apparent story v by Gastón Fernández /// KM Cascia

and the volumes of Uccello matter very little. A light wind knocks around outside, after so much time. The window hinges shake but it seems to him that, in effect, a drop has fallen against the glass. Run and see, for the umpteenth time since the afternoon began. Outside some people open their umbrellas, unhurriedly. He spins around and decides to go out. A bird dangerously grazes the neighboring cornice in an attempt to slow its flight. In the elevator the preceding minutes pass one after the other, first like a soft recollection, perhaps come from the Vengerstraat, or from the Oudebaan, until they seem to softly shake the window, the first of the year, after so much joy in the streets. Then the window glass went, with an animal noise that made the living room tremble...He takes the Naamsestraat towards the market, but everyone’s in shirt sleeves and laughing. And the sky is blue, with that peculiar intensity of evening and some, like new parts of the sidewalk, like old supports or old thin ankles, cross at the level of the San Miguel staircase, clouding his gaze a bit. It isn’t that they matter very little, not really, but all in all, he thinks, it isn’t important: the British Museum keeps the cock and worries of Achilles in an amphora like a testimony to Exekias’ contribution to the history of

He stops and spins around, turns his back on the market. The landscapes he leaves behind, paradoxically, seem different to him when he turns to look at them. The Naamsestraat ends where the baroque gear of San Miguel cuts it off like a sensation.

sation. Then disappears. He goes right, toward the Hogeschool plaza. Tired, he sits down in front of the Holy College of Cardinals. A grafting of lime and banana trees keeps him still for a moment, when he raises his eyes to the building’s dirty edifice. “If...” he starts to say out loud but stops himself. He reflects a moment. He feels uneasy when he stops, and when he sits down, a little bit at the level of his sternum, too. He opens Cena’s Castle but doesn’t read it. “Or if one’s gaze is clouded...” A man passes, looking at him out of the corner of his eye, but a huge explosion inflates the air over the plaza, leaving everything as it was before. He raises his eyes toward what seems like a pigeon crossing in front of the building, which takes refuge in one of the lime trees at the moment a drop of water falls on his book, leaning back against the head rest. Exposing his face in this way, his skin reacts like a versatile tongue and he scrutinizes why the same incessant racket comes from the streets, why nothing has stopped, dumbstruck because the area has been removed. “Maybe nothing shook,” he thinks, “But that pigeon thing?” He smiles slowly and leaves the bench, heading off toward the market. He spins around and takes the Krakenstraat, where the awnings rise up from early morning. The same wind makes a sound like the one he’d heard a while back, when they’d said to him: “the wind is blowing.” But he rejects the idea. It comes out from below, gives a complete turn and falls over the plaza, shaking and moving the awnings, then shaking them again. A new explosion obliges everyone to sharpen their voices and gather in precise, tight circles, shopping this way, so as to protect themselves from the rain. He raises his head, and that damp smell isn’t enough to definitively flood the market plaza under every awning and disfigure, in falling, the volumes of houses and cobblestones. Then he writes: “If one’s gaze is clouded” and “Lord.” Hunched over, some people between purchase and purchase look at him standing, alone, under what is now becoming a torrential rain and how, coming around the corner on Krakenstraat, a high leg and thigh are lost for no apparent reason. He spins around. A soft pressure under his belly makes him look above the awnings again, and upward, because the same noise as before settles down in front of the Holy College, arranges itself in the market like some great filthy matter. The space above, now totally covered by rain, is that black or red steppe or a near memory undoing itself on the teeth of the gears, that falls, sticking for a second to a multitude of craniums before wringing itself out soundlessly. He finds it strange, it’s one of those things he just can’t understand, like when a fly poses on a window and doesn’t move for half an hour, how the city could be the same after so much time. How they all go on living, Aunt Rosa, his brother Plácido, Edoardo Guenía, he thinks, among others. The gringo Fiarona. Olavide. Paol Guenía, Gilles Murginier. The same city, across the sea. It must be an optical illusion, but it isn’t, and this disillusions him. The umpteenth time he runs toward the window to see, a soft blow shakes the ceiling, the window hinges and his parents go on writing to him: “around here, as usual, everything’s fine.” Maybe it’s in this way, or because of it, that women grease themselves, children grow, grass doesn’t fluctuate between the wind and a deep green and goats nibble bark from trees, as if for another absolute truth. Then he spins around, but he carries his hand at the level of his sternum until he rounds the corner of Krakenstraat. Another explosion, like a noise, and he feels the slow approach of those impassible incense burners that will doubtless flood everything in a few minutes, some like exhalations split the air up to his throat and beneath his belly, inside a silent cavern, which he knows with no proximate finality, only intermediate prayer, and his original inability to inflate space with them is sufficient, maybe, he thinks, that protective voluptiousness of solitude, that organizing fury that falls from nameless heights, wind, a trench, a splendid cradle with the fur of a golden animal brushing its hands on the first surface of the city’s doors to the vertebrae of God, which he locates in his temples and even in his throat and beneath his belly, inside a silent cavern and with no proximate finality, only intermediate prayer in the evening

Vania...! Vania...!

He spins around: feels something inside his cranium like an impalpable suction towards the outside and at the same time, at a precise second, in a determined point in space that he can locate, and in its own time, a note marking a meridian like an inaudible scream, which comes from his cranium itself. For an infinitesimal, incalculable minimum he thinks he’s gone mad but, strangely, he notices it. A second later, during a second’s disappearance, the scream attaches itself to a sensation of death as if to another personification of masks, to another lyrical vomit in the belly of King David, to another liberating absence in the orgasm of Achilles, in the decisive orgasm of another reproductive centaur fomenting firecrackers in the convulsive cunt of Canaan

There is silence, when he raises his eyes and leaves Vaartvest. In Tiensesteenweg, after the city’s last wall, the water falls in torrents, reaches a new passage at the level, at the height of someone out for a stroll. He feels suddenly tired and writes “Protect one’s self? From what?” but immediately erases it. An image obliges him to turn around, he manages to make out the pedestrian who runs for refuge, and whose figure now has no object: he sees himself subjected to an old letter from a relative to remember that being able to speak with someone is so unreal, near, and so oppressive, so close: like seeing a woman with small tits for the first time or speaking face to face, without blinking, to a cripple who loves just because

the rain is implacable over Mosa, over the Maastricht dome. “The stature of chance (he thinks, perpindicular to migratory flight) that freedom couldn’t plausibly bury.” Another explosion, weakened, seems to come from the walls. He stops, confusing himself in the clamor of water with the last screeching of the larks, adjusting Cena’s Castle in his armpit. He raises his head. It seems to him that at afternoon’s end the evening should have been measured with that same diurnal, comforting revelation of water over matter, pitilessly pouring itself over a reflection now: astonished, he watches the house interiors light up one after the other; and he feels that every switch behind the windows, automatically connecting the lights behind the curtains, is also hidden from pedestrian eyes. It’s fatal to him and therefore incomprehensible, at least so that he decides to impede the very course of the light; but the decision is also the fruit of reflection—when he was a boy, the fixed visage of a centaur before him accuses his features so much that he changes, for an instant, into an illusion, or a scandal. One light after another nails itself to his retinas. And it’s the sky hurriedly changing into an identical explosion, like an original catastrophe.

Maastricht. The flood does not abate over the earth; it rests, and takes possession of goods. He spins around (remembers that only for a moment, in the night fostering itself between city lights, the water seemed to be growing uniform to the point that he believed in silence, but no). Why Achilles, he thinks? Why a crossroads or an eventuality to give it meaning, or immediate sense. He writes: “Why an eye’s direction since the morning began.” He still remembers that yesterday the incessant noise of the rain was tightened, not even by his open hands—by the idea of something: the ground, he thinks, horribly subjected to the extremes of something...It’s not even art (a cigarette, the circle of a hairdo rapidly arranged by a hand, the new awareness of licking his navel to avoid lucidity) nor his single expression, which is as art to matter. A miserable substitute...He spins around. He’s cold. When did he hear about cold for the first time? a long gust of wind wraps around him as he crosses over the border, his steps drown in the fury of the water. He doesn’t know it. On the horizon in front of him, the rain intensifies in a determined area. The sky darkens the farms from one side to the other, which soundlessly waste away, he barely manages to see a white movement that disappears in the air against an acacia: a dove, and he has no idea if it’s the dove itself or the wind that makes the motion. He’s cold. He asks himself where it sneaks in, by what routes reaches his body and what traces it leaves in his two naked hands, and on his temples, when one thinks that to walk in silence is an urgent belief. The steppe is far away. Altenhar, maybe, or Bayreuth. But why, he thought, if all of that was indifferent to him as the sun to evening.

Lovaina, summer 1973