The Autobiography of Red

by Anne Carson

  argument about the use of moods.

  We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods.

  It is state-of-mind that discloses to us

  (Heidegger claims) that we are beings who have been thrown into something else.

  Something else than what?

  Geryon leaned his hot forehead against the filthy windowpane and wept.

  Something else than this hotel room

  he heard himself say and moments later he was charging along the hollow gutters

  of Avenida Bolívar. Traffic was sparse.

  He moved past shuttered kiosks and blank windows. Streets got narrower, darker.

  Sloping down.

  He could see the harbor blackly glittering. Cobblestones grew slick. Smell of salt fish

  and latrines furred the air.

  Geryon turned his collar up and walked west. Dirty river slapped along beside him.

  Three soldiers observed him from a porch.

  There was a sound of dripping behind the dark air—a voice. Geryon looked around.

  Down the quay he could see

  a dim square of light like a café or a shop. But there were no cafés down here.

  What kind of shop would be open at four a.m.?

  A big man stepped straight out into Geryon’s path and stood adjusting the towel

  on his arm. Tango? he said

  and stepped back with a sweeping bow. Over the door Geryon read Caminito

  in white neon as he stumbled down

  into the soggy black interior of what (he later realized) was the only authentic

  tango bar left in Buenos Aires.

  Through the gloom he saw very old concrete walls lined with bottles and a circle

  of tiny round red kitchen tables.

  A gnome in an apron was darting about among the tables delivering the same tall

  orangeish drink to everyone

  in a glass like a test tube. A low stage at the front of the room was lit by spotlight.

  Three ancient musicians hunched there—

  piano, guitar, accordion. None of them looked less than seventy years old,

  the accordion player so frail

  each time he swayed his shoulders around a corner of the melody Geryon feared

  the accordion would crush him flat.

  It gradually became clear that nothing could crush this man. Hardly glancing

  at one another the three of them played

  as one person, in a state of pure discovery. They tore clear and clicked and locked

  and unlocked, they shot

  their eyebrows up and down. They leaned together and wove apart, they rose

  and cut away and stalked

  one another and flew up in a cloud and sank back down on waves. Geryon could not

  take his eyes off them

  and was rather annoyed when a man, no it was a woman, parted a curtain

  and came onto the stage.

  She wore a tuxedo with black tie. Detached a microphone from somewhere inside

  the spotlight and began to sing.

  It was a typical tango song and she had the throat full of needles you need to sing it.

  Tangos are terrible—

  Your heart or my death!—and they all sound the same. Geryon clapped every time

  the other people clapped then

  a new song started then they all began to blur into a stream that ran

  down over the dirt floor

  and then he was asleep, burning, yearning, dreaming, streaming, asleep.

  Awoke with his cheekbone scraping the wall.

  Looked around dully. Musicians gone. Tables empty. No lights on. Tango woman

  leaning over a glass while the gnome

  swept around her feet with a broom. He was dozing off again when he saw her rise

  and turn towards him.

  He jolted awake. Pulled his body upright inside the overcoat and tried to organize

  his arms casually on the front of his person.

  There seemed to be too many of them. In fact there were three since he had,

  as usual, woke up with an erection

  and today had no pants on (for reasons he could not immediately recall) but there

  wasn’t time to worry about this,

  she was drawing a chair up to the table. Buen’día, she said.

  Hi, said Geryon.

  You American? No. English? No. German? No. Spy? Yes. She smiled.

  He watched her extract

  a cigarette and light it. She didn’t speak. Geryon had a bad thought. Suppose

  she was waiting for him

  to say something about the music. Should he lie? Bolt? Try to distract her?

  Your singing— he began and stopped.

  The woman glanced up. Tango is not for everyone, she said. Geryon did not hear.

  The cold pressure of the concrete wall

  against his back had tumbled him into a recollection. He was at a Saturday night

  high school dance. Basketball nets cast

  their stretchy shadows high up the walls of the gym. Hours of music had crashed

  on his ears while he stood

  at the wall with his back pressed against cold concrete. Jolts from the stage

  threw lit strips of human limbs

  across the dark. Heat bloomed. Black night sky weighed starlessly on the windows.

  Geryon stood upright

  within the rayon planes of his brother’s sports jacket. Sweat and desire ran

  down his body to pool

  in the crotch and behind the knees. He had been standing against the wall

  for three and a half hours in a casual pose.

  His eyes ached from the effort of trying to see everything without looking at it.

  Other boys stood beside him

  on the wall. The petals of their colognes rose around them in a light terror.

  Meanwhile music pounded

  across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being

  a self in a song.

  Well? said his brother when Geryon came through the kitchen at five past midnight.

  How was it? Who did you dance with? Do any dope?

  Geryon paused. His brother was layering mayonnaise, bologna, and mustard onto

  six pieces of bread laid out

  on the counter beside the sink. Overhead the kitchen light shone sulfurous.

  The bologna looked purple.

  Geryon’s eyes were still bouncing with images from the gym. Oh this time I decided

  to sort of just watch you know.

  Geryon’s voice was loud in the too-bright room. His brother looked at him quickly

  then went on piling up sandwiches

  into a tower. He cut the tower diagonally in half with a downthrust of the bread knife

  and piled it all onto a plate.

  There was one piece of bologna left in the plastic which he shoved into his mouth as he

  picked up the plate

  and headed for the stairs leading down to the TV room. Jacket looks good on you,

  he said thickly as he passed.

  Clint Eastwood movie on the late show bring me down a blanket when you come.

  Geryon stood thoughtful for a moment.

  Then he replaced the lids on the mayonnaise and the mustard and put them back

  in the fridge. Threw the bologna wrapper

  in the garbage. Took a sponge and wiped the crumbs carefully across the counter

  into the sink and ran water

  until they disappeared. From the stainless steel of the kettle a small red person

  in a big jacket regarded him.

  Shall we dance? he said to it—KRRAAK—Geryon came abruptly awake

  to gritty daylight in a tango bar.

  The gnome was slamming chairs upside down on the red tables. Geryon could not

  for the moment recall who she was

  this woman sitting across from hi
m knocking her cigarette on the edge of the table

  and saying Tango is not for everyone.

  She looked around the vacant room. The gnome was sweeping cigarette butts into a pile. Original daylight trickled

  weakly through gaps in the stiff little red curtains that hung at the windows.

  She watched it. He

  was trying to remember a line of a poem. Nacht steigt ans Ufer …

  What did you say? she asked.

  Nothing. He was very tired. The woman smoked in silence. Do you ever

  wonder about beluga whales?

  Geryon asked. Her eyebrows were startling, like two ascending insects.

  It is an endangered species?

  No I mean in tanks in captivity just floating.

  No—why?

  What do they think about? Floating in there. All night.

  Nothing.

  That’s impossible.

  Why?

  You can’t be alive and think about nothing. You can’t but you’re not a whale.

  Why should it be different?

  Why should it be the same? But I look in their eyes and I see them thinking.

  Nonsense. It is yourself you see—it’s guilt.

  Guilt? Why would I be guilty about whales? Not my fault they’re in a tank.

  Exactly. So why are you guilty—whose

  tank are you in? Geryon was exasperated. Was your father a psychoanalyst?

  She grinned. No it’s me who’s the psychoanalyst.

  He stared. She was serious. Don’t look so shocked, she said. It pays the rent

  and it’s not immoral—

  well not entirely immoral. But what about your singing? Hah! She flicked ash

  to the floor. Make a living singing tango?

  How many people did you see here tonight? Geryon thought. five or six, he said.

  That’s right. Those same five or six

  are here every night. Goes up to nine or ten on weekends—maybe, if there’s

  no soccer on TV. Sometimes we get

  a party of politicians from Chile or tourists from the States. But it’s a fact.

  Tango is a fossil.

  So is psychoanalysis, said Geryon.

  She studied him a few moments then said slowly—but the gnome gave the piano

  a shove against the wall

  and Geryon almost missed it—Who can a monster blame for being red?

  What? said Geryon starting forward.

  I said looks like time for you to get home to bed, she repeated, and stood,

  pocketing her cigarettes.

  Do come again, she said as Geryon’s big overcoat swept out the door but he

  did not turn his head.

  XXXII. KISS

  Click here for original version

  A healthy volcano is an exercise in the uses of pressure.

  ————

  Geryon sat on his bed in the hotel room pondering the cracks and fissures

  of his inner life. It may happen

  that the exit of the volcanic vent is blocked by a plug of rock, forcing

  molten matter sideways along

  lateral fissures called fire lips by volcanologists. Yet Geryon did not want

  to become one of those people

  who think of nothing but their stores of pain. He bent over the book on his knees.

  Philosophic Problems.

  “… I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.

  But this separation of consciousness

  is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is

  to believe in an undivided being between us.…”

  As he read Geryon could feel something like tons of black magma boiling up

  from the deeper regions of him.

  He moved his eyes back to the beginning of the page and started again.

  “To deny the existence of red

  is to deny the existence of mystery. The soul which does so will one day go mad.”

  A church bell rang across the page

  and the hour of six P.M. flowed through the hotel like a wave. Lamps snapped on

  and white bedspreads sprang forward,

  water rushed in the walls, the elevator crashed like a mastodon within its hollow cage.

  I am not the one who is crazy here,

  said Geryon closing the book. He put on his coat, belted it formally, and went out.

  Out on the street it was Saturday night

  in Buenos Aires. Shoals of brilliant young men parted and closed around him.

  Heaps of romance spilled their bright vapor

  onto the pavement from behind plate glass. He stopped to stare at the window

  of a Chinese restaurant where

  forty-four cans of lichee nuts were piled into a tower as big as himself. He tripped

  over a beggar woman

  low on the curb with two children pooled in her skirts. He

  paused at a newspaper kiosk

  and read every headline. Then went round the other side to the magazines.

  Architecture, geology, surfing,

  weight lifting, knitting, politics, sex. Balling from Behind caught his eye

  (a whole magazine devoted to this?

  issue after issue? year after year?) but he was too embarrassed to buy it.

  He walked on. Went into a bookshop.

  Browsed through the philosophy section and came to ENGLISH BOOKS ALL KINDS.

  Under a tower of Agatha Christie

  was one Elmore Leonard (Killshot, he’d read it) and Collected Verse of Walt Whitman

  in a bilingual edition.

  It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,

  The dark threw its patches down upon me also,

  The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious,

  Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil.…

  … tu solo quien sabe lo que es ser perverso. Geryon put evil Walt Whitman down

  and opened a self-help book

  whose title (Oblivion the Price of Sanity?) stirred his ever hopeful heart.

  “Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.

  There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.

  All language can register is the slow return

  to the oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape

  and habit blurs perception and language

  takes up its routine flourishes.” He was about to turn the page for more help

  when a sound caught him.

  Like kissing. He looked around. A workman stood halfway up a ladder outside

  the front window of the shop.

  Some dark-colored bird was swooping at him and each time the bird came near

  the man made a kissing noise with his mouth—

  the bird somersaulted upwards then dove again with a little swagger and a cry.

  Kissing makes them happy, thought Geryon

  and a sense of fruitlessness pierced him. He turned to go and bumped hard

  into the shoulder of a man

  standing next to him—Oh! The stale black taste of leather filled his nose and lips.