Mona and Other Tales by Reinaldo Arenas

Author:Reinaldo Arenas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307426925
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

La Habana, 1963

The Parade Ends

To Lázaro Gómez Carriles, witness

NOW SHE’S ESCAPING ME. Again I’m going to lose her in this sea of legs so close together that they seem to blend into a jumble of clothes and compressed bodies, all these bare feet sinking into pools of urine and mud, into mounds of excrement. I’m looking for her; I keep looking for her as if she were (as in fact she is) my sole salvation. But again she is escaping me, the bitch. There she surely goes, miraculously clearing her path, slithering away between the soiled shoes, between bodies so tightly packed they cannot collapse even if they faint, amid the tears and urine, liberating herself from me as she slips away and, at the same time, by who knows what sort of unique intuition, managing to elude being fatally trampled. My life depends on you, my life depends on you, I tell her, slithering along just like her. And I go after her, sinking into the shit and the mud. I continue to pursue her, laboriously but mechanically pushing away bellies, buttocks, feet, arms, thighs; a whole mass of stinking flesh and bones, a whole mélange of screaming, shifting bulges wanting like me to move about, to turn around, to go somewhere else, and causing only greater compression or balancing on the other foot while stretching and convulsing but unable to break through, to take a step, to run, to truly get moving, or accomplish some displacement, some advance; all of us, like prey, caught in the same spiderweb that yields on one side, pulls back on the other, and lifts here, without ever permitting a breakthrough anywhere. So people retreat, advance, move backward, forward, between knee-bumping, kicking and being kicked, now raising arms, heads, noses high toward the sky in order to breathe, to see something other than the fusion of their own stinking bodies. But I proceed, I have not yet lost sight of her, and I continue pushing away bodies, dragging myself, being hit and cursed, but not giving up, still going after her. On this (on her) I’m betting my life. Life above all, life in spite of it all, life under any conditions, deprived of everything, deprived of you (and in spite of you), in the loud noise now rising between the cries and the singing, because they sing and sing again, the national anthem, no less. Life now, while I go after you, stepping through the excrement to the tune (or the screaming) of the anthem, their refuge and justification, instant solution, support; and as for the other things (what other things?), we shall see. Now I care only about that lizard, so crafty and covered with excrement, that damned lizard, again scurrying away from me among the thousands and thousands of feet also mired in shit. Life . . . He had reached again, like so many years ago, that extreme situation in which life is not even a useless and humiliating

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