EYES OF A BLUE DOG
Then she looked at me. I thought
that she was looking at me for the first time. But then, when she turned around
behind the lamp and I kept feeling her slippery and oily look in back of me,
over my shoulder, I understood that it was I who was looking at her for the
first time. I lit a cigarette. I took a drag on the harsh, strong smoke, before
spinning in the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. After that I saw her
there, as if she'd been standing beside the lamp looking at me every night. For
a few brief minutes that's all we did: look at each other. I looked from the
chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. She stood, with a long and quiet hand
on the lamp, looking at me. I saw her eyelids lighted up as on every night. It
was then that I remembered the usual thing, when I said to her: "Eyes of a
blue dog." Without taking her hand off the lamp she said to me:
"That. We'll never forget that." She left the orbit, sighing:
"Eyes of a blue dog. I've written it everywhere."
I saw her walk over to the dressing
table. I watched her appear in the circular glass of the mirror looking at me
now at the end of a back and forth of mathematical light. I watched her keep on
looking at me with her great hot-coal eyes: looking at me while she opened the
little box covered with pink mother of pearl. I saw her powder her nose. When she
finished, she closed the box, stood up again, and walked over to the lamp once
more, saying: "I'm afraid that someone is dreaming about this room and
revealing my secrets." And over the flame she held the same long and
tremulous hand that she had been warming before sitting down at the mirror. And
she said: "You don't feel the cold." And I said to her:
"Sometimes." And she said to me: "You must feel it now."
And then I understood why I couldn't have been alone in the seat. It was the
cold that had been giving me the certainty of my solitude. "Now I feel
it," I said. "And it's strange because the night is quiet. Maybe the
sheet fell off." She didn't answer. Again she began to move toward the
mirror and I turned again in the chair, keeping my back to her. Without seeing
her, I knew what she was doing. I knew that she was sitting in front of the
mirror again, seeing my back, which had had time to reach the depths of the
mirror and be caught by her look, which had also had just enough time to reach
the depths and return--before the hand had time to start the second turn--until
her lips were anointed now with crimson, from the first turn of her hand in
front of the mirror. I saw, opposite me, the smooth wall, which was like
another blind mirror in which I couldn't see her--sitting behind me--but could
imagine her where she probably was as if a mirror had been hung in place of the
wall. "I see you," I told her. And on the wall I saw what was as if
she had raised her eyes and had seen me with my back turned toward her from the
chair, in the depths of the mirror, my face turned toward the wall. Then I saw
her lower her eyes again and remain with her eyes always on her brassiere, not
talking. And I said to her again: "I see you." And she raised her
eyes from her brassiere again. "That's impossible," she said. I asked
her why. And she, with her eyes quiet and on her brassiere again: "Because
your face is turned toward the wall." Then I spun the chair around. I had
the cigarette clenched in my mouth. When I stayed facing the mirror she was
back by the lamp. Now she had her hands open over the flame, like the two wings
of a hen, toasting herself, and with her face shaded by her own fingers.
"I think I'm going to catch cold," she said. "This must be a
city of ice." She turned her face to profile and her skin, from copper to
red, suddenly became sad. "Do something about it," she said. And she
began to get undressed, item by item, starting at the top with the brassiere. I
told her: "I'm going to turn back to the wall." She said: "No.
In any case, you'll see me the way you did when your back was turned." And
no sooner had she said it than she was almost completely undressed, with the
flame licking her long copper skin. "I've always wanted to see you like
that, with the skin of your belly full of deep pits, as if you'd been
beaten." And before I realized that my words had become clumsy at the
sight of her nakedness she became motionless, warming herself on the globe of
the lamp, and she said: "Sometimes I think I'm made of metal." She
was silent for an instant. The position of her hands over the flame varied
slightly. I said: "Sometimes in other dreams, I've thought you were only a
little bronze statue in the corner of some museum. Maybe that's why you're
cold." And she said: "Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel
my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate. Then, when the blood beats
inside me, it's as if someone were calling by knocking on my stomach and I can
feel my own copper sound in the bed. It's like--what do you call it--laminated
metal." She drew closer to the lamp. "I would have liked to hear
you," I said. And she said: "If we find each other sometime, put your
ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you'll hear me echoing. I've
always wanted you to do it sometime." I heard her breathe heavily as she
talked. And she said that for years she'd done nothing different. Her life had
been dedicated to finding me in reality, through that identifying phrase:
"Eyes of a blue dog." And she went along the street saying it aloud,
as a way of telling the only person who could have understood her:
"I'm the one who comes into
your dreams every night and tells you: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'" And she said
that she went into restaurants and before ordering said to the waiters:
"Eyes of a blue dog." But the waiters bowed reverently, without
remembering ever having said that in their dreams. Then she would write on the
napkins and scratch on the varnish of the tables with a knife: "Eyes of a
blue dog." And on the steamed-up windows of hotels, stations, all public
buildings, she would write with her forefinger: "Eyes of a blue dog."
She said that once she went into a drugstore and noticed the same smell that
she had smelled in her room one night after having dreamed about me. "He
must be near," she thought, seeing the clean, new tiles of the drugstore.
Then she went over to the clerk and said to him: "I always dream about a
man who says to me: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'" And she said the clerk had
looked at her eyes and told her: "As a matter of fact, miss, you do have
eyes like that." And she said to him: "I have to find the man who
told me those very words in my dreams." And the clerk started to laugh and
moved to the other end of the counter. She kept on seeing the clean tile and
smelling the odor. And she opened her purse and on the tiles with her crimson
lipstick, she wrote in red letters: "Eyes of a blue dog." The clerk
came back from where he had been. He told her: Madam, you have dirtied the
tiles." He gave her a damp cloth, saying: "Clean it up." And she
said, still by the lamp, that she had spent the whole afternoon on all fours,
washing the tiles and saying: "Eyes of a blue dog," until people
gathered at the door and said she was crazy.
Now, when she finished speaking, I remained
in the corner, sitting, rocking in the chair. "Every day I try to remember
the phrase with which I am to find you," I said. "Now I don't think
I'll forget it tomorrow. Still, I've always said the same thing and when I wake
up I've always forgotten what the words I can find you with are." And she
said: "You invented them yourself on the first day." And I said to
her: "I invented them because I saw your eyes of ash. But I never remember
the next morning." And she, with clenched fists, beside the lamp, breathed
deeply: "If you could at least remember now what city I've been writing it
in."
Her tightened teeth gleamed over the
flame. "I'd like to touch you now," I said. She raised the face that
had been looking at the light; she raised her look, burning, roasting, too,
just like her, like her hands, and I felt that she saw me, in the corner where
I was sitting, rocking in the chair. "You'd never told me that," she
said. "I tell you now and it's the truth," I said. From the other side
of the lamp she asked for a cigarette. The butt had disappeared between my
fingers. I'd forgotten I was smoking. She said: "I don't know why I can't
remember where I wrote it." And I said to her: "For the same reason
that tomorrow I won't be able to remember the words." And she said sadly:
"No. It's just that sometimes I think that I've dreamed that too." I
stood up and walked toward the lamp. She was a little beyond, and I kept on
walking with the cigarettes and matches in my hand, which would not go beyond
the lamp. I held the cigarette out to her. She squeezed it between her lips and
leaned over to reach the flame before I had time to light the match. "In
some city in the world, on all the walls, those words have to appear in
writing: 'Eyes of a blue dog," I said. "If I remembered them tomorrow
I could find you." She raised her head again and now the lighted coal was
between her lips. "Eyes of a blue dog," she sighed, remembered, with
the cigarette drooping over her chin and one eye half closed. Then she sucked
in the smoke with the cigarette between her fingers and exclaimed: "This
is something else now. I'm warming up." And she said it with her voice a
little lukewarm and fleeting, as if she hadn't really said it, but as if she
had written it on a piece of paper and had brought the paper close to the flame
while I read: "I'm warming," and she had continued with the paper
between her thumb and forefinger, turning it around as it was being consumed
and I had just read ". . . up," before the paper was completely
consumed and dropped all wrinkled to the floor, diminished, converted into
light ash dust. "That's better," I said. "Sometimes it frightens
me to see you that way. Trembling beside a lamp."
We had been seeing each other for
several years. Sometimes, when we were already together, somebody would drop a
spoon outside and we would wake up. Little by little we'd been coming to
understand that our friendship was subordinated to things, to the simplest of
happenings. Our meetings always ended that way, with the fall of a spoon early
in the morning.
Now, next to the lamp, she was
looking at me. I remembered that she had also looked at me in that way in the
past, from that remote dream where I made the chair spin on its back legs and
remained facing a strange woman with ashen eyes. It was in that dream that I
asked her for the first time: "Who are you?" And she said to me:
"I don't remember." I said to her: "But I think we've seen each
other before." And she said, indifferently: "I think I dreamed about
you once, about this same room." And I told her: "That's it. I'm
beginning to remember now." And she said: "How strange. It's certain
that we've met in other dreams."
She took two drags on the cigarette.
I was still standing, facing the lamp, when suddenly I kept looking at her. I
looked her up and down and she was still copper; no longer hard and cold metal,
but yellow, soft, malleable copper. "I'd like to touch you," I said
again. And she said: "You'll ruin everything." I said: "It
doesn't matter now. All we have to do is turn the pillow in order to meet
again." And I held my hand out over the lamp. She didn't move.
"You'll ruin everything," she said again before I could touch her.
"Maybe, if you come around behind the lamp, we'd wake up frightened in who
knows what part of the world." But I insisted: "It doesn't
matter." And she said: "If we turned over the pillow, we'd meet
again. But when you wake up you'll have forgotten." I began to move toward
the corner. She stayed behind, warming her hands over the flame. And I still
wasn't beside the chair when I heard her say behind me: "When I wake up at
midnight, I keep turning in bed, with the fringe of the pillow burning my knee,
and repeating until dawn: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'"
Then I remained with my face toward
the wall. "It's already dawning," I said without looking at her.
"When it struck two I was awake and that was a long time back." I
went to the door. When I had the knob in my hand, I heard her voice again, the
same, invariable. "Don't open that door," she said. "The hallway
is full of difficult dreams." And I asked her: "How do you
know?" And she told me: "Because I was there a moment ago and I had
to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart." I had the door
half opened. I moved it a little and a cold, thin breeze brought me the fresh
smell of vegetable earth, damp fields. She spoke again. I gave the turn, still
moving the door, mounted on silent hinges, and I told her: "I don't think
there's any hallway outside here. I'm getting the smell of country." And
she, a little distant, told me: "I know that better than you. What's
happening is that there's a woman outside dreaming about the country." She
crossed her arms over the flame. She continued speaking: "It's that woman
who always wanted to have a house in the country and was never able to leave
the city." I remembered having seen the woman in some previous dream, but
I knew, with the door ajar now, that within half an hour I would have to go
down for breakfast. And I said: "In any case, I have to leave here in
order to wake up."
Outside the wind fluttered for an
instant, then remained quiet, and the breathing of someone sleeping who had
just turned over in bed could be heard. The wind from the fields had ceased.
There were no more smells. "Tomorrow I'll recognize you from that," I
said. "I'll recognize you when on the street I see a woman writing 'Eyes
of a blue dog' on the walls." And she, with a sad smile--which was already
a smile of surrender to the impossible, the unreachable--said: "Yet you
won't remember anything during the day." And she put her hands back over
the lamp, her features darkened by a bitter cloud. "You're the only man who
doesn't remember anything of what he's dreamed after he wakes up."
Read also
SHORT STORIES
No comments:
Post a Comment