Avalovara by Osman Lins

Author:Osman Lins [Lins, Osman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2002-02-14T13:00:00+00:00

A

Roos and the Cities

19

I open the window: the moonlight brightens one of the walls and all the lights are out. The Venetian blinds open, I lie down again. Dogs with their hair on end stir under the bed or in the drawers; I hear them and I catch the smell of mange. I can wait until July 15th before taking the job in Recife; but it will be difficult, with the money I have left, to postpone my return until then, even in hotels like this one and eating poorly. My days here, therefore, will soon be over. Roos knows that I’ll be going back, that I’m passing through, and she wouldn’t think of abandoning the man dying in Lausanne; crossing the Ocean; entrusting her life to me, the poorly skilled child of a region that in her eyes is wild and uncivilized, even though fascinating: the fascination of an underground animal. Ambiguous, she is exposed, in spite of the enigmatic character of her body, to disfavor and suspicion. Involving herself with someone in transit and enduring the consequences? Her understanding closed to the always ephemeral character of human fruitions and encounters. She removes herself, therefore, as if definitively, before the series that has begun can take on order and come to an end, no matter whether for our despair or for our joy. In the mean-time her aversion for me or not, her blindness or lucidity, everything is governed by the laws that rule our relationship: this coming and going, this sinuous diagram. Lying down with the window opened onto the pleasant June night while the remnants of the moonlight move along the courtyard wall, I lament last night’s scene and Roos’s frankness, aware that this still isn’t the end (even though the end, inexorable, is already being outlined) and that not even the lament is arbitrary or fortuitous here. Roos, too, knows, in one way or another, that the goodbye at dusk is leading us to the new sequence in the series. These dogs under the bed and in the drawers, invisible in the light of the dawn that is starting to come in through the window, form part of the sequence.

Changing my quarters—I know—won’t stop the dogs from following me. I move, however, to the Hôtel Sainte-Marie, with a window on the Rue du Montparnasse. I return before dawn after pounding boulevards and bridges that soon become deserted, my feet without feeling, an emptiness in my stomach, my back muscles heavy. The dogs have gone.

I go to the Rue de Rennes branch post office to pick up a registered letter and I run into Roos. Polite expressions, banal and vague, amidst the sound of rubber stamps and tinkling coins. I show the check that came with the letter from the Fat Woman. (“That certain person came by here again, giving to understand that you broke her cherry. Is that true, Abel?”) Roos prolongs the trivial conversation and shows signs—discreet, however—that seeing me again hasn’t upset her. Would she like a cordial? She looks at her watch: a little after one.

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