The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson Page A

woman sitting across from him knocking her cigarette on the edge of the table
     
    and saying
Tango is not for everyone.
     
    She looked around the vacant room. The gnome was sweeping cigarette butts into a pile. Original daylight trickled
     
    weakly through gaps in the stiff little red curtains that hung at the windows.
     
    She watched it. He
     
    was trying to remember a line of a poem.
Nacht steigt ans Ufer …
     
    What did you say?
she asked.
     
    Nothing.
He was very tired. The woman smoked in silence.
Do you ever
     
    wonder about beluga whales?
     
    Geryon asked. Her eyebrows were startling, like two ascending insects.
     
    It is an endangered species?
     
    No I mean in tanks in captivity just floating.
     
    No—why?
     
    What do they think about? Floating in there. All night.
     
    Nothing.
     
    That’s impossible.
     
    Why?
     
    You can’t be alive and think about nothing.
You
can’t but you’re not a whale.
     
    Why should it be different?
     
    Why should it be the same? But I look in their eyes and I see them thinking.
     
    Nonsense. It is yourself you see—it’s guilt.
     
    Guilt? Why would I be guilty about whales? Not my fault they’re in a tank.
     
    Exactly. So why are you guilty—whose
     
    tank are you in?
Geryon was exasperated.
Was your father a psychoanalyst?
     
    She grinned.
No it’s me who’s the psychoanalyst.
     
    He stared. She was serious.
Don’t look so shocked,
she said.
It pays the rent
     
    and it’s not immoral
—
     
    well not entirely immoral. But what about your singing? Hah!
She flicked ash
     
    to the floor.
Make a living singing tango?
     
    How many people did you see here tonight?
Geryon thought.
five or six,
he said.
     
    That’s right. Those same five or six
     
    are here every night. Goes up to nine or ten on weekends—maybe, if there’s
     
    no soccer on TV. Sometimes we get
     
    a party of politicians from Chile or tourists from the States. But it’s a fact.
     
    Tango is a fossil.
     
    So is psychoanalysis,
said Geryon.
     
    She studied him a few moments then said slowly—but the gnome gave the piano
     
    a shove against the wall
     
    and Geryon almost missed it—
Who can a monster blame for being red?
     
    What?
said Geryon starting forward.
     
    I said looks like time for you to get home to bed,
she repeated, and stood,
     
    pocketing her cigarettes.
     
    Do come again,
she said as Geryon’s big overcoat swept out the door but he
     
    did not turn his head.
     
     

XXXII. KISS
     
    Click here for original version
     
    A healthy volcano is an exercise in the uses of pressure.
     
     
    ————
     
    Geryon sat on his bed in the hotel room pondering the cracks and fissures
     
    of his inner life. It may happen
     
    that the exit of the volcanic vent is blocked by a plug of rock, forcing
     
    molten matter sideways along
     
    lateral fissures called fire lips by volcanologists. Yet Geryon did not want
     
    to become one of those people
     
    who think of nothing but their stores of pain. He bent over the book on his knees.
     
    Philosophic Problems.
     
    “…  I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.
     
    But this separation of consciousness
     
    is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is
     
    to believe in an undivided being between us.…”
     
    As he read Geryon could feel something like tons of black magma boiling up
     
    from the deeper regions of him.
     
    He moved his eyes back to the beginning of the page and started again.
     
    “To deny the existence of red
     
    is to deny the existence of mystery. The soul which does so will one day go mad.”
     
    A church bell rang across the page
     
    and the hour of six P.M. flowed through the hotel like a wave. Lamps snapped on
     
    and white bedspreads sprang forward,
     
    water rushed in the walls, the elevator crashed like a mastodon within its hollow cage.
     
    I am not the one who is crazy here,
     
    said Geryon closing the book.