Free The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson Page B

pain.
     
     
    ————
     
    Panic jumped down on Geryon at three a.m. He stood at the window of his hotel room.
     
    Empty street below gave back nothing of itself.
     
    Cars nested along the curb on their shadows. Buildings leaned back out of the street.
     
    Little rackety wind went by.
     
    Moon gone. Sky shut. Night had delved deep. Somewhere (he thought) beneath
     
    this strip of sleeping pavement
     
    the enormous solid globe is spinning on its way—pistons thumping, lava pouring
     
    from shelf to shelf,
     
    evidence and time lignifying into their traces. At what point does one say of a man
     
    that he has become unreal?
     
    He hugged his overcoat closer and tried to assemble in his mind Heidegger’s
     
    argument about the use of moods.
     
    We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods.
     
    It is state-of-mind that discloses to us
     
    (Heidegger claims) that we are beings who have been thrown into something else.
     
    Something else than what?
     
    Geryon leaned his hot forehead against the filthy windowpane and wept.
     
    Something else than this hotel room
     
    he heard himself say and moments later he was charging along the hollow gutters
     
    of Avenida Bolívar. Traffic was sparse.
     
    He moved past shuttered kiosks and blank windows. Streets got narrower, darker.
     
    Sloping down.
     
    He could see the harbor blackly glittering. Cobblestones grew slick. Smell of salt fish
     
    and latrines furred the air.
     
    Geryon turned his collar up and walked west. Dirty river slapped along beside him.
     
    Three soldiers observed him from a porch.
     
    There was a sound of dripping behind the dark air—a voice. Geryon looked around.
     
    Down the quay he could see
     
    a dim square of light like a café or a shop. But there were no cafés down here.
     
    What kind of shop would be open at four a.m.?
     
    A big man stepped straight out into Geryon’s path and stood adjusting the towel
     
    on his arm.
Tango?
he said
     
    and stepped back with a sweeping bow. Over the door Geryon read
Caminito
     
    in white neon as he stumbled down
     
    into the soggy black interior of what (he later realized) was the only authentic
     
    tango bar left in Buenos Aires.
     
    Through the gloom he saw very old concrete walls lined with bottles and a circle
     
    of tiny round red kitchen tables.
     
    A gnome in an apron was darting about among the tables delivering the same tall
     
    orangeish drink to everyone
     
    in a glass like a test tube. A low stage at the front of the room was lit by spotlight.
     
    Three ancient musicians hunched there—
     
    piano, guitar, accordion. None of them looked less than seventy years old,
     
    the accordion player so frail
     
    each time he swayed his shoulders around a corner of the melody Geryon feared
     
    the accordion would crush him flat.
     
    It gradually became clear that nothing could crush this man. Hardly glancing
     
    at one another the three of them played
     
    as one person, in a state of pure discovery. They tore clear and clicked and locked
     
    and unlocked, they shot
     
    their eyebrows up and down. They leaned together and wove apart, they rose
     
    and cut away and stalked
     
    one another and flew up in a cloud and sank back down on waves. Geryon could not
     
    take his eyes off them
     
    and was rather annoyed when a man, no it was a woman, parted a curtain
     
    and came onto the stage.
     
    She wore a tuxedo with black tie. Detached a microphone from somewhere inside
     
    the spotlight and began to sing.
     
    It was a typical tango song and she had the throat full of needles you need to sing it.
     
    Tangos are terrible—
     
    Your heart or my death!
—and they all sound the same. Geryon clapped every time
     
    the other people clapped then
     
    a new song started then they all began to blur into a stream that ran
     
    down over the dirt floor
     
    and then he was asleep, burning, yearning, dreaming, streaming, asleep.
     
    Awoke with