours later, Humbert has breakfast, gets dressed, picks up the car, drives around, and parks in front of the building DelNonno went into the night before. He buys a sandwich and a newspaper at a deli and eats and reads in the car.

Towards noon, Marino DelNonno leaves the building and stops a cab. Humbert writes in his little notebook: “Series of photos: on someone’s trail.” He thinks that trying to go up to the DelNonnos’ apartment would be fruitless because they live in one of those buildings where the doorman announces the name of each visitor over the internal telephone. He spends an hour and a half trying to come up with a ruse, unsuccessfully. What he does do, though, is fill up the little notebook with notes, and if that doesn’t exactly offset his failure to come up with a scheme, it is gratifying, at least.

At 1:15, the woman appears at the door of the building: she is wearing a black raincoat (shiny, very tight in the waist, with a very full skirt), a black hat, great big round earrings, black gloves, black stockings, and black shoes, shiny and high-heeled.

The girl takes a bus; Humbert follows it methodically, trying not to miss her stop. When she gets off of the bus, close to the cathedral, he parks the car in the first space he finds and fills the parking meter with coins.

He watches her walk in front of him. He finds her attractive. He imagines her in Heribert’s arms, soft and warm. He gets an erection. He takes out the little notebook. He takes notes as he walks.

He has no doubts about how to approach her. Using the most common, cheesy approach of the neighborhood guys from his teenage years, without more ado he asks her where they’ve seen each other before.

“Did we meet at. .? Were you at the Yacht Club on a motor. .? No. Then at that quiche place on. .? No, no. Were you at the Paquito D’Rivera concert last week? No, not there. At the opera. That’s it. I’m sure. I know you from the opera. You were at the Met last night, weren’t you?”

The woman smiles, and in that moment, Humbert is certain he will never know if she did so out of politeness or because the line had amused her.

“Why did you smile just now? Where are you going? What dumb questions, I’m sorry. Am I bothering you? Do you mind if I walk along with you?”

It doesn’t matter to him that she doesn’t answer. On the sidewalk a silver-painted bald man is imitating the movements of an automaton to such perfection that the group of rubberneckers gathered there gives him an ovation. Humbert would like to be capable of performing in public, doing something like that man is doing. He takes out the little notebook and jots down in the last remaining corner: “Silver-painted man moves like a robot. Reflect upon this. Body art?” He adds another line: “Hildegarda’s face, watching him: joyful.”

“What are you writing down?”

“I take notes so I won’t forget what I have to do.”

The woman smiles at him. Humbert thinks it is the prettiest smile anyone has ever smiled at him. He would like to kiss her on the spot. He wants to embrace her, feel the warmth of her body. He wants to kiss her from her toes to her eyelids. He wants to caress her, make love to her (make love to her?) without even undressing her. He would have gone to the ends of the earth with her, traversing deserts and streams, glacial crevasses. . Note in notebook: “Review (and, if necessary, recover) romantic symbolism.” He takes her hand and kisses it.

“Are you crazy, what are you doing?”

•

“Are you crazy, what are you doing? We don’t even know each others’ names.”

She laughs with her white teeth, gossamer lips, and brilliant eyes, dark as the night. He feels he has never met a woman like her. They kiss and caress each other. Humbert has successfully undone her bra without taking off her sweater. They are in the car, close to the docks and meatpacking houses, parked on a silent and deserted street. Humbert isn’t entirely sure whether the possibility of some guy’s showing up with a knife adds excitement to the moment or not. She takes off her hat. He kisses her again, and her lips open like a shell. He tells her his name is Humbert.

“My name is Alexandra.”

Was this some kind of joke. .?

“Alexandra?”

“Yes. Don’t you like it? You made a face. It’s not such a strange name. .”

“You’re kidding.”

“What do you mean?”

He knows by the way she looks at him that she isn’t kidding. Her name is Alexandra and it has never been Hildegarda, and never will be, and she will never be the Hildegarda he thought he had in his arms. All at once those supple lips, those legs wrapped in black, that tiny skirt that Humbert has slowly been pushing up, make no sense at all. . He tries to visualize a scene that will keep him from losing interest in the woman, at least sexually. He tries to forget that her name is Alexandra, he tries firmly to believe that this is Hildegarda and that Marino himself, dressed as if he were onstage in Madame Butterfly, was offering her, Madame Butterfly herself, to him personally: “Here. Do as you wish with her. See how soft she is. She’ll do anything you ask.” But it doesn’t work. The woman is not Hildegarda, and only with his eyes closed is he able to go on, follow the ritual, undress her partially, allow her to undress him partially, and finish up in a hurry, murmuring trivial excuses, leaving her at her door, taking out the notebook to write down a number he will never use, giving her a fake number, not even waving goodbye when he drives away.

He looks up the name DelNonno in the telephone book. He calls a few numbers that could be Marino DelNonno’s, but aren’t. He puts on his tuxedo.

“Since you don’t like the opera, I’m not going to ask you if you want to come along,” says Humbert, not unaware that, having formulated the offer in this way, Helena might just decide that she would like to come along.

“You’re going to the opera again? What’s gotten into you?”

“It intrigues me.”

“It must. No, I’m not coming. Give me a kiss when you get home. And another one right now.”

•

This time Marino DelNonno leaves the theater with a man. They go for martinis at a bar by the opera house that’s strung with Christmas lights.

Humbert double-parks in front of the bar and waits. When they finally come out, they say goodbye right at the door. DelNonno stops a cab and gets in. Humbert follows him. The street where the taxi drops DelNonno is not the same one as the night before. The building is small, but similarly sumptuous. He takes down the address in a new little notebook. He calculates the possibilities of spending the night waiting. From a nearby phone booth he calls information in case DelNonno’s number is listed, but not yet in the phone book. No new DelNonno. The phone must be listed under his wife’s name. What is Hildegarda’s last name? If only there were reverse listings, by address. . After a while he calls information again. It’s a different voice. He requests the phone numbers for that building, claiming not to know the last name of the person under whose name the telephone is listed.

He calls all the numbers, asking to speak with Marino. If the number doesn’t correspond to the apartment where DelNonno and Hildegarda live, the response will be unsuspecting. If, as on the previous day, he is at a house that is not his own, Humbert might sense some hesitation on the other end. If nothing comes of it, he can opt either to spend the night or return the following morning, as he did yesterday. From the list of seventeen numbers he had gotten from information, at the ninth he notices a slightly uneasy response. It was a woman’s voice; she was not terribly convincing about Marino’s not being home.

“Who’s calling?”

“Who do you think? Put him on quickly, I have no time to waste. This is urgent.”

“. .”

“Do you hear me?”

“But he’s not here. Well, let me go make certain.”

He doesn’t hear the sharp clack receivers make when they are left on a table, or footsteps pattering toward a fictitious inquiry, but rather the silence of a hand over the mouthpiece. Humbert considers the possibility of hanging up. This may not be DelNonno’s apartment either, but the home of another girlfriend. But what if it is, in fact, DelNonno’s house and that is Hildegarda’s voice, trying to screen their calls. They don’t leave him time to decide: the other end has gone dead. Humbert smiles. He could have some fun. Blackmail them. Would they be concerned about the press exposing DelNonno’s adulteries? He doubts it. These days of libertines and decadents weren’t exactly a golden age for blackmailers. He might even be doing him a favor, publicity-wise. Humbert leaves the booth. He is walking toward his car, lost in thought, when the solution opens the door to the building: Marino DelNonno is arranging his scarf and calling for a taxi. The telephone stratagem has produced an effect that perhaps, if it can’t exactly be qualified as unexpected, at least is not the one he had initially been after.

He follows the cab, which stops twelve blocks away. DelNonno goes into a new building. Humbert writes down the address. In light of the kind of life this Marino lives, it’s possible this is not his house either, but, according to the rules of chance, or intuitively (and right now he doesn’t feel like ascertaining which of these lines of thinking makes it clear to him), the probability of DelNonno’s living there is almost absolute. He decides to go home.

He opens the door. He finds Helena still wearing her raincoat and boots, looking over some files containing documents from the gallery. He takes them out of her hands, takes her in his arms, kisses her, undresses her.

•

The following morning at nine he has already parked by the corner and is standing in front of the building. He doesn’t think either DelNonno or Hildegarda tends to leave the building before nine with any regularity. He goes straight up to the doorman. He intends to ask for Mr. DelNonno, but at the last moment, not quite knowing why, but sensing that it is the right thing to do, he asks for Mrs. DelNonno.

“Whom shall I say is calling?”

He hesitates a second.

“Heribert.”

The doorman goes into his booth, unhooks the telephone, and presses a button, the number of which Humbert is unable to see.

“Good morning. Mr. Heribert would like to see Mrs. DelNonno.”

When the doorman comes out with a negative response, there’s nobody there. Humbert is in a deli, buying sandwiches and beer.

He sits behind the wheel of the car, positioned so as to be able to keep track of everyone who leaves the building. But how is he to know who she is if he has never seen her? Will he have to go after every woman who leaves the building? Recognizing someone he has never seen before is not exactly a task he can leave to mere inspiration.

He realizes he hasn’t been taking notes for a while. This whole thing is so entertaining that he can’t put his mind to it. It’s fascinating to pull on a thread and follow it without knowing if he will find a ball of string or the end of a rope. From the building emerge: a woman dressed in pink, a man dressed in navy blue, a man dressed in gray, a woman dressed in orange, a man dressed in white, a woman dressed in red and black and a woman dressed in beige, a man dressed in pink, a man dressed in yellow, two men dressed in gray, a man dressed in blue and a woman dressed in blue and white, a man dressed in red, a woman dressed in black, and a man dressed in gray and black stripes.

•

At noon, when the sun is at its peak and Humbert has eaten all the sandwiches and drunk all the beers, and is thinking of making another trip to the delicatessen to buy more, Marino leaves the building with a woman. That definitely must be Hildegarda. He follows them with his gaze. They go into the garage next door. Humbert starts the car. When he sees them leave in a black Buick Park Avenue, heading in the opposite direction, he finds himself having to make a U-turn in the middle of the street. The man by the curb with a sandwich cart is forced to pull back in a hurry and backs into a passing ambulance, which doesn’t have time to brake and tips him over with a crash.

DelNonno’s car stops in front of a glass-and-steel building. Hildegarda gets out. The car takes off, crosses a double line, passes another car, and vanishes down the street.

Humbert gets out of the car and looks at the door of the establishment Hildegarda has gone into. A large neon sign proclaims in stylized letters that this is a Health and Sports Club, that is, a posh gym. The services offered by the club are detailed in a list on the glass door: swimming, tennis, sauna, gymnastics, dance. Dance? He takes out the notebook and makes a note. He never thought of doing anything on dance. He feels good: he hasn’t taken any notes in so long that, even though he knows that his lack of fertile ideas is due to his investigation, he was half worrying that his brain was rusting. He pushes the door open.

A very blond girl wearing a t-shirt with the name of the club and a short skirt informs him at length about the facilities the center has to offer. Humbert, who has always shunned all types of physical activity, signs up without even waiting for the girl to finish her promotional spiel.

“Can I start right away?”

“Naturally. We’ll be glad to give you a tour of the club.”

He has trouble losing his guide. He goes through all the rooms twice, no longer trying to go unnoticed. He goes into the gym, sees people vaulting the horse, flipping on the bars, stretching their arms on the rings. He makes his way through the steam of the sauna. Pretending to be lost, he goes into the women’s dressing rooms, eliciting shrieks and giggles. At the pool, he watches as a man dives off the board, twisting his body on its axis like a corkscrew. He wanders through the halls, checking all the tables of the small bar-restaurant on the top floor. He finally finds her in front of a mirror, one of the many women lined up at the wall, lifting one leg delicately behind them and thrusting it forward suddenly, as they double their trunks over. . When he sees her face up close, the few doubts he is still harboring are immediately erased: this is Hildegarda, it is unquestionably she. This was the face that had filled all the canvases of Heribert Julià’s final period like an obsession, until he had started drawing himself, getting more and more lost in a maze of self-portraits and men seen from behind, exhausted and leaning on any surface they could find.

How should he approach her? With self-assurance, he could approach her any old way and make a success of it. But he wants his method to be so perfect that, for the first time, he decides to reflect on it. One by one, he discovers the defects in each of the plans he comes up with. His imagination is prolific, though, and he continually conjures up new ones. He imagines and, applying his fine critical faculties, rejects so many that, before he knows it, she is on her way out. Defenseless, he can’t find the wherewithal to follow her and launch right in without further ado. He decides to think about it some more, and more calmly, and puts off any action until the following day.

•

Humbert tells Helena that he roams around the city from one place to another, looking at buildings he has looked at a thousand times and discovering new facets to them. He follows people and watches where they go, how they sit on a bench, how they grab the handle to get onto the bus, how they open the newspaper, how they put their handkerchiefs away after blowing their noses, how they put one foot before the other, time and again, when they walk. Habitual behavior seems more and more strange to him every day, with careful observation.

“And what will come of it all?”

“All what?”

“All this observation?”

Following people will enable him to learn things he will then make use of to advance even farther, to break with what he has created thus far, to take the leap that will put even more distance between him and the crowd, turning meters of separation into kilometers, atop all the tops, an aerostatic balloon soaring over the cupolas of all cathedrals. He realizes that, unthinkingly, he is taking the excuse he invented for Helena for the truth, and even elaborating a theory based on it. He takes out the little notebook and writes: “Tell a lie. Believe it. Elaborate a thought based on the lie, a thought which, brilliant though it might be, is of no use, based as it is on a falsehood.” He is about to add one more detail when he realizes that Helena is sound asleep and he turns out the light.

•

Bright and early the next morning Humbert is on his way to the club. He spends the morning doing simple exercises and checking out the dance studio from time to time, to see if Hildegarda is there. In the afternoon he does laps, drinks soft drinks at the bar, reads the newspaper, and fills a few pages of the notebook with notes.

Around 9:00 p.m. he gives up on waiting. He goes home, has coffee and donuts for supper, gets right into bed, and when Helena gets in at 3:30, he turns over and gives her a hug.

In the morning, at the club, he has a sauna and plays tennis with a fat man with glasses who has asked him to play. Not only does he defeat him soundly, but with his final stroke he smashes the ball and leaves the lenses of his opponent’s eyeglasses in pieces. Once in a while, he goes to the dance studio, hoping to find her there. In vain. That afternoon, at a table in the bar of the club, he fills up his little notebook with a list of possible sports-related paintings. What if he based his January show on the topic? Would it be enough of a novelty, or was it better to pursue the idea of working out the dream series in iron? He makes a note: “January exhibit based on sports? Include allusions to George Bellows?”

At 8:30, he goes home. He has a chicken sandwich and orange juice for dinner. He goes to bed early. Helena is there, reading an Art and Artists from many years before. Scattered about the sheets are issues of Artforum, Arts, two months of ArtNews, one Arts Magazine, and the previous week’s Arts Weekly. For a moment he tries to suss out which articles Helena is interested in, but sleep quickly overcomes him and he falls asleep.

In the morning Humbert lifts weights and, from time to time, stops by the dance studio. Around noon he finally sees her, on the floor, twisted into a knot, spreading her arms and lifting her head. He goes wild with joy, his heart beating like a cuckoo clock.

When Hildegarda gets out of the shower (an hour and a half later, her dance session over for the day), she runs into Humbert (who, meanwhile, had also showered and dressed), who introduces himself straight off. Hildegarda says she has heard of him and, since she, too, is very interested in painting, she’s pleased to meet him. Humbert confesses that he has wanted to paint her since the very first time he saw her on the dance studio floor. Hildegarda asks him if he’s been going to the club for very long, because she’s never seen him before. Humbert says a couple of years, but he doesn’t go very often: work and all. . Humbert thinks of a painting in which Hildegarda appears, languid and pallid, surrounded by trees and plants. . What an effect that painting would have in January’s big show! Forget sports. Now he decides it will revolve around a single person: fifty, sixty, eighty, a hundred paintings of Hildegarda. How mediocre Heribert’s paintings of her would seem in comparison with the ones he, inflamed with a consuming passion, would do! He can already see the titles in the art reviews: “Toward a new romanticism?” To escape such labeling, he thinks, he could do each painting in a different style, forgotten or a bit out of vogue, which could be regarded as new: new cubism, new op (or new figurative perceptual abstraction), new Dadaism (Hildegarda dressed as the Mona Lisa with a landscape of factories in the background, with a mustache like the one Duchamp affixed to Leonardo’s), new neo-classicism (Hildegarda as a Homeric Helen out of a painting by Poussin), new pop (Hildegarda as Wonder Woman, destroying the face of the bad guy with a single blow, in a three meter by three meter comic strip), new baroque (Caravaggio’s Virgin with Hildegarda’s face), new romanticism (Hildegarda as one of the women at Delacroix’s death of Sardanapalus). Hildegarda says she doesn’t know what to say.

“Say yes.”

“Yes.”

“When can we meet?”

“I’ll come to your studio.”

“No, not to the studio. I’ll do studies of you on the street. I see this as something alive, completely spontaneous. .”

Hildegarda tells him that another painter had asked her to pose for him, a long time ago.

“But he must not have done anything with the paintings in the end, because I’ve been waiting for him to do a show, to see if I had been an inspiration to him, but he’s never done another exhibition. You don’t hear anything about him these days. We were good friends. Maybe you know him. .”

Humbert looks at her: she is wearing a black wool pullover with a deep V-neckline front and back, a straight gray skirt, big earrings, a wide, shiny leather belt, black gloves, gray stockings with seams, shoes with five-inch heels, with a great big black bag under her arm.

•

“I have to go. How could you start sketching me now? Call me at home tomorrow.”

Tomorrow was too late, Humbert thought. They are sitting on a bench in a park, and Humbert is surprised that there are still pigeons around at that time in the afternoon. Over by another bench a pigeon and a squirrel are staring each other down, motionless.

Humbert asks her if she’d like to go to Chicago with him, to a show he’s doing there, which he hadn’t planned to go to, and wouldn’t, he had just decided, unless she came along. Hildegarda keeps laughing, saying over and over that he’s crazy. He takes her hand, looking at her lips, which are so dark red it almost hurts. As he moves in to kiss her, she asks him (without backing off so much as an inch) if he doesn’t think he’s moving a bit fast. Humbert doesn’t know whether to continue along the road leading to those lips, or to turn back. He sees her floating in the air, soaring over the buildings.

She agrees to go to Chicago, though. But they won’t be able to leave together, she says, since her husband, who is an opera singer, is in the city now, and he will definitely want to take her to the airport to say goodbye, particularly since the following Wednesday he will be starting his European tour. It would be easy for her to find an excuse for going off suddenly to Chicago: so many years of marriage have created a network of tacit ellipses and accepted ploys that amply justified sudden leave-takings. Humbert confesses that he, too, is married. She kisses him hard, not just closing her eyes, but squeezing them shut, with such ardor that Humbert feels weak and aroused at the same time, seeking closer contact, which she does not want. As they walk toward the place where the car is parked, they set the date. She will go by plane, he will go by car. When they say goodbye, besides kissing, they feverishly caress each other’s backs.

•

The problem is how to explain this sudden change in plans to Helena, how to justify his repeatedly having refused to go over the past few weeks, only to change his mind so unexpectedly. He pushes open the door to the house, vaguely certain, though, that it won’t be all that hard for him to find a way. There is a surprise awaiting him at home: the whole room is full of people he knows, and some he doesn’t, drinking, laughing, and talking at the top of their lungs, inaudible under the waves of music. When he isn’t able to locate Helena at first glance, he tries to cross the room discreetly, to the corner where the drinks are set up. Along the way, though, he greets four painters with mustaches who are chatting with one another, a couple of critics, an Ethiopian sculptor whose show has just opened, three women he has never met before (two of whom are twins), and two expressionless men, who are leaning against the wall and contemplating the goings-on, seriously, with drinks in their hands. Finally, he finds Helena, behind a ficus, arguing with an illustrator; they’ve both pierced the same canapé. He gives her (Helena) a kiss and takes her aside. What are they celebrating?

“Xano. He was supposed to be back today with the latest news, live, about the Japan show, but he hasn’t gotten in yet.”

Humbert struggles, successfully, to avoid being included in a discussion of art deco, rationalism, and the Nazi aesthetic. At one point, trying to catch a rest from the din in one of the bedrooms, he encounters a luxuriant couple. In the kitchen he finds traces of jam in the mustard pot. Someone must have stuck a knife in without cleaning it. He finds a woman’s shoe in the freezer. In the hall, having taken out his notebook to jot down a few impressions, he runs into the double giggle of the twins, who carry him off into one the bedrooms, undress him, and subject him to all manner of abuses. On his return to the living room, dressed only in a Japanese kimono (too short and too tight for him), he finds a cardboard rocking horse in the hall, a whiskey bottle among the potted plants, a turbot in the fruit bowl. They were playing the lying game. The person who seems to have proposed the game is a short guy who is so drunk he can only keep his balance by holding on to the curtains. For a while everyone tells lies that give them away, lies that seem like the truth, boring lies, brilliant lies, pointless lies. Then a critic, who was sitting on top of the television set and nudging a peach someone must have stepped on after it had fallen on the floor with his foot, tells him that his work is extraordinary, that the utilization of diverse methods, styles, and media is neither impoverishing, tacky, nor the greatest farce in the history of art, but rather an enrichment; what’s more, it wasn’t full of contradictions, as some said; on the contrary: it was one of the most solid oeuvres of the century, probably the body of work that was destined to link this century with the next, to make that leap for contemporary art which the great creators of other times had made for their own. The people laughed; Humbert, annoyed, gets up from his chair, and slams his fist into the critic’s face without missing a beat. Short, and quite astonished, the guy loses his balance and, trying to clutch on to something, encounters the curtains, which he brings down with him in his fall. Then there is a mass of arms trying to keep Humbert and the critic apart, one or two shrieks, the giggling of the twins, Helena telling him that what he has done is deranged, and Humbert alleging that the critic was out for blood, and even a child would have been offended if someone telling a lie had gone on about how good he was. Helena tells him that maybe he should develop a little humility and self-control and get used to tough criticism. Humbert tells her that, by the way, he has decided to go to Chicago the next day.

Humbert is driving down the highway. He has been at the wheel for more than twelve hours, and he has only stopped once. To compensate, he decides that from that point on he will stop at every bar he comes across.

At the first, he orders a scotch. At the second, a bourbon. At the third, a vodka. At the fourth, a gin. At the fifth, a rye. At the sixth, a glass of wine. At the seventh, a tequila. At the eighth, a rum. At the ninth, an anisette. At the tenth, a cognac. At the eleventh, a martini.

At the thirteenth he sees, right next to the jukebox, a woman who starts out by singing the song that’s playing on the machine, then dances to it by herself, and, as it ends, dances to it with another one of the women sitting there. At the fourteenth, he sees an American flag placed symmetrically across from an Irish flag on either side of the mirror between the shelves of drinks, centered on the shiny cash register. At the fifteenth, a drunk is so happy to hear that Humbert has ordered his brand of beer that he turns his own bottle around to show him the label and demonstrate that he, too, is drinking that brand. At the sixteenth, he finds a backed-up toilet that has left puddles of piss all over the floor, which is composed of tiny tiles. He has to slosh through it to get to the bowl. At the seventeenth, he finds a bar with no bar, only tables. Indignant, he turns and leaves. At the eighteenth, he finds the waiter asleep at one end of the bar, and when he raises his voice to wake him, the other customers give him a dirty look. At the nineteenth, they don’t let him in because they’re closing. At the twentieth, he goes over to the pool table and watches as the player rips a hole in the green felt, and everyone, both the player who made the hole, the other players, and the other customers in the bar, stares at him in silence until he leaves. In the twenty-first he finds a little boy at the bar, drinking sarsaparilla, looking into the eyes of a man who must be his father, who is drinking Curaçao. At the twenty-second, he orders giant clams with horseradish sauce to go with his drink. At the twenty-third, he orders cheese with onions and mustard on wheat bread. At the twenty-fourth, he orders oysters with lemon, but they don’t have any: they’ve run out.

The twenty-fifth is the bar of a roadside hotel. After having a drink at the bar, he orders an abundant supper, followed by coffee and a glass of whiskey. He looks at his watch: 1:15. He decides to spend the night there. He asks if there are any rooms.

A receptionist (dark, tall, with thick lips, a little under twenty years old, who walks in front of him gently swaying her hips) takes him up to his room, showing little surprise at his having no luggage. She takes her tip with a smile and closes the door softly. Humbert urinates, washes his face, and lies on the bed to rest for five minutes. Since it seems clear to him that he isn’t drowsy, and is not likely to fall asleep, he goes back down to the bar.

The bartender asks what he’ll have. Humbert would like to see the whole length of the bar full of glasses and more glasses of different sizes and shapes. For starters he orders gin and then, in succession, a whole series of different kinds of drinks. A half hour later that stretch of bar looks like a glassware showcase, until a woman comes out of the kitchen and picks up all the empty glasses, leaving him just the one that is half-full of maraschino. Humbert takes out the little notebook and writes: “Still life of different types of glasses and mugs.”

Humbert turns his head. A woman with long curly brown hair, dressed in black and staring at the surface of the liquid in her glass, is sitting two stools down. When she also turns her head to look at him, they both smile. Humbert thinks of initiating an approach, but when he feels his eyelids heavy with sleep, he picks up what money is left, puts it in his pocket, and leaves the bar without looking back.

Once in bed he hears a couple arguing in the next room. Humbert positions his ear closer to the wall. The woman is saying (so loud the whole building could probably hear her) that, although he is indeed a good politician, capable perhaps of being the best — by his standards as well as by hers — he would never really be the best, because what he was after was to be the only one, to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue, every member of the human race, forever after, in every remaining moment of history, and that, the woman said, was impossible. There has never been anyone, no matter how important his or her contribution to the course of history, who isn’t a stranger to many. Neither popes, nor emperors, nor film stars, nor pop music idols (when pop music was still producing idols) have ever managed to do it, and neither would he. Humbert takes out the little notebook and takes it all down. The woman is running down a list of great celebrities and asking him how many times a year he thinks of each of them. Without waiting for an answer, she herself responds, hardly ever. He tells her to shut up, and his rebuttal is so garbled that Humbert has trouble understanding any of it. She then says not to take it like that, that she loves him, but that loving him hasn’t left her so blind as not to see clearly what was happening to him. He seems to be sobbing. Humbert hears how she starts consoling him, in a lower voice, and how they kiss. He hears whispering, brief laughter. He can even imagine how they are touching each other. Humbert is immediately aroused. He hears the woman moan. He hears some obscenities being whispered by the man that intensify the woman’s cries. Humbert begins to stroke himself. The bedsprings in the room next door creak obsessively until the woman breaks out in a long cry, almost at the same moment in which Humbert abundantly stains the sheets and, as he dries himself, hears the cavernous groan of the man.

For a while, everything is quiet. Then the whispering starts up again, more placid this time. Humbert has another erection. He should have taken advantage of the chance to strike up an acquaintance with the girl at the bar. Maybe it isn’t too late: he could get dressed and go back down. But most likely she will already have left. Not knowing what to do, he frantically dials the desk and orders a double scotch, and when the same receptionist who had taken him up to the room delivers it, he pulls her into his arms and, between giggles and no-no-nos, drags her to the bed, pushes the wet sheet aside, and kisses her passionately.

•

The following morning he spends his breakfast in the hotel bar trying to imagine which of the couples who occupy the other tables had spent the previous night in the room next to his. He closes his eyes, trying to place the voices, without success. He pays for his breakfast and the room and, as he opens the door, sees two of the chambermaids whispering to each other, looking at him, and shrieking with laughter. He stops, takes out the little notebook, and sketches the hotel, with the two maids at the door, one whispering in the other’s ear.

He drives without stopping. When he reaches the town where he had arranged to meet up with Hildegarda, he sees two cars totaled by a recent crash.

He doesn’t have to look very far: the hotel is a gigantic skyscraper, boring and extravagant, on the only street in town. The receptionist greets him with a smile. He tells him his wife has already arrived, not fifteen minutes before. He tells him the room number. Humbert bounds up the stairs, two by two. He knocks twice on the door. He hears Hildegarda’s voice asking him to wait a moment. But the door had opened when he knocked; it must not have been quite shut. Humbert walks around the room, looking at the items of clothing Hildegarda has left scattered on the bed. He runs his hand over all of them, picks one up, and smells it. Hildegarda opens the bathroom door, wrapped in a towel, and takes little steps in his direction, leaving the floor full of wet footsteps. She hugs him gleefully as he scolds her for having left the door open, and he takes off her towel.

•

When they park by the bar, Humbert realizes that the gas tank is almost empty. They have coffee at a small table by the window. It is beginning to snow. The room smells of boiled cabbage. An extraordinarily fat black cat, like a balloon about to burst, saunters between the tables, rubbing up against the legs of the people sitting there. Humbert finds the animal so disgusting that, when it comes near, he gets up from the chair and goes to sit at another table. Hildegarda shoots the cat a ferocious glare. The cat turns tail and goes over to Humbert’s new table. Humbert gets up and goes to the other end of the room. The cat is so bloated that he think just touching it will leave his fingers slathered with lard. If he squashes it, he thinks, he will splatter the walls of the place with grease. When the cat comes over to him yet again, Humbert goes back to Hildegarda’s table, asks for the check, and pays, fleeing from the animal’s slow and constant gait, that trails him wherever he goes. When Hildegarda opens the door to leave, he closes it instantly, fearful it will follow them out.

In the next town, he also parks on what appears to be the main street. They go into a movie house. In the vestibule, the woman who sells popcorn is eating a chocolate-covered cake. In the theater, once their eyes have adjusted to the dark, they realize there is no one else there. They talk about movies. Though Hildegarda hasn’t seen many of the ones he mentions, the few she has seen she really likes. Happy to be alone, they allow themselves to speak in a completely normal tone of voice, in a movie house.

When they leave, the woman who sells popcorn is eating a sandwich and drinking orange juice. It is still snowing. He gets back into the car. Humbert announces that they have been running on empty for quite some time and that they should fill up as soon as they see a gas station.

A little ways beyond the town, to the right, Hildegarda sees the lake. They veer off onto a little road and park lakeside. They kiss and embrace, isolated from the outdoors by the coat of snow that is blanketing them.

•

When they try to start the car, it won’t start. Hildegarda says they should have filled the tank. Humbert says, “Ah.” They have two alternatives: wait for the snowstorm to peter out or try to walk back. They opt for the latter. Humbert considers offering to go to the gas station himself, but he thinks she could also have offered. They pull up the collars of their coats, pull their hats down over their ears, give each other a hug, and start walking.

When they arrive, over an hour later, they are completely soaked. They buy a can of gasoline and ask the person in charge if he knows anyone who can drive them back. He knows someone who lives in the next town over and runs a taxi service. He arrives twenty minutes later. He takes them on a search that seems unending because in that snowstorm all the roads look alike, and at each fork in the road they end up choosing one side practically at random, only, in the end, to have to turn back and try the other. It is hours before they find the car.

Exhausted and aggravated, they go back to the hotel. They go up to their room and get into bed. Humbert turns over to embrace Hildegarda. She says not right now.

Feeling restless, Humbert tries to figure out if he can get any notes out of all that. Finding nothing, he tries to sleep. Hildegarda asks him if he’s sleeping. He says no. Then she starts talking non-stop: somehow out of context, he feels; she tells him that years before she had been involved with a stage actor, precisely at the same time she was a member of a mime troupe. And now she has the same feeling she had when she started losing interest in the opera: she feels she isn’t going anywhere with her painting. She asks him if he really thinks she isn’t any good. Humbert alleges that he hasn’t seen her work and thus has no way of judging. Hildegarda says that the same thrill of satisfaction she had once got with mime, and then with the opera, she was now getting (more and more strongly) with jazz. She asks him his opinion as to what instrument she should try. Humbert, acting as if he were thinking it over, wonders how to evade this monologue that doesn’t interest him in the slightest. In his little notebook (which he had left on the night table, just in case) he manages to write: “Woman tells boring story that doesn’t interest me at all.” He continues to listen until he falls asleep and dreams that he is going out with a girl who had been Heribert’s girlfriend but isn’t Hildegarda. Since Helena is at his house, they go to hers, but when they open the door, they find it full of cockroaches. Humbert then proposes that they go to his house, where there have never been any roaches, and they would find some pretense for Helena. They go there and the house is a hotel, which greatly reduces the danger of their being found out by Helena. They are so certain that no cockroach has ever entered that house that they are taken by surprise when, upon turning on the lights in their room, a roach appears right in the middle of the bed. When he immediately proceeds to crush it, the juice that oozes out is like thick semen, which obliges them to take off the sheet. They lie down without touching. They fall asleep. Humbert, in the dream he is dreaming in the dream, dreams that he is in a car at Hildegarda’s side. She is driving, and she announces that something is wrong with the car. In what appears to be the ideal solution for such cases, she has connected the car with wires to a (disgusting, fat, enormous) dead cat. But Hildegarda tells him that they have to massage the cat; otherwise, the contraption doesn’t work. Humbert goes to massage the cat; when he touches it though, its flesh, soft and putrid, disintegrates and falls off. Humbert realizes that this is only natural, because they hadn’t boiled it first. In cases like this, you had to boil the cat so the car could keep going. So they boil it, then, as all these people look on. Thousands upon thousands of roaches start to stream out of it. A spider appears and approaches. The spider is laughing. It goes up to the pot, looks in, and rests a leg on the rim. The people bat it away. It goes off, but remains within eyeshot. From there it observes the scene with disdain. Then it comes close again: dozens of hairy legs in motion, that stupid laugh. . It sticks its head in the pot again, to see the dead cat (which, dead and all, is surreptitiously laughing) boiling and the roaches streaming out. The people bat it away again, and it exits laughing. Then, in the dream, he awakens from the other dream because the weight of the woman’s body (who has rolled over on top of him in her sleep) is smothering him. He gets up to have a drink of water, and a red roach comes up out of the drain of the sink.

•

He wakes up because the weight of Hildegarda’s body (who has rolled over on top of him in her sleep) is smothering him. He’s thirsty. He remembers woolly fragments of his dream: the weight of a body, a man with the face of an arachnid. He gets up, goes into the bathroom, turns on the faucet, lets the water run a little, looks at himself in the mirror, and, in the silence of the night, hears the sound of the stubble when he runs his hand over his chin. When he lowers his head to drink from the faucet, he sees a cockroach hiding behind the bowl of the sink. He tries to kill it, but can’t. Using all his might he manages to separate the sink a bit from the wall (fearing that the tiles, or the sink itself, will crack) forcing it to flee down the tiles to the floor. There he crushes it and stands immobile, looking out of the corner of his eye, expecting a vengeful coalition of hotel roaches to appear. What if he gets into bed and one of those repugnant creatures decides to stroll across his pillow and his face? He gets into bed, covers his whole body with the sheets (cotton sheets, still smelling of detergent), so fresh that no cockroach would ever dare come in contact with them, he thinks, to reassure himself.

Three quarters of an hour later, he deduces that this edginess that is keeping him from sleeping must be insomnia, which he has heard so much about, but never suffered from, and which has so often been said to be an ailment favorable to creative fertility. Is he, then, having insomnia for the first time? He’s pleased: new experiences always interest him. Perhaps if he becomes an insomniac he’ll be able to devote those long hours of silence and the snoring of others to a deep meditation upon the meaning of his work, to the structuring of a theoretical framework. He walks around the room. He’s doesn’t want to touch anything, because a cockroach might have skittered over it (except for the sheets, and he doesn’t know why he’s so sure about the sheets). He can only bring himself to drink water from his hands (not from a glass!) if he tries not to think that a roach could also have strolled down the faucet.

Humbert sits down in a chair at a table against the wall, on which he had left the room key and Hildegarda her pocketbook. He runs the index finger of his right had over the edge of the table and checks it for dust. He hears Hildegarda pull the sheet over her, blow a raspberry, and say what may or may not be a word:

“Budalowkey.”

Humbert stops looking at his finger, gets up, goes over to the bed, and sits down. Hildegarda is fast asleep, gripping the edge of the sheet with both hands. What was that “budalowkey” about? What could she be dreaming about? He wishes he could penetrate Hildegarda’s dreams. . And not just Hildegarda’s, but anyone’s, and learn what everyone is dreaming, see the images they saw, contemplate the combustion of ideas that takes place behind each pair of shut eyes. Humbert brings his face down to hers. He whispers:

“Budalowkey.”

She doesn’t budge. If only he could get inside the dream, be part of it, answer and ask without bringing down the whole structure in which the other person momentarily lives. . And “budalowkey,” what does that mean? Maybe she said “barliqui-barloqui” in Catalan; no, it was very unlikely she would know the word. In English, “budalowkey” could be something like “but a low key” or “but I locked it.” But why? What could these phrases mean? And maybe it wasn’t so clearly “budalowkey” after all, but more of a “badalecky” or “battle-hockey” or “Bore a locket.”

Hildegarda is stirring; she emits throaty sounds, as if she were carrying on a whole conversation inside. That white expanse of sheet wrapped around a flesh-colored burst of shoulder, and the light shade from the night table, an obsessive greenish blue. . Humbert gets up, takes the little notebook from the night table, opens it, and begins to sketch: the bed, the night table, the wall, the painting of a snow-covered landscape, the drapes, the door. . Then he draws the same composition, replacing each object with another: the bed is now an enormous pack of cigarettes; the door, a loudspeaker; the painting, a stamp; the night tables, a pair of dice on either side of the pack of cigarettes; the wall is gone; the drapes are a forest in flames. . He draws the same scene again: the bed is a dark black spot; the door a soft stain that spreads and spreads until it fills up the whole page. In one corner a boy (a boy or a girl?) plays with a pail. A girl, clearly. Humbert recognizes her at once. It’s Helena, from one of those photographs in the album she had first shown him a couple of weeks before: Helena as a little girl, playing on the beach; as a young woman in a little dress, with tacky high-heeled shoes, and a hairdo drenched with spray; with friends on a camping trip; or, now older, with that mysterious Henri, the artist — not French, just an American snob — about whom he knows only that they had been engaged, and from whom some time back he had discovered letters, bound with a rubber band, in her stocking drawer. . Humbert flips through the little notebook and on a blank page begins to write: “A whole series of brides — in the appropriate gowns — without makeup. Another series of brides with too much makeup. Brides with beautiful faces and fake mustaches. A lame bride, with a crutch. Brides against a backdrop of factories. Brides with their skirts lifted, showing their bushes. A bride leading a dog on a leash. A series of paintings of brides in tuxedos with carnations in their lapels. A groom with a limp penis coming out of his fly. A groom with the bride’s bouquet in his hand, striking a serious pose. A group of gentlemen in tuxedos trying to catch the bouquet the bride has tossed as it floats in mid-air. A groom in a tuxedo with high heels. A groom smoking a corn cob pipe, making so much smoke it hides his face. Two men smoking pipes and fistfighting, neither of them dropping the pipe (in pure primary colors in which red predominates). A transatlantic steamer navigating in a sea of blood, with merrymaking on deck: colored lights, streamers, an orchestra. . Modern warships and aircraft carriers full of soldiers dressed as gladiators. Variation: two aircraft carriers, one next to the other, the guys on one of them, dressed as pirates, going after the guys on the other. A stereotypical pirate, drinking scotch from a bottle of Cutty Sark, with the label in clear view. The bar of a bar: a whole slew of men standing there drinking and in the middle, as if it were absolutely normal, two pirates. The bar of a bar: a whole slew of boys drinking cognac right out of the bottle. A ballroom: a couple dancing, him in a skirt and her in running shoes. .”

Humbert cannot fathom how some critics can demand — in the name of some sacrosanct consistency — that he amputate part of his imagination. Even if he worked constantly, without a moment’s interruption for years and years, he would not have enough time to produce all the things boiling in his head, because each idea is a magician’s hat from which new ideas pop up in the form of magicians’ hats from which new ideas pop up. . (He adds the bit about the hats to the list.) What about the idea he had been toying with for days now? Making movies. Not video, no: conventional cinema. He has so many stories to tell. . For this film he himself would write the script, build the buildings (ah, architecture, how often it, too, had tempted him!), and compose the score, as Charlie Chaplin did. Like Charlie Chaplin, he would act in it, too, because who, if not he, would be able to sense the precise gesture, so subtle that words could not convey it, that each moment of the film would require? And what about the symphonies that course through his head? And current dance, how blah it seems in comparison with all the dances he imagines! And novels: if he ever has time to write one (between painting and painting, symphony and symphony, film and film. .), how he will shame all the other writers! They will be so mortified that they will have to go home and hide and never show their faces again. And theater: he will set up colossal productions with thousands of actors who will overflow with emotion in amphitheaters and sports stadiums (because his productions will draw such crowds that not even the biggest theater will be big enough to contain the multitudes who will clamor to see this new facet of his art). And poetry? If he ever decides to write a poem, it will be exceedingly brief, containing only the essence: the whole of life condensed in a single phrase; a poem after which no one else will ever be able to write another line. But his activity cannot be limited to the arts; the entire world will be his field of action: he will have all of humanity interpret one sole performance: three or four billion beings, each playing a role in a work that will outlive him and will bring happiness to humankind. . Perhaps, some day, he’ll have to consider politics?

•

Sketch upon sketch, he fills up all the sheets in the little notebook. He is distressed to be left with no working materials. He scratches his neck, goes to the bathroom, and pulls out a paper hand towel. He draws a horizontal line on it. He shades in the bottom. He looks at it. It doesn’t please him. He crumples it up into a ball, which he throws into the wastebasket. He pulls out a second paper hand towel. .

An hour later, when he sticks his hand into the dispenser, he finds there are no towels left. He then moves on to the spare roll of toilet paper in the medicine chest, and when he has used that up, he goes on to what little there is left on the roll. He sketches silhouettes of fleeing men on the bathroom tiles; simple geometric forms on the ceiling; a big face with no features on the mirror; arrows on the floor. . He goes back into the bedroom. He fills the walls with a spectacular desert landscape: three UFOs are about to land and there’s a laughing moon in the background. Then, unsatisfied, he scratches it all out. When his felt-tipped pen runs out, he searches through all his pockets: his shirt, his jacket, his raincoat. . When he doesn’t find a single pen, he opens Hildegarda’s purse and empties the contents onto the night table. With her eyebrow pencil he draws the shadow of a woman on the bathroom door and, taking no time to look for another surface, on top of that he draws a pyramid and shades in the volume. On top of that he draws the corner of a room and the figure of a girl studying a boring book, crying shiny tears of silver or mercury, whose brilliance he represents with a multitude of tiny rays. On top of all these figures he draws a horse on fire, a skyscraper with oval windows, a shoe without a sole. . until the door is nothing but a huge black spot, a tangle of doodles, a mess. Halfway through drawing a hat on the lampshade of the table lamp, the eyebrow pencil runs out on him. He finds a lipstick among Hildegarda’s things on the night table. He finishes the hat and decorates the windowpanes with a drawing of what can be seen through the window: the night and a mastodontic building. On top of that, he draws what might be going on in each of the rooms. The lipstick doesn’t last long, though, but he keeps on drawing, now scratching on the glass with the metal rim of the lipstick case. When he can’t get any more use out of it, he throws it on the floor, puts on his pajamas, and goes out into the hall, which is long and carpeted in gray, with cream-colored walls and dozens of doors on either side. Humbert is surprised: the whole hall is full of pairs of shoes lined up outside the door, waiting to be cleaned. At the door to room 1030, there is a pair of brown men’s shoes, with traces of mud. He bends down, picks them up, and deposits them in front of door 1034. At the door to 1035, he gathers up a pair of black men’s shoes and takes them to door 1030. At the door to 1022, he finds one pair of women’s green high heels and one pair of men’s gray shoes. He takes the men’s shoes and puts them in the wastebasket next to the elevator. He sniffs the women’s shoes and leaves them at door 1028. At the doorway to room 1033, he turns his head, looks back at the wastebasket, and finds that it doesn’t go with the rest of the décor. He lifts it up and goes down the stairs to the next floor. At the door to 904, he sees a pair of navy blue women’s flats. He picks them up and leaves the wastebasket in their place. In exchange, he leaves the shoes at door 909 and, as he does, hears a conversation inside: a man and a woman talking, but, hard as he listens, he can’t make out the words. The shoes from 910 he leaves at 914 and the shoes from 914 at 920. He hasn’t got many steps farther when he hears a door open. He doesn’t dare turn around until he hears the door close again. Then he turns slowly and discovers that the shoes he left at 920 have disappeared. But the ones he left at 914 are in the same place. Is it possible that the people in 920 opened the door and took the shoes in without realizing that they weren’t theirs, not remembering that they hadn’t even left any shoes outside the door? In front of 932, he hears a door open down the hall. He stands still. He sees a man stick his head out of room 936, look from side to side, and, on seeing him, quickly close the door. Humbert finds it so strange that he stands right there, motionless, on the spot. About a minute later, the door to room 936 opens again, and the same man sticks his head out again; seeing him still there, he quickly closes it again. Humbert is trying to decide whether to knock on that door (he doesn’t quite know why: perhaps to have a little chat) or draw a phenomenal fireworks display on it, when he sees a man come out of the door to room 943, clinging to a woman who is kissing him all over. He says goodbye to her softly, closes the door, and, out in the hall, looks uncomfortable when he sees Humbert. Even so, he goes on to door 936, knocks, and when (after quite a while) it opens (Humbert can’t see who opens it), he goes in. Ten minutes later, Humbert sees how, without making the slightest bit of noise, the man who previously stuck his head out twice appears, silently closes the door, looks at Humbert out of the corner of his eye (and acts as if he weren’t there), and knocks on the door to 943. The same woman, who had just taken such effusive leave of the man who had then gone into room 936, opens it.

Humbert feels that he must make note of all that, but he doesn’t have paper or pencil handy and, even if he had, he strongly doubted he would know what he ought to write. He feels a little tired. There he is, running up and down instead of lying in bed. He decides to walk up to his floor, but when he reaches the stairwell, he goes down instead of up.

He goes down to the eighth floor, where he crosses paths with a bellboy who greets him with a broad smile. Humbert buttons one of the buttons on his pajama top.

On the seventh floor, Humbert presses the button to the elevator. He goes down to the concourse level. He goes to the bar. He finds it closed. He gets back into the elevator. He goes up to the fourteenth floor. He walks around, listening at the doors, switching the wastebaskets around. On the twelfth floor, he sits down to rest awhile. On the eleventh, he hears moaning and thudding at door 1109, like someone being hit; at door 1118, he hears a player piano; at door 1132, he hears rock and roll.

He goes down to the tenth floor, goes into his room, lies down on the bed, and looks at the desert landscape he had drawn (and then scratched out) on the wall in front of him until 7:45.

Hildegarda wakes up at 7:45. She opens one eye, looking for Humbert, and sees him lying on the bed, staring fixedly at the wall in front of him. She too turns her gaze toward the wall in front of them: seeing it all marked up, she gapes, gets out of bed, and walks all around the room examining the scrawling all over the place.

They have breakfast at the hotel bar, and taking their time, they make their way to the Art Institute. Humbert spends an eternity in front of Nighthawks. Hildegarda sleeps through it, her head resting on his shoulder. Then they go to the gallery. The woman in charge (fat, wearing a polka-dot dress and coke bottle glasses) is very pleased he has decided to come in the end. Hildegarda walks around the room looking over the canvases. They are almost all up, except for one that two men are hanging at that very moment. In the painting, two men (one of whose glasses, fluorescent, are stuck on with glue) are hanging a painting of two men who are hanging a painting.

Humbert phones Helena, who seems to be in a relatively good mood; undoubtedly better than the day before, in any case. She notifies him that they have been able to arrange an exhibition in New Zealand and that Xano has finally got in from Japan. There had been problems with his flight, and he had had to change planes in Los Angeles. She asks what he thinks of the preparations for the show there. Humbert says it looks too crowded and, besides, it was harebrained to open a show on such a strange day, right at year’s end. Helena says that it’s the fault of the people in Chicago, and that when he gets back he’ll have to start working on the New York show. Because — in light of the news that a gallery belonging to the competition is about to fold — she’s considering the idea of acquiring it — as it’s a good buy — and fixing it up so as to have three galleries in the city. So what does he think of having a triple show instead of a double one, if the deal with the third gallery turns out? Does he think he’s up to it? Humbert offers her all kinds of assurances. She shouldn’t even think twice about it. Not only does he have it all in his head, he’s brimming with energy. He wouldn’t shrink from filling up fifty galleries at once. Helena insists that he musn’t count on work already completed, as they have already placed it in other shows and, in New York, above all, they need something surprising. She asks him not to let her down as Heribert had so recently and, before him, Hans, Herman. . When is he coming back? Humbert says he will most likely stay another day, maybe two. Helena tells him she has arranged to spend New Year’s Eve at Hannah’s house. He says he’ll do his best to be there, but he wants to take advantage of his stay to visit a few museums and see some people, and in the event all this takes time and he isn’t back by New Year’s, she shouldn’t worry. She tells him she’d like to spend the last night of their first year together, together. He says he would, too. They blow each other kisses and say goodbye.

The woman from the museum takes them to the door and walks them out to the street. She reminds them that the opening is at 5:00 p.m. They get into the car. A driverless taxi is double-parked there, mostly taking up the parking space in front, but also partly blocking Humbert. Humbert maneuvers, but he is just barely unable to get out. People who double-park, with absolutely no consideration for others, drive him nuts. He steps gently on the gas until he touches the taxi’s chassis, and then he floors the accelerator, pushes the taxi forward, and steers it until it bumps into the car in front. Without missing a beat, he maneuvers again and gets out with no difficulty.

They have lunch in a Polish restaurant. They stroke each other’s hands across the table. At the table beside them two boys with Asian features discuss baseball. He turns back and contemplates Hildegarda. He centers his attention on her lips, the mere sight of which is enough to bring on an erection.

“Do you like baseball?”

Hildegarda opens her eyes wide (but Humbert hardly notices) and her lips (to say something), but then she stops and smiles. Humbert thinks perhaps he has asked the wrong question, but he’s not sure why. Changing tack, he says:

“Do you like sports?”

“. .”

“Do you like to swim? I do, I love to swim. Do you like to go jogging? Mountain climbing? When I was young, hiking was one of the sports I liked best. Running, too. . How about hockey? Many of my relatives have been field hockey players. My grandfather founded a club. Just to be contrary, I played ice hockey in high school. .”

Hildegarda is watching him.

“What about laughing? I really like to laugh. Do you? I like laughing better than talking. Do you like to talk? Do you like cars? What about cigarettes, what brand do you like best? I prefer unfiltered cigarettes to filtered. What do you like better, vodka or tequila? Between beer and wine, which do you like better? Do you like Italian or German food better? I like both. And what kind of movies do you like better: French or Scandinavian? Do you like French movies better, or American detective novels? When you were little, were you happier during Christmas vacation or summer vacation?”

Humbert looks at Hildegarda with a mixture of tenderness and embarrassment, and squeezes the hand under his affectionately.

“What a lot of nonsense, huh? What time is it?”

Before Hildegarda can look at her watch, though, he has already looked at his own.

“Do you like this watch? It’s a Cartier. Do you like men’s or women’s watches better? Do you like to wear jewelry? What do you think is more flattering on a woman: earrings, necklaces, or bracelets? Do you like earrings on men? And do you prefer they wear one earring or two?”

He stops talking. Just to have something to say, Hildegarda says:

“God, so many questions. .”

“Ask some, ask some yourself, quickly, the first thing that comes to mind: do you wear your shoes backwards? Have you ever eaten Tibetan food? What’s the capital of Liberia? What year was Queen Christina of Sweden born? What’s the formula of silver nitrate? What year did Garibaldi die? How many questions in a row are too many questions in a row? Why are you holding my hand? Why have you suddenly let it go? Why have you taken it again? Why are you squeezing it tighter now? Do you love me? Do you think I love you? Will we grow old together, you and I? Why does this table have a pink tablecloth, and not white or blue? Why aren’t you asking any questions?”

“Because you ask enough for both of us. Shall we get started for the gallery?”

“Not yet. It’s early. Would you like to have dinner in an exotic place?”

“. .”

“It’s a real question. Where do you want to go for dinner?”

“We just had lunch. We haven’t even gotten up from the table. Don’t even talk to me about dinner.”

“No, no, no: where would you like to go for dinner? Surrounded by palm trees, in a solemn building, next to a lake. .?”

“We can think about it later, with a restaurant guide in front of us.”

“I don’t mean what restaurant would you like to have dinner at, I mean what city, what country would you like to have dinner in?”

Hildegarda delicately scratches the nape of her neck.

•

At the airport they find the fewest customers at the Aeromexico desk. They ask what’s available. A thin, dark man with blond hair explains the various options. They choose the one that — aside from being the earliest flight and one that doesn’t require a visa — seems most logical, since they are at the Aeromexico desk: Mexico City. Hildegarda spends the quarter of an hour licking a chocolate ice cream cone, and Humbert has an orange juice.

A few hours later they are on the Avenida de los Insurgentes, dining in a restaurant, stroking each other’s hands under the table, eating out of each other’s plates, laughing as they hail a taxi and ask the driver to take them to the airport.

They doze off in a Líneas Aéreas Paraguayas 747. When they reach Asunción, Humbert yawns his way through customs. Hildegarda laughs throughout the bus ride into the city. Humbert is not so sleepy as not to suspect, though, that it may be a little strange (but what exactly does “strange” mean?) to be having a meal of chicken and whiskey, a bottle of beer, and coffee for breakfast, at that time of the day, at a restaurant with blue- and pink-checked tablecloths, only to go dashing back to the airport where they catch an almost-empty plane. Humbert sleeps the whole way, clinging to Hildegarda’s arm. She is also sleeping when they reach Tenerife, wondering whether it is fun or not to be having lunch at that time of day, above all not even noticing what they’re eating, without time even to take a walk to digest the meal, before finding themselves on another plane that is taking them to Munich where — without even eating — they take another plane to Karachi, where it is already late at night, to have dinner at dawn, and then catch another plane, and have breakfast in Hong Kong in mid-afternoon. At the airport, since the plane they are waiting to board is delayed, they play hopscotch until they hear the announcement of their flight to Wellington, where they have lunch at midnight sharp, hurrying through dessert because — Humbert having no desire to see the country he has taken such pains to exhibit in — the plane that is to take them to Samoa is leaving right away, and they have to take it to get to Pago Pago to have dinner at high noon, speculating in the car that takes them back to the airport as to whether it is acceptable to qualify uncommon behavior as illogical. Once aboard the plane, Humbert reasons that, in point of fact, it was completely acceptable (and therefore possible; that is: normal!) to have lunch in the dark of night and breakfast as the sun goes down, which last they do, in fact, at the Honolulu airport, as they feel too tired to go into the city. They catch the first flight out and land in San Francisco, where they eat three meals in a row, in three contiguous restaurants on Market Street. In the evening they set down in New York on a TWA airplane.

They catch a cab. Humbert thinks he’ll have to have his car shipped from the Chicago airport. Hiledgarda sees a great deal of frolicking in the street. She asks the driver what day it is. The driver looks at them in the rearview mirror as if they were drunks who were trying to be funny. But, finally, he says New Year’s Eve. Hildegarda suggests they go to Tiziana’s house, where there was going to be a party.

When they arrive, midnight has long since passed. For them, though, Tiziana sets the clock back and everyone toasts again, and at each stroke of the clock, they all eat a grape. Humbert puts all the grapes in his mouth at once and chews them, forming a mass of skins that he delicately spits into a planter. A really young guy (who can’t quite carry off the perverse role he is affecting) tells him that he likes the exotic custom of eating grapes on the last twelve strokes of the old year. Humbert’s champagne glass is empty, and for a moment, he isn’t sure it if had been full a short time before, or if it was already empty when they handed it to him, which seems more than improbable. He goes up to a girl (wearing a magician’s hat covered in cardboard stars and a golden sun) next to a table (full of objects it takes a while for him to recognize as plates, forks, glasses, hors d’oeuvres, salads, sandwiches, drinks. .) who has a bottle of champagne in her hand. He hands her his glass, and the girl fills it up and asks him how it’s going, if he’s having a good time at the party. He doesn’t know what to say, so he says yes. He begins to think that he’s going to have to come up with a repertoire of topics of conversation. He thinks he’ll have to make a list, with all the topics recorded, quite clearly, in a logical order that will ease passage from one to the next without any brusque transitions. A brilliant idea crosses his mind, but he doesn’t really feel like taking out his little notebook and writing it down. When he tries to remember it, thirty seconds later, he can’t do it: the idea has vanished completely. He lifts the glass of champagne to his lips, sips, swallows the liquid, smiles at the girl, wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, dries the back of his hand on his pants, sits down on the windowsill, and hears the sound of a bottle of champagne breaking as someone pours champagne all over him. He thinks of writing down: “Painting divided into two parts: in the first, one man pours champagne over another’s suit; in the second, the other gets up and sticks a dagger into the body of the first,” but to write all that down seems like such an effort — such a tremendous effort — that he lets the idea slip away. He thinks of writing down “Man from whom ideas get away, or who lets ideas get away from him”, but it seems like such a boring idea, so inane. .

He gets up. He tries to cross the room discreetly, to the corner where the bar is set up. On the way, he greets four painters with mustaches who are chatting with one another, a couple of critics, an Ethiopian sculptor whose show has just opened (why, all of a sudden, are there so many people from the art world at the party?), three women he has never met before (two of whom are twins), and two expressionless men with drinks in their hands, who are leaning against the wall and contemplating the goings-on, seriously, with drinks in their hands. He finds Hildegarda, behind a ficus, arguing with an illustrator; they’ve both pierced the same canapé. He gives her (Hildegarda) a kiss, with the uncomfortable feeling that he’s done this before.

Humbert struggles, successfully, to avoid being included in a discussion of art deco, rationalism, and the Nazi aesthetic. At one point, trying to catch a rest from the din in one of the bedrooms, he encounters a luxuriant couple. In the kitchen he finds traces of jam in the mustard pot. Someone must have stuck a knife in without cleaning it. He finds a woman’s shoe in the freezer. In the hall, having taken out his notebook to jot down a few impressions, he runs into the double giggle of the twins, who carry him off into one the bedrooms, undress him, and subject him to all manner of abuses. On his return to the living room, dressed only in a Japanese kimono (too short and too tight for him), he finds a cardboard rocking horse in the hall, a whiskey bottle among the potted plants, a turbot in the fruit bowl. They were playing the lying game. The person who seems to have proposed the game is a short guy who is so drunk he can only keep his balance by holding on to the curtains. For a while everyone tells lies that give them away, lies that seem like the truth, boring lies, brilliant lies, pointless lies. Then a critic, who was sitting on top of the television set and nudging a peach someone must have stepped on after it had fallen on the floor with his foot, tells him that his work is extraordinary, that the utilization of diverse methods, styles, and media is neither impoverishing, tacky, nor the greatest farce in the history of art, but rather an enrichment; what’s more, it wasn’t full of contradictions, as some said; on the contrary: it was one of the most solid oeuvres of the century, probably the body of work that was destined to link this century with the next, to make that leap for contemporary art which the great creators of other times had made for their own. The people laugh; Humbert, annoyed, gets up from his chair, and without thinking twice, he slams his fist into the critic’s face. Short, and quite astonished, the guy loses his balance and, trying to grab on to something, encounters the curtains, which he brings down with him in his fall. Then there is a mass of arms trying to keep Humbert and the critic apart, one or two shrieks, the giggling of the twins, and Hildegarda telling him to calm down. Humbert sits down on the windowsill he had been sitting on a long time before (he feels as if hours have gone by), before getting up to try and discreetly cross the room over to the corner where the drinks are. He closes his eyes and decides to count to a thousand. When he has reached about eight hundred, he notices that someone is spilling champagne on him and immediately begging his pardon. He keeps his eyes closed and goes on counting. He overshoots, though, and reaches 1001. When he opens his eyes, he sees Hildegarda drying off the champagne spot on his shirt with a paper towel. He does the same thing: he grabs the paper towel and dries an imaginary spot of champagne on her. She says:

“What are you doing?”

He responds:

“What are you doing?

When she puts her hands on her hips and looks questioningly at him, he puts his hands on his hips and looks questioningly at her. She says to him:

“What are you up to?”

He answers:

“What are you up to?”

She says:

“Are you mimicking me?”

He says:

“Are you mimicking me?”

When she thumbs her nose at him, he thumbs his nose at her. When she slaps her cheek, he slaps his cheek. When she sticks out her tongue at him, he sticks out his tongue at her. When she raises her fist as if she’s about to take a swing at him, he raises his fist as if he’s about to take a swing at her. When Tiziana asks them what they’re doing, Hildegarda points at him and says:

“This nut is mimicking me, like a little kid.”

“This nut is mimicking me, like a little kid,” says Humbert, pointing at her.

In the early morning, when they leave the party, they give goodbye kisses and say the same parting phrases to every guest, successively. Out in the street, they both stick out their arms to flag a cab. When Hildegarda announces the name of the town they’re going to, Heribert repeats it.

When they get there, and Hildegarda gets out of the cab without paying, Humbert does the same. When Hildegarda goes back and pays the driver, Humbert pays him again. They open the door to the street twice (once each). They open two bottles of champagne, each filling the other’s glass. When Hildegarda laughs, Humbert laughs. When Hildegarda cries out in fury, Humbert cries out in fury. They get into bed. Hildegarda turns over on her left side and puts her arm under the pillow. Humbert turns over on his left side and puts his arm under the pillow. As soon as he hears her sleeping, he, too, falls asleep, but it’s a waking sleep. That is: he sleeps, entirely conscious that he’s sleeping, and this so unnerves him that he has a premonition: if on New Year’s Eve night he doesn’t manage to fall asleep right away (or if, once asleep, he wakes up again), not only will he never sleep peacefully again, but the year that is beginning will be the first in an interminable series of years (which will only end with his death) full of insomnia, night and day, and that, forevermore, even asleep he will dream that he is having insomnia, and this torment will reach such a point that he’ll never know if he really is an insomniac or if he is dreaming he is: if it is true that he gets into bed and isn’t able to sleep, or if it is all a figment of his imagination (and, if he is really awake, he will be consumed by doubt as to whether that night will turn into another terrible night of insomnia or if, in fact, it is no more than a passing waking state which will disappear a few minutes later when he sinks easily into the cocoon of sleep). Sometimes, the very disquiet of not knowing what will happen to him will keep him even wider awake. It will be useless for him to try to calm himself down, to think that he will soon be dreaming of blue canals, that he will be a boat without a rudder, carried off by shards of light half-erased by fog and dampness, by the lapping of the water against the wood of the dock, because he’ll never again know if the dock is the dream or the waking state. As a child he had understood that it was useless to count sheep, that it didn’t get you anywhere or help in the slightest, and that, instead of bringing on drowsiness, it ruins it beyond repair. Sometimes he will get up, go out to the kitchen, open the refrigerator, drink a glass of water (observing the slow advance of the cockroaches with horror), urinate, open the window, look out at the street. . Sometimes, above all at the beginning, he’ll pick out a book at random, naively supposing that reading it will help him fall asleep, unaware that a change has taken place in him, far more sweeping than the passage from one year to the next, so that never again will he be able to read things as he had before, nor observe objects with the same casual familiarity as he had until now, and he will find himself having to learn all over again how to walk, to move, to bring the spoon up to his mouth, to talk, to look at each and every one of the objects that surround him, to understand so many things that until now had seemed perfectly comprehensible, and he will even lose interest in what he had, until now, believed to be the unassailable focus of his behavior. At times, he will sit down to relax on the sofa, and it will be there, on that very sofa, that he will awaken the following day, not having rested, so fatigued that he will not even have the wherewithal to lift his hand to pick up the pencil and hone it down to a fine point before sticking it into the throat of a dog, which is a robot, which is a flame, which is a bloated tiger (more like a cat), which is a horse rearing on its hind legs, which is a Hussar in battle, which is a hooker shaking off sleep, which is a sack falling to the ground, which is a gust of wind blowing over the entire planet, which is an orange falling from a tree and crushing a slew of bicycles, a tin clown, a man throwing himself off a skyscraper, a tunnel.