Count the present days until today arrives (ME)

 

(It had been months since I'd had that recurring nightmare about the sealed black tubes in the American embassy in Sweden that no one could manipulate, which made my mind and, by extension, my imagination more fluid and gentle, enough to seem to generate light on the paper, as I composed "My Julián" on that warm night beside Yerma; it was as if a drunken decorator had placed a life-size replica of Snow White next to a Tibetan Buddha: cold spiders of panic seemed poised behind our eyes, ready for both copulation and sudden fear --- Every now and then I'd stop writing the text and catch Yerma staring at me with a lust suspicious of everything, which would distract me for a minute --- then I'd smoke and continue writing what Julián might have written like this: "Compact heights sought in a desolate mist. Then he sets off at a gallop, in fragments, armed with the very Spanish taste for putting all things in life to the sword. Whether or not the poetic dream of a lifetime had been realized there, in that harsh territory, punished by history—of cruel and difficult knowledge—whether or not it exceeded my expectations, the fact is that I had crossed the line. Under the gaze of the sky, stone, acid, and metal inaugurated the consciousness of a people open to fire. And allow me to be quite frank here: at the bottom of their horrible civilizational whirlwind of centuries, a new desire now stirred, monstrous and mixed with the pangs of historical guilt; a Goyesque desire capable of killing women and children with accurate stabs and then resurrecting them in a Disneyesque, televised and globalized lie, now predominating a false style of bourgeois aristocracy amid countless ultramodern football stadiums and editions of cheap newspapers, a mere purple stain on the neck where the old vampire of the nobility had feasted for centuries. For that "new rotten cream" of Spain, there was no longer any difference between being a god or a con artist in a metastasizing Disneyland - all lost in the same unconscious movement of language as they exploited the wreckage of a bankrupt yet promising kingdom for a small spectrum of private enterprise, internal and external, in controlling the image of the world in people's minds --- (yes, I wrote as I went, like Julián himself: red wind, endless chatter; narcotic passages full of possible dawns debated on café terraces - the old Mediterranean habit, Greek in origin, of debating and announcing "dawns" (wine, beer, and shopping) -, as Yerma had explained to me a short time ago: along with the ebb of a misdirected sexual desire, a vain pang of disgust, incapable of breaking down the social barriers that, apparently, oppressed and suffocated the nervous Julián. Salty conversations with patches of lilies, with feet of a mad goat that they dance the Spanish impatience in the things of life; impatience of the angry hair, of the blood full of incubi and succubi that came out of old depraved castles today make the populace sing in the streets, sing, spin and talk, talk, talk, remaining of the silence in the great Spain today is just that millionth of a second of the abrupt silence of the castonholas "for the English to see"; rebellious, counterfeit Spanish silence, hidden in the sharp, cutting edge that swears revenge in a corner, with resentful eyes --- ideas, notes, paragrammatical mass that gushes out in vomit with black humor and mental tantrism, that's what I had spread out on various loose papers, almost smoked from so much pipe smoke in the room) ---