Translated by Alexandra Samothraki

The Feelings Detector

To Elena

One early evening, I was strolling in Buenos Aires at Lomas de Zamora. It was still winter and it was very cold. I was engulfed in homesickness and my heart was so sensitised that I could detect, without any effort, even the slightest feeling diffused in the atmosphere. 

Until then, I had never imagined how many feelings circulate unnoticed every moment, every second, seeking their target. What struck me was that they would arrow across the air, forming a straight line. At first this line was vivid and intense but then, once weighed down by the excessive logic prevailing in the atmosphere and the fear of human contact, it would curve slowly and finally would pierce the vulnerable substrate of the so-called objective reality, like a spear. I could detect hundreds of similar lines everywhere around me but every time I desperately tried to spot from whom they came, I couldn’t. 

For instance, I tried to match a light-blue line of joy to a happy face, to no avail. When I thought I had found it, the face would pout even before I got close and it would shrink in its corner, perhaps considering the potential threat posed by a stranger like me. 

An endless mesh of uninhabited feelings, similar to the infrared beams that protect safes in crime movies, would spread everywhere and as a result, in every step that I took, my heart, upon detecting it, would vibrate so much that it almost broke, and my body, trying to escape this net of fruitless feelings, would sound every now and then its internal alarm to the point of exhaustion. I made a final effort to escape, crawling almost on the sidewalk’s gutter and right after that I attempted quite a few enviable acrobatic positions, in order to avoid the unbearable and dangerous internal upset I was feeling. The positions I took would put to shame professional acrobats, or the most famous movie stars while trying to pass through the infrared beam trap in a thriller, but still my efforts came to nothing.

I felt captured and weak, unable to take a single step. I was certain that remaining in that social framework would gradually drive me to total inertia, would nail me dangerously to the ground without any hope of escaping. 

People, thinking I was performing an act of those usually performed on squares, gathered around me and many of them, excited, threw coins at me, cheered and clapped to reward my effort. I looked at them with curiosity, in the same manner they looked at me. 

At one point, I decided that the only way to escape from the mediocrity of barren and aimless feelings – that like infrared beams sounded an unbearable internal alarm with my every move – was to re-adjust the scale of my heart to only trace feelings of higher sensitivity and special importance, like passionate love or unfathomable hatred. 

It was wise thinking. At once the landscape changed and I was freed. I got up and shook off the dirt from my clothes. The crowd that had gathered around me a while ago, and caused all that internal collapse, burst into warm applause and dispersed. I collected the money thrown at me (it was not a small amount ) and I walked away happily. I had discovered an honest but very deleterious job. 

Ginette, the Content

One day in Paris I met Ginette. Ginette was the queen of sadness; she possessed the unique ability to spot in everything, including me, only the bad aspects and namely those that would hurt and depress her. Patiently and neatly she would store all the materials needed to raise castles and dig moats that would protect her from the siege laid by the joy of life. The only thing she enjoyed was inventing all sorts of Calvary, attaching the year’s hardest days one after the other, pouring on them impasses and standing in the middle of the crossroads to facilitate the passing of wretchedness, weakness, sorrow and pain. Every single time she would impress me with the way she managed, even in the most carefree moment, to tell easily what would upset and frighten her. In new clothes she would spot right away a loose seam, in the clear sky a tiny white cloud, in the tastiest food a mistake in the recipe, in the prettiest blue sea urchins, jellyfish and sharks, in her own life a huge void, dark like tar and unlit like an alley in an uninhabited village. 

On the other hand, I was in a completely different mood, and many times, carried away by Ginette, I fretted with the idea that wild birds would be my last company and tear my dead insides. 

No matter what I tried to lift her mood, nothing worked; more drastic measures were needed. Sometimes, I thought to myself, in order to meet the other and for the other to meet his hypnotized self, you need to pass from where you are not expected. From roads and paths left unguarded or that the other considers so well-guarded that no one will dare cross. 

So I got her Jeff Koons’ enormous, fluffy, playful, pinkish balloon dog. I knew she hated all that and considered it to be useless garbage and revolting kitsch. It was a huge, colourful dog, weirdly balloon-y, smiling and proud. She could barely stand the sight of it. According to her taste, it was the ugliest thing on earth. However, she did not react as I had anticipated. On the contrary, at length she seemed to make her peace with this ugly and artless thing (her words), and when I suggested to her taking it for a ride, at first she was upset, then embarrassed but, in the end, after a lot of pleading from my end, she accepted in order to indulge me. 

We rode Jeff Koons’ pink balloon dog through the city’s suburbs late at night, when it was quiet. We might have looked very funny, but it was the first time she had a reserved smile on her face. Each time we ventured further away and passed from more central streets. I held the reins in one hand and an umbrella in the other, to keep us dry from the tears of an unknown crucified Jesus, and we hopped across Saint Germaine, and usually in the evening we would hang out at a bar, owned by Sarah Bernhardt, near the Luxemburg Gardens. 

I sang arias and Sarah climbed on the bar’s tables and aroused the patrons by promising them heavenly things and provoked them to press their fingers tightly around their necks, to the point of asphyxiation, if they truly wanted to feel my singing to the depths of their being. To be left with only one sense, that of touch. ‘Only touch can take you to heaven; only by touch you can become enchanted,’ she said. When I took a break, she would often come to our table and chat Ginette up. ‘You should always have such a little fox with you,’ she would advise my friend, ‘like this one,’ and kept patting Koons’ pink balloon dog. ‘It can always guide you out of the darkness. Little foxes always know how to take flight from danger. Always hold onto the morning little fox, the one born by your mind at the day’s first light as it is the most robust and the wildest, as heavy as the sorrow of crucifixion and as light as the sheet of the descent from the cross.’

At some point we broke up with Ginette. She mounted her enormous, shiny and gorgeous balloon Jeff Koons’ dog and left. She interpreted in her own way all we had said and done together, what Sarah and other friends of ours had told her, she combined all that to her personal experiences and made her personal choice. 

She writes to me on a regular basis from Père Lachaise cemetery where she lives happily. ‘At night,’ she writes, ‘I sleep between the graves of Amedeo Modigliani and Jeanne Hébuterne, as I feel safe and warm there, and during the day, I ride Jeff Koons’ balloon dog and give visitors a tour of the cemetery and I introduce them to the deceased.’

Often a time have I wondered how many faces life has. The logical conclusion is that she has two: the good one and the bad one. I know I am wrong as nothing can stand on two feet for too long. This is why, many times, unwittingly, I dream that I touch my fluffy little tail.