‘The Poet’, by Amadeus Raven: chapter XII

CHAPTER XII

THE ASSASSIN’S DIARY

Day 1

I can’t allow myself to think much of Priscilla romantically. I just write about her in the spirit of an intern; To such an extent have I castrated my soul.

Strictly speaking, it has become a kind of internal legend that I feed and with which I empathize, alienated and intramural from the life that happens outside and is foreign to me.

When I see her, she just painstakingly builds a beautiful Chinese ice wall around her principles with the same determination as a log cutter in competition.

The most sophisticated polygraph would be unable to detect the slightest oscillation in the linearity of his behavior with me, which is commendable.

She should have been a nurse anesthetist because of the extraordinary soporific capacity of her words and gestures. She has the gift of boring me after thirty seconds of conversation and, above all, she is a consummate specialist in nullifying any hint of elevation that I could harbor towards her.

The effects of the psychological devastation will be complicating my existence until the end and the best way I have to cope with them is to analyze them with a magnifying glass and the vocation of an entomologist.

Day 2

I keep dreaming about Priscilla, but I never sink into erotic dreams, but into nightmares of absurd words and images that flood reason and weigh down my spirits when I wake up. It is as if I were sentenced to life imprisonment in the prison of the imaginary life while the real one insomniac perpetrates the greatest atrocities against the calm of my spirit, more and more broken.

I never masturbate thinking about her nor do I think it would work if I tried. The onanistic activity of the human being requires the spicy ingredient of morbidity, which has been aseptically eliminated from my psyche in relation to sexuality, I suppose as a reflex measure of the subconscious in favor of a minimum serenity of spirit.

Another of the curious collateral effects—consolidation strategies—that I have observed in my behavior towards her is that I avoid looking at her legs when we meet. In addition, if I detect that the iceberg is dangerously approaching, I draw my phone with the skill of a professional gunman, pretend to speak and make a vague gesture with my hand while standing a meter away, never closer —security strategies— , to avoid falling into the two humiliating and insulting kisses on the cheek, and I whisper to him to ask me for a coffee at the bar where we met. This is how I shake off the dust of the formality in which she unfolds like a fish in water and I, in the desert.

Recently, I forgot my cell phone in the office and I was perplexed at a magical moment: the situation forced me to extend the security perimeter to a meter and a half, sheltering behind a barricade of folders and files that, fortunately, I had with me that day and that served as a shield for me, but Priscilla managed to lean towards me to give me the two kisses at an impossible angle that denied the law of gravity, imitating one of Michael Jackson’s most famous choreographies.

When she regained her verticality, I thought I heard the metallic sound of a mechanism that, like a spring, pulled her back, although it was probably the effects of the state of hallucination in which I was immersed. Or my stressed neurons squirming restlessly.

Anyway, I’ll have to find another trick to avoid the number tower of Pisa because I’ve done the phone and parapet thing several times already and I find it a bit pathetic to myself, although, fortunately, with the new circumstances that will arise we will see less of each other.

Day 3

I have to leave it written here that her real name is Laura and not Priscilla —and this is another special effect that I deploy with an idealizing desire while I tense the topic of the beloved-enemy, like a curtain that hides what happens between the dark scenes of my theater of the absurd—although in my texts I refer to my muse with her distinguished and suggestive alias and, sometimes, with the quixotic apposition sovereign and high lady. Of course, Priscilla ignores him, as she ignores everything.

In front of her recent boyfriend —Boss suit, neat verbalism, amorous escapade to Paris— I address her familiarly, calling her Lau to unsettle him. I guess Hugo will find it a circumstance attached to his partner with whom he compromises out of decency and interest.

On the rare occasions that I have come across the chosen one, I have tried to glimpse some of the qualities that she values ​​in a man, remembering ancient conversations we had when we drank together, but under the layers of protocol greetings at winners’ parties, clean shaves, shiny shoes, millimetric tie at the height of the buckle of the pants and courtesy phrases for the first placenta, I have been unable to find anything similar to a shadow of the qualities that the couple that my drunken friend dreamed of would treasure.

But that horror empty that assails me after Hugo’s skinning is evidently not shared by her, since it is obvious that my argument lacks objectivity and reeks from afar of a precarious attempt to raise my self-esteem. Unsuccessful, of course.

Besides, he’s a lawyer, and if my long, accusing index finger were to point directly to the immaculate man’s frozen heart, in the closing argument his professionalism would probably destroy me without even resorting to his elegant professional conjurer moves, without needing to pull a legal rabbit out of his top hat, arguing deadly, simply, and convincingly that I’m a bitter asshole. With his hands in his pockets and looking steadily at the court.

The popular jury would unanimously find me guilty and imbecile.

Day 4

One of the reasons Priscilla gave for rejecting me was that the undersigned had been with many women. At first I thought it was a joke, but then I knew that she had meant it very seriously. I suppose he will have a comprehensive report regarding his new man on this momentous matter.

Probably, the strangeness that his way of expressing himself produces in me has a lot to do with his inability to accurately convey what he thinks and, above all, with the content that his mental structure gives to words. In this sense, the multiple meanings of the verb “to be” in Spanish do not help much either.

She recently advised me to go to an important meeting with her in “dark shoes and proper jacket.” I think the darkness of the shoes is minimized compared to what he really meant, in the same way that the suitability of the jacket will forever remain in limbo pending an approval that will never be given, since that appointment was canceled through his secretary without further explanation.

Priscilla has an extraordinary ability to contradict herself, and when she tries to put herself in pantocrator modethe effects are withering for the spiritual peace of the perplexed listener.

I’ve been going to the movies a lot lately and I devour books until my eyes hurt or I run out for a gin tonic when the shadows close in Sometimes I have felt the temptation to enter a church, but I end up reading some passage from the Bible, especially from the Old Testament, where the fierce and inhuman god seems to grant me a truce with the balm of the Song of songs.

I try not to stay alone for a long time and I try to get into the lives of others, imaginary or not, which is the same. After two drinks, when I talk to someone in a bar, I notice that they are carried away by an irrepressible, and fifteen minutes intolerable, attack of verbiage based on the sudden reimplantation of the heliocentric theory, where the Sun becomes the unleashed speaker.

day 5

Sonnets, vodka, gin and peach-flavoured Spidifen: today has been an effervescent day. I am going through a very creative and fast-paced time. But now it’s cold and the ice rattles in the chipped glass of my heart.

I really miss the sense of humor in these situations when I read the stories of the unrequited love of great writers who lived through the trance in an agonizing way. But no big deal, ladies and gentlemen.

The love experience has absolutely nothing elevated nor does it awaken the spirituality of the human being. It can be the trigger for creativity and the most sublime invention, but it does not imply purity or nobility. It has more to do with selfishness, with licking one’s wounds with catlike relish and public overexposure ad maiorem gloriam propriam.

I am more interested in the analysis of the comedy character of this alleged apocalypse.

The scorned lover tormented by pain does not stop being a scarecrow for others. The ridiculous and excessive Caballero de la Triste Figura «ferido de la punta de la punta de libertad» by Dulcinea is the Cervantes transcript of what I am analyzing. And he is so great that the whiff that not even Don Quixote himself believes what he says is thrown even by the alert reader.

In this trance it is important to laugh at oneself or transform into an insect to be analyzed with a Kafkaesque lens.

Between an urban beetle and a pathetic lover, the differences are restricted to the period in which they will be crushed, with the advantage for the insect that it finds nooks and crannies to postpone the inexorable.

Above all, it is convenient to unravel oneself, open the frog of love and tear out the guts of the presumably ineffable to be made explicit in sentences of irreproachable syntax.

I love Priscilla. Analysis: I am the subject—omitted, of course—and she is the direct complement.

Priscilla is not with me. Analysis: here she is the subject and I am hidden under a personal pronoun as a circumstantial complement.

They see him? The charm is lost.

day 6

I know that there will be no other rebirth for my spirit other than the one that throbs in the baroque beauty of words that caress ideas and reveal sentiment, that are chained harmoniously tracing elegant pirouettes, creating and developing conceptual structures that end up crowned by syntactic gargoyles excessive, extravagant and beautiful, forming sentences that procession mourning and crimped in iron paragraphs rusted by your absence that subordinate my being to the only tribute I can offer you: to immortalize you.

The sublime interior introspection in which love is felt as an interstellar journey to the most mysterious and exalted of the human soul, in which the danger of perishing is breathed with each rearing and deranged heartbeat while trying to cover the distance of light years that separate two hearts under the merciless breath of hope; the portentous force that threatens to break the chest and that makes the throbs faint, stressed by a blood that runs amok through veins that threaten to break, or that stops and freezes or gets mired in smelly sewers of rotten roses; the most mistaken verb, but so charming, placed against the current in the middle of a conversation that precipitates into a cataract of uncertainties that are merciless in falling in love or hurting you; the aura that threatens to envelop you and break the dome of selfishness; the drive to please you, to indulge you, to amaze you, to not stop until you laugh out loud and then look at me with half-closed eyelids, making me suspect disturbing complicity; the ecstatic memory in the flaming arch of your lips; the way I walk away from you; the way I don’t want you to remember me; in short, all that is shocked and vulgarized when exposed to the light of the cold general grammar of your predatory eyes and busted like a vampire without night.

I don’t want to be eaten by worms. I want to burn without you hurting me. At last.