Teatro Grottesco by Teatro Grottesco

Author:Teatro Grottesco
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

WHEN YOU HEAR THE SINGING, YOU WILL KNOW IT IS TIME

I had lived in the town near the northern border long enough so that, with the occult passing of time, I had begun to assume that I would never leave there, at least not while I was alive.

I would die by my own hand, I might have believed, or possibly by the more usual means of some violent misadventure or some wasting disease. But certainly I had begun to assume that my life’s end, as if by right, would take place either within the town itself or in close proximity to its outskirts, where the dense streets and structures of the town started to thin out and eventually dissolved into a desolate and seemingly endless countryside. Following my death, I thought, or had begun unwittingly to assume, I would be buried in the hilltop graveyard outside the town. I had no idea that there were others who might have told me that it was just as likely I would not die in the town and therefore would not be buried, or interred in any way whatsoever, within the hilltop graveyard. Such persons might have been regarded as hysterics of some kind, or possibly some type of impostor, since everyone who was a permanent resident of the northern border town seemed to be either one or the other and often both of them at once. These individuals might have suggested to me that it was also entirely possible neither to die in the town nor ever to leave it. I began to learn how such a thing might happen during the time I was living in a small backstairs apartment on the ground floor of a large rooming house located in one of the oldest parts of town.

It was the middle of the night, and I had just awakened in my bed. More precisely, I had started into wakefulness, much as I had done throughout my life. This habit of starting into wakefulness in the middle of the night enabled me to become aware, on that particular night, of a soft droning sound which filled my small, one-room apartment and which I might not have heard had I been the sort of person who remains asleep all night long. The sound was emanating from under the floorboards and rose up to reverberate in the moonlit darkness of the entire room. After a few moments sitting up in my bed, and then getting out of bed to step quietly around my small apartment, it seemed to me that the soft droning sound I heard was made by a voice, a very deep voice, which spoke as if it were delivering a lecture of some kind or addressing an audience with the self-assured inflections of authority. Yet I could not discern a single word of what the voice was saying, only its droning intonations and its deeply reverberant quality as it rose up from beneath the floorboards of my small backstairs apartment.

Until that

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