Five of us were reading Conrad, each to his own book. Shelling picked up before dawn. When the whistle blew we set our books aside. One man after the next filed up the pinewood ladder, following the previous reader into the breach.
Only I read now, and I now read Cathay.
Shuvalkin (after Deleuze)
I, Shuvalkin, came upon the privy councilors distressed by matters of state in the most ornately gilded room in the administrative building. The documents needing Potemkin’s seal loomed even higher on the table than the tallest councilor’s cap. First I offered to seal the documents myself, and the gentlemen dismissed me. Then I suggested I deliver them to Potemkin, who had sequestered himself with illness in his chambers for many weeks, in an apartment known to few, and the gentlemen hurriedly thrust the heap onto my outstretched arms. I who can find any room in Petersburg without treading once in the snow, my vision blocked though it was with papers, wended through gray halls and tunnels guided only by my nose. The door to Potemkin’s room was ajar, and I pried it open with my boot. The documents raised a cloud of dust when I placed them beside the bed. He lifted himself from his dun pillows so that he might take the equipment, and from my satchel I handed him each instrument he asked.
Imagine my pride and vast satisfaction, as I passed the Marshal each new sheet, at seeing the last was sealed with my sigil. I pressed the Marshal’s spotted hand in mine. Thus I returned the heap to the councilors, who one by one, dismayed, made the documents rise then fall as snow, across the salon.
Sarmiento (after Pergolini)
When we arrived to wake the President from his slumber we found him not long dead. In the years after his term, the Father of the Country had grown stout, and so it was some effort to roll the body out of its mess and change it into its formal attire. We called the concierge to help us roll the corpse over the room and lift it onto the chair, behind the empty desk. The concierge changed the sheets, and he pledged us his discretion.
Soto searched the shelves for the thickest volume and, once identified, laid it open near its midpoint beneath the body’s head. I stood beside it. As we awaited the arrival of representatives from the press, apprised at Soto’s instruction, I peered through pale, wispen hair at the ends of definitions.
Transatlantic (after The Guardian)
I, Jane Bowles, steamed back to New York City, reading Voyage all the way. A young, difficult man who held his chest ahead of his ankles stalked up and down the promenade deck until, at last, he dared approach my bench. He was handsome, though from his demeanor I feared he might be ridden with fleas. I sat in his tremulous shadow. Jabbing his thumb toward the name on the spine, he asked without preamble, “And so, what do you think?” He asked me the question in French. I told him that I thought the writer the greatest in his language.
In my life I have never seen eyes so flash.
Malibu (after Playboy)
A mutual friend informed me Brian Wilson had taken pleasure in both my published books. His butler led us from the front door to a red, silk tent, furnished with pomp. The floor was thick and Persian, his lamp inlaid with lapis, and the swampish air so richly perfumed that I remembered myrrh and frankincense, though I never knew the smell. The master of the house dressed, I imagined, in the manner of the later khans. With silent, unrushed grandeur, he gestured that we might share his carpet and seat ourselves before him. He did not offer his water pipe.
Brian Wilson did not speak for many hours. He only stared into my face. As morning approached I felt compelled to pull the flap away, and so I entered into the light, hard and from above, of his pale, sunken sitting room.
Frankfurt (after Perloff)
We would not have bared our breasts to the theorist had they told us of his heart trouble.
Still, we would have thrown flowers.
Soto (after Piglia)
I, Soto, my whole adult life was the strongman of our town. I was beautiful. I commanded respect. When Soto the tamer of lions arrived, I did not fear for my position. Many itinerant circuses have showed throughout our province, and many tamers of lions have plied the same bag of tricks. Not until the second night did I begin to feel my solitude, and then followed three more days in which, from my haunt on the dusty highway that cleaves our little town, I heard on the lips of all passersby “Soto” in prayerful tones. I did not know which Soto they meant nor which I was meant to be. On the fifth night, when laborers were striking the tent and loading the instruments onto the carts, Soto entered the saloon where I had presided all my life. He pushed the swinging doors inside, and he entered with neither his whip nor his liontamer’s stool. “Here there are one too many Sotos,” he said.
Under the bar where I sat every night, I lowered my head. I did not run. I laid my brow across my knees.
Abe (after Edelstein)
In his garret in Jena the philosopher approached the closing lines of his treatise on History and its spirit. A rare hesitation in search of the right wrong word intervened on the last page, and his search, awkward, fumbling, ended in the scholar’s peering through the glass behind his desk at the quiet cobbles below. His daydreams continued without incident until they appeared to summon the one he called the Worldspirit, who appeared on horseback in the frame of his window at the head of a long and raucous procession whose noise was beneath the scholar’s notice. Released from the word into the world by History incarnate, as he believed, he wet his pen and slid unhindered to the correct summation of many years’ trial. Final flourishes were applied. As wounded and laggards and unvirtuous women processed without, the philosopher composed History within, and he knew himself my sole witness.
Yet I was retired many years. Three more would pass before my eyes were opened anew on my backwoods, my Kentucky, the rivers of my Illinois.
Vichy (after Catani)
At headquarters the men almost turned him away for his aspect of a madman. His dress was not appropriate to the nature of his call, but I intervened and escorted him to my office on the third floor, where I proffered the armchair in front of my desk. He sat, then stood, then hunched over the oaken desk, then again sat and raved to me as he pulled in sequence at each of his fingers, issuing complaints and murderous intents directed at groups and bodies that were, under our government, dissolved. I did not inform him for fear of his response. I did not believe he wanted what he wanted. I did not believe he wanted anymore. His silences were hard and forbidding as his talk, and so I declined to interrupt him. When the sun fell low enough to gild our neighbors’ windows I stood to escort the madman to our sentries. I saw how it cost him to hold his torso straight.
He declined to accept my hand but consented to my gaze, trembling. In my life I have never seen eyes so flash.
Douradores (after Wikipedia)
I, Álvaro de Campos, frustrated the courtship of the servant girl whom my master espied in the street from his rooms. It sufficed to send her a letter, whose paper she used to lift the tears from the top of her cheeks. They did not fall in volume. To me, who watched my reception, they appeared a matter of form.
My master returned me to the chest after, that we might resume navigations. I swelled when I felt the tide first lap at my frayed edge, then at his.
Tortoni (after Vargas Llosa)
Long ago now I entered the coffeehouse without saying anything, only quiet nods to patrons I recognized, to whom I owed recognitions, as I languidly passed to the ill-lit back of the gallery and ran a finger down my glasses, over my ear. In the far corner sat the painter, the writer, and the young heir, and I claimed the table nearest. For an hour I watched their colloquy in silence, not permitting my face to show any expression above my coffee until I heard one of them broach Henry James. “What kind of imbecile,” I asked aloud, “would learn from Henry James?”
Only the writer turned toward me, up and somewhat away. I saw him seeing yellow. I saw his distress.
Celerino (after Vila-Matas)
By day my atheist uncle strode from hamlet to hamlet on dirt tracks to sell his sacraments to parents desperate to pass their salvation on. He was tall, his steps were long, and he smelled sharply of aniseed. I strove to match his stride, skipping through wheel ruts beside him. We made camp in groves of nopal and the wretched sheds of believers, whom he made to feel immanence. By night beside the lantern, which illumined the sheet in front of him and the far half of his face, he gave me stories from the typewriter.
I fed his machine fresh paper and awaited, while he wrote without pause, new-christened pages that drifted from the light onto my outstretched hands, as snow swirls up before falling, then joins to the outstretched tongue.
Hank (after Davenport)
When the genius returned to my country he found it an execrable desert.
I was away upstate, learning my music, my Occitan.
