THE TRANSFORMATION {Stories}

 

Like a fever, sometimes he would get that feeling that nothing would ever turn out right, that all efforts would always be useless, and that nothing would be changed in any way. More than sensation, a dense viscous certainty that prevented any movement in the direction of the light. And beyond the certainty, the premonition of a future where there would not be the slightest outline of a kind of hope, faith, joy, I didn't know, but surely something like that.

Those were slow days, those. No matter how much he moved in everyday gestures - waking up, eating, walking, sleeping - something inside him remained motionless. As if his body were just the frame of the drawing of a face resting on one of his hands, eyes fixed in the distance. He was absent, they would say when they saw him, if they saw him. And it wouldn't be true. In those days, he was present as never before, so full and close within what he would call - if he had words, but he didn't have them or didn't want to have them - vaguely and precisely:The Big Fault.

It was translucent and icy. If she had eyes, they would surely be green, with remote pupils. On the shore of the beach she had once found a piece of a bottle so polished by the waves, sand and winds that it shone in the sun, a small wandering jewel. She squeezed it between her fingers, feeling an anesthetic cold that prevented her from noticing the drops of blood that were warm from the palm of her hand. It was like that.The Big Fault.If they could see it, if they could see themselves, they would also see the blood, he and the others. It happens that he became invisible in those days. Looking in the mirror, he knew immediately that he was inside Her. In the glass, apart from himself, he only found a clear greenish reflection.

She was as inside him as he was inside Her. Intricate, about to become at the same time background and surface of the other. It was mitigated at times during the course of the day, clouds that dissipate, cloudy water that clears until night falls and surprises it clearly, passed in clean, passed in white. Then he smiled, called on the phone, sang or went to the movies. But other times it condensed like an increasingly dark sky, turbid agitated rising from the bottom, fogged glass. Without sleeping, he glowed between the sheets listening to the early morning noises that came as if drowned by a thick layer of cotton. He dissipated or concentrated the next morning and, concentrating, it was not a following morning, but just a fluid and gentle continuation without setbacks.

His greatest fear was the fear he felt. Whole, without sorrows or shortcomings or expectations. Whole, without memories or fantasies. She even felt a non-fear, because not working out was the natural way of things being, unchangeable, irreducible to any type of effort. Outside the intimacy of the waters or the air, who knows who knows parameters to understand that quiet glide of a fish, of a bird. Creature of the earth, his fear was who knows how to lose the support of his feet. And creature of fire,The Big FaultIt crackled with flames inside him.

His invisibility, meanwhile, did not make him invisible: it meticulously bound him into a certain body and a particular voice and some habitual gestures and some personal grimaces that, apparently, were himself. That's why it's not true that they wouldn't see it. They would see and see, yes, that shell perfectly reproducing what was external to him. So perfect that it didn't even provoke suspicion by increasing the pauses between words, delaying the gaze, slowing down the passage of that false body. Behind the shell, however, the glass glowed. Under the earth, will-o'-the-wisp buried so deep that the skin didn't even shine.

Something he would never have, and he was so aware of that forever absence that, as paradoxical as it may seem, he was complete in that state of complete lack. That happened only when he was inside Her, since when he disembarked, instead of smiling or doing something, he often limited himself to crying with sorrow as if only the pain was capable of returning him to the previous stage. The disconsolate and inconsolable pain, in sobs that shook him more and more strongly, in each one of them breaking the shell, breaking the frame, cracking the glass, going out the fire.

Like another kind of happiness, that freedom from another kind of happiness. Emerged, he splashed in emotions: he had violent desires, petty gluttonies, dangerous urges, honeyed tendernesses, virulent hatreds, insatiable excitements. He listened to plaintive songs, drank to awaken distracted ghosts, reread or wrote passionate letters, overflowing with roses and abysses. Exhausted, then, he drowned in a dream at times without dreams, at times - when the dress rehearsal of the artificially provoked emotions (but that someday, on another plane, the earthly one where, he supposed, he liked to tread, would really happen) did not happen. was enough - populated by cold reptiles, who tried to bind him with sticky tentacles and green eyes with vertical pupils.

I couldn't say for sure how or when it happened. But one day - a certain day, any day, a banal day - he realized that. No, she really couldn't say at least what she had realized. But it was like this: looking in the mirror in the morning, she perceived the clear greenish reflection. She's back, she thought. And at the same moment, so immediately after that it was confused with the previous one, he sang, again himself. In the second verse, a small contraction, he had the piece of luminous glass between his fingers again. But before his hand bled, he would have made himself a drink, even if it was morning, and drank it slowly, intensely. Before swallowing the liquid, his body reached sudden peaks, framing the drawing of a face resting on one of the open hands, eyes fixed in the distance.

It was a busy day, that one. The shell of him was split and remade, gloomy sunset and brilliant noon interspersed. He smoked too much, without finishing any cigarettes. He drank many coffees, leaving a residue at the bottom of the cups. He became exalted, he absented himself. In the interval of absence, he also distracted himself by calling her, between fright and fascination,The Great Indifference eitherThe Great Absence, eitherThe Great Departure, eitherThe great, or The, or. In the attempt or hope of, who knows, naming it in order to control it.

Could not. That stopped caring. Taken at intervals by the anonymous, he crossed the afternoon, stranded the night, entered early in the morning to find the next morning, and another afternoon, and another night still, and a new dawn, and so on. During years. Until the temples turned gray, until the grooves around the lips deepened. There would have been a pause, he would have asked for help, although he didn't know who or how. There wasn't. But because things are like this, perhaps because of a certain magic, predestinations, signs or simply chance, who knows, or even because it is natural that it should be that way, and less than natural, inevitable, fatality, tragic charms - in short, there was a day, Marco, when they touched him gently on the shoulder.

He looked to the side. On the side was Another Person.The other personShe looked at him with attentive brown eyes. The attentive brown eyes were warm, slightly worried, a little expectant. The transformations had accelerated so much that, at first, she couldn't say ifthe other personHe saw him or Her, if he went to the frame, to the shell, to the glass or to the drawing, to the original body, to the drops of blood. That at first. In a second, she was absolutely sure that she had stopped being invisible.The other personHe looked at a thing that wasn't a thing, it was himself. He himself looked at a thing that was not a thing, it was Another Person. His heart beat and beat, full of blood. Perched on his shoulder, the hand ofthe other personHe had veins full of blood, pulsing softly.

Something exploded, broken into pieces. From then on, everything was even more complicated. And more real.

 

END

 

1959 Republished by Paya Frank @Blogger