TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

The Dreamed Part

even dangerous. It’s like going back to the old neighborhood and going up to that housewhere you once lived and putting your face up to the window and looking inside and discovering that the furnishings are different (really they aren’t different, but they’ve been rearranged, and the kitchen is now the bathroom); that other people live there now, that none of that is yours anymore and that, if you don’t leave soon, someone (who looks a lot like you or, better, looks like you once looked, and yet . . . ) could come out with a rifle and mistake you for a psychopath and shoot first and only ask what you’re doing there after. And so you flee.

And it’s so dark.

And it’s raining.

And all the dogs on that street bite your name and gnaw on your signature.

His own books were not there, under his body. To the contrary: he had them in the most remote and frozen regions of his library, several rooms to the south, in the never-now-explored Antarctic of his readings. His books were now for him like the point at the center of the Pole: he knew of their existence, he had seen photographs of their creaking and breakable flags waving in a cold so cold that it no longer gave you time to feel the cold, that just froze you instantly; but he had no need to revisit them. Similarly, another unrealizable fantasy, decades ago he had given up in defeat when it came to the chimerical promise and impossible desire to put his library in some kind of order. So he let it run wild and free throughout the rooms and the kitchen 211