During That Time I Would Flee Scenes That Were Too Mysterious

La Trampa

During that time I would flee scenes that were too mysterious.

Like people with stomach trouble who avoid heavy meals,

I preferred to stay at home elucidating certain questions

Concerning the reproduction of spiders,

To which end I would shut myself up in the garden

And not appear in public until the early hours of the morning;

Or in shirtsleeves, in a defiant attitude,

I would also hurl angry glances at the moon

Trying to avoid those evil-tempered thoughts

That stick to the human soul like polyps.

When I was alone I had absolute control over myself,

I would go back and forth fully conscious of my actions

Or stretch out among the boards in the cellar

And dream, and think up procedures, and resolve minor emergencies.

Those were the times when I put my famous oneiric method into operation,

Which consists of doing violence to yourself, and dreaming whatever you want,

And instigating scenes arranged beforehand with the help of the Beyond.

In this way I managed to obtain valuable data

Concerning a whole series of doubts that afflict our lives:

Trips abroad, erotic confusions, religious complexes.

But all my precautions were useless

Because for reasons that are hard to explain

I began to slide automatically down a kind of inclined plane,

Like a balloon losing air my soul lost altitude,

My instinct for self-preservation stopped working

And deprived of my most essential prejudices

I fell fatally into the trap of the telephone

That attracts everything around it, like an abyss,

And with trembling hands I dialed that damned number

That I still repeat automatically while I'm sleeping.

Those moments were filled with uncertainty and misery

While I, like a skeleton standing in front of that infernal table

Covered with yellow cretonne,

Waited for an answer from the other end of the world,

The other half of myself a prisoner in a pit.

Those intermittent noises on the telephone

Affected me like a dentist's drill,

They sank into my soul like needles thrown down from above

Until, when the moment finally arrived,

I began to perspire and to stammer feverishly.

My tongue was like a piece of veal

Hanging between me and the girl I was talking to

Like those black curtains that separate us from the dead.

I didn't want to have those conversations that were too intimate

But I provoked them anyway, like a fool,

With my voice full of desire, charged with electricity.

When I heard myself called by my first name In that tone of forced intimacy

I was filled with vague discomfort,

With agonizing localized disturbances that I tried to ward off

By means of a system of rapid questions and answers

That created a state of pseudoerotic excitation in her

And that eventually affected me as well

Taking the form of incipient erections and a feeling of failure

Then I'd force myself to laugh and then I'd fall into a state of mental prostration.

Those absurd conversations would go on for hours

Until the landlady of the boarding house appeared behind the screen

And brusquely interrupted that stupid idyll,

Those contortions of a candidate for heaven

And those catastrophes that were so depressing to my spirit

But which did not stop completely when I hung up the phone

Since, generally, we would have a date

To see each other the next day at a soda fountain

Or in the door of a church whose name I don't care to remember.