Tango for “Irma la douce”
Here she was
upset by the fingering of gossips
and by alarm clocks
Here she was much too sad at the end
her open hands under her neck and her dishevelled hair
wild as the fibres on a coconut
looking all around her uncomplicated and admiring
“you sure look like a writer” she says to me
very softly in the darkness of a room with its bottle of gin
stereo
and plastic flowers of all colours
There they were and you couldn’t miss them
of course it was
Sosa Beny Moré Gardel
the classics of tango and bolero
and the others
the same old Mozart and Beethoven
in sum all that one has learned to feel
and that really does seem
the only truly neat
fitting way
to avoid the brutality of events
I felt distant trying
falsely
to cheer up the tired blood in my veins
and she wide-bodied almost covering the bed
performing superbly
with what you could call her beauty
that is to say “her truth”
something made of heat power and strength
an overflowing
like a white mare with her hind legs
wide open
so that they become silver and begin to shine
in a glimmer of lights
unstable
a slit of light through the venetian blind
which goes up her legs and makes her body
as pale as avena
and everything everything losing certainty and eternity
as if the light were really inventing
a new reality
The night was already over
she put a hand on my face and said “I am a tired woman”
her look so sweet that I felt myself go soft
without any squabbling
I wanted to move on and push up the blind
to let in the frankness of the day
the sadness all around
to break the mirage the deceptive magic spell
“why do you talk so my kitten those are the things
that neurotic intellectual women say”
“I know but believe me I’m being completely serious”
and then as the most natural thing in the world
“I know that the error is in myself”
she calls her life “error”
and she tells me about her musician husband
a mafioso
sucking on his trumpet as if it were marijuana
until dawn
“no it’s not fun at all to be alone every night believe me”
and she went on talking and putting her TV-model bra and black
/suspenders
and saying “it’s outrageous” and “it’s stupid”
as if answering a known question
an inquisition in code
“yes I think this way is better”
she adds
“no troubles or telephone numbers or love letters or anything”
“I like change, I like a free life”
I say to her
“I have an absolute horror of possessions
and now you know my name and where I live so that we’re beginning
to tie the knots
so that everything begins to end”
And I invent for her a so-so story
deeply provincial
or literature considered to be a perfect alibi
she didn’t cry or laugh
she looked gloomily
in front of her as if there was a blank space there
it was obvious she didn’t know anything about Iago or Othello or
“Chéspier”
not even about Maupassant
and this ignorance led her to her childhood
softly
“The world is like this” I sum up
as if I were already going far away
in a gentle and cold manner
and I end with a sudden “people . . .”
that’s the vague imprecise word
with which I have suddenly
decreed her end
Outside in the quivering light
the closed houses covered by a frozen vapour
a blind
that opens like an eyelid only to be closed again
I try to touch once more
her scented navel her little tits squashed covered up
by a barrier
of buttons and tassles
trying to invent a gesture an attitude a word
to dissolve in an amiable casual manner
this longlonglong sadness
like a blocked-up well
the enchantment broken
But one has to go one must not wait too long
she hid behind her dark glasses
tall distant already going
with that smell of rue-and-salt under the armpits of her sweater
and her living flesh tense under the skin
with love . . .
“Call me whenever you want to” she said as a farewell
Above the trees with leaves of silken down
a flag-blue sky began . . .