from The Night

The Gatekeeper

1.
            The mountain with sullen radiance in a clearing of the night
            with a vestige of storm glistening on the vault
            suggesting the sketch of a cup with no handle in the smoke-mottled corner,
near a dented tin plate that reflects the gaze and draws down and stings the eyes.

            The endless dark of the dade rimming my room's four walls
            a bit above the stucco, a bit below the wallpaper
            a ray a sign a hint of light
            a vile vision sits me bolt upright and stands my hair on end.

            It's a man with humped back and fluorescent eyes
            in thick yet transparent air he rubs his hands and looks at me, all sorry-like
            he's a tall man in a starched collar, a rhinestone tie
            he slips off his shoes, no doubt to pad silently first clockwise then counterclockwise
            I watch him approach the bed where I lie, but can't hear him
            I see his lips pursing and unpursing around words and words I can't make out
            he presses my brow with his strong and bony hand
            he knees me in the plexus and head-butts my chest
            he jabs at my eyelids with quick fingers and with sharp nails rakes my beard and tickles me under the arms
            now he dons a huge and bizarre mask and gives a listen to my heart
            abruptly he takes one step back and, rubbing his hands, fades slowly into the shadows
            but he forgets his shoes which linger, beyond memory, in my room.


2.
            Who shows up now but a distant cousin I only recognize by his mustache, his oily hair parted up the middle.
            From his polite little nods in this and that direction, you might imagine the room full of people, but I don't see them.
            And noting that he doesn't nod politely in my direction, nor glance at me, nor say a word to me,
            I can only assume I no longer exist.
            Suddenly he grabs my headboard, yanks himself close, and right off the bat, he smacks me silly.
            Of course, he must be a doctor and must have his reasons.
            Then snatching and knotting a butcher's apron, smirking contemptuously, he hacks at me, full of gusto, with a saw,
            and because he hasn't had enough, he whips out a carving knife and disembowels me and whisks my entrails with undisguised relish:
            and after yanking out a steaming, live, throbbing mass that would seem to be my stomach,
            he plunges the great blade into my groin, missing my balls by a hair.
            And with this, he backs away, nodding politely.

3.

            Who is that, the one with bull's neck and lion's mane?
            He appears from nowhere in the doorway, this gatekeeper of the threshold, blocking those who would pass through.
            There is sunlight, and water, and breathing in the air,
            and there are people.
            The air hums with the fluttering and fluttering and fluttering of beings.
            And this humming, which resounds in every realm, rising to a roar,
            is nevertheless a silence more profound than pure silence.
            There are two worlds, there are two lives, there are two deaths,
            ~whatever they call the One and Absolute doesn't exist.
            There are two faces, two edges, two abysses.


            The gatekeeper wearies.
            The sun has gotten to him, and with glowering eyes he cuts down those who clamor to come in and see me.
            Facundo, the good carpenter, lends him a straw fedora. Señora Anselma offers him a glass of water.
            A man with a grim mug gives him a cigarette and whispers in his ear.
            The gatekeeper, like a dreamer, half-closes his eyes and folds his arms defiantly across his chest,
            and every so often consults his pocket watch,
            and then stares at the sky.
            But in the middle of this casual regime he lets rip a scream and stiffens.
            For a night moth has suddenly appeared,
            black as night,
            in the middle of the day in clear sun,
            with a fringe of purple on its enormous wings, flapping with a weird torpor,
            tracing a spiral that slowly descends;
            and it settles on the brow of the terrified gatekeeper,
            and there it stays forever,
            as if stamped in cloth, or forged by fire into the shield of a mythical knight.

4.

            This poor, abandoned body;
            this poor, squandered body, good as forgotten, situated only by the gravity of its situation,
            and with stick legs here, and with baked, stick arms there,
            ~now those peculiar and unknown smells, even the imagined ones, evaporate, the ones that transported you to the very worlds for which you longed.
            Now the smells are nothing but smells, if truth be told, and they pertain only to your body, your human condition.
            Had you hoped to smell like roses, or honeysuckle, or pine boughs,
            only to be taken aback, even horrified, by the stink of your own excretions?
            Smell, moreover, is a great enigma;
            nor is it beside the point to remember that birth as well as death are announced by singular, dreadful smells.

5.

How should you learn to die?
~it must be an extremely hard thing.
No doubt it requires a lot of humility and self-control. A whole life of effort and meditation.
And if you ask yourself why learn to die,
the answer comes clear:
learning to die is learning to live.
And learning to live is, plainly, learning to know intimately;
but don't forget that for intimate knowledge, you must first learn how to know intimately.

*          *         *

At night, through the years, hours and hours are spent thinking.
But you don't really spend time thinking; the truth is that you simply pass the time, and that's all.
Completely still, eyes on the abyss. And--why not say it--you get sad, miserably so.
And what makes you saddest is yourself--the being there.
Without knowing what to do. Without knowing anything about anything.
And suddenly there's a miracle:
when it's least expected it starts to rain, and a lightning flash stuns you--you are cloaked in an invulnerability,
with the rain.
And if you get the urge to write some poignant poem, you probably won't;
you'd rather listen to the rain.
For some voice inside you whispers that the poignant poem is folded inside your pocket.
And this is something that doesn't surprise you at all, accustomed as you are to miracles:
indeed, the poem is in your pocket; you take it out and read it.
And all of a sudden you wonder who the author might be,
as if you had no idea he hasn't yet been born.

6.

            Over the years, all your furniture and possessions wear down and fine away.

            Many things disappear or break, while others meet odd fates, as if they were human.

A crystal inkwell I adored wound up with the cops, under totally bizarre circumstances;

            an automatic pistol sat pawned in a whorehouse for ages, until Forito Cisneros redeemed it to kill himself.

            Thanks to a magnifying glass ten centimeters in diameter which, on a misguided lark, I lent to an academic, a series of bloody atrocities were committed.

            Some high energy apparatuses, which triggered resplendent violet rays, and which were in pawn to an apothecary shop, were redeemed, with my authorization, by an acquaintance who undertook to fool around with said apparatuses in such a manner that he was electrocuted stone-dead. Presently they are pawned to a tailor shop, and I have no intention of redeeming them.

            The Complete Works of Nietzsche, in twelve volumes, left my room one night, never to return. For we pawned them on a whim to a cab driver, and in our exuberance, forgot to ask his name or take down the license number.

            The exact same thing happened with a portable typewriter, the apple of my eye.

            To ledger the fate of my belongings would be endless.

            What irks me is the fate they suffered, and what irks me no less is the fate to be suffered by all the stuff I still keep around.

            I'm alarmed by the way the designs carved into the seats of my chairs are rubbed out.

            The calamitous state of my armchair, which, moreover, must be pushing a hundred years.

            The appearance of my writing desk wounds me, all pockmarked and worn, though still solid and noble.

            Bequeathed to me by grandmother, a bedside table, older than my soul, now bleached out, clutching its dignity, the survivor of toe-stubs, bumps, kicks, and drunken falls.

            Nevertheless, the table, made in Vienna, petite and glass-covered, handed down from mother, is in decent shape save for a few nicks.

            The tall, skinny bookcase, made of rosewood, with a door and delicate pyrography, a gift from Aunt Esther, stands in its place; and if anything fascinates me, it's the neglect it has suffered.

            Apart from these, there is a whole world of things.

            A wheeled table with double leaves, gone rickety; a walnut armoire in ruins; more furniture full of history, and mystery, appallingly antique.

            What's it all worth, I ask myself.

            Well, in truth, not much, and even under best circumstances, not enough to buy a ranga-ranga.

            They're all sad pieces of junk, rickety wrecks, long out of style

            ~and, precisely for that reason, they are indivisible from life, and it's murder to let them go.

7.

            How long does the night go on?
            No one can guess, even if, for purely practical reasons, it's been assigned twelve hours.
            The sure thing is that night endures in space, while day takes place purely in time.
            That's why at any given time of day you can find regions where the night dwells.
           Such regions are signed with moss, metal, and wind;
            with a pregnant silence that oozes from the stones and hovers in emptiness.
            Such regions are often found, just the same, on certain faces which appear to us out of nowhere on the streets, disgorging their message.

            The regions where the night, in plain day, dwells, are to be found here, on this very paper,
            and also over there, on that other paper,
            and they are to be found in many places, in many people, in many animals, many objects.
           At a glance, even by touch and scent, you can discern these regions.
           
           In a tin fetish, long forgotten in a drawer;
           in a dark-hued envelope, in a faded inscription,
           there you'll come across a region where night dwells;
           in those stones along the path, which seem to wait for you, watching you.
           In an old and useless key buried in your pocket;
           in that scar, from who knows what, on your left hand
           ~in some crater of your skull, which often burns without warning,
           there you'll find a region where the night dwells.
           And you'll find it in that sunbeam which the window softens,
and which renders the flight of the blowfly.

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