Tropic

又名，一个人渣的濒死妄想

There was a quietness in the evening that reached across the blue. Once again were the ponderings of the solitariness in the wake, the solace in destitute, and the ever-impending question of judgement in his own conscience. The truth was, he had never expected this to be the end. In his imaginings, there are always the most riotous of banter and the most uncompromising of blames. When the tumultuous applause crescendos, there will be a quietness, loud and clear, and a voice, familiar, will point to him, guilty or clean. And yet, there was a quietness that was not the evasion of language, but a blankness of rest. For the first time ever, he was without an audience, and he found himself an incompetent critic of his life. 

He heard the low humming of the drivers in the night, and he felt a warmth that escaped his hand. He wondered where he had felt the fleeting warmth before, and suddenly a drape fluttered in the evening wind, and there was the crooked man standing in the door. He had finished the last of the letters to be sent to Geneva, to a daughter whom he would not see again in ten years. The ink on the paper was hardly dry and he found himself thinking about the typewriter he had left in Sao Paolo that was missing two keys. Then there was the crooked man in the doorway, with one foot in brown leather brogue stepping offensively on his study carpet. The man lighted a cigarette that smelled of cloves, and asked him why he wasn't dead. The man had found a grave, and as funerals usually are, they demanded more than one witness. She had died in the gutter, he explained, with a hole in the back of the skull where the bullet passed through. She had used the right kind of gun so the cut was clean. And if there was pain, it would've been minimal. There was a half-smile on his crooked lips. It was all sorted out in the end, as he had killed all the men who killed her in the years following, and they had died painfully. Oh, very painfully. Why am I here? No reason in particular, the man snorted. Because a funeral demands an audience, and since you had loved her so be it. 

There was a quietness in the blue smoke of cloves that rolled off the ceiling of the loft in Casa di emana, which was subsequently sold in the summer of 1956. It was not unlike the summer evening when he had let go of his daughter's hand when she raced across the lawn in satin dress and white sandals. And he couldn't answer why he wasn't dead, since he might as well have been. But for a moment, the warmth stayed in his skin and there was a soft humming from the motorway, and, papa, look! She cried, but the person she thought she saw never came and she ran to the gate for nothing. 

But what difference does it make, whether she died in the gutter or in a grave of dandelions? She was dead and never will she smile again in the blueness of the calm night, like the day she stepped ashore and caressed his cheeks with words softly, come back to me. Come back when you're a good man. And there was a quietness extending to the end of the blue sky, the summer his daughter came back with her own daughter in her hands, and she had asked him the question that he never answered, so for once in his life he tried to be sincere, and it was a bad thing he would never try again. So she had left with a bouquet of flowers, for Amsterdam, to find her father, her real father. And she had found a grave, and she never came back.

There was a bar in Sao Paolo, where he had the keys of the typewriter in a cup. He had hoped to glue them back on but she threw them away for a refill of gin, because who the fuck takes a typewriter to get a drink? And there was a quietness in the blue light of the singer who only sang jazz in broken English, and neither of them spoke and there was an avoidance of words. They had met when they were children, when the fire went up in the middle of the night and lives went up in the smokes, and she vowed that she would never again be bullied or be good. She had said softly in the quietness, come with me, and we shall live like kings together. 

Then he had married in the spring of the beginning of the war, to a girl named Miriam, like the sister of Moses. And the son had pink cheeks that were soft as satin and he would wave at him from the morning balcony in summer. But there was a bomb in the embassy, and she had worn her hair in a long braid down her back, the way he liked it. There was fire that went up to the sky, and there was nothing left of them anymore. He thought he had loved her still, but in the fall his daughter came and he began to forget, because without the typewriter there was only so much space to store the words. 

There was soft humming in the engines when they crossed the border, and he remembered the night she had left and changed her name. Carmen, like the song she never sang, and she was a jazz singer who sang in broken English and told them she was a duchess from Spain. There was static buzzing in the radio when he grabbed the boy's hands, and her hand was in his too. On the way to the border she sang to him. Pero si un mirar me hiere al pasar, su boca de fuego, otra vez, quiero besar. And the boy had looked at him with liquid brown eyes. Years later, crooked words came from the child's lip, and there was a grave and a funeral, since he had loved her so. And there was a quietness in the evening shows where her dress was blue velvet, and there was an absence of voices, because the men were struck dumb by her words. He should've taken his daughter to a show, because Carmen was her mother if she had a mother. But he never came, because he never was a good man, and she had died in a bed of cloves burned up in smoke. 

Now in the evening there was a quietness, and the blue day turned to night, and there was a child in the doorway, with a dress of torn satin and dirty sandals that kicked up dust. Papa, you are dying? And then she was gone, with a banquet of lilies and her child in her arms, like her own father, who was dead and gone. And you will die alone, father, she had said softly without words, and he did. He did. But there was a woman in the doorway, who wrote music in the bar in Sao Paolo but never sang, and she was dead and gone, but he was too. And in the quietness, she sang to him, Andrea, come to me, come home.

And he said, smiling, annoyed, yes, alright. Voy a venir.