Tiutchev, "Бессонница"

A work ("Insomnia") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

The hours war in lockstep pace,
The burdened news of night’s misdeeds!
A tongue unknown to every race
And, clear as conscience, our fear feeds!

Who from us with no yearning heard,
Amid the global silence still,
The quiet years of moaning’s chill
And prescient voice, the final word?

We dream and see an orphaned realm,
Where fate’s hard force cannot be turned;
And we in war, at nature’s helm,
Are left to bear from what we’ve learned.

Before us then our life awaits,
A specter perched on green earth’s end;
And our mad years and those years’ mates
With us grow pale in twilight’s bend...

New generations rise up hence,
Against the sun they bloom in fire;
And we, dear friends, and our years sense
Oblivion’s long unbroke spire!

But rarely do sad rites convene
At midnight hour to sing our wake;
The funeral dirge of metal’s sheen
Shall mourn our time and mortal make!

La niña santa

One critic was so strikingly wrong about this film that we shudder to think what other pleasant, quiet, and infinitely introspective cinematic works he has demoted to the rank of unwatchable – but now I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Its motifs, he claims, are merely grazed but never explored in depth and the whole affair turns out to be quite a bore; he adds insult to such lesions by dismissing the characters as equally shallow and unfocused. Now, one would not insist that the film submerges the viewer in emotion and thought – it is far too subtle for that. But the sad thing about the remark is how often we as living beings eschew profundity for the bare essentials of survival. We make hasty choices about getting to know certain people, certain books, certain places, and some of us decide that only a few such acquisitions are necessary for the human experience. Those some of us (I gleefully exclude myself) would also have nothing to say about a film like La niña santa.

The film begins with a healthy dose of self-degradation as a young and rather pretty woman by the name of Inés (Mía Maestro) tells a group of adolescent girls about their role in God's plan – with some added degradation from the onlookers. Amidst the virgin hordes we find Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg), an irreverent tomboy who even goes by José, and the eponymous lass, Amalia (María Alché), who has the type of wan, permanently disappointed face you would normally associate with Goth girls. She smiles occasionally but the smile is still crooked. And when she does in fact scrutinize an object or person she seems quite repulsed by either herself or what she sees. In time we learn why: her life has been resolved spiritually but not in any other way. Although it might be too much to ask of a teenager to have a complete personality, apart from her faith Amalia really has no personality at all. She is nothing more than the epithet foisted upon her by the director. But since faith can assume a host of different forms, she is distinct and original enough – not words commonly applied to teenagers – to stand out from among her classmates. And so, it is of little surprise that she also catches the eye of a prurient doctor named Jano (Carlos Belloso).

Jano finds Amalia at a Theremin street concert and forces some of his manliness upon her in a fashion not really punishable by law. She wonders about the soul of this ugly man, why he would do such a thing, and what if anything she can do to help him. That they come into contact to begin with is one of the film's odd conceits. Jano is attending a medical conference at a hotel, the same “dilapidated family hotel” (a unanimous label among reviewers) in which Amalia lives with her dishy mother Helena (Mercedes Morán) and her pasty, self-hating uncle Freddy. The hotel is accurately described by its inhabitants as being unfit for human residence, but Helena grew up in the hotel and knows no other means of managing the daily grind. There are also a slew of family dramas: Freddy has not seen his children since his Chilean ex-wife got custody of them; Helena’s ex-husband is having twins with his new wife; and Josefina is being pressured into a deflowering by her sex-starved boyfriend (the last not quite family, but you get the idea). If a cultured, middle-aged man, a self-absorbed once-married sexpot and a moody adolescent of budding sexuality all sounds like a familiar plotline, you may expect certain things to happen that simply should not. Instead of satisfying our lascivious urges, which are stroked repeatedly and unabashedly, we get rumors and restraint. With diabolical glee, Josefina reports Inés’s alleged indiscretions (“Yesterday she was kissing a much older man, one with hairy knuckles, with tongues down each other's throats, and she was shaking like an epileptic”) and does nothing but encourage Amalia’s curiosity about Jano. Amalia sees Jano at the hotel pool and starts praying to ward off temptation. But it is not the temptation of a handsome man, despite what Freddy says later, it is the temptation of experience; to wit, the experience of being with someone who has an intimate knowledge of the female body. 

What occurs thereafter will smack of humbug, but it remains true to teenagers and their methods, especially guilt-ridden teenagers. Amalia decides to run at once on two very different tracks: she will follow the otolaryngologist around the hotel yet will not succumb to his urges. She will tempt him, worship him, and giggle in knowing giddiness with Josefina, but nothing more. At least this is the plan. She touches children's heads as they race by in the hotel corridor, and one immediately thinks of a benevolent nun. Then she enters his room, finds his shaving cream and rubs some on the inner lapel of her school uniform shirt. At the same time, of course, Jano finally acts on the stolen glance of a bare back in our fabulous opening scene and ingratiates himself with Helena who, like most attractive women, can still fall for one of the oldest lines in that book that people seem to have stopped reading. Their romance, if one can call it that, is boring because Helena is boring, and Janus – I mean, Jano – has many other things on his mind: the conference, his family, and that girl who keeps hovering in his vicinity, seizing his fingers in the elevator, shooting him that leer that girls give when they are ready to be conquered. Our camera loves necklines, backs, shoulders, and in general disembodied torsos, and we get to behold our characters not as their words match their treacherous lips, but as their words do not correspond to their bodies. This is very true for Helena, who is shown at every possible angle and therefore Jano’s natural choice of patient for the closing panel of the conference. Why? Because she suffers from a form of tinnitus and sleep disturbance, which in the world of otolaryngology is presumably meaty stuff. But this much-belabored skit will come, we understand, only as our curtain falls. And so, as all the perspectives converge into one sensible whole, one could easily argue nothing of any consequence happens and that everything is the product of a dilapidated life in a dilapidated hotel; one may also wonder what staying at such a hotel says about those doctors. And we haven’t even mentioned Jano’s knuckles.

The Journey to the Dead

There are many things to admire about this prolific author, not the least of which are his attempts to embellish what has already been written by writing it again, this time with more perspective. Readers familiar with his massive oeuvre of novels, short stories, poetry, and reviews would probably concur that for all his cosmopolitan education, Updike was very repetitive and very American. And what, pray tell, might "very American" mean? Americans are an interesting breed in that they do not share a common history, nor for that matter a common faith, package of interests, or definition of nation or patriotism. Unfortunately such a lack of commonalities often leads them and those who vaunt their culture to glorify the baser aspects of existence, the easy bourgeois pleasures of money, material wealth, and commercial success. Some would even go so far as to aver that typical American culture begins and ends on the sets and director's chairs of Hollywood. A fair claim, but incomplete. However much one wishes to and should criticize their subsequent treatment of the natives, the first American settlers came for political and religious reasons, mostly as a consequence of this movement. Their goals were isolation, revitalizing their community in these new surroundings, and basking in the sunshine of a world that still had fresh and untampered pockets in which the persecuted could roam. There is something artistically reclusive about such an approach: the return to nature, the inculcation of basic human values, the emphasis on self-reliance and propriety, the softness of familial bliss. Of course, not of all these things happened as planned (never mind the relations with said natives), and the conservative factions that obtained in many places were quite the antithesis of artistic liberty. Still, the austerity of their basic ideals lives on in many of their descendents, which might be one of the more typically American topoi from which Updike drew his inspiration. And one topos that can never be exhausted because it can never be understood is the subject of a fine story in this collection.

Martin Fredericks has recently divorced after spending half his life unmarried and the other half with a wife to whom he rarely speaks. He is past the midpoint of life's career and unpleasant thoughts jactitate within him, not really regrets but rather hints of disorder, infirmity, and confusion. The slow march of death he sees embodied in a friend of his wife's, a woman he knew from college called Arlene Quint. For the totality of the story, Arlene will be his portal to another angle of why we are alive and what happens to us when our spirit leaves, but she will not do it out of magnanimity. No, Arlene's main preoccupation is life itself – making the most of it, ignoring her age and past (she has "a certain air of benign defiance"), and pretending that it is all still in front of her like a grassy lea atop a distant hillock:

Her happiness glowed through her not quite healthy skin and her legs kept kicking friskily – the drumstick-shaped calves, the little round-toed Capezio flats. Those shoes dated her; Fredericks's former wife, too, had worn ballerina shoes in all weathers, in rain or snow, as if life at any moment might become a dance.

The two of them, both divorced although Martin already has another, unnamed partner, meet after many years and begin to explore their past through the common medium of Martin's wife Harriet. In time, Martin learns that Arlene is sick; she has had many valiant battles with cancer and seems to have gained some dominion over the disease. But as this is a story about death we expect and are quickly confronted with a relapse (indeed, the very first paragraph has Harriet asking Martin to drive her to the hospital).

Martin then mulls what death has meant to him in his fifty-odd years of sentience: he thinks of another friend who passed away a few years ago and held a farewell party of sorts; of the depictions of the moribund in two great classical works that remind him of his college days; of what he himself would be like as he lay dying. He deposits Arlene at the hospital where "from behind, she seemed, with her little suitcase and bulky coat, an immigrant, just arrived," and spends the rest of the story calling her and paying occasional visits to her artsy loft apartment. Arlene may have been attractive at one point in the not-so-distant past; but her condition, the weird infidelity of cavorting with an old friend of his wife's, and the overall necessity of moving on collectively prevent Martin from performing what might be done in other, lesser works. Yet they seem to have a good time together, perhaps mostly out of mutual solitude:

The sun of youth dappled their reminiscences, as Arlene stiffly adjusted her legs on the sofa from time to time and Fredericks sank lower into the chair and into alcoholic benignity, and the sky with its traveling clouds sank into evening blue.

Little by little, Martin learns about some of his wife's indiscretions as a much younger woman and is puzzled not by their occurrence but why they seem to mean nothing to him, why his memories are constantly warped to meet the needs of his current state of mind. He continues to chatter on with Arlene despite the vacillations in her health until one day, particularly worn out, she informs him that, "I just can't do Harriet for you today" – at which point our story takes a drastic turn.

Connoisseurs of Updike's works will have seen, heard, and touched the details of this story many times before –though never quite in this morbid combination that, upon closer scrutiny, offers us quietude and redemption. Martin may have been oblivious to much of life before befriending someone whose hours were numbered, yet such is the slow progression of the scythe. Throughout a lifetime esoteric elements of our consciousness dive and surface often at random, and when we come to the end, to a summary of what has passed and a glimpse of what might come, we will dwell on the small discoveries that made us realize how many layers of truth this reality possesses. Perhaps we are nothing more than evolved amoebae; but before the bourdons wail we need to close our minds to certain tasks that will never be completed, certain people we will surely never see again, and certain accomplishments that will be mummified with us as darkness gains. Some people, even heroes, however, will just close their eyes and hope that they wake up.

Historias que me cuento (part 2)

The conclusion to a work ("Stories I tell myself") by this Argentine. You can read the original as part of this collection.

So I let her sleep; the story now possessed the development that I always liked in the stories I tell myself, the meticulous description of every item and every act, a super-slow film for a pleasure that would keep increasing on account of her body, her words, and her silence. I still asked myself why Dilia that night and then almost immediately stopped asking, for now it seemed so natural for her to be there half-asleep at my side, every so often accepting a new cigarette or murmuring an explanation about why here amid the mountains. The story would then get expertly muddled between yawns and broken sentences since nothing could have explained how Dilia was here at midnight on the most remote and godforsaken part of the road. At that moment she stopped speaking and looked at me, smiling that little-girl smile that Alfonso termed that of a buyer, and I gave her my truck driver name, always Oscar in my stories; and she said Dilia and added as she always added that it was a stupid name imputable to an aunt who loved reading trashy novels. It was almost incredible, I thought, that she didn't recognize me, that I was Oscar in the story and she didn't recognize me.

After that comes everything that the stories tell me but that I cannot tell the way they tell it. I only have uncertain fragments, potentially false deductions: the lamp lighting the folding table at the back of the truck parked now between the shelter of two trees; the screeching of the fried eggs, then of the cheese and jam; Dilia looking at me as if she were about to say something and then decided to say nothing; that it was not necessary to explain her getting down from the truck and disappearing beneath the trees. I would be facilitating matters with coffee, almost ready, with a cup of grappa, Dilia's eyes, which would close between drink and sentence, my insouciant way of bringing a lamp to the stool by the side of the mattress, tossing on a blanket because it would indeed get colder later, telling her that I was going to go up to the front cab to make sure the doors were properly closed since you never knew on these deserted stretches of road, and she would lower her eyes and say: don't go now and sleep in the seats in the front cab, that would be stupid – and I would give her my back so that she wouldn't see my face when I became vaguely surprised at what she was saying although, of course, it would always happen as such in one way or another. At times the squaw in her would talk about sleeping on the floor or her inner gypsy would take refuge in the cab and I would have to take her by the waist and steer her back inside, then take her to bed despite her tears or arguments. But not Dilia. Dilia would be going slowly from the table to the bed with a hand looking for the zipper on her jeans, the gestures which I could see in the story although I had my back to her and entering the cab I was giving her time to tell me that, yes, everything would be the way it had to be one more time, an uninterrupted and perfumed sequence, a super-slow traveling from the immobile silhouette caught in my headlights on the mountain swerve until Dilia as she was now, almost invisible beneath the woolen blankets, and then the cut that always occurred: turning off the lamp so that all that remained was the vague ash of the night entering the rear peephole with the plaintive call of a nearby bird.

This time the story went on interminably because neither Dilia nor I wanted it to end. There are stories that I would like to prolong but the Japanese girl or the icy and condescending Norwegian tourist do not let them continue, and despite the fact that I am the story's decision-maker there comes a moment in which I no longer have the strength or even the desire to make something last which, after the initial pleasure, begins to slip into insignificance. It is here where I might invent alternatives or unexpected incidents so that the story may continue in a lively fashion instead of going to sleep with one last, distracted kiss or more useless crying. But Dilia did not want the story to end; from her first gesture when I slipped next to her and instead of the unexpected, I felt her looking for me; from the first double caress I knew that the story had not done anything more than begin, that the night of the story would be as long as the night during which I was telling it. Only now there is nothing more than this, words talking about the story, words like matches, groans, cigarettes, laughs, supplications and demands, coffee at dawn, a dream of heavy waters, of fogs and returns and abandonments, with an initially timid tongue of sun coming from the peephole and slicing Dilia's back turned towards me, blinding me while I pressed against her to feel her open herself again amidst screams and caresses.

The story ends there, without the conventional farewells at the first village on the road as would have been practically inevitable, and from this story I drifted into sleep without anything apart from the weight of Dilia's body falling asleep on mine after a final murmur. I woke up when Niagara spoke to me about breakfast and an engagement we had later that evening. I know I was about to tell her and something held me back, something that was perhaps Dilia's hand returning me to the night and prohibiting me from uttering words which would have spoiled everything. Yes, I had slept very well; no problem, we'll meet at six at the corner of the square to go see the Marinis.

At the time we knew from Alfonso that Dilia's mother was very sick and that Dilia was traveling to Necochea to be with her. Alfonso had to take care of the baby, which gave him quite a bit of work, and we would have to see whether we'd visit them once Dilia returned. Her mother died a few days later and Dilia didn't want to see anyone for two months after that. When we went to dinner we brought some cognac and a rattle for the baby and everything was fine: Dilia was finishing up the duck à l'orange and Alfonso had the table all set up to play canasta. Dinner slipped into friendliness as it should have because Alfonso and Dilia are people that know how to live and began speaking about the most painful matter, quickly draining the subject of Dilia's mother; afterwards it was like softly passing a curtain to return to the immediate present, the games we always played, the keys and codes of humor through which we would spend a pleasant evening. It was already late and cognac time when Dilia alluded to her trip to San Juan, the necessity of forgetting her mother's final days, and the problems with such relatives that complicate everything. It seemed to me as if she were speaking for Alfonso's benefit, although Alfonso must have already known the anecdote because he smiled amicably while serving us another cognac, the car problems in the mountains, the empty night and the interminable wait on the side of the road where every nocturnal bird was a threat, the inevitable return of childhood phantasms, the lights of a truck, the fear that the truck driver would also be afraid and just keep on driving, the blinding lights sticking to the cliff, then the marvelous screeching of the brakes, the warm cab, the descent between dialogues hardly necessary but which helped her feel so much better.

"She's still traumatized," said Alfonso. "You've already told me the story, sweetheart, and each time I notice more details about the rescue, about your Saint George in overalls saving you from the evil dragon of the night."

"It's not that easy to forget," said Dilia. "It's something that just keeps coming back, and I'm not sure why."

She perhaps did not; Dilia perhaps did not know why, but I did. I had to drink my cognac in one gulp and serve myself another as Alfonso raised his eyebrows surprised at an abruptness that he did not recognize in me. His jokes, on the other hand, were more than predictable, telling Dilia that he had decided to stop the story, knowing, in addition, the first part but sure that there had been a second, that it was so obvious, the truck in the night, all that which is so obvious in our life.

I went to the bathroom and stayed there a while trying not to look at myself in the mirror, trying not to find what had been horribly there while she was telling me the story and which now I felt once more. But here this very night, this was what began to take over my body, this was what I had never imagined could be possible after so many years with Dilia and Alfonso, of our happy couple friendship of parties and movies and kisses on the cheek. Now it was the other, it was Dilia, and again the desire, Dilia's voice coming in from the living room, Dilia and Niagara's laughs which had to be making fun of Alfonso for his stereotypical jealousy. It was already late; we drank some more cognac and made ourselves a final round of coffee. From upstairs came the baby's cry and Dilia ran up and brought the baby down in her arms ("He's wet himself completely and it's just a mess. I'm going to change him in the bathroom"). In the meantime Alfonso was elated because this gave him another half-hour to talk to Niagara about Vilas's chances against Borg, and enjoy another cognac and a pipe; in the end we were all quite plastered.

But I was not there. I had gone to the bathroom to accompany Dilia who had put her son on a small table and was looking for things in a cabinet. And it was as if somehow Dilia knew when I told her that I knew the second part; when I told her that it couldn't be but she could see that it was so; I knew that second part. And Dilia gave me her back so as to undress the baby and I saw her incline not only to remove the safety pins and diaper, but also because she was suddenly oppressed by a weight from which she had to free herself. This was the same weight she was shedding when she turned, looked me in the eye, and said that it was for sure, that it was stupid and had no importance whatsoever, but it really was for sure, that she had slept with the truck driver. "Tell Alfonso if you want. In his own way he's convinced of it anyway; he doesn't believe it and yet he's sure of it."

This is how it was. I would say nothing and she would not understand why she was telling me this, why me, since I had asked her absolutely nothing and instead had told her something that she could not have understood from that side of the story. I felt my eyes descending like fingers towards her mouth, her neck, looking for the breasts which her black blouse outlined like my hands had outlined that whole night, that whole story. The desire was a crouched leap, the absolute right to approach her and seek out her bosom below her blouse and involve her in our first hug. I saw her turn, incline once more but this time lightly, freed from silence. She swiftly pulled out the diapers; the smell of the baby which had peed and shat himself came to me together with Dilia's murmurs to stop him from crying. I saw her hands which reached for the cotton and placed it between the baby's raised legs. I saw her hands cleaning the baby instead of coming to me as they had come to me in the darkness of that truck which I have used so many times in the stories I tell myself.

Historias que me cuento (part 1)

The first part of a work ("Stories I tell myself") by this Argentine. You can read the original as part of this collection.

I tell myself stories when I sleep alone, when the bed seems bigger and colder than it really is; but I also tell myself stories when Niagara is there and she falls asleep between indulgent murmurs, almost as if she too were telling a story. More than once I've wanted to wake her up and find out what this story is (yet it is only a sleepy murmur and in no way a story); but Niagara always comes home from work so tired that it would hardly be fair or becoming to wake her just as she falls asleep, just as she seems filled to the brim, lost in her perfumed and murmuring shell. So I let her sleep and tell myself stories, just like those days when she works the graveyard shift and I sleep alone in this brutally enormous bed.

The stories I tell myself are any old thing but almost always feature me in the lead role, a type of Buenos Aires Walter Mitty who imagines himself in anomalous or stupid situations, or through intense and belabored dramatics whereby the listener might amuse himself on melodrama or affectedness or humor deliberately inserted by the narrator. Why should Walter Mitty also have a Hyde aspect? Because English literature has wreaked havoc on his unconscious and his stories are almost always born to him from the learning of books, armed with an equally imaginary imprint. The very idea of writing down the stories I tell myself before falling asleep seems to me inconceivable the next morning – and anyway, a man should have his secret luxuries, his silent squanderings, things from which others will profit until there is nothing left. And there is also the superstition that I have always told myself, that if I were able to write down any of my stories, that story would be the last for a reason that escapes me now but which may have to do with notions of transgression or punishment. Therefore, no: it is impossible to imagine myself waiting for sleep next to Niagara or by myself without being able to tell myself a story, having stupidly to count sheep or, even worse, recall my workdays that were scarcely memorable.

Everything depends on the humor of the moment because it would never occur to me to choose a certain type of story. Hardly would I or we have turned off the light then I would enter into that very second and beautiful cape of night atop my lids. The story is there, an almost always provocative beginning. This could be an empty street with a car approaching from a great distance; the face of Marcelo Macías as he learns that he has been promoted – until that moment an almost inconceivable action given his incompetence; or simply a word or sound repeated five or ten times from which the initial image of the story begins to emerge. Occasionally I am amazed that after an episode that may be termed bureaucratic, the following night yields a story either erotic or sports-related. Surely I am imaginative even if it's only evident right before I fall asleep; yet I do not cease to be amazed at my unpredictably varied and rich repertoire. Dilia, for example, why did Dilia have to appear in that story and precisely in that story when Dilia was not a women who in any way could be linked to such a story? Why Dilia?

But I decided a while ago that I would not ask why Dilia, why Trans-Siberian, why Muhammad Ali, or why to any of the scenes adopted by the stories I tell myself. If I remember Dilia at this time already outside of the story, it is because of other things that were also there and are now also outside, because of something that is no longer the story and, perhaps for this reason, that obliges me to do what I would not have wanted or been able to do with the stories I tell myself. In that story (only in bed, Niagara would return from the hospital at eight in the morning) I would be running through a mountain pass and a route which they feared, which obliged them to drive with caution, their lights marking the ever-possible visual traps of every curve, alone and at midnight in this enormous truck that was hard to steer on this coastal road. Being a truck driver has always seemed like an enviable job because I imagine it as one of the simplest forms of freedom, going from one place to another in a truck which at once is a house with its mattress to spend the night on a tree-lined road, a lamp to read with cans of food and beer, a transistor to listen to jazz in perfect silence, as well as this sensation of knowing yourself to be unknown by the rest of the world, where no one would learn whether we have taken this road and not another, with so many possibilities and villages and adventures on the way, including muggings and accidents which are always the best part, as would suit Walter Mitty.

I have asked myself at times why a truck driver and not a pilot or transatlantic captain, knowing all the while the simple and ground-level answer at my fingertips: I have to hide more and more from the day. Being a truck driver is being the people who speak with truck drivers, it is those places through which a truck driver moves. As such, whenever I tell myself a story of freedom it frequently begins in this truck crossing over the pampas or an imaginary landscape like the one now, the Andes or the Rocky Mountains, in any case a difficult road to travel that night when I was driving up and saw the fragile silhouette of Dilia at the foot of the rocks violently picked out of nowhere by the beams of my headlights, the violet walls which rendered the image of Dilia even smaller and more abandoned. The image of Dilia making a gesture of entreating aid after having walked for so long with a satchel on her back.

If being a truck driver is a story I've told myself many a time, I was not forced to meet women asking me to give them a ride like Dilia was doing. Although, of course, I had placed them there so that these stories almost always satisfied a fantasy in which the night, the truck and solitude were the perfect accessories to the brief happiness of finishing a stage. At times, no, at times there was only an avalanche from which I escaped – God knows how – or the brakes which failed during the descent so that everything ended in a whirlwind of changing visions which obliged me to open my eyes and refuse to carry on, then to look for Niagara's warm waist with the relief of having eluded the worst. Whenever the story dealt with a woman on the side of the road this woman was always a stranger, the caprices of my stories which would opt for a redhead or a woman of mixed race seen perhaps in a film or magazine and forgotten in the surface of the day until my story brought them back without my recognizing them. Seeing Dilia was therefore more than a surprise, it was almost a scandal. Dilia, you see, had nothing to do on this road and in a way was damaging the story with her gesture both imploring and threatening. Dilia and Alfonso are friends whom Niagara and I see from time to time; they live in different orbits and we are only brought together by a certain faithfulness to our university years, our common tastes and interests, eating now and then at their house or here, following from afar their life with baby and quite a bit of dough. What the hell was Dilia doing there when the story was proceeding in such a way that any imaginary girl, but not Dilia ... because if anything was clear in this story it was that, this time, I would meet a girl on the road and hence would occur some of the many things which can happen when you arrive at the plains and make a stop after the great tension of the crossroads. Everything was so clear after that first image, dinner with other truck drivers in the village inn before the mountain, a story in no way original but always pleasant in its variations and mysteries, only that now the mystery was different. It was Dilia who was completely incongruent with this curve on the road.

Maybe if Niagara had been there murmuring and snorting softly in her sleep, I would have chosen not to pick Dilia up, and instead erased her and the truck and the story by simply opening my eyes and saying to Niagara: "It's strange: I was about to sleep with a woman and it was Dilia." At which point Niagara in turn might have opened her eyes and kissed me on the cheek, calling me an idiot or mentioning some phony pop psychology, or asking me if I had ever desired Dilia, just to hear me say the truth or whatever about a dog's life, and so then more phony psychology or something to that effect. Yet feeling so alone within the story, as alone as I was, a truck driver in the middle of the mountain crossroads at midnight, I did not have the willpower to pass her by. I braked slowly, opened the cab door, and let Dilia climb in. In her fatigue and somnolence she barely murmured a "thank you" and stretched herself out in the seat with her travel bag at her feet.

The rules of the game are fulfilled from the very beginning in the stories I tell myself. Dilia was Dilia but in the story I was a truck driver and nothing more than that for her; it would never have occurred to me to ask her what she was doing there in the middle of the night or to call her by her name. The exceptional thing about the story, I think, was that this girl contained the person of Dilia, her limp red hair, her bright eyes, her legs almost conventionally evocative of those of a foal, too long for her height. Apart from this the story treated her like anyone else, without a name or prior relation, the perfect meeting by chance. We exchanged two or three sentences, I gave her a cigarette and lit myself another, and we began to descend the slope the way one has to descend a slope in a heavy truck. Meanwhile Dilia stretched herself out even more, smoking out of neglect and the torpor which had washed over her during her many hours walking and perhaps even out of fear of the mountain.

I thought that she would fall asleep at once, and it was pleasant to imagine her like that all the way down to the plain below; I also thought it might have been pleasant to invite her to the back of the truck and pull out a real bed. But never during a story had things permitted me such a liberty because any of those girls would have looked at me with a bitter and desperate expression of what they imagined to be my immediate intentions, and almost always looked for the door handle, for the necessary flight. Both in these stories and in the presumable reality of a truck driver, things could not happen this way. A truck driver had to talk, smoke, make friends, obtain from all this the inevitably tacit acceptance of a stop at some woodland or shelter, the acquiescence of what would come later and yet not be bitter nor angry. A truck driver would simply share what he had already been sharing since the chat began, his cigarettes, and the first bottle of beer drunk straight from the neck between two turns.