Cuadros de familia (2)

Would you please come back in a few minutes? The priest throws me out, he looks uptight, he has the same wilted face as in my childhood when he decided to become a priest. My father talks about death. Is it this you want, I ask. He gets infusions, he speaks more clearly. He will recover. In the room next door, he gently pets the shoulder of a man in a wheel-chair, comforting. The man looks like a highbrow, immobile, his hands trembling. Could you dial for me, he asks. I push the buttons, he speaks fast, the number recorded in his head.

Goldberg-Variationen

It is handwritten on the disc like an incantation, my magic formula to get back to myself. There is a crack at the end, the piano stops abruptly, returns to track one, starting over again.

This night I had a strange dream: She calls me on my mobile, I see her name on the display, I need to find her petit ami, the man with whom she has the child, he’s lost. There are no more words necessary. I am not sure whether this is Meissen or not but I walk on a plastered road along a river, it looks like fall somehow, there are booths and shops and only few people. I enter a radio shop, the vendor is just demonstrating the virtues of a hi-fi to some believers but the music soaking out of the speakers sounds dull and old-fashioned. There is something I need to buy there, something unusual.

First snow in the morning, looks beautiful. But in the supermarket, people put on faces grey and angry.