Fragments of Place Read online

  Two years earlier, as the minutes ticked by and his mother lay dying in his arms, as they watched each other intently, he witnessed her sacred part leave its hiding place and migrate slowly to her face. At the moment of death, she was illuminated by that sacred thing whose existence he felt early on, and had dearly loved.

  She had been wounded by a bullet in a demonstration, and friends had managed to carry her, with great difficulty, through the retreating crowd, to his house. It was the end. She had lost a lot of blood, but was still able to give him this final offering: the sacred part visible in her eyes and on her skin.

  He wasn’t leaving the alley, though he should have, while he still could.

  He leaned over the woman and uncovered her face. A pinkish jelly was smeared over it as if someone had applied a thick beauty mask. A thin veil covered her undamaged eye that had stayed open.

  There was nothing of what he feared in her face or eyes.

  He felt enormous relief.

  He would keep this as his final image of the woman, and not the other one that had imprinted itself on his mind as he stepped out in front of her, and she saw him.

  He finally left the alley.

  When he got home, he undressed and showered. He rubbed his skin hard and the water was much too hot.

  He came out of the bathroom and walked to the refrigerator. He took a beer and popped it open with his finger, then drank it down in a couple of gulps.

  Images flooded through his mind. Banks of eyes followed him. Sometimes they caught him, captured him, a leech refusing to let go. They appeared and disappeared, piling up one over the other until they blocked out everything and blinded him.

  They formed a black screen, and on it was the look the woman in the alley gave him. The man struggled for air. His legs were weak. He slipped to the floor, a ragdoll.

  It took him a minute to recover. He pulled himself up to the standing position, got another beer, and collapsed into the armchair.

  A little later, he went back to the bathroom and threw his shirt into the sink to soak it. It smelled like dead dog.

  With his fingernail, he scraped off the sticky flecks of brain. They would go down the drain and into the sewers, and disappear like all those kids who were daring enough to challenge the system, including his younger brother. He was among the ones shot and thrown into the sewage canal on the south end of the city.

  Usually he never wore a good shirt when he had a mission, but this time the target was more important than the others.

  The woman was the Minister of Order and Security’s wife. She was beautiful and haughty, and with her long skillful fingers, she cleverly manipulated the levers of power by using her husband. Certain that the more horrible decisions concerning the fate of the protestors carried her signature. Blood red, like the colour of her perfect fingernails and full lips.

  He had dressed carefully because he didn’t want that cruel, arrogant woman to take him for an ordinary small-time criminal who was using the explosive political situation to exercise his personal violence.

  The woman was walking down the alley on her way to a secret encounter.

  That piece of information shook the simplistic idea he had of her.

  So there was a secret lover, and she was putting her life in danger for him. That possibility was something new. Behind the pitiless official image, was there another more vulnerable woman?

  That was the woman he encountered back in the alley.

  In her eyes, just before he shot her, that’s what he had seen: her desolation as she realized that the love between her and the man she was going to see was over. Their private love affair that was outside history.

  He hesitated an instant before pulling the trigger, but she had seen his face and, if they arrested him, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep quiet when they tortured him.

  So he fired. He aimed for her eye.

  He couldn’t explain that.

  During his training, he had been advised, as much as possible, to avoid any eye contact.

  Because of his inexperience and, later, in other circumstances, he had made eye contact with seven of his fourteen targets, whether he had hit them or not.

  For a fraction of a second, each of his targets had turned into a human being.

  The first times, they entered his flesh like lightning bolts that kept pushing to the surface when he least expected it.

  He swore he would avoid his targets’ eyes.

  But instead, he started seeking them out. Never, not even once, had their eyes revealed anything but the human.

  In the eyes of the woman in the alley, the sacred had emerged. Just before he fired.

  THE ULTIMATE

  It’s not like anything else.

  Right away you look for words that might name it, even from a distance, as a kind of reassurance. A pile of rubble. Ruins. A heap of debris containing shattered rocks, shreds of clothing, and shards of glass. Maybe flesh, too. The ferrous bitterness of fresh blood in the air, the smell of raw organs, the slaughterhouse – all things too intense not to return to.

  But it’s more than that. There wasn’t bombing, or an explosion or cataclysm. It wasn’t a mass grave where bodies were mixed into the rocky ground with the help of a bulldozer to hide proof of the massacre.

  And it wasn’t as if we had arrived afterward, too late, after everything had happened. We wouldn’t have known what we were supposed to do there, only that we were at the heart of something.

  Last night, we fell asleep peacefully, believing this morning would be like all the others, with the trail of sunlight on the table and on our hands, the taste of coffee and bread on our tongues. But the normal passage from night to dawn did not occur.

  Suddenly it was noon. We woke up standing, our eyes wide open, here on this vast arid plain. We closed our eyes to awaken fully. Then opened them again. It was no dream. Only this in front of us: these ruins of nothingness, and an endless view stretching on forever, without buildings, without trees, without animals, without people.

  Maybe we should have fled right away, it wouldn’t have mattered where because it was all the same, run full speed toward the horizon. But there was this irrepressible need to put words on it before we ran for safety, and maybe understand, even a little, before we turned away.

  Now there is no more escape, we know it, and it isn’t a bad thing. There’s nothing left but to give in to the attraction. Now we have grasped the dark force that has drawn us from the very beginning, sucking us in and leading us slowly toward chaos, and soon, it’s clear, nothing of ourselves will be identifiable again.

  Despite appearances, we won’t be victims, not the way others might think, that we were subjected to brutal aggression, ground into dust, annihilated.

  It was just an extreme experiment – the ultimate, perhaps – vaster and more mobile than language, and we agreed to experience it to the very end.

  Just to see. The way we always wanted to see the rest, before, even if it meant, sometimes, not returning.

  THE SPINNERS (WHAT CAME NEXT)

  The three sisters took out the skeins of wool with their rich and varied colours, the wooden frame, the distaff, and the scissors they had thrown into the dungeon of forgetfulness a long time ago.

  They had decided to stop spinning the silky thread of life, which was their gift to men. They stopped spooling it across fields of time, then cutting it off, when the hour was right, to preserve the harmony of the world.

  And so they had given up their patient and secret woman’s work that creates life and accompanies it to the very end.

  Outside, the madness of men, already so great, had gone beyond all limits in its fanaticism, cupidity, barbarity, and indifference.

  Nothing could appease their greedy gaze.

  And nothing touched them with its grace, even if Elpis, the youngest of the women who had sought refuge among the Spinners, told them that, down below, most human beings resisted as best they could the madness of the pitiless, all-powerful
minority. Those humans needed the women to believe that their resistance was not in vain.

  Even if the three sisters had lost all hope, they agreed to transmit the art of spinning fragile human lives to the younger women.