Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Odile Cornuz

FOG OUTSIDE In the end, we could have gotten married. I’m an urban planner and she was all curves. I’d have liked to be handsome, but that wasn’t part of the plan. Whose plan?—I don’t know. I excavate and I draw up plans. I make fun of any and all lines. When they’re straight, they’re suspicious. I draw with my feet elevated: a small bench, a radiator, a cushion left by chance. It takes time for the lines to be plotted. Time for them to interweave themselves. I follow them to their vanishing point. Vertigo. I construct my universe. I burst out laughing. She’d have had the power to exorcise all my wishes: a formula please; a magic spell, no? How could she have fallen in love with me? By loving stones, immobility, silence. No obligation, no—that ’s not me. I’m not the man you think I am, but the other, the one next to him, the one you don’t notice passing, the one whose face blends into the color of the façades. Always the same doggedness: scrutinize, analyze, deconstruct, reconstruct; build, behind smoky glasses; observe at your leisure, undermine all a prioris; gain experience on terraces, a glass of lemonade as ammunition, clear-eyed and staid, active. Why go to so much trouble? To understand, if possible, what I’m doing surrounded by everything that was built before me: creatures of flesh and blood and blocks of

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