Brooding clouds in the sky over Compañía Street. A street like a flexed arm, but the blow never arrives. I wandered into Víctor Jara’s bookshop, undefiled, but possessed by the Dionysian spirit. It was just what I was waiting for, just what my life needed: a hint of inebriation, a touch of madness, action. I wanted risk in every movement, knowing that in Greek, to seduce also means to destroy. I sought destruction. I made my way to the poetry section and stopped beside a volume by Pascoli. Take from each thing the smile and the tear, says Pascoli. I closed this book and took another, something more du jour, from Michaux: Man needs a landscape within which to rage. And then another, from the poet Alberto Santamaría: When I came down, I hardly knew where my body led me. Half beaten and exhausted from these truths I took down a book from Calasso: The Dionysian phallus is a hallucinogen, we know nothing of the fidelity to cultivation and only copulate in the wild woods. Finally I tired of poetry’s instruction. I heaped all the books onto a funeral mound fancying that by osmosis Pascoli would be Michaux, and Michaux Calasso, and vice-versa: Santamaría Pascoli, and Michaux Santamaría and like this agitating all the poetry until it formed a single compendium of verse that would say everything and then I thought: now that I have read these books I need to live some of what they say.

I looked about me. There was a girl reading a “Best Seller.” I came up right beside her, moved close to her and watched for a reaction, but she did nothing more than continue quietly reading her book, so I moved closer and said to her, “Would you like to have a drink with me?” She replaced the book and looked at me, but said nothing. Then she walked over to the non-fiction section without replying, and this movement, toward the non-fiction section, signified, that without a doubt, the answer was, No, I wouldn’t like to have a drink with you. I shrugged my shoulders. I climbed to the second floor of the bookshop, walking decisively across the creaking parquet. My eyes were like pincers when I saw the book. In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity was the title, and there was no doubt, I would have it. I went down to the register, hardly knowing where my body led me. Beside the register were screenplays, behind that a public toilet. I stopped in front of the cashier. The first thing I noticed were her lean and meagre buttocks, clenched. She didn’t look at me, only took the book In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity and told me, robotically, how much it was.

“No,” I said.

“No what?” She said, looking up at me. “I need something else,” I said, “please accompany me to the screenplays, there’s something I need to ask you.” She abandoned the register to its own fate and followed me to the screenplays.

“What is it”? She asked me.

“I would like a Kieslowski,” I replied. She turned toward the screenplays and as she did I tried to move closer to her. “This?” she asked, raising a script. “No, a different one, something else,” I said. While she was looking through the screenplays I tried to nudge her in the direction of the public toilets, and in this bold move I finally felt the fullness of life, the thundering in my veins, the throbbing of the heart valves and the cramping of my stomach. I pushed a little more, brushing her buttocks. Seduction moves destructively. I continued nudging her toward the wild wood of the public toilets and, for a moment, I had the impression that we would consummate our love, that it was mutually agreed: she appeared to yield, to anticipate my little touches toward the intimacy of the lavatory. But she suddenly shouted and said: “What are you doing, you fool?”

Alarmed, I replied, “Well, you see… how to say it? Don’t you want to kiss me?…”

“What? Of course I don’t, you idiot.”

“Okay… well then I don’t want the Kieslowski,” I said to her and added in a neutral tone, “ring up the charge for this In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity.” We returned to the register and I noticed in her a certain contempt; she didn’t say a word to me.

I had failed. No, that’s a lie: I didn’t fail! It is man who has failed, because he who reasons too much spouts too many absurdities about life, and doesn’t know the beauty of risk, and if I was Alcibíades (who in part I am) and you were Sócrates, we would be here loving one another and not reading each other in a chair or on a bed or in a verdant garden; and if I went out into the rain, I would think of Alcmeón de Crotona who said: For this men die, because they don’t have the capacity to connect the beginning to the end. Dionysus gave us wine to love each other, and we only use it to get drunk. From each thing the smile and the tear. Now, more than ever, we need a landscape where we can rage.

(2009)

Keith Payne lives in Salamanca