Casualties of Forgiveness. Part IX
They boarded a train toward lost southern fields and cottages. They were moving between worlds and I was following, gathering the discarded pieces of myself.
My story is written in the margins of the Spanish countryside. A foreign typewriter echoes in the room of the man I’m chasing. The machine doesn’t know the movements of my language. It hesitates as I strike. My fingers falter.
You and Isabella are staying in this Spanish room. You’ve been here a few weeks, a month at most. You speak seldom, offer no stranger your names. You’re caught in a young girl’s quickly moving dream. I’ve been a step behind through Italy, through France, through Spain, infiltrating the silence of your spaces whenever you’re not there. I often wonder if you still think of Maria and I? Of our nakedness. I’ve been watching you with Isabella, the way you watched me, biting down hard on my tongue, piercing flesh, at once saving words and sharpening them for our conversation in the night.
The landlady expects you back in two days, plenty of time to finish, I think. I’ll leave the typewriter behind this time. Along with these pages to your novel. Think of them as early Christmas presents. The slow resilient death of language, neatly wrapped in a big red bow. Resilient and deserving of our forgiveness, the qualities you deny.
I’ll reveal myself eventually, in a bar or cheap motel. I’m waiting for Isabella to leave you. That’s when you’ll better understand. Maybe when you’re drunk I’ll seem like an apparition at your side. “Did you really expect the novelty of silence and strange accents to last forever?” your apparition will ask. She’s too young; winter will find her and she’ll beg for a blanket of words to keep her warm. I’ll sit down on the stool beside you, buy you a drink for the pain I’ve caused. You should do the same. You’ll accuse me of obsession. The last to let go of intimacies forged in fever. I’ll explain the necessity of confronting the man who abandons all that I hope to hold.
I spoke to Maria from a payphone at the French border. She told me you’d sent her a copy of your manuscript. I sent her an early draft of the words that go with it. She wonders whether we’re trying to wound or ask forgiveness? I’ll leave that question to you. Maria has a story of her own, one she wants me to pass on.
“At least you know how to pick up a phone,” she said. “If you see him tell him for me.” The acknowledgement of a child had been on the tip of her tongue for too long and it slipped easily into the distance between us.
My story is written in the margins of the Spanish countryside. A foreign typewriter echoes in the room of the man I’m chasing. The machine doesn’t know the movements of my language. It hesitates as I strike. My fingers falter.
You and Isabella are staying in this Spanish room. You’ve been here a few weeks, a month at most. You speak seldom, offer no stranger your names. You’re caught in a young girl’s quickly moving dream. I’ve been a step behind through Italy, through France, through Spain, infiltrating the silence of your spaces whenever you’re not there. I often wonder if you still think of Maria and I? Of our nakedness. I’ve been watching you with Isabella, the way you watched me, biting down hard on my tongue, piercing flesh, at once saving words and sharpening them for our conversation in the night.
The landlady expects you back in two days, plenty of time to finish, I think. I’ll leave the typewriter behind this time. Along with these pages to your novel. Think of them as early Christmas presents. The slow resilient death of language, neatly wrapped in a big red bow. Resilient and deserving of our forgiveness, the qualities you deny.
I’ll reveal myself eventually, in a bar or cheap motel. I’m waiting for Isabella to leave you. That’s when you’ll better understand. Maybe when you’re drunk I’ll seem like an apparition at your side. “Did you really expect the novelty of silence and strange accents to last forever?” your apparition will ask. She’s too young; winter will find her and she’ll beg for a blanket of words to keep her warm. I’ll sit down on the stool beside you, buy you a drink for the pain I’ve caused. You should do the same. You’ll accuse me of obsession. The last to let go of intimacies forged in fever. I’ll explain the necessity of confronting the man who abandons all that I hope to hold.
I spoke to Maria from a payphone at the French border. She told me you’d sent her a copy of your manuscript. I sent her an early draft of the words that go with it. She wonders whether we’re trying to wound or ask forgiveness? I’ll leave that question to you. Maria has a story of her own, one she wants me to pass on.
“At least you know how to pick up a phone,” she said. “If you see him tell him for me.” The acknowledgement of a child had been on the tip of her tongue for too long and it slipped easily into the distance between us.
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