Empty Words

by MARIO LEVRERO

  (second sheet)

  Another part of the dream took place in a market, while I was looking around for a butcher. I chose a piece of meat, but for some reason I wasn’t going to buy it right away and instead tried to hang it back up on a hook that was dangling from the ceiling. Someone from another butcher’s stall nearby said he could give me a hand, but I told him I didn’t need any help. When I tried to push the meat onto the hook, however, the end of the hook receded into a kind of rag that had been wrapped around its base, so hanging the meat was impossible.

  Then someone turned up with a message from a girl who worked in a café in the market, whom I’d apparently asked out on a date. The girl wanted me to know she was waiting until the market closed and she finished her shift. I responded with ridiculous self-importance, sending the messenger back to say it was too late and she’d missed her chance.

  At another point in the dream, I’m in the same place as a strange, tall car, maybe a tractor. On the lower part of the vehicle there’s a kind of tray for soil and plants, and in it, near the vehicle’s large wheels, is a little girl. Her parents were riding in the upper part and couldn’t see her very well. I noticed the girl was in danger and thought worriedly: “Her parents don’t realize she’s big enough to move around now. This way of transporting her would have worked fine when she was much smaller and couldn’t go anywhere, but it’s not safe anymore.”

  (third sheet)

  There was something like a tree trunk on the ground in the market, and in that tree trunk lived a family (a human family, or a family of fauns—at one point they turn into my friends the X family). Anyway, the family was attached to the tree with some round black rubber straps, which crisscrossed the trunk in whimsical patterns. I drew closer and saw that in among the straps was an extremely dangerous snake, which looked a lot like a strap itself. I tried to separate the (useful) straps from the (dangerous) snake, removing pieces of bark from the tree in the process, but I couldn’t finish the job because of the threat from the snake. I was busy with the bark (which at times was a bedsheet and at times something abstract and immaterial) when the snake woke up, and the two of us had a conversation. This conversation included a challenge, and the snake turned into a wolf. I found myself committed to a duel to the death with him, with knives as the weapon, in an adjoining room.

  The wolf is wearing clothes. I look at his chest, which is the part I need to aim for, and it’s covered by a shirt identical to mine. He lets me go first and bares his breast to my blade. I have various wooden cases piled up on top of one another, all containing various kinds of knives. I choose one and stab the wolf in the heart.

  (fourth sheet)

  (Reliving it now in my imagination, I see that I aim for the right side of the wolf; it would be my left in the mirror, and this detail seems very significant.)

  But I’ve chosen the wrong knife; its blade folds like paper and the wolf bursts out laughing. I pick another and the same thing happens. I think about a particularly powerful knife I know is in a compartment of one of the cases, but something keeps me from using it. I don’t really want to kill anyone; I don’t want to feel the metal slicing through flesh, and I don’t want to see any blood. The wolf’s chest radiates strength and virility. I feel very small and weak, and I’m jealous of that strength and virility I’ll never have. In the end, I surrender. I ask the wolf if I can write a letter, saying he can kill me after that. (I have no idea what letter I wanted to write.) The wolf seems satisfied and agrees, but then he’s replaced by a woman with round glasses and a sky-blue dress, a woman with some authority there, who tells me the whole thing’s absurd and I shouldn’t let anyone kill me. The wolf is nowhere to be seen, and I imagine I’m out of danger. I feel relieved but at the same time ashamed of my cowardice, of preferring to be killed than to kill.

  December 13

  Yesterday I didn’t have time to do these exercises, and the day before I didn’t so much do exercises as fill page after page with accounts of my dreams. I was pleased to hear that the writing was legible, even though forming the letters couldn’t have been further from my mind—unlike now, when I’m concentrating hard on it. Practicing like this is paying off, then. Anyway, yesterday I had another dream. I’ll write it down now, and while I do I won’t worry about my handwriting.

  I was in an enormous bathtub—like a big swimming pool, only narrower and very long—full of soapy water. The soap in the water made it very murky, and because of that nobody could see I was naked. My friend M was with me (and I knew she was also completely naked, though her body was out of sight; only her head was visible above the surface). We were both swimming around happily, and the overriding mood was one of gentle eroticism. But then I notice that the water level in the bathtub is going down; there’s much less water than before. I move toward the plug and M is already there, trying to sort it out. “The plug’s leaking,” she says, struggling to fix it. But her fiddling only loosens it even more, and the water’s escaping fast as we try to cover our “modesty” with our hands and arms, twisting our bodies so as little as possible is on display. The gentle eroticism disappears and is replaced by a certain anxiety about what’s happening, but at the same time we find the situation funny and start laughing. There are other women outside the bathtub, and we ask them to bring something to cover us up. The bathtub is in the middle of the countryside.

  December 14

  Last night I had another dream about water. This one took place in a little cove in the river or the sea. To the right there was a wooden bridge, or jetty, that extended a certain distance over the water. There were also a few pieces of wood in view, some floating and some poking out above the surface like concrete piles. I often used to swim there, always for long stretches of time, and I was feeling happy, even though Stalin had just come to power and there was a bit of political tension in the air. The public still didn’t see him as a malevolent figure, but I knew no good would come of him. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel personally afraid—it was as if I had a kind of immunity. I even advised other people, who looked like tourists (and maybe I was a tourist too), to try to get out of that country, though I carried on swimming peacefully myself.

  In other news (and now it’s time to pay attention to my calligraphical duties again—though if “calli-graphy” means “beautiful writing,” maybe graphical duties are enough for me), today was the first Friday of the new phase of my relationship with Alicia. We’ve agreed that Fridays will be days dedicated entirely to us, to our communication and intimacy. In fact, this “day” was reduced to about an hour, as I predicted. Alicia says it’s something new to get used to and she still needs to adjust a few details (or, in her words, “grease the wheels a bit”; I think it’ll take a lot of grease). And so the situation remains the same: the circumstantial always displacing the essential; our existences endlessly revolving around stupid, pointless things; and life passing us by for other people to live, if they want to. Time to take my antidepressants.

  December 15

  And so it goes. I don’t know what else I can say. So it goes. (The title of a novel by Saul Bellow comes to mind: Dangling Man. I’m also dangling, in a way, not dangling in the sense of my feet not touching the floor, but in the sense of a dangling participle. A pause, uncertainty, reaching the end of one word without finding the right one to follow. You could also say “Man in Brackets,” though it would be more accurate to say that I’m a man located after the first bracket, wondering where the second one is. A temporary emergency phase, but one that’s extended and extended and never properly defined. It’s like going to a hotel for two or three days and then staying for months, years, living out of a suitcase or bag the whole time and not sorting anything out “until I’m settled somewhere.”)

  This situation appears to be caused by the clash of two wills, Alicia’s and mine. If I were alone, the parenthesis would have been much shorter. But I have to wait for her, though waiting seems completely nonsensical by now because I know she’s never going to
arrive. Maybe I do it out of curiosity, wanting to see what new tricks she comes up with, but whatever my reasons, I have no excuse for this interminable postponement of my own self, except laziness, except stupidity, except negligence (a word derived from a Latin verb meaning “to look at with indifference”) (and in-difference is the inability to differentiate; it refers to a scale of values that isn’t really there). (And so I look at myself indifferently, ascribing no value to anything within me, devalued in my own eyes.) How can I get out of this situation? I hope graphology can help me, since I’ve been forsaken by the gods.

  The Discourse

  December 15

  Today the topic of the dog has been thrust upon me once more—because the dog has disappeared. At least, he’d disappeared as of last night, and if this morning he came back and then went out again, I know nothing about it because I slept until past noon. Anyway, I can’t help worrying about him, and his absence is impossible to ignore. Although it’s been over a year since he widened the gap in the fence and learned his way around the streets, a disappearance like this is unusual. He’s stayed out late before and not come back until after dark, but I don’t think he’s ever gone missing so decisively. What’s more, since moving day is getting closer and we don’t know if there’ll be room for the dog in the new house, we’ve been starting to think about what we might do with him. For example, we could give him to someone who lives farther out than us, ideally in the countryside, and can find some space for him. This matter has already caused some conflict, since the dog is very much part of the family and sending him away would be hard for everyone—for the dog and for us, I mean. But his disappearance now doesn’t solve the problem; it just makes us feel all the more guilty.

  The day he widened the gap by himself and went through it to the empty lot next door, he returned a few minutes later as if wanting to ensure that it worked properly in both directions. Then he went straight back out and explored every square inch of the lot with olfactory relish, rolling around in the long grass and urinating at a number of strategic points to mark his territory. That day, he went through the gap over and over again in both directions. On the following day, he left the empty lot and went out onto the pavement. A few days later he was crossing the street, at first without looking and at great risk to himself, though later he learned to check for cars. Now he’s an expert, but accidents can happen to anyone, especially someone like the dog, who’s so much governed by his instincts. We have a child in this house, too—Ignacio—and he’s often risked life and limb careening across the street without looking, worried about the fate of a ball that’s slipped from his hands or bounced the wrong way off the wall and ended up in the road. The instinct to run after the ball overrules all the awareness of danger we’ve instilled in him.

  The risk is far greater in the dog’s case, since his instincts are stronger and his awareness, if we can call it that, is much weaker. Especially when he’s in heat, and his aggression is running high. Yesterday, for example, he had an altercation with a little dog on a leash that was trotting past with its owner. He doesn’t normally go in for scenes like that. I heard the commotion and went out to get him, and when I made him go into the house he carried on growling for a long time afterwards, as if his rage would never subside.

  We need to be careful around him when he’s like this, too, though he’s never bitten anyone seriously. If he thinks we’re attacking him or invading his personal space, he’ll immediately retaliate with growls or a violent bark and a snap at the air. Once he actually bit my shoes, as if even at the height of his atavistic passions, he’d felt somehow protective toward his owners and directed his fury somewhere he knew it wouldn’t do any harm.

  I’m monumentally bored of talking about the dog. I feel as if my discourse has denatured completely, as if it’s lost its original form and rhythm and I’m now writing automatically, out of habit. But I haven’t forgotten what I’m trying to achieve, and I’m wondering if this boredom might be a necessary prelude to a surprise attack, the sudden capture of the discourse’s real content, which I’m still waiting to find. I don’t know. Or maybe, if I want to carry on writing, I should stop for a bit and wait for inspiration to strike.

  *

  Unlike what seems to happen with humans, being in heat sharpens the dog’s wits. For months, he refused with incredible stubbornness to learn, even by trial and error, that if he came into the house he’d be sent straight out to the courtyard, where his kennel is now, in disgrace. We’ve been doing this a few times a day for a very long time, and yet he’s only recently caught on.

  He discovered he could get into the house the day after he learned how to use the gap in the fence, and what a discovery it was: finally he understood the relationship between the front and the back ends of the house, which it seems he’d previously thought were completely unconnected. Ever since then, it’s been his life’s ambition to get into the house and live with us inside it. There are a number of reasons why we can’t allow this, among them his habit of urinating in corners and on the legs of the furniture—no one house-trained him when he was young and it seems impossible to do it now. He’s also overly exuberant when welcoming visitors, and his impassioned displays of affection can get somewhat out of hand. With a few exceptions, he’s far too positive about everyone.

  Anyway, when he discovered he could get out of the back garden through the gap in the fence, cross the whole of the empty lot and run a few yards down the pavement, then come into the house through the front door, a whole world of possibilities opened up to him. I had to make a kind of miniature door out of an old iron grate and some wires, which I used to close off the gap in the fence whenever we thought it was a bad time to have the dog hanging around near the front door, waiting for his chance to slip inside. For a few months, then, we were able to regulate the flow of the dog around the house at our convenience. It was all going very well, albeit not entirely effortlessly, until one day the dog was in heat and learned—don’t ask me how—to remove the grate. We tried a few techniques for reinforcing it, only for him to realize he could escape around the other side through a few badly filled holes in the hedge. At first I managed to cover one of these holes with a sheet of metal borrowed from a neighbor, but then the dog made another. That one was too difficult to close off, because of the size of the metal sheet it would need and the fact that it was surrounded by a profusion of shrubs and other vegetation, which complicate all human endeavors. And that was how we lost control of the dog until, the heat gone (from him or from the female dog who got him riled up), he seemed to forget about this particular modus operandi. But now he’s remembered, and once again we’ve lost control.

  It was in the middle of the saga of the dog’s comings and goings that the cat appeared. A very beautiful white cat, with yellow-green eyes and a particularly haughty sort of elegance. The first time I saw him, he was in the empty lot next door, and I’d just moved the sheet of metal aside to let the dog out. I thought things were really going to kick off. And the dog did indeed make a move in the cat’s direction, but the cat didn’t seem to care. He looked straight at the dog, seeming to hold him back with his gaze, then turned and stalked off, calmly and gracefully, and for reasons beyond my comprehension, the dog didn’t move an inch. He simply stood and watched the cat vacate the lot through one of the broken gates and emerge onto the pavement. The cat hadn’t run away, which would have led to a chase; he’d merely turned his back on the dog and departed peacefully, his gait slow and nonchalant, his head held high and his tail aloft. At that moment, all the dog did was cautiously sniff the places the cat had been and the routes he’d walked, like a police officer collecting fingerprints in order to capture the criminal at a later date.

  Exercises

  December 16

  It’s hard not to be frightened when you realize you can’t rely very much on yourself. I’ve played all my cards and lost, and now there are no more chances. Repeat my Buenos Aires adventure? Things aren’t so easy now (not t
hat they were ever very easy), because the circumstances have changed and I have that first experience weighing on me. It was a good thing to do once, but it would be a terrible thing to repeat. Montevideo? Aside from the weather, there’s nothing appealing about that. And who knows what I’d do to pay the bills.

  A couple of days ago I made a dangerous move, though now I’m glad I did: I sent a fax to the agency that buys crosswords from me, requesting a new rate. If it works out, the extra money might shake things up a bit. If it doesn’t work out … well, I’ll have to think of something else.

  Really, the most difficult part of all this is making the drastic decision to separate from Alicia. If I could do it, cleanly and irreversibly, I know I’d immediately find a way to move forward. But I haven’t been able to make the decision. I speculate about it, but something very powerful—more powerful than fear—is still holding me back. I need to explore this more deeply. But I’m afraid of deceiving myself, or allowing her to deceive me. Everything can seem so clear, and then she makes another move, plays another trick, and suddenly it’s all muddled up again and shining with the lights of (false) hope. And so I decide to go on hoping, and every new hope exhausts me a little more, sucks a little more life from me, and dismantles my remaining self-esteem, until the only thing I have left is the pointless lucidity with which I passively observe the way I’m going under once and for all.