Interruptions (English version)

Toujours nous sommes interrompus, jamais nous ne sommes achevés.

(Paul Valéry)

 

I see myself on a hospital gurney. I’m coming out of the lethargy with a choked scream because of my paralysis, I feel it in my body and in my soul, the awful thrust of a broken will. I think there was an accident, a German car, an airbag or something else exploding in front of me. I wasn’t there, or didn’t want to. After the sound of the explosion I can’t remember anything else. My jaw hurts, my face itches. Can’t move. The universe is being born inside of me, like neon lights, it expands itself through all my nerves. Everything around me looks familiar, though I’ve never seen it before. I slowly disappear, gradually. I merge with the blurred white of the room. I’m on a train, seat forty-nine. My favourite book is in my hands. “Underneath is always the same,” I read. I follow the words with my eyes as if they were trying to get away, every word, every blank space dictates every step of my life. I’m cold in my bones. It feels like my chest is made of concrete, I’m stuck to my seat, as if it were an extension of my body, I think. The train stops and I don’t understand why. I hear explosions in the distance, but the sounds gets closer and closer. The same message, different scene. A bomb alarm. I jump from my seat like a panic attack, pass through the station, the columns, the walls, the doors, the windows, everything is covered by climbing plants and faded willows. I hear screams, but there’s no one around. I hide in the forest, didn’t know there was one here. Did I imagine all of it? This place, the other? Which one of the two is real? Perhaps neither one. I try to regain control of my body, to stop shivering. It happens all the time. You know something’s lost just when you start looking for it. Light can only enter for the first time in a place where there was nothing before. Everything seems imprecise, abstract. I lay down. Don’t want to close my eyes, I want to feel like myself again. The sky doesn’t seem to have an end, all around the air is stained, there’s an almost imperceptible but thick fog, a mushroom cloud spread everywhere. No day or night, can’t guess. A constant breeze brings a damp frost that doesn’t get me wet. I appear again in a basement, sitting in front of a piano. It´s my piano. I slip my fingers through its keys, it feels right. The guys are playing their instruments, they wave at me. I’m sure that I know them, but I’ve never seen them before. I start playing, hit the keys hard and singing a melody. My jaw doesn’t hurt anymore, but my face’s flaccidity is there, always reminding me that wherever I am I don’t belong there. The melody takes over me, words come out: “It’s alright, it’s alright”. Everything flows, the bass drum punches, the constant, thick melody of the bass, the sharp sounds of the guitar. I disappear between the notes. Open my eyes. I move along through the forest, paths meander between tangles of roses, a smooth continuity of vivid, glowing colours. My flesh and my nerves blend with the shadows of the trees. Maybe, beyond the paths, if there’s anything, it will be the end of all that exists. It would be comforting. The sky is covered by a translucent opacity, as if it would anticipate a rain that will never fall. I stop. There’s a young girl, far, beyond the trees, in a landing. Her presence doesn’t seem casual or confusing; the intruder, in fact, is me. I look at her through of the author of the gravity’s rainbow. I feel exiled from this place, and it`s too late, it’s always too late. She doesn’t see me there, she’s far from me. Nor would I see myself. Her little dry-up and solemn body diverts attention to anything else. She wears striped socks of many colours, but no shoes. A short flowered skirt covers half her thighs; above, a cream-coloured shirt adjusted to her languid child figure. I remember a girl that used to look like her, she left me high and dry. I hate those words. I feel that I’ve been in this hospital for a very long time, in this white room. I am one and a half years old, but I’m fully aware of myself, of being here, of the universe breathing inside of me. I don’t remember my mother, don’t know her face. I have a book about animals in my hands that my grandmother gave to me. Words are not the right ones somehow. It talks about the miracle of the invasion of a world to another. I understand. All the tubes and cables distract me. The path of my dreams floats within them, through the amniotic fluid inside. I look outside the window to the sanitized playground of the hospital. There she is, the young girl again. While she sits with her legs crossed to the sides, she combs her long brown hair. She moves with ease, takes out from the pocket of her skirt a little note book, no cover or back. It’s a weird object. She turns around the pages randomly, over and over, obsessive, relentless. There’s something unsettling in that obstinacy and there’s a meaning in that wandering behaviour. She takes out a pen of the same pocket of her skirt and starts to take notes in the last pages and then backwards. Her skin is stained with pots or moles. But, as I see them, I lost them, they fade, and come back then, as blurred silhouettes, in her legs, in her arms, in her face. All those figurations, irregular at times, unstable, they seem have life of their own. She doesn’t care for them, or doesn’t know they are there. I’m cold and tired all of a sudden, I feel numb too. If want to blow through the ceiling and run, but there’s nothing to do. I wake up in my house, alone, my wife went out some time ago. I look at my hands. My body doesn’t nothing at the same time. Everything becomes blurry. I can yet foresee the shape of my hand before my eyes, and little by little the rest of things start to focus. I’m trying to concentrate. Everything seems to be in its right place. As is natural, both in life and in dreams, everything remained practically the same, though not really. And as is natural, both in life and in dreams, everything was in the exact place it should be. I guess I’m in Wellingborough, in Oxford Street. My destiny protects from the world. I go to the bathroom and look in the mirror. There it is, the asleep half of my face, but I’m not sure that it’s actually my own face. There’s a melody inside my head that won’t let go, the notes haunt hypnotically. There are words: “There’ll be something missing, always,” says a voice in my head. The melody takes me into a trance. I disappear again. I move along, slowly, carefully, through the green. I don’t know where I am, but I’ve been here before. That soft whisper of the breeze penetrates my bones one more time. A feeling of weightlessness takes over me. I tear myself in the air, in the grass, in the trees, in the tears of the willows, and everything around. There’s a lake at the end of one of the paths, children playing, messing around in circles. They move like headless chickens. The scene seems lysergic. I’ve got the feeling that something terrible is going to happen from the bottom of the lake. In the centre of one of the circles is she, the young girl with the flowered skirt and white socks with no shoes. One of the kids takes the little note book from her hands, they pass it to each other as she tries to reach for it. The stains, freaking out, with their eerie and intermittent shapes, they’re there, all over her body. They appear, all of a sudden, disappear, in the same manner, and come back again, different fictions, in the same place or another, smaller, bigger. A naturalised horror. Her skin seems blurry, veiled. The stains look alive, more and more. They start to show on her face. All the children that were messing with her are silent now, they are puzzled. They try to get close to her and touch her, to read with their fingers that horror. She doesn’t seem to understand, can’t tell. She tries to take something off her face that she doesn’t know what it is. The stains fuss. The children’s frighten turns into mockery. I wake up again in my house. The melody’s still in my head. I feel like I was sleeping the whole day. I’m hungry, very. Most of all, I’m sleepy. My wife’s not home again. I go out, walk the streets. I’m definitively not in London. Someone yells at me and passes through me, literally through me. I turn around. He spits at me and hits me in the face, runs away. I think I’ve read this scene in the book I was holding on the train. Deliberately, I do nothing. A few seconds after, a car almost runs over me while I’m crossing the street. That’s the German car I remember. Bursts, politics, everything symbolises the same. The rows of houses bear down on me. Machines communicate through people. Sidewalks are full of dirt, broken eggs and dead birds. There is that sound again, the bomb alarm, comes back, gains strength, becomes constant, unbearable. All things take position to swallow me. The world falls from its place. I feel My brain reels, close my eyes. I appear again in an hospital gurney. I slowly appear as myself again. I look at my hands. They’re full of time lines. I guess my face with my fingers and there are a lot of scars. My jaw hurts still, even more, my face itches. I don’t want to move. It’s an ordinary just like any other. I feel the universe growing inside of me again, or dying perhaps. I’m the only witness of that miracle. I still have that book about animals that my grandmother gave to me. The room looks the same, though everything feels different. I try to remember my mother’s face, but it’s impossible. I look through the window. The young girl is not there, but there’s a boy. He looks like me. I’ve got that same note book in my hands, and I turn the pages frenetically, one time and another, and I make notes from back to front. If I could look at myself in the mirror right now, would I recognise myself… I want to call the doctors, warn them that there’s a boy alone down there, in the playground, all alone. I’m an accident waiting to happen. I hear the claws of a wolf scratching the door. Someone screams from its insides. The voice sounds like if he was under the water. “It should have been you,” says. The stink of the wolf passes through the door, its presence takes over me patiently. It won’t come in, but it won’t let me out either. Close my eyes, disappear one more time, and open again. I’m lying on a landing, near the train station. I hear the engines’ combustion, bomb explosions. The sky is in absolute darkness. That gives me a feeling of disorientation, disarray. “No more,” I say to myself. The air’s steeped with a beak heaviness. I start to feel more like myself, like I have a place there and, yet, I still feel estranged from all of it. A woman lies beside me, nude. Her long brown hair merges with the withered grass. I know her. The stains, all that fictions, they’re still there, on her skin, alive. She has a baby in her arms. The note book’s gone. “Decisions emerge from chaos.” I can see myself lying next to her. Willow trees have grown, they’re weeping, rosebushes don’t have roses anymore. A soft rain falls heavily. It’s hard to see in the distance. The baby starts crying and it wakes her up, she embraces him tenderly, but the creature can’t calm himself and the crying goes on. She tries to get his lips close to one of her breasts, but there’s nothing inside of her, and she knows it. The little one puts his mouth around her breast and bites the nipple. It hurts her, too much, but doesn’t reject him. The satins, oscillating, concentrate on that breast. Then, the baby takes his mouth away from the nipple, coughs and spits blood. Slowly, he stops coughing and, a few seconds after, he stops breathing too. She moans and cries, wraps the creature around her arms and lies down again. I crawl to where she is and stick to her body. I doodle with my fingertips on her arm, following the stains. She startles, frighten, as if she had just realized I’m there. I grab her from behind, embrace her and rub her arms with my hands. The young girl, the woman stops her eyes in my hands and holds them in hers. Mine are full of figures and doodles like hers, coming and going, convulsing. She turns and fixes her eyes on mine. She raises her left hand, reaches for my face, and evens my eyelids with her fingers. Only then, I become conscious again of that pain that never leaves me, the sting in my cheekbones and in my eyes, the pin in my jaw. After, with her right hand, she braces her fingers in my face and smiles at me. She is now staring at her own arms and hands. She doesn’t say a word, but I can guess her thoughts. For the first time, she becomes aware of the stains that come and go, pounding in her skin, everywhere in her body. She’s not scared, not really. She follows them with her fingertips, like playing, as I did before. Perhaps she thinks she can wash them away. She gets up, walks along to the lake, deep because of the heavy rain, and gets deep into it until she disappears completely. The baby’s still there, beside me. I lie down on the grass, wrap him around with my body and await for the darkness to swallow me. I appear on stage with my friends. I’m dancing, don’t know how. The sound pushes my body like an electrical discharge. There are thousands of people in front of me. I don’t feel my face numb, but it’s there, always. The first hit of the snare drum tears the words out of my guts: “You’ll go to hell…,” I know this, words come out of me naturally, “… for what your dirty mind is thinking.” Time stops with those words and those notes. I remember other words from the book I was reading all of a sudden: “The fact that you don’t remember your sins in other lives, doesn’t free you from doing penance for them.” And there it is. That mesmerizing melody. They all sing along. It’s beautiful. I feel the burst of the stars tickling inside of me, and no one can see it. They cheer. I want to disappear now, feel not my face ever again. Hear not the insides of the wolf. Watch not the young girl going deep into the lake. Perhaps this time the airbag won’t blow up. Our next war will be against ourselves. I want to be nothing but a melody, no body, no urges, no desires, nothing but an unambiguous thought in the universe, the one that grows and dies constantly inside of me. I want to disappear. I’m not here, not entirely. Open my eyes. I’m in a train car heading to New York. No more bomb alarms. The day is clear and bright. A sunbeam leans on my eyes. I rub my face. There’s no pain, no scars, no numbness, no shame. I’m going home, I think. I have still inside of my head that melody that I’ve heard in my dreams, in another life, before, after. I don’t know. I try to sing it, but it’s impossible. Through the window, I see a landing, faded, colourless. In the centre, there’s a hole. It looks like there was a lake before there. The soil is curdled all around. I smile to myself. I don’t feel pain, nor stings, nor pins. I don’t want to close my eyes ever again, to submerge my soul and not ever come out again to the surface. “Don’t get big ideas,” I say to myself. As the train engine slowly numbs my eyelids, I start murmuring that melody, the sound bounces inside my body, and I just can’t feel anymore a part of my face. “Don’t get any big ideas,” don’t. They’re not going to happen.