Giannina Braschi - Yo-Yo Boing!

— Then your desire was not genuine.

— Then you were not going to be a critic. Nobody breaks what people are. They can hurt your feelings, yes. Verlaine broke Rimbaud’s heart, but nurtured his poetry by unleashing his emotions.

— He made him despise poetry.

— He broke his heart, not his art.

— And this is why a rose is a rose is a rose. Because there are roses that are not roses. You know when you meet a rose. You know it by its scent. But people don’t know. And that’s the problem. But what bothers me, and this is my dilemma, if I didn’t have an editor picking apart my poems, I would have already finished my book. Because it’s true, you refine the language, but when I have an idea that is not fully developed, you say:

— It doesn’t work, but it’s a great idea.

That’s how you kill my idea. I won’t continue working with it if it doesn’t already work. If it were a great idea, it would work.

— If you work with it, you can make it work.

— All I want to know is whether or not it works.

— Just this paragraph that I’ve had to rewrite from scratch. In other words: palimpsest. What would you do without me? What you’re writing is immature. I make it serious.

— What matures, rots. I’d rather be green. I’m still hopeful that I’m going to be.

— If you say, Never. Listen. I’m not in love . I’m an echo, echoing, I’m in love — in love. I love you — love you .

— It’s torture to have to hear the opposite of what I negate. I say, I don’t love you.

— I say, I love you — love you .

— It breaks a person’s spirit. Don’t you think?

— You think. You think.

— So I always have to hear your back-talk.

— It’s your own voice contradicting you.

— I’m not in love.

— I’m in love — in love. I love you — love you.

— It’s true. Echo is an original. She copies Narcissus’s last words but projects a new meaning. Imagine. Once he emerged from a cold black cloud, arm in arm with another woman, and called my name. Not knowing where the voice was coming from, I looked around, disconcerted, alone as I was, and torn, and used my hands to shield my eyes from a glare in the agonizing haze and looked both ways. Suddenly through the haze, the crowds, and the sunlight, I saw him coming toward me — smiling with swollen bags under his sleepless, drunken eyes — with a tick inside — sun-streaked, crow’s feet, like a map of the world — travails on a flying trapeze of needles twitching, like icicles dripping — and he came over to say:

— Hello. How are you?

My eardrums nearly burst. How am I? The nerve of him. It’s only been a week since we broke up. He, it seemed, was fine indeed.

— Fine indeed, thanks. And yourself?

— Divine.

I stared him down — divine, eh? What’s a cross-eyed fat bitch like her doing with him? Why is she looking at me with that attitude? He must have warned her when he saw me coming:

— That’s her. Keep walking. Right past her.

That’s when the skunk stopped to say hello, and the bulldog did what she was told. She knew who I was. She had listened in on my phone calls, and now she saw me in flesh and blood. Bam-boom-pow-wow-auu, I figured it out — she was the bitch who stole him from me — the one who used to listen in and laugh at my pain. Of course, they were both degenerates. They were naked, and she was sitting on his lap with the phone cord wrapped around her neck like an onyx choker — too bad it didn’t choke her — I swear, I heard her cackling when she saw me begging Jabalí to come back.

— Degenerate.

— You don’t know how many times I had to hear Ingrid Bergman reciting Jean Cocteau’s monologue of a woman talking to her lover on the phone before she commits suicide.

— Jabi gave you that record.

— Yes, until one day, he came home with Edith Piaf and told me he found her at Rizzoli. I later learned it was that bitch who gave it to him. I sensed it.

— How callous.

— He ran off with Edith Piaf and left me with a scratched record of Ingrid Bergman bidding her lover farewell. We never hear his voice, just her desperate responses. With me it was different. I saw his lover seated on his lap, naked, eavesdropping and squealing with pleasure, deep pleasure, more pleasure, the sum of more and more pleasure, thinking she had him eating from her sweaty palm — and they were swilling scotch and soda on the rocks, and I heard the icy ice, his voice choking with pleasure when he said, so easily, with no emotional regret, no sensitivity, cold and distant:

— Blackbirds will come again, but they won’t come back the same.

— But why —I asked— why won’t they come back the same?

— You can’t cross the same river twice. New waters .

In the background I heard the bitch’s laughter, sloshed as she was, with her curly sweaty hair, which I’m sure she hadn’t washed in ages, and her shiny face and her yellow, yellow teeth, and her gums, open wild, I could even see the chambers of her throat with scotch splashing sassy, screaming like a witch and dancing, because he was with her and I was alone and lonely in my solitary room. The question is — why did he want to say hello?

— He wanted you to know he found a new love.

— So why didn’t he say so when he had me on the phone?

— Fear of sabotage.

— So why didn’t he sneak around the corner when he saw me instead of jumping out of the fog like a frog?

— It’s not as if he introduced you.

— Worse, suggestion hurts more.

— You took him by surprise. He didn’t expect to see you, so he called your name out of reflex.

— But why did he look at her at that very moment with a look that said:

— She caught us in the act. Keep walking. Don’t stop. I’ll say hello.

— That’s your jealousy talking.

— No, I swear, it was his bitch. And if he had any balls, he would’ve introduced me to her. What’s wrong with meeting a whore? He was hiding something. His conscience.

— Please, he’s got no shame.

— The look in his eyes. Her look. Her messiness. They were making love minutes before they encountered me. I’m not stupid. She had no makeup on.

— That’s your rage, your jealousy.

— I just want you to know how cruel he was.

— Cruel, but funny. I love the story.

— Look, I’m going to show you how I did it.

— Easy. It’s called hypnotism, and it’s a lack of respect.

— Wait, I thought you believed in my power to enchant.

— I believe it’s a kind of spell.

— Yes, but I’m not taking away their will. I’m giving and giving music to each singer, showing them how to voice the pain in the notes, lowering the catastrophes and feeling them, and being at one with them. And everyone who saw me, believe me, felt the voice of pleasure. All my hairs were on end — I had goose bumps all over.

— Spare me. You were nine years old when you conducted the choir.

— But with such devotion simple, yet sacrificial, knowing the mortality and the wounds, I mean, really knowing what art is about, a mystical experience, recognition of a vocation. And at that age.

— A very normal experience for a very normal child.

— Not any child can sustain that devotion. The choir was flying high. They knew it was no silly game. They followed my hands better than Evy Lucio’s.

— You memorized her gestures.

— Yes, but you have no idea what conducting means to me. I was bored of strumming the guitar, no, it wasn’t the guitar, or the scales, or the piano, or the scores, not even, not even singing. Now that I hear Dulcinea I recognize my style in the way she howls. She arches her neck all the way back until a simple, high-pitched howl comes out of her throat, the dark sound of a stormy gale of wind: Auuuu. Auuuuu. The auuuuuu conveys the gust of abandonment at the same time — calling for help — it voices pure panic in the face of danger — while howling to the infinite and hearing the echoes in the depths.