Dream Come True a Permanent Passion
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Dream An extract from chapter 1 of Come A Permanent Passion by Philippe Sollers True Translated from the French by Armine Kotin Mortimer by Guillermo Samperio hat month, November or December, I had actu- So there I was, in my room one evening, mostly Translated from the ally decided to end it all. I had Betty’s revolver petrified, when the event took place. I say “event” for Spanish by Shawn Gonzalez Tthere on my right, I would look at it from time convenience. The fact is everything happened as if space to time. I won’t forget that black stain in the drawer, declared a difference of levels. I hadn’t taken anything, eticia thought that she was receiving a certified the window open onto the wet courtyard, the nar- no alcohol, not even a little joint, not a single line. I check for 85 pesos, but her bank, by mistake, row, badly furnished room, the obese, senile landlord was tired, that’s all. Slowly, the bed started to sink Lmade it for 48.7 million pesos. The next day, coming in to shout in my ears, every other day, that I underneath the bed, the walls slid along their surfaces. Leticia went to cash the check without having realized had again forgotten the light when I went out. I still The place was folding in and opening up at the same the error, until the bank gave her two boxes full of 500 had enough money for eight or ten days, but I might time, embarkation, fluid burial. I avoided moving, to peso bills, and she went straight home. Immediately, as well blow it all in one night, no? And then, bang, verify that the movement continued outside of me, that she packed a suitcase with clothing and two with the goodnight dead-end outlook, screw the imbeciles. In it wasn’t due to sleep or to a hallucination. Perspectives bills. While she loaded the suitcases into her car, she this type of situation, obscenities burst directly into opened up on the left, on the right. The earth was not felt like a drug trafficker, or, well, that drug traffickers your head, they explode in silence, they are aimed at quaking, because this lasted, insisted, transformed the must feel this way when they traveled with so much an undifferentiated physical mass reduced to its shitty dimensions of the room. No pain, no fear, almost no cash, and she liked the idea. She arrived at the city in base. Yeah, trouble. surprise, a great tranquility. Silence glowed in its orb, Yucatán that she liked so much. She stayed in a hotel It would have been fun to leave my cadaver like a I could see it. Silence like that is spherical, one could for a week; she hired a lawyer who, for a generous surprise headache for the landlord. He would have the almost say it mimes a presence that can do very well sum, got her a new birth certificate. The same lawyer police on his back, so much the better, I could even set without living beings. I briefly thought, okay, I’m dead, acquired a house to Leticia’s taste in a stupendous up a little eleventh-hour shady deal to give him a hard and that’s all it is, what a big fuss. But no, that wasn’t neighborhood, and she bought a new, aerodynamic time, what a Fascist pig, typical French (Gibert, Paul it either. I lay for an hour with my eyes open on a void car with a sunroof, obtained furniture, curtains, and Gibert, his name comes to me just now, Gibby to his barely tinted a deep blue. The movement continued decorations; everything stupendous, agreeable. And pals of the Unified Social Front, I suppose). What an underneath, it had changed direction, it seemed to she changed herself. She hired one of the best surgeons asshole. And a widower as well. Mme Gibert must have head north, now, a phony north, not at all terrestrial in the city, who gave her a pretty face and body like a been deaf at the end, a bitch like him with her petty or celestial. I was still verifying that I was awake, that TV actress; again, with the help of her lawyer, she got accounting, her rotting blubber. Anyway, why not start I wasn’t dreaming, that I could reason or calculate. I new documents for everything, like voter credentials, a by taking down this pig with the big eyebrows, the red felt, though, that I was going to give in. I went under. passport, and everything else. In a luxurious restaurant, face, the sweating, the grunting, already hysterical The next morning I took Betty’s revolver, went and she met Christopher and they soon moved in together about the events, ready to shoot at whatever moves? threw it into the Seine. It was raining, and this cold, in her mansion, where she bought him a comfortable No, that’s too kind, let’s not mix substances, death is hostile rain thrilled me. Everything was changed, car. One Sunday, when they were walking near the not egalitarian, in spite of what they say. shapes, sounds, colors, odors. Things rose up with main plaza, machine guns opened fire on them from This room was the only hole in the wall I could find, nothing beyond, brutal, bare, contourless. I was one two cars. For quite some time, Leticia and Christopher a cheap ground floor on a dead end street. I would go to of those things, they were neither in front of me nor looked like rag dolls that could not fall to the ground a café very early, return as late as possible to sleep. Paris around me, they were simply there, freed from having due to bursts of gunfire that kept them upright and is unlivable in winter, with its sinking sky, its blasts any sort of orientation and any sort of meaning. The formed stars of clothing and blood on the couple until of swirling wind, its electrically hateful, compressed, right to the absence of meaning ought to be a man’s they both collapsed. When the vehicles departed and obsessive psychology. Work? No, of course not, instead, first right, the second being, precisely, the right not vanished, the people in the main plaza continued run- the last flourish, as cutting as the shadows of thought. to be one. There I was, motionless, on the Pont-Neuf, ning in different directions, distancing themselves from You won’t be the first or the last to take the short cut, face exposed to the freezing rain, in the terrible wind the blasts. The next day, the local newspapers, in their let them say what they want. Let’s go, do it, no speeches. that sometimes seems to rush in among the gargoyles four column headlines, stated that the drug trafficker Tomorrow, I promise. of Notre-Dame to blow its stupid desolation onto Lino Téllez, alias El Christopher, had fallen to pieces I can still hear Betty’s voice before she left: “What the city. The fact is I was hot, I was burning up with beside a beautiful woman, his accomplice. a pain in the ass you are, in the end!” Exactly my a fever, I was sweating under the rain, and the only opinion. In general, with me, she mostly minded her clear idea I had at that moment was that my life, my GUILLERMO SAMPERIO is a prolific essayist, journalist, and fiction vocabulary, but that time it just came out all at once, story, had no importance, no value, no meaning, and writer. He won the 1977 Casa de las Américas prize and his writing has been widely anthologized. His work has been translated into several lan- in the bathroom. And yet we had just made love rather it was wonderful just like that. No good, no bad, not guages including French, Romanian, and Vietnamese. Selected stories well, at least I thought so, or else it was precisely because even an animal function. My principal sensation was are available in English translation in Beatle Dreams and Other Stories of. Actually, the trigger was the red rose on the fireplace, of being traversed by a transparent column, a scroll of (1994, Latin American Literary Review Press). in a glass, she thought someone must have given it to certainty, take this or don’t take it, your choice. It’s not SHAWN GONZALEZ is pursuing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at me, a floozy, whereas I had just bought it so I could see just drowning people who see their lives pass before Rutgers University. Her research interests include multilingual literature it when I woke up, the idea was to cheer things up a their eyes in a few seconds, there are also those burning and literary translation. bit. Even Gibert had noticed it: “Now it’s flowers too?” in the rain, the ones thunderstruck by the unfinished, Bastard. Anyway, Betty got hot under the collar about the maniacs of overflowing infinity. it before my very eyes, convulsing like a child. Three Plunk, into the brown water. No suicide, and in a way months together. Okay, ciao. The revolver belonging to no death. It’s totally unforeseen, this rim surmounted one of her friends was all that I still had from her, but by time, this foot on the other shore, on the other side of she was boasting, she didn’t know how to use it, I think. the lines. It was still raining, and there I stood, watching Farewell, pale, nervous Betty, not a bad deal, when I the eddies under the arches.