Scarecrow & Other Anomalies Page 6

  From that moment on, the faintest associations with the idea of death erupted with such violence that it was enough to find oneself opening a can of sardines, for example, to be immediately reminded of the lining of a coffin; or, fixing one’s attention on the stones in the sidewalk, to discover their kinship with the tombstones at the graveyard. Amid enormous consternation, it was determined that whitewashed façades had a color and composition identical to that of bones, and that it was practically impossible to climb into a bathtub without assuming the posture used in a casket, so that no one could ensepulcher himself between the sheets at night without thinking about how the creases resembled those of a shroud.

  The heart, with its isochronous and deep-seated rhythm, evoked the most funebrial ideas of all, as if the organ that symbolizes and nourishes life had the power only to irrigate suggestions of death. Hearing its tick‑tock through the pillow, who could help but mourn the life that was passing away second by second, listening to its steady march as if it were the echo of steps trudging towards the tomb, or, what is even worse, as if it were the pounding, from the bottom of one’s own entrails, of a heavy brass ring knocking at death’s door?

  The urgent need to be free of this obsession with the mortuarial drove the citizens to seek refuge—each according to his or her personal quirks—in mysticism or licentiousness. Churches, bordellos, inns and sacristies filled with people. The multitudes prayed and fornicated on the streetcars, in the public passageways, in the middle of the street... Drunken with supplications or hard liquor, they abused life, squeezing it dry as if it were a lemon, but then a gust of weariness extinguished forever this flash fire of piety and vice.

  The excesses of libertinage and devotion lasted long enough, however, for bodies to waste away and skeletons to assume a greater prominence with each passing day. A person had only to put his hands up to a light bulb to learn the most intimate details of his anatomy, since he not only had the benefit of X‑ray vision, but also flesh itself became more and more translucent, as if the bones, tired of remaining in darkness, insisted on coming out and taking the sun. The most elegant women—among other things—launched the fashion of trailing enormous trains of crepe and, not content with riding around in hearses first-class, decked themselves out like the deceased so as to receive visitors on their own catafalques, ringed by hundreds of candles and wreaths of immortelle.

  Vainly the citizens organized pilgrimages, kermesses, popular festivals. Attempting to uplift the mood of the city, musicians hired in the neighborhoods played “Charlestons,” but as though they were funeral marches, and couples couldn’t take a whirl without their movements acquiring the sinister rigidity of a danse macabre. Even inspirational speakers specializing in extolling the sensuality of life proved to be no help at all, not only because their most practiced topics acquired a cadaverous frigidity between their lips, but also because the audience left off its indifference only long enough to shout at them: “Death to this resurrected verbomaniac! To the tomb with this garrulous cadaver!”How could this propensity for the funereal, for the skeletal, fail to instigate, sooner or later, a veritable epidemic of suicides?

  In this pursuit, at least, the populace demonstrated a vitality and an inventiveness that were downright admirable. There were suicides of every variety, for every taste; collective suicides, serial suicides, suicides wholesale and en masse. Anonymous societies of suicides were founded as well as societies of suicides anonymous. They opened preparatory schools for suicide, with faculties boasting the title of “the perfect suicide.” Festivals, banquets and masked balls for dying were given. The spirit of competition made everyone ingenious in coming up with an original, unedited suicide. One in particular involved the ideal family—a family better organized than an “Innovation” trunk—who directed that they be buried alive in a casket that accommodated, in complete comfort, the four generations making up the family line. Eight hundred suicides wearing Lazarus costumes plunged into the asphalt from the twentieth floor of one of the most prominent buildings in the city. A “dandy,” after transforming the inside of his car into a coffin, sped into the cemetery at 100 mph, pulled up to the grave of his sweetheart and shot himself four times in the head.

  Public dismay was too intense for this outburst of annihilation and extermination to persist. Pretty soon no one was capable of draining a cup of strychnine anymore, no one could slit his eyeballs with a Gillette razor. An unspecified torpor benumbed the citizenry and inhibited the hygienic precautions required by certain functions of the organism. Heaps of garbage were left to pile up in the street, transforming every corner into a paradise for cockroaches. Neglectful of the dignity that befits any cadaver, people expired everywhere, in the most degrading positions. Armies of rats invaded homes that gave off a whiff of the tomb. Silence and pestilence strolled arm in arm through the deserted streets, and faced with the inertia of their owners—already putrefying—parrotssuccumbed with empty stomachs, but with mouths full of curses and obscenities.

  One morning, the thousands and thousands of crows that circled over the city—darkening it at the height of day—disbanded in the presence of a squadron of airplanes.

  The planes were bound on a clean-up mission whose implacable scientific rigor was evident from the first moment.

  Without getting too close, so as to avoid the danger of contagion, the planes fumigated the rooftops with every type of disinfectant, dropping bombs filled with vitamins, aphrodisiac confetti and little balloons inflated with optimism, until a prolonged examination demonstrated the futility of every prophylaxis, since the population, topping the world record for extinctions, had been reduced to six or seven moribund hold-outs.

  Only then, after obtaining this evidence, they ordered the destruction of the city, and a downpour of grenades burned it up altogether in a single flame, reducing it to rubble and ashes, making sure that the miasma of the certainty of death would spread no farther.

  POEMS

  INVITATION TO VOMIT

  Cover your face

  and cry.

  Vomit.

  Yes!

  Vomit,

  thick slivers of glass,

  bitter straight pins,

  worm‑eaten words,

  stifled shrieks of fright;

  puke on this pus‑flood of innocence overflowing its banks,

  this slime of sickening iniquity sloshing from its trench,

  and this fetid, denatured submissiveness brewed

  from a flatulent broth of terror and starvation.

  Cover your face

  and cry...

  but don’t hold back.

  Vomit.

  Yes!

  Vomit,

  retch in the face of this macabre paranoiac stupidity,

  heave all over this delirious stentorian cretinism,

  and this senile orgy of prostatic egoism:

  foul coagulations of dried‑up disgust,

  pulped hulks of impotence already drowned

  in a rancid gravy of boredom,

  rotten chunks of soured hope...

  hours split open by neighings of anguish.

  IT’S ALL DROOL

  It’s all drool.

  Your drool.

  Effervescent drool.

  Caustic,

  fetid drool;

  black, rancid drool

  which slavers slimily in a slobbering stream of stinking snot

  from your gangrenous, cud‑crunching lips,

  from your putrid oyster pupils,

  from your pustulous blisters encrusted with grit,

  from your festering umbilicals of a worn‑out quack,

  from your buboes swollen with compounded interest

  with usurious acts;

  pestilential drool,

  doctoral drool,

  which mucks the silk settees with a slather of mucoid spittle,

  which glops the plushest armchairs with gobs of congealing goo.

  Yammering, stammering drool,

&nbs
p; adhesive,

  viscous,

  which cruds the cork‑lined walls

  and plots a major crime against the breast pocket of a blazer.

  Driveling, dissolving drool.

  Acrid, oxidizing drool.

  Drool.

  That right! Your drool...

  which clogs the hours,

  perverts the air,

  dribbles onto paper,

  coats metal with unguent sputum;

  infects repose,

  eyes and innocence,

  with its worm‑eaten queasiness,

  its virus of loathing,

  of idiocy,

  of blindness,

  of indigence,

  of death.

  MIASMIC EXECUTION

  What is this fog of asphyxia which congests the lungs

  with the gasping anguish of a landed fish?

  This adhesive and errabund stench,

  which poisons life

  and dunks us in viscous nightmares of mud?

  This corrupt miasma,

  which stops up our pores

  with pulpy cravings,

  with squished-grape desires,

  does not arise,

  nor has arisen

  from these agglomerations of dirty hemoglobin,

  quicklime,

  caustic soda,

  hydrogen,

  uric acid,

  that infect mattresses,

  ceilings,

  sidewalks,

  with their tender souls

  and their leprous gestures.

  This homicidal smell,

  creeping,

  ineluctable,

  flows from other sources,

  ensues from other springs.

  Filtering through all the dead years,

  the rancid afternoons,

  the gaseous sepulchers,

  the underground passages,

  it has agglutinated with the pestiferous saps,the fetid detritus,

  the corrosive viscera,

  the rotten splinters leaving the crime,

  the purulent moronity,

  the iniquity without sex,

  the gangrenous inveiglement;

  until it floats on the air,

  fills itself with wind

  and turns corporeal;

  so as to fling open windows,

  penetrate rooms,

  snatch us by the scruff of the neck,

  and rub our noses in puke,

  while screaming its ill will,

  its aversion,

  its disparagement,

  for all that blunts the acrimony of the hours,

  for all that lifts the anguish of the days.

  WEARINESS

  Weary.

  Yes!

  Weary

  of having only one spleen,

  two lips,

  twenty digits,

  who knows how many words,

  who knows how many memories,

  graying,

  fragmentary.

  Weary,

  very weary

  of this freezing skeleton,

  so chaste,

  so clean,

  that when it undresses,

  I can’t tell whether or not it’s the same one

  that I used while living.

  Weary.

  Yes!

  Weary

  of lacking antennae,

  an eye in each shoulder blade,

  an authentic tail,

  happy,

  loosely dangling,

  instead of this hypocritical rump,

  degenerate,

  stunted.Weary,

  above all,

  of being always myself,

  of finding me each morning,

  at the end of a dream,

  there, bumbling into myself,

  with the same nostrils

  and the same legs;

  as if I didn’t long

  to breach a crack in the wet crust of the beach,

  to offer, to the dew, breasts made of magnolias,

  to caress the earth with a caterpillar’s stomach,

  to live, for months at a time, inside of a rock.

  BLOODLESS DICHOTOMY

  My hand always shows up

  later than another hand that mixes with mine,

  and together they form a hand.

  When I am going to sit down

  I notice that my body

  settles in another body that just sat down

  where I feel myself to be.

  And at the precise moment

  I enter a house,

  I discover that I am already there

  before having arrived.

  Thus it is quite possible that I may not attend my own funeral,

  and while being watered with commonplaces,

  I will find myself already six feet under,

  clothed in a skeleton,

  enduring the boring news and floods of false tears.

  NIHILISM

  Nothing from nothing:

  is everything.

  So I love you, not a bit.

  Entirely!

  For nothing.

  PROWESS

  Everything,

  everything,

  in the air,

  in the water,

  on the earth,

  jumbled and acidic,

  disintegrated,

  lost.

  Water made horse before cloud and rain.

  Bulls transformed into submissive pulleys.

  The hoax unveiled,

  no tutu,

  no tits.

  The impudent lie exhibiting its rump

  in every position,

  on every corner.

  The voracious moths of cooked-up expediency,

  costumed as hyenas,

  as tapirs with tool kits.

  The ceilings emigrating in furtive flocks.

  The windows spitting out dentures of pianos,

  sauce pans,

  mirrors,

  carbonized legs.

  Therefore look

  without a pinch of moss,

  my heart of tinder,

  at what we did,

  at what we’ve done

  with our poor hands,

  with our skeletons of winter and summer.

  Unleash the fire.

  Applaud the disaster.

  Process,

  with rubber,

  the pustulant appetites.

  Prostitute twilight.

  Worship baloneys

  and the dried brains of softened walnuts...

  As if nothing more existed than sweat and disgust;

  as if we yearned only to nurture with our blood

  the roots of rancor;

  as if it weren’t depressing enough

  to know that we are nothing but a pale turd

  of love,

  of death.

  DOWNFALL

  I plummeted,

  I fell

  among splinters and bones,

  among teardrops of sand

  and showers of glass,

  then I heard them shouting:

  “Down!”

  “Farther down!”

  and I kept falling,

  turning round

  and round,

  among stinging ashes

  and mangled screams,

  “Down!”

  “Farther down!”

  in a spiral,

  revolving,

  engulfed in demolition,

  in murky tourbillions,

  of flakes and fragments,

  of slivers,

  of howls,

  “Down!”

  “Farther down!”

  among rubble and ruins

  ravings,

  reports,

  asphyxiation,

  within a horror, within a mystery,

  beyond breath,

  beyond light,

  beyond recollection.

  VORTEX

  Fro
m the sea, to the mountains,

  over land,

  through the air,

  from one mouth to another,

  spinning,

  whirling,

  between furniture and shadows,

  fretful,

  screaming,

  I have lost my life,

  I don’t know where,

  I don’t know when.

  QUIBBLE

  It appears that I am living,

  that I exist amid this noise,

  that I can see these walls,

  that these hands are mine,

  but perhaps I am mistaken

  and walls and hands

  are only things remembered

  from a former life.

  I said “it appears.”

  I don’t guarantee a thing.

  NARROW PURPOSE

  Too corporeal,

  limited,

  compact.

  I’ll have to open up these pores

  and disintegrate a little.

  I’m not saying too much.

  LUNARLUDE

  to Norah Lange

  I SAW HIM leaning against a wall, his eyes almost phosphorescent and, at his feet, a shadow much twitchier and raggedier than that of a tree.

  How can I account for his weariness, that look of a dilapidated and anonymous house that is known only by objects condemned to the worst humiliations?

  Would it suffice to say that his muscles sought relief from the strain of supporting a skeleton so gangly that it was capable of wearing out even the most recently donned clothes? Would it take any special persuading to see that this same artificiality of effect ended up by giving the impression of a mannequin lumbered in the corner of a storeroom?

  Eyelashes brimming with the sickly climate of his pupils, he hung around this café where we used to meet, and, rooted at the far end of the table, stared at me as though through a cloud of gnats.