Chaos of the Senses Read Online Free Page B

to bury his father in that country that kills poets while hosting all manner of poetry festivals, and ended up being buried, a maimed corpse, next to the one he had gone to bury.
    Before that he used to say he was going to stop writing poetry and try his hand at a novel!
    Do you suppose those two lovers would really have met again if I’d given her the freedom to reply as she’d wanted to? And what would she have said?
    I think she would have replied with one of those nebulous expressions of hers. She would have said, for example, ‘Maybe we’ll meet,’ knowing full well that she meant ‘of course’. And to be even more circuitous, she could have said, ‘It might not happen,’ to give him the false impression that it wasn’t going to happen.
    In that case, he would have upped the ante and replied, ‘Absolutely. It doesn’t matter anyway.’ Then he would have put down the receiver and buttoned up his coat again.
    Silence in and of itself doesn’t bother me. But I hate men who withdraw into an absolute silence like someone who buttons his shirt up to the very top, like a door with myriad locks and keys, in order to convince you of his importance.
    That kind of armoured door doesn’t inspire my confidence. The possessions such a person keeps hidden behind it don’t somuch impress me as they expose their owner as some nouveau-riche obsessed with his newly acquired fortune. After all, truly rich people always forget to close a window or a wardrobe in their mansion.
    Keys are the obsession of the poor, or of those who are afraid that if they open their mouths they’ll lose other people’s illusions about them.
    The nice thing about this man was that, like all people who dream of being wealthy, he would leave one button undone at the top of his heavy coat of silence for the sake of illusion, like a door that’s left ajar. This may have been the most seductive thing about him. He wasn’t entirely silent, nor did he say any more than necessary in order to crack open the silence.
    He was a character ready to be set in a novel, who granted himself to you in instalments.
    And is a novel anything but the distance between the top button that’s been left undone and the bottom button, which may have been left undone as well?
    Did this man really exist only in my imagination? If so, then what was to explain all the factual details I’d included in that story without ever having heard of them before? Although I’m doubtful of authors who claim that there is some supernatural force that dictates what they write, I also doubt that such details, taken together, are nothing but a coincidence.
    Had I fallen prey so thoroughly to writing’s seductive allure that I thought this man had dictated to me an appointment I’d thought up myself ?
    I love that moment when I’m surprised by a man, even when, after the moment of surprise, he no longer resembles my illusion of him.
    Every story with a man lands you on the shore of surprise. If he’s a husband, the story is bound to usher you into a series of surprises. In the beginning, we know who it was that we married. But the longer we’re married, the less certain we are who it is we’re living with!
    The most mysterious and surprising men are the ones who’ve been through protracted wars that swallowed up their childhoods and youths without mercy and turned them into men who are at once violent and fragile, sentimental and superhuman.
    A man of this type always has another man hidden inside him who might wake up when you least expect him to. He also conceals a little boy who grew up at a time before they’d invented Legos so that, like boys of the younger generation, he could practise putting their pieces together and taking them apart again according to the dictates of his childlike imagination.
    I suspect that my husband was born with a military mindset, and that the first thing he ever held was a weapon. So what wonder is it that he breaks me without meaning just as,