They have been walking around downtown for quite a while. Elsa has bought two pairs of shorts, a blue one for the older girl, a pink one for the younger, and a book for each. She has pointed out the old guitarist, the one who stands in the arcade and is given coins of twenty or fifty, and even bills of one hundred, by people passing by, their hearts swelling with gratitude for so many cheerful tunes. Now she has taken them to a McDonald’s, and they’ve chosen to go upstairs, sitting down with their burgers and Cokes next to a stained-glass window. The view is partly obscured by a flag with the McDonald’s sign, but whenever the flag moves aside in the breeze, they can see a swarthy little boy sitting barefoot on the sidewalk, with a tin can in front of him, and on his knees a piece of cardboard with something written on it. From this angle, they can’t read what it says. The boy is so dirty they can see brown streaks on his face. Elsa remembers the poster she glanced at this morning at the baker’s, advertising a lecture called “Your skin, a major asset” and a free demonstration of cosmetic products. She explains to her daughters that a blackened face is one of the major assets of a street kid—it’s what you show people when you can’t sing or play an instrument to attract the public. She thinks it’s a good thing to open the eyes of her well-to-do girls to such realities. A walk downtown can be very instructive when you live in a residential suburb that looks like a very clean stretch of countryside, with well-kept roads. Besides, Elsa tells herself as she watches her daughters eating their burgers, compassion comes easy to them. So she places two coins next to their glasses, one for each. “Don’t forget to give it to the little boy on the way out!”
Two tables away from them, a fat young man with bulging eyes is sitting. He’s eating without looking at anyone. Elsa wonders what kind of thoughts can possibly be buried beneath that pile of fat. She supposes that from where he’s sitting—facing the second window—he can also see the little beggar boy and the flag flapping like an unfurled sail. But all he’s looking at is his burger. Even then he’s looking at it without seeing it, totally absorbed in the act of eating, with what seems a kind of morose contempt, a despair at not seeing, not feeling, not tasting anything through the prison of fat—at least, that’s how Elsa interprets it, and she knows what she’s talking about, she thinks, because as a teenager she, too, went though a phase when she was bulimic and had a kind of gray hatred of the world. But right now, she has no memory of it, or rather her memory isn’t an obstacle anymore, and it seems curious to her that, even though you know perfectly well what you were, you can be affected by a kind of amnesia of the senses, so that you can’t relive what you felt in the past, and you’re reduced to imagining despair, the way someone imagined one day that it might be a good idea to put chopped meat into soft rolls or to fit stained glass in a McDonald’s window. She is overwhelmed with contentment at the thought that the past can disappear as quickly as the mouthfuls of a meal you scarf down without thinking. She realizes now why she burned the poet’s letters. Everything vanished so quickly, a little bundle of ashes that immediately grew cold. She thinks now it was the right thing to do—there’s no point in thinking about him anymore. A day will come, in fact, when the only thing she’ll have left will be to imagine everything that happened, as if that man with his fiery eyes, who looked like a retired government employee in his worn suit, had never spoken to her in the tearoom where she was taking a rest from her shopping, as if he had not sat down next to her without hesitating and begun reading her one of his own poems, as if she had not succumbed to the charm of his words, had not agreed to see him again and let him write to her without her husband knowing but on a purely platonic basis. The letters were innocent enough—he talked about the taste of the air and the sound of the rain, about Verlaine and Lorca— and there were more poems, too, poems in praise of Woman, Her role as muse, as inspiration, as glorious oracle.
It was all a dream, she thinks now, just one more dream among other dreams—most are still to come, they can rise up at any moment, anything can set them off, a child’s gaze, a glass of Coke, a piece of stained glass. Yes, Elsa tells herself with intense excitement, I’m a factory of dreams … and right now she is transported in her imagination into a fault in the stained glass, a bubble of air inadvertently trapped in the pane. She stares at it unblinking for a while, until her eyes smart. Then she looks away, and the whole room seems red. The girls have bloodshot eyes, as if they are on a photo taken with a flash, and the food is red, and the napkins and the plastic knives and forks. For a moment Elsa is enchanted. Then sadness comes over her like a wave. The poet wrote to her in red ink. Obviously it’s not enough for her to transport herself into a bubble of air and dream to her heart’s content, she can’t forget so easily all about that handwriting the color of fresh blood—or about the red dress she was wearing the day she was raped.
It happened when their correspondence was at its height. One day, Elsa was walking along a path in an almost deserted part of the park, waiting for her daughters to come out of school, when a stranger with a hood over his face emerged from the bushes, clutching a knife. “Don’t move, don’t scream!” The man placed the point of the knife in the hollow of Elsa’s neck, against the jugular, and dragged her clumsily to a damp hollow, where he ordered her to undress. Her legs quaking, she took off her red dress and lay down, still under the threat of the knife. Her mind bolted like a frightened horse, and she began to moan crazily, shaking her head from side to side, her mouth filling with dead leaves. “Drop the knife … drop the knife …” she begged endlessly, the words gushing from her lips and throat and belly, all the time, all the time that he …
Forget. Leave the stained-glass window, transport yourself into the street, keep your eyes on the crowd, let yourself be divided by the crowd, into little fragments of faces and hair and hands and knees. There’s a store down there with clothes hanging on a rail near the entrance and women fingering them, taking them down. So reassuring, so banal. Buying something to attract glances—she used to dream of that. Not now. Now all she wants is to pass unnoticed, she doesn’t care if men never look at her again. Let her daughters attract all the attention, her beautiful daughters with their swollen lips and hair as smooth as silk. The poet was in his sixties, but his desire for women was as strong as ever. For her, all that is over. She looks through the window without emotion, at this town like so many others, neither more nor less busy, with its beggars lying in the same positions as everywhere else. And yet this street is not just any street. She often walked along it with the poet. It was all quite innocent—she might have been with her own father. He never touched her. Just a peck on the cheek, like a friend or a well-behaved child. But he liked the red dress.
“Mummy, what’s the little beggar boy doing?”
“Nothing—just waiting.”
“You’re watching him, aren’t you?”
“You can see she’s watching him,” the older girl says to the younger, who is drawing on the table with a finger dipped in ketchup.
Elsa’s gaze returns to the window. She looks down. All she wants is to vanish utterly into the mobile heart of the crowd and scatter happily with them in all directions, the past flowing away beneath everyone’s feet like an underground stream, she wants this particular street to be like any other street in any other town, so that it could lead even to the sea like a river turned toward the setting sun, while the hamburgers and the flag and the glasses and the plastic forks and even the pieces of stained glass have long since drowned along with the housefronts and the paving stones, the people in the restaurant and the people on the street… Her forehead against the windowpane, Elsa breathes methodically, to the rhythm of an imaginary march. She is heading for the open sea, for the sun of oblivion.
At this exact moment, the sun goes down. Just like a picture postcard. A card showing the mouth of the river, the waves and the setting sun—a piece of card curling at the edges, like the rest, in the auto-da-fé she lit to exorcise the past. There are words written on the back, in red ink: “The river joins the sea. The wind pants and flees, guilty of the disorder on the beach …” Elsa holds her breath, staring stupidly at the lead frames of the stained-glass window. No image, no daydream escapes the poet. His power did not vanish when his letters dissolved in ashes. Even today Elsa drowns in that scarlet ink, her lungs are full of it, even the air she breathes. There’s no escape. There isn’t a single crack in the sidewalk, a single centimeter of skin, a single fold in a garment, a single fiber of her memory that does not contain red, that does not recall the rape and the poet.
Back to the street, look again at humanity in motion, humanity pounding on the sidewalk like rain. The stream, denser now with people coming out of offices, moves quickly, a uniform mass, except for one white spot, pitching like a skiff tossed by the waves—a woman in a veil, a Muslim woman walking along unconcerned. Imagine yourself behind a veil, behind a reassuring screen, looking out at the street through a very narrow slit, seeing without being seen, walking protected … Why shouldn’t all women wear veils? Why not give them that comforting illusion, until they are cured of love, or they weary of it, or grow old? Why not die veiled? At the thought of it, Elsa suddenly feels more wretched than ever, her breath comes in gasps, her dry mouth hits against the glass and metal of the windowpanes as if pushing against the imaginary material of a gag. The man in the park. He had a hood and he, too, could see and feel protected. All Elsa saw was his hard eyes, pale beneath very blond eyebrows.
Kill the memory, don’t look at the street, close your eyes, make everything go black, hard as it may seem. Elsa closes her eyes. She knows it’ll be only a moment—the girls are sure to ask her something and she’ll have to answer. But she knows it only takes a moment to go a long way away, somewhere where nobody can find her, a magic place she used to go in her childhood daydreams when she couldn’t cry or scream because she always had to be a little beacon for others, she had to shine, to shine until she was exhausted. That was when she used to invoke the Island. A place full of palm trees and bird’s wings and good giant lions, the Island would bury the child’s fears and sorrows in its bosom.
Elsa’s closed eyes call to the Island, its palms rustling like those feather fans the Pharaoh’s handmaids used in her illustrated Bible. But the Island no longer responds to the call. All Elsa can see now is the rapist, with his hood, and his hand clutching the knife, and his naked legs with their prominent muscles, and his underpants that he pulled off and kicked away. She can feel the man inside her, she can see his cold blue eyes through the slit in the mask, then the image blurs and re-forms and comes back to her. She is penetrated again, hard and quickly, and now the eyes are fiery and unblinking, a father’s eyes, a master’s eyes, staring at her with tenderness and admiration. By some strange metamorphosis, it’s the poet who’s making her weep beneath him and cry out “the knife … the knife …” while her mouth fills with earth. He’s laughing with the huge, chaste laughter of a man who has never touched the woman he chose as a muse, and his steadfast and luminous eyes devour her, and in his hand he holds, instead of the bare weapon, a batch of letters in a roll, letters that crackle with red words, love of art, fusion of opposites, union of souls… What irresistible words, seeds of a future for which Woman is the precious catalyst, words that open and consume, an intoxicating elixir swallowed with complete trust! The poet laughs, and his unoccupied hand gropes in search of something else, a piece of charcoal perhaps, because now he penetrates her with it, a piece of charcoal like those he loves using to illustrate his writings, and Elsa’s cunt swells and becomes black and tender. Then the poet seizes a paintbrush and dips it into the opening that’s as dark as soot now, and places it on a sheet of paper and writes the first words of a poem. Paying no attention to Elsa, he writes, occasionally reaching out without looking at her and plunging his brush into her, his eyes fixed on the page. But suddenly he lets go of the brush and begins to poke Elsa hard. He pushes all sorts of instruments into her inflamed cunt—quills, paper knives, pencils, ballpens, staplers, scissors, things that cut and tear and make a hole in the walls of Elsa’s belly, cutting them to shreds, forcing a passage toward the vital organs, vibrating in unison, gathering in a spiral, climbing toward her heart and lungs. She can’t breathe, she wishes she could die, but all he does is stare at her, she thinks she’s finally going to cry out, but nothing comes out, because as you know, you poets, women don’t say anything, they’ve been taught to keep quiet and let others do what they want to them, little beacons radiating happiness at being chosen, full of mute supplication. My mouth is closed, and my eyes shine, and my smile says I owe you everything, poet, you are my master forever, I am delirious with gratitude before your millennial genius while my body is torn from inside, from top to bottom, from mouth to cunt. Seeing that I don’t cry out, you rummage through a drawer and take out the bottle of red ink you use for writing to me. Then, calmly, you take your pen, your big ancient fountain pen that dates from before the atomic bomb, and you dip it in and fill it to the top, and you lodge it inside me like one more weapon, gently you press the tube and this scarlet balm enters me, sealing the gaps, soothing the wounds, and nothing exists anymore but this hot liquid that fills me up completely, I become this red ink that you inject patiently into me, it floods my vagina and stomach and kidneys and lungs, my arms and my hands, and where my nails were, bitten with anxiety, there are now almonds threaded with crimson, through some alchemy blood emerges from the tips of my fingers, and I reach out to you, poet, so that you can see what you’ve done to me, and what I have done with your ink, and suddenly I arch, my mouth is distorted, and a cry comes out that I do not recognize, a cry that seems not to come from me, a cry flung at the trees and the sky and a stranger’s face, in a deserted park, at the hour when the children are happily waiting for the bell to signal the end of the school day.
Has someone cried out? Elsa opens her eyes and sees the restaurant exactly as it was before she plunged toward the Island. Her daughters are finishing their burgers, eyes half closed, their fingers shiny with ketchup. The fat young man is wiping his mouth. Elsa pushes away her glass and her burger. She doesn’t feel hungry or thirsty anymore. All she’d like to do is spread her legs and open her mouth and cry out so that the whole world can hear her: “Look! Look what they did to me …” And everyone would see, everyone except the girls, because just then they would be outside, giving their coins to the young beggar. The fat boy would stop eating and would also look, and suddenly he would look exactly like the police inspector, and he would say, as they say in such cases, hardly lifting his eyes, looking at her through half-closed lids: “Were you sexually aroused? We need to know for our investigation.”