As he woke up, he felt a terrible chill. It was very cold.
He looked around, in the dim light, without recognizing the room. There was a strong, bitter smell, and he had the impression that his torso was damp. He touched his chest. His fingertips sensed a sticky substance. He realized that he had vomited in his sleep.
He reached his hand out on the side of the bed and hit something that produced the sound of glass. A familiar sound. He’d drunk himself stupid, and then he’d passed out.
Freedom. Freedom. This isn’t what he’d been dreaming of, he thought. It wasn’t this.
His mind strayed to the whore, a black woman he had picked up on the street the night before; luckily he’d had the presence of mind to make sure she left, otherwise she would certainly have rolled him, taking wallet and cash. Instinctively, he patted his pocket and felt the familiar bulge of his wallet. He’d paid her what he owed her and seen her out the door. Good work, you were smart for once. At least you’ve learned a thing or two.
When you’re behind bars, he thought, you dream constantly of freedom, you think you can perceive it in its concrete form. As if it were a cool breeze, or the memory of a taste. And you give it a first and last name, as you draw up the list of things you’ll do when no one can tell you, with a long piercing whistle, that your hour of exercise in the yard is over and it’s time to head back to your cell.
For the first ten years in prison, he had thought of his wife and children. Then he had come up with the idea of the black whore and he had cultivated that fantasy. It had come to him when his wife had fallen sick and had stopped coming to see him in the visitors’ room, to keep him from having to look at Death, riding on her back, eager to carry her off.
A black whore, he kept telling himself, there, behind bars, is just a piece of life. You have your fun, you pay her, and you send her away. She’s not a real woman, she has nothing to do with the woman who stood beside you in real life, with the mother of your children.
A black whore doesn’t resemble that girl dressed in white who shone in the June sunlight, a thousand years ago.
You can’t confuse a black whore with the smiling woman who greeted you when you came home from work, and at the mere sight of her you felt like taking her in your arms even before you had a chance to wash your hands.
You don’t hold a black whore by the hand for a solid hour while she gives birth to a ten-pound baby boy, all the while smiling at you nevertheless, even through the pain and suffering.
You don’t caress a black whore while she sleeps, thinking that your life depends on hers.
You don’t even recognize a black whore, because all black whores have the same face. You fuck them and you send them away, and that way you’re free to practically drink yourself to death.
Outside there was no sound of traffic. He tried to remember where he’d wound up, in what corner of that absurd city, but his memory was too tangled up.
He got up and went over to the window and his back twinged in a stabbing burst of pain to which his head responded with an immediate, terrible pulsating ache in his temples.
He felt like an old man. In prison, the difference in age didn’t matter. Young or old, they were all behind bars, brothers in sorrow, strangers in flesh and soul. Now though he felt like an old man.
An old man is a sad thing, he thought, as he looked out at the pitch darkness outside the smudged dirty panes of the windows in his room. Unless he has a family.
A family. He saw in his mind’s eye the young woman in the white dress in the June sunshine: back when she was still alive, then he had a family. But now she was dead. She had died without him. She had died while he was still behind bars.
A family. A wife, of course, but also children. What’s left to a man, if they take his family away? There was someone in prison, maybe a professor, who spoke as bright and clear as mountain air; he had murdered his wife and her lover, and never regretted having done it, far from it. Well, the professor had explained the meaning of the word “proletarian” to him: someone who is poor, extremely poor, a man whose only wealth is his offspring, from the Latin proles, meaning offspring, posterity, in other words, his children.
Proletarian.
He’d had two children when he’d gone into prison, and when he got out there was only one waiting for him, his daughter; then she too had abandoned him. What else was he supposed to do? He’d gone to fetch her home. That’s what.
He thought that he had two children, but instead he found himself face-to-face with two strangers. His son, that young asshole, had even gone so far as to threaten him: Beat it, or I’ll call the police and have them throw you back behind bars. I brought you into this world, he had replied to the boy, and I can send you straight back out of it. And the girl, the girl who bore his name, the girl who was so similar to her mother when she had danced all in white in the June sunshine—the girl was just as rotten as the boy. Just so she could chase after her lazy good-for-nothing boyfriend, she’d started waving her bare ass around for all to see. Offspring. Nice offspring that he had.
Then a guy reacts without thinking. Then a guy gets himself into trouble he can never get out of.
God, what a terrible headache. He dragged himself back to the bed, in his eyes the vague recollection of a broken, intermittently flashing neon sign: a fifth-rate pension over by the train station.
He didn’t have much left from the money he’d had when they released him from prison. Maybe back home he could find work in the fields, again; that’s not a job that can change much in sixteen years. Even though everything else in this world seemed to have gone insane, he thought, people everywhere tapping on the cell phones in their hands, flat, gleaming television sets even in the bars and cafés, cars that all look identical.
He didn’t have much money left, but he did have a little. His wife—before dying far from him, what a prank you played on me, what a miserable prank, to die like that—had even set aside some money and had hidden it in their usual place, the jar under the old shoes in the cellar. When he had found that money, old banknotes rolled up tight, whose value he couldn’t even place yet, he hadn’t been able to withstand the emotion. He had broken down crying like a fool. It wasn’t much, but it was still a message that came from the afterlife.
Now you’re dead and I don’t know how to live. Ain’t that grand.
He grabbed the bottle. There was enough left to send him back into a dreamless sleep. This evening, or this morning, it all amounted to the same thing, I don’t want a black whore. I don’t want anyone near me. Even if a black whore is warm, at least.
And she’s cheap, too, when all is said and done. But no cheaper than the bottle that you use to die a little bit.
To die a little more.