Count the present days until today arrives (BERNARDA)
(So many secret treasures suddenly unearthed in my life, so many strong signs that time is not always faster than the hallucinations of art --- the dragon of insomnia devoured me on those two fronts open against time: Antonina and now, Julián: that unsuspected two-headed opus made me touch the inextinguishable, the unfinished and unnatural work of conquering death and time --- I had become capable of visualizing Antonina and now also my late Julián with a beatific lucidity, bordering on an unlimited revelatory delirium; I actively participated, with those texts, in the darkness of each one, highlighting from each piece of history some sound that resonated lingeringly in my inner ear, like a ghost synchronized with the source of a thousand conversations organized to subsist by the power of their own radiant enigma --- For example, in Antonina's book, apparently, we follow the trail of my beloved Hespeld to Italy, and after his meeting with an Italian named Giorgio Liguori in Naples, we heard nothing more of him --- I leafed through the later pages of Antonina's manuscript out of curiosity, and I found no trace of Hespeld after that strange and verbose encounter in Italy; my desolation was enormous, mitigated only by the news of "Julián," brought by the beautiful Yerma --- At that moment in Antonina's book, when Hespeld leaves the hotel worried, the room where he has just spent two days isolated, almost completely immobile on the bed, preparing his disguise as a Swiss editor interested in the originals of a thematic-critical compilation of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, produced by a group of former Red Brigades committed to finding 'antidotes' for the 'infantile disease' of the new populist degenerations that threaten Europe, the United States, and Latin America --- in that hotel room in Naples, Hespeld is boxed inside his own head, and his only contact with anyone, before the encounter, is with the hotel manager: "There are no more thieves in Naples; they all went to Milan, Modena and Bologna. You can walk around there in peace, per caritá!'', the manager says to Hespeld --- there in that city, however, Hespeld seems systematized by a chronic distrust of everything that makes him sweat coldly on his back and have the occasional heart palpitations --- even so, he leaves: sailors and women looking at Vesuvius out of the corner of their eye, and seagulls, mix with a bit of initial dizziness; Hespeld continues through the streets of Naples, stopping now at this café, now at that one ---
---Naples' cafés and their old political chatter, now reduced to the bone of alienation, were still, at the very least, picturesque; they functioned as secret laboratories of clichés, and amusing stories were accumulated by lingering there. However, Hespeld has an encounter with a shadowy man with a mechanical gaze on Toledo, the city's busiest street --- there, everything arriving from the port is scattered to one side and the other. At 2:00 p.m., there was the 'avvocato' Giorgio Liguori in his car, inviting Hespeld to accompany him to a busy bar in a poor neighborhood. For a moment, as they glide through the streets of that city of mad sailors, Hespeld is simultaneously reminded of Coleridge's Lay of the Ancient Mariner and the Jolly Roger, the original blood-red pirate flag. At the bar, across from Liguori at the table, Hespeld amuses himself by imagining him with a parrot on his shoulder, an eye patch, drinking rum from a mug and smoking a pipe, while scanning the horizon with a spyglass: "The way in which, in the smallest of our trattorias here in Naples, fish and meat are displayed in the window escapes the habit and demands of connasseurs; do you consider yourself a connasseur, Mr. Hespeld?" Liguori asked ---
ResponderExcluir--- Hespeld had no doubt that Liguori, with the copy of Gramsci's critical edition under his arm, was at that moment reading his mind with an extrasensory awareness of his mental planes --- to discover the most about a person, it is better to talk than to listen, thought Hespeld, still calmly remembering his quick training at Savatti: ''Certainly, Naples, with its starfish, crabs, octopuses and obscure shellfish taken from the waters of the gulf and displayed in the fish market to be eaten raw with just a few drops of lemon, escapes somewhat from instrumental rationalism and the modernization of mass production, but not from the most acute economic, social, cultural and sexual problems of the mass worker, derived from it. The brutality and cynicism of the new American Way of Life is the reduction of the worker to a trained gorilla, as Gramsci says in notebooks 3 and 4. Perhaps, Mr. Liguori, I am indeed a 'connasseur' '' Hespeld said, fraternal ---
ResponderExcluir--- "Indeed," Liguori immediately retorted, "...there's no escaping that old whore, the experience of hegemonic struggles; today, it's in everything, and everywhere; we've revised, we've tracked this old whore down to the smallest detail in our edition, intellectually the best in decades, through every possible version, from the class struggle at ground level to the hard labor of building superstructures. Let us consider this bar, where early in the morning the unemployed sit drinking coffee from tin cans, only to later migrate to rusty park benches where they will experience the sudden, graveyard-like calm of big cities when drugs reduce them to a spectral fissure, hearing only the desolate molecular rhythms of their own bodies, motionless in the midst of the desert of existence; let us consider, then, Mr. Hespeld, 'Americanism,' alienation, the colonization of ideas, ways of being, and even enthusiasms and hatreds, as we have seen today:
ResponderExcluira complex phenomenology of the 'figures' that assume or may come to assume the consciousness of any people under Yankee pressure, economic or anti-economic, friendly or hostile, is found in this new thematic-critical edition of the Notebooks (by Gramsci), Mr. Hespeld; the need to combat deleterious 'extreme simplifications', the 'axioms of liberal governability' that, elaborated by the American State and Market, are soon being implemented throughout the world with its military, media and (sub)cultural task force; this megalomaniacal hegemonic effort of premeditated and ill-intentioned usury to entangle the common sense of citizens of the entire world in an incurable oscillation between the passive acceptance of a neocolonial subalternity and the impotent disdain for an absurd and inhuman world imposed from outside as a permanent state of exception'', Liguori said --- from any point of view (Hespeld sensed), Liguori was striving to tear him away from his 'querencia' --- a term used in Spanish bullfights and remembered by Burroughs in Naked Lunch, to designate the bull that goes to a corner of the arena and stays there, attracting the bullfighter (in this case, the 'policeman') ---
ResponderExcluir--- for Hespeld, at that moment, there was none of the slovenly patterns of the typical communist specter raving in the afternoon sun in cafes in Liguori's behavior, nor of the disembodied pseudo-intellectual lust of academic pousse-cafés; Liguori's 'radical organicity' leaped out like the irruption on a deserted street of an armed car with mafia-like attention to everything, an active interlocutor of all the dark realizations of the new global Americanist order, calling for the elaboration of an economic, social, cultural and political alternative; alternative to that passive sedimentation in which people, reduced by Yankee globalization to intoxicated specters attached to consumerism, debt, and bare life, deluded by the rhythms of partying and working for the masses, who look at a middle class lavish in varnishing with vulgar photographic refinements the same thing that the enslaved masses have under intricate neon signs, mentally destroyed by the incorporeal lust of the society of the spectacle,
ResponderExcluirtend to agree with their own minds programmed to agree in the binary and microcephalic molds of yes or no, up or down, which distracts them while they accept an increasingly subordinate role in the face of the new universality of the 'American brand' (as Gramsci would say, aiming at the alienation of all spheres of society around them) --- ''And in the midst of all this...'' Hespeld ventured, after a minute in which, smiling timidly, he tries to make his fear fly over Liguori's face in particles of light ''Countless anti-dialectical fundamentalisms, you must 'agree' with me, Mr. Liguori'' --- Hespeld and his overly European smile, always making light of other people's states of inflammatory exaltation, trying to infiltrate Liguori's speech with his ghostly voice --- ''Malvagitá, Mr. Hespeld! For decades in Italy we have been deluding ourselves with the refined and nonexistent 'reconstruction' of a culture, of a national-popular consciousness; something that cannot be done by passionately alluding in films and books to the 'stupendous apples of Pompeii' and the 'famous figs of Vesuvius'. In Italy (as in the rest of Europe) for a long time now the only political force that inhabits us has been GLUTEN;
ResponderExcluirwe pose for the world as an enormous macaroni palace topped by a fairy covered in trinkets, singing the 'sole mio'. Publishing our social poems in bazaars and fashion magazines and marvels of our historical 'adventurous spirit' is just another veneer for our factory of 'dead' dreams and thoughts; similar inhibitions weigh today on our 'wheelchair-sitting' Marxists (to use the Spanish expression), longing to be signing autographs in fancy bars full of dirty little spotlights, until they finally co-opt some 'big one' from our front ranks, who proceeds to bark the famous conclusion: "WHAT'S THE SENSE OF TELLING EVERYONE ANYTHING?" Liguori said. --- In the continuation of Antonina's text, Hespeld seeks only to vaguely 'post-censor' the 'avvocato' Liguori, with timid appeals to sincerity and art, against the 'vagrant tricks' of people with their heads full of 'state affairs' --- Antonina's text becomes confused, fragmentary, almost surrealist: there is mention of 'chocolate prisoners' disguised with clothes and hairstyles in empty houses that are existentialist bars in every city in Italy, full of technocrats hidden crossing wiretaps and new rich informants converted into extensions of the Italian plainclothes police cursing:
ResponderExcluir"AND WHO WANTS TO LISTEN TO THIS?", who soon after betray and change sides after being offered billion-dollar contracts by Russian banking funds --- there is a last allusion to Hespeld 'escaping' down a wide, deserted street, dusty and lined with palm trees, thinking to himself to calm himself as he walks aimlessly "Just part of a new, alienated generation" --- suddenly, a window opens in a tenement and someone unseen says: "I DON'T KNOW YOU, CAPO!" --- then a beggar comes out of his pigsty (nothing new to add to the pigsty feeling here) and shoots repeatedly --- it is not clear in the text, but it is assumed that he shoots at Hespeld --- it is assumed that it is Hespeld, crawling in a pool of his own blood in the middle of the street, thinking one last time:
ResponderExcluir
ResponderExcluir"I wish I had stayed there in the bar, indifferent, or in the shadow of Les Collines d'Anacapri, an invention of Debussy who dispensed with the 'seggiovia' to write his preludes" -- a drowsy, post-mortem calm descends upon the rest of the chapter --- there is obscure talk of "statesmanship" and political books; of a column of faces marked for death in the Corriere della Sera (all together in a single maritime ambush) --- at the same time, somewhere in Africa, they appear together hoisting and waving a blood-stained flag --- with an American aircraft carrier anchored at sea in the background --- here, Antonina clumsily interjects some phrases from Rimbaud's prose poem "DEMOCRATIE" --- I close Antonina's book after hearing a noise at my bedroom window; I look and see a man all in black and a sky mask hanging from rappelling ropes, trying to break it --- I scream HELP!!!!!!! several times)