Never Did the Fire by Diamela Eltit

Author:Diamela Eltit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: never did the fire;Diamela Eltit;charco press
Publisher: Charco Press
Published: 2022-02-17T15:18:58+00:00

I experience an unmistakeable feeling of wellbeing very close to forgetting or to the desire to remain suspended in an immovable iron present. I see how you, meanwhile, get immediately lost in yourself. You could, in reality, yes, walk on your own, with that treacherous way you have of dragging your feet, of spreading the traces of the pain caused by the calamitous state of your legs, that habit of lowering your head, imprinting a pronounced curve onto your spine. You are alone surrendered to a kind of impenetrable absence that passes through the obstinate neutrality of your face. We do the same route, the usual one. Tiny, precise. Surrounded by the dusk, we turn the corner, then walk the two blocks that take us to the square. We cross it. Your eyes never come to rest on the bodies already obscured by the shadows, quite unreal, nor do you notice unexpected details like the sudden opening of a new grocery store, a little one, so small that it hardly fits within its own interior. You don’t see it or you notice it only tangentially or you don’t want me to notice that you’ve seen it because any gesture might oblige you to share an amazement that’s irrelevant and you don’t do that, because you’ve surrendered to the autonomy of remoteness, the remoteness that’s a part of the slow monthly walk, yours, ours, always.

We cross over, leave the square behind, walk in a straight line into the last street of ours, always the same one, this street marked by the instability of the paving stones that obliges us to look out for the cracks so as not to trip. You don’t want to trip and your watchful eyes focus on the flaws in the cement and, at once, you take my arm, very near the elbow, the right, and I feel how, in a way, you squeeze it too tight, thus avoiding me being the one who stumbles. You don’t want, you protect, you repel, through the pressure of your hand, me to lose my balance and to lean chaotically on you. You can’t stand it, you don’t like being touched unexpectedly, nobody, you’ve said, you do it, you protect yourself. I feel your fingers very near my elbow and it’s as though my arm has expanded till it doesn’t belong to me any more or else has reduced me to the only thing that defines me, an arm. I’d like to say to you, let go of my arm or I can’t bear you touching my arm or get your hand off my arm, but I say nothing hoping that this disastrous street will end, without picking up the pace so you won’t notice in what way and how much this decision of yours to obstruct bothers me. The pavement is impossible as if the mere abstract addition of a day might ruin it even more. Like the unleashing of a minuscule nuclear attack, its ancient surface has already become collapsed.

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