The Color of a Dog Running Away by Richard Gwyn

Author:Richard Gwyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385521475
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

14. KATASKAPOS

It was approaching daybreak when I left Igbar and Sean and walked home. The wind blew in gusts around me from the direction of the sea. It had been a hot day, but this wind brought no relief. The blasts of warm air chased the shadows cast by the scant lighting in this part of the city. There were few people around. The drugs I had consumed, and the dislocation of myself from my own story, combined to make my trip home both detached and vivid. In the dark, narrow streets, sound was intensified; every shadow a recumbent night-creature. I remembered those muted voices in the alleyway of two hours earlier, and Santiago’s “This much I know.” The bar owner’s words hung in the air long after the explanation that followed them.

When I did pass the occasional pedestrian, the muscles in my neck and shoulders tightened. I became gradually overtaken by an obsessive hypothesis: that the few people I passed were ghosts, led on leashes by the unseen hands of the living, and that I, too, was of their number.

Back in Santa Caterina, I climbed the stairs to my flat, grateful that there were no cryptic messages under the door. I checked the answerphone: Eugenia had left a message saying she would be around the next day with Susie Serendipity, and to call her back if I was not going to be in. Let them come, I thought: let them all come. I have a tale to tell.

I went out and stood on the veranda, leaning over the parapet so that I could see the stretch of road directly below. The cobbles were reflected back at me under the street-lamp. Somewhere nearby a cat-fight spluttered into action, the preliminary hissing and wailing drifting in malevolent waves across the rooftops. Up here the warm wind blew in more constant drafts, ruffling my shirt and hair. I stripped off down to my boxer shorts and lay on the hammock.

What was it about my red-tiled outpost above the city that rendered me invulnerable to all that went on below? I had been living here for two years untroubled by normal social exigencies or their consequences. My sex life had adapted to a pattern of one-night stands since moving from Maragall and Fina’s monogamous ministrations. I had become an observer of city life, a cynical frequenter of all-night bars and clubs. A reluctant flâneur. I had stood by, unable to force myself into any kind of action while witness to a street robbery that evening in May; had questioned my inactivity roundly, and yet had still remained incapable of doing anything. Since then the circumstances of my life had changed. My terrace remained much the same, the view identical. But it was as if everything within my immediate sensory zone had acquired a new intensity, while the boundaries of the familiar world became more indistinct.

I lay there smoking, resisting sleep. When the morning trucks arrived and started unloading outside the market, I dragged myself out of the hammock and into the bedroom.

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