Parque Chas, Buenos Aires
Even the maps she’d seen the previous evening were confused, because the west was invariably in the north, and the center was tipped out over the eastern edge.
[...]
She was starting to get used to words being in one place and what they meant being somewhere else entirely.
[...]
That was Buenos Aires, Grete said to herself at that moment and repeated to us later: a delta of cities embraced by one single city, a myriad of tiny, thin cities within this obese unique majesty that allows Madrid-style avenues and Catalan cafés next to the Neapolitan aviaries and Doric bandstands and Rive Droite mansions, beyond all of which, however — the taxi driver had insisted — were the livestock market, with the lowing of the cattle before sacrifice and the smell of dung, the evening dew, the open plain, and also a melancholy that comes from nowhere except here, from the end-of-the-earth feeling you get when you look at maps and see how alone Buenos Aires is, how very out of the way.
[...]
If I could be born again, I would choose Buenos Aires and I wouldn’t move from this place even if they stole my purse again with a hundred pesos and my […] driver’s license in it, beause I can live without those but not without the light of the sky I saw this morning.
[...]
The language of Buenos Aires shifted so quickly that the words appeared first and then reality arrived, and the words carried on when reality had already left.
[…]
I talked to him for several minutes about the intricate mandalas outlined in the floors of the French cathedrals: Amiens, Mirepoix and especially Chartres. He replied that the ones we had in front of our noses and let pass unnoticed were no less fascinating.
[...]
‘If I want to go to the center I must not leave the edge, if I want to walk to the edge I cannot move from the center.’
[...]
[His] language contradicted his asceticism: it was florid, elliptical and, most of all, evasive.
[...]
‘Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but it does change something in the mind which contemplates it.’ David Hume
Tomás ELOY MARTÍNEZ, El cantor de tango, 2004 (after Anne McLean's translation)
[...]
She was starting to get used to words being in one place and what they meant being somewhere else entirely.
[...]
That was Buenos Aires, Grete said to herself at that moment and repeated to us later: a delta of cities embraced by one single city, a myriad of tiny, thin cities within this obese unique majesty that allows Madrid-style avenues and Catalan cafés next to the Neapolitan aviaries and Doric bandstands and Rive Droite mansions, beyond all of which, however — the taxi driver had insisted — were the livestock market, with the lowing of the cattle before sacrifice and the smell of dung, the evening dew, the open plain, and also a melancholy that comes from nowhere except here, from the end-of-the-earth feeling you get when you look at maps and see how alone Buenos Aires is, how very out of the way.
[...]
If I could be born again, I would choose Buenos Aires and I wouldn’t move from this place even if they stole my purse again with a hundred pesos and my […] driver’s license in it, beause I can live without those but not without the light of the sky I saw this morning.
[...]
The language of Buenos Aires shifted so quickly that the words appeared first and then reality arrived, and the words carried on when reality had already left.
[…]
I talked to him for several minutes about the intricate mandalas outlined in the floors of the French cathedrals: Amiens, Mirepoix and especially Chartres. He replied that the ones we had in front of our noses and let pass unnoticed were no less fascinating.
[...]
‘If I want to go to the center I must not leave the edge, if I want to walk to the edge I cannot move from the center.’
[...]
[His] language contradicted his asceticism: it was florid, elliptical and, most of all, evasive.
[...]
‘Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but it does change something in the mind which contemplates it.’ David Hume
Tomás ELOY MARTÍNEZ, El cantor de tango, 2004 (after Anne McLean's translation)
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire