Dimitris Nollas: A Little Night Music on a Lighted Balcony

five o’clock as night falls,
ah, how cruel at five as night falls
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA

Like a candle-flame, a twinkling star moving in a fatal orbit, the woman got up, wrapped in a large yellow towel. A tender shoot, her black hair still wet, she stood on tiptoe before the half-open balcony door and said, “You’ve cut me to the quick”. The colours of dusk made the light on the balcony seem like a lamp fixed on a shoal and only made things worse.

The man lying on the bed didn’t react as he appeared to have had his fill of love and words, though it’s well-known of old that neither the one nor the other can satiate a soul so that it finds peace. He stretched himself and set to humming a tune.

“Yes, that’s what you’ve done,” she said curtly, on recognizing the tune that crept furtively over the blue sheets, “you’ve let me die. And now it’s over.”

He smiled, humming more clearly now “Whatever I love dies,” not wanting to dispel her delusion. He was the one it was referring to; the words were referring to him. And naturally he loved himself. For when he’d been smitten with her for so long without her giving him due, wasn’t that death? Wasn’t it death when like a drunk, having lost his human status, he banged his head on one side and the other trying to rid himself of it? What was it if it wasn’t death? Life? He kept wondering, while he whispered “you, you’re made of undying stuff… Not to mention that you’re smart and sensitive and all the rest, that’s why you don’t understand.”

“Whereas you?” she cut in mockingly.

“Me, I’ll drag myself to the door and leave for a foreign land. But I’ll live as though I were dead.”

There was no grievance in his voice. It was a cold statement of fact, like the words of a fortune-teller.

“Melodramatic,” she went on in the same tone.

She knew that there was no point to the conversation; they were just repeating the same old things. The twisting of meanings, the wrestling holds stifling the words in the mouth, the wonderfully pleasurable stabbing, the wounds that never close. And all this like the rehearsals for the same play that’s never going to be staged but that’s doomed to be constantly repeated.

She was now sitting on the edge of the bed slowly pulling up a pair of faded blue jeans as though it were a pair of stockings over her honey-down legs and shapely thighs.

“Lovesick drivel,” she added. “Not even melodramatic. It’s a rung lower.” And after a while “You’ve worn me out,” she said harshly. “You don’t have a shred of dignity. You never thought twice, you scumbag, about cheating on me with that whore,” she said now, raising both the tone and the harshness of her voice, though she knew it wasn’t this that.

It was his turn. When he spoke, he was equally harsh. As soon as he began to shout, Blanche closed the balcony door, leaving the naked bulb on the balcony wrestling with the dusk coming down from the hill. She didn’t listen. She didn’t want to hear. She didn’t want to hear him accusing her in his turn, while he kept repeating “…I who lie at your feet like a wounded animal. Like a dog or some beast of the sea extinct for centuries.”

Blanch paid no attention. She had let herself be dragged into what she wanted to avoid and now she was rummaging through a cigar box from the time that they both smoked aromatic cigarillos. Now the box was full of sweets, together with some photos and papers, notes, pins and paperclips, and a broken pen. The first photograph that slipped from her fingers was of a trip to Delos (When was that failed attempt, another one in the endless chain, she wondered). Standing beside one of the lions, she looked almost as tall as the sculpture given the way the photo had been taken (By whom? She continued to wonder), and with him lying beside her on the holy Cycladic earth. If she wanted, and if it were possible for her to move in the photograph, she could have trodden on him given that he had become one with the earth beside her feet. How much truth there was to be found in a photograph… Her fingers caressed and shuffled all those testimonies to the entrapped moments of a life thirsty for something else without knowing what. If she carefully searched through all of them one by one and read the yellowed papers, she would no doubt find much of what she would have liked to say to him now but kept putting off because she didn’t want to hurt him. And yet, what’s the point in not hurting someone that you have already decided to kill. So everything that she had decided not to say and didn’t say, such as that he was incapable of putting food in her mouth night and day and day and night like a little bird as he had pledged, or of bringing her red wine in the palms of his hands from the barrel miles away without spilling even one drop. Nor even of adorning her first in white then in black or of singing to her in the night while waiting for the dawn as he had promised her when he still called her “my undoing”.

All this, but also all the rest that she didn’t say or didn’t dare think (yet for how much longer?) was, strangely enough, heard by the man. He had heard it word for word though she hadn’t opened her mouth. How else might it be explained that when he spoke, he said “I’ve given you everything. I’ve given you my life. And if I’d had more than one, I’d have given them all to you.”

“And what value is there in a life without love?”

She looked straight at him, deep into his eyes, to see whether she could see her image reflected in them, but he averted his gaze. Blanche wondered what those sick with love might mean when they sing “your eyes met mine” at the height of their passion. She reflected that it was perhaps because they would like to be able to see what their beloved’s eyes see. Though more likely, she continued to reflect, it must mean your eyes in which I can see myself and so I know that I exist, my mirror, my image. Something that hasn’t happened for a long time with you.

“You’re right,” the man went on as though Blanche had let it all out, whereas she again hadn’t opened her mouth, “you’re right that there’s no point to this whole business. It’s as though we had a slave, me, and we were trying to find a master, you. And whereas we possess the love slave, we’re still searching for the love. Absurd, don’t you think?”

The man was now pacing back and forth in the room that was growing darker, unable to understand how two people who loved each other so much could part in such a manner. In the past he had tried to subjugate her but she had resisted. He supposed that when the prey doesn’t wish to lose its life, it becomes enslaved, surrenders and puts up with whatever it couldn’t stomach in its life of freedom. But Blanche wasn’t made for a life of that sort. And when it was clear that her resistance created an insurmountable obstacle, it rebounded on him as a failure and drove him to the other extreme, to his own surrender, because he had forgotten that always in the end the hunter and the prey become alike or even one. He was hunting himself and when the moment came, the moment that always visits us and is now, he wanted to be transformed into her slave, a love slave, and now he saw (saw?) her moving freely, like the flame of a match in the darkness, wrapped in the yellow towel and in the dusk that had spread throughout that room, full as it was of words unsaid, and wanting to put an end to things. Wanting it just as a vein desperately seeks a razorblade.

And it was that very time, dusk’s cruel hour, when the man felt weak-willed and incapable of rising even to the occasion of his servility. A prostrate corpse.

Translated from the Greek by David Connolly