SPECTER

—“He manages to hold all my madness hostage,” Carmen said to Joana, who greeted us at the bookstore entrance. Her eyes, blazing with coffee under the short-circuited blue lamp on the stand, now searched my face in the shadows. I laughed softly, the laugh of a Stock Exchange in collusion against humanity. They continued talking among themselves, unresponsive. “My world remains ghostly until its substance gives it substance, like a sublime fixative. Without K, in recent years, professional projects, relationships, trips, etc., seemed as frustrating to me as someone falling from a window, passing through the windows of the rooms below, wanting to become intimate with its occupants,” Carmen concluded. “It was different with me,” Joana said. “When we were married, even the fruit in the refrigerator seemed cursed, while he meditated in the dark room.” Alone in the other room, I felt her ghost like a ferment of unknown anatomical lines, of imaginary women trying to fit into my body, in a guarded and overloaded extension of the air. "What do you see when you look at me?" I asked him one day. He smiled and said, "Neck, hands, loose hair falling over my face, covering my mouth, stuck to my chin or throat, in a still solitude." He was still smiling wryly, listening to the sounds coming from the apartment above... HIGH HEELS! --- she said. Carmen smiled with her as I took a syncopated step forward. A bookstore employee silently fixed the light and half-opened the new release stand, waving us over. We creaked out, beer glasses in hand. Joana delayed our departure as much as possible with that subject: – (...) Crackling, gurgling, kitchen noises, the accumulated voice of several simultaneous movements, a pan being placed on the stove, someone flushing the toilet, glass bumping against glass, footsteps on the linoleum, in short, the sounds that fill any middle-class apartment, but gathered into a whole mapped out full-time in his mind. I was sure that his ghost knew all those homes like the back of his hand, and many others far away... that's when I started to get bothered by his nightly practices, which at first I thought were just yoga. "If the universe weren't driven by a very simple mechanism (he once said), it would eventually fall apart." That was before he started on the military front. On another occasion, I asked him, point-blank, about Sabrina... then, from one minute to the next, my thoughts began to blur, I became dizzy, as his heart raced alarmingly, to the point of being visible. All this in silence, until—at this point, I had to interrupt her and pull her by the arm, considering the personal risk in the ethical assessment of her "version of the facts." My resolve, at that moment, expressed the tenacity of my character, and the remorse for that subtle "proto-marital infidelity," in which I had led my "proto-wife" to be the only one there able to present my being and my thoughts. Carmen had such a sweet accent that, listening to Joana, it was impossible not to want to substitute one for the other. Furthermore, I was the author of the book to be launched there, and it was now up to me to personify the zeal for that prodigy. Combating the surreptitious forms of expressionism that constantly appeared on modern television, my work now reached a kind of rarefied state: "For the INDEFINITE" (I said to a group of old men who had mistakenly entered the bookstore and approached the sales stand in search of information) is a PRESS that crushes itself until it produces from its own blood all the monsters of the INFINITE, not as states, but as real beings. Thus, I began to aspire to the heaven of "nocturnal adherence" in that bookstore, as it gradually filled with unknown people. The nocturnal adherence, which replaced meditation with drugs, was the Three-Headed Dog, the jewel of the universal panacea. And indeed, in that new book there was a delicate assurance in the choice of meticulously filtered material. It even incorporated inorganic elements. Smiling lines and serious, dangerous lines, as Jean Arp said about his sculptures. Lines of total insubordination to rigid theoretical schemes and so-called "ethical and healthy" human aspirations, hence its name, "KUNDATIGUADOR," in which I once again vampirized Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, searching for a political meaning for the spiritual question. Carmen pricked up her adolescent ears when she heard me quote the poet: "Baudelaire has wrinkled over time, but has retained a strange youth. Each verse of Mallarmé, from birth, is a beautiful, fine wrinkle, studious, noble, profound. In the world of the small, everyday wars of modern life, of social and political life, my book adds them to the Eleven of Cranly, true men of Wicklow, to free the Earth from its hypocritical criticisms and esoteric heresies; and also against all this virtual fragmentation of war that, together, constitute TOTAL WAR." Through the plastic power of capturing the forces of EVIL, I seek to present to the reader the endless struggle of man's liberation from his dark Karma, from his unlucky feet, from his mass tendencies towards falsification and the degradation of the spirit, which brings him so much pain and tribulation, erring in a work that is, in its essence, the work of a great civilizer. This book, ladies and gentlemen, deals, first and foremost, with USURY in the organs of government, from the birth of Western civilization in Greece to the present, and with the destructive effect of financial logic in the United States and China. Speaking like this, I felt the political reality rising beneath my feet (a foreigner in my own country, conversing with a mirror inhabited by strangers). It was difficult for me to know what Carmen was talking about next to me, while Joana filled my glass with something red. A diamond cut with the aim of breaking into dead flesh, my eyes served only to cut the glass of the mirror, transforming it into a display case. "Nothing is sadder than Jules Renard's diary, nothing better demonstrates the horror of Literature. He must have thought: 'Everyone is so low, vile, upstarts. No one dares to confess. I WILL CONFESS THIS AND I WILL BE THE ONLY ONE!'" Carmen said unexpectedly, causing considerable discomfort around us. I laughed. "I feel that you, K," she continued, "would need more than that to compose your Hamlet. You would still need to create a figure that the world would place alongside Hamlet." Then an old man beside her said: --Temos aqui um novo Shakespeare? –