XXXII. KISS
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A healthy volcano is an exercise in the uses of pressure.
Geryon sat on his bed in the hotel room pondering the cracks and fissures
of his inner life. It may happen
that the exit of the volcanic vent is blocked by a plug of rock, forcing
molten matter sideways along
lateral fissures called fire lips by volcanologists. Yet Geryon did not want
to become one of those people
who think of nothing but their stores of pain. He bent over the book on his knees.
Philosophic Problems.
“… I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.
But this separation of consciousness
is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is
to believe in an undivided being between us.…”
As he read Geryon could feel something like tons of black magma boiling up
from the deeper regions of him.
He moved his eyes back to the beginning of the page and started again.
“To deny the existence of red
is to deny the existence of mystery. The soul which does so will one day go mad.”
A church bell rang across the page
and the hour of six P.M. flowed through the hotel like a wave. Lamps snapped on
and white bedspreads sprang forward,
water rushed in the walls, the elevator crashed like a mastodon within its hollow cage.
I am not the one who is crazy here,
said Geryon closing the book. He put on his coat, belted it formally, and went out.
Out on the street it was Saturday night
in Buenos Aires. Shoals of brilliant young men parted and closed around him.
Heaps of romance spilled their bright vapor
onto the pavement from behind plate glass. He stopped to stare at the window
of a Chinese restaurant where
forty-four cans of lichee nuts were piled into a tower as big as himself. He tripped
over a beggar woman
low on the curb with two children pooled in her skirts. He
paused at a newspaper kiosk
and read every headline. Then went round the other side to the magazines.
Architecture, geology, surfing,
weight lifting, knitting, politics, sex. Balling from Behind caught his eye
(a whole magazine devoted to this?
issue after issue? year after year?) but he was too embarrassed to buy it.
He walked on. Went into a bookshop.
Browsed through the philosophy section and came to ENGLISH BOOKS ALL KINDS.
Under a tower of Agatha Christie
was one Elmore Leonard (Killshot, he’d read it) and Collected Verse of Walt Whitman
in a bilingual edition.
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious,
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil.…
… tu solo quien sabe lo que es ser perverso. Geryon put evil Walt Whitman down
and opened a self-help book
whose title (Oblivion the Price of Sanity?) stirred his ever hopeful heart.
“Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.
There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.
All language can register is the slow return
to the oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape
and habit blurs perception and language
takes up its routine flourishes.” He was about to turn the page for more help
when a sound caught him.
Like kissing. He looked around. A workman stood halfway up a ladder outside
the front window of the shop.
Some dark-colored bird was swooping at him and each time the bird came near
the man made a kissing noise with his mouth—
the bird somersaulted upwards then dove again with a little swagger and a cry.
Kissing makes them happy, thought Geryon
and a sense of fruitlessness pierced him. He turned to go and bumped hard
into the shoulder of a man
standing next to him—Oh! The stale black taste of leather filled his nose and lips.
I’m sorry—
Geryon’s heart stopped. The man was Herakles. After all these years—he picks
a day when my face is puffy!