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Now reading
MADRID, 1980
Upstairs on the mezzanine where marble graces the streetgirls' narrow beds and jasmine flowers in a vase in the foyer men with hair sculptured like matadors step down into their own deaths, their immaculate shirts arranged in post-coital candour. You who scrape platitudes off the bones in the cold light of afternoon, rinsing cobwebbed thought from eyes grown dim with the adjectives of arrival, have pity on us, late come exiles, drifters hungry for life having for nourishment such slender shreds of the obvious here where alien words make musical solipsism. A lone girl draped in fur against the cold elegantly lifts a brandy without ice to burning lips in the cubicle where she takes off her coat and clothes me in the warmth of her thighs as I trade a token for her token a life for her life mil y la cama. There is a place different from all places under frail winter trees, a backroom where working men fork gobbets of casserole into gaping chins and where the black beans fried in olive oil snarl lazily from the pan and there you opened out the weed of my self pity saying, "Look" and each wizened face was as pinched and bleak as an eternity of spooning thin soup without the money for a whore or the hope of a better break. In the palace gardens drab statues of horsemen imitate other statues of horsemen. Old men with fishing lines catch the clear light that shines in a muddy pool between the poplars. They know the patience of very small nibbles. At midday in the Metro the elegant, the poor, the friendly, the hostile tote bags of long white bread to buildings that glitter like the silvery scales of sardines.