The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson Page B

He put on his coat, belted it formally, and went out.
     
    Out on the street it was Saturday night
     
    in Buenos Aires. Shoals of brilliant young men parted and closed around him.
     
    Heaps of romance spilled their bright vapor
     
    onto the pavement from behind plate glass. He stopped to stare at the window
     
    of a Chinese restaurant where
     
    forty-four cans of lichee nuts were piled into a tower as big as himself. He tripped
     
    over a beggar woman
     
    low on the curb with two children pooled in her skirts. He
     
    paused at a newspaper kiosk
     
    and read every headline. Then went round the other side to the magazines.
     
    Architecture, geology, surfing,
     
    weight lifting, knitting, politics, sex.
Balling from Behind
caught his eye
     
    (a whole magazine devoted to this?
     
    issue after issue? year after year?) but he was too embarrassed to buy it.
     
    He walked on. Went into a bookshop.
     
    Browsed through the philosophy section and came to ENGLISH BOOKS ALL KINDS .
     
    Under a tower of Agatha Christie
     
    was one Elmore Leonard (
Killshot,
he’d read it) and
Collected Verse of Walt Whitman
     
    in a bilingual edition.
     
     
                   
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
                   
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
                   
The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious,
                   
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil.…
     
     … 
tu solo quien sabe lo que es ser perverso.
Geryon put evil Walt Whitman down
     
    and opened a self-help book
     
    whose title (
Oblivion the Price of Sanity?
) stirred his ever hopeful heart.
     
    “Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.
     
    There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.
     
    All language can register is the slow return
     
    to the oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape
     
    and habit blurs perception and language
     
    takes up its routine flourishes.” He was about to turn the page for more help
     
    when a sound caught him.
     
    Like kissing. He looked around. A workman stood halfway up a ladder outside
     
    the front window of the shop.
     
    Some dark-colored bird was swooping at him and each time the bird came near
     
    the man made a kissing noise with his mouth—
     
    the bird somersaulted upwards then dove again with a little swagger and a cry.
     
    Kissing makes them happy, thought Geryon
     
    and a sense of fruitlessness pierced him. He turned to go and bumped hard
     
    into the shoulder of a man
     
    standing next to him—
Oh!
The stale black taste of leather filled his nose and lips.
     
    I’m sorry
—
     
    Geryon’s heart stopped. The man was Herakles. After all these years—he picks
     
    a day when my face is puffy!
     
     

XXXIII. FAST-FORWARD
     
    Click here for original version
     
    That was a shocker,
they agreed over coffee at Café Mitwelt later the same day.
     
     
    ————
     
    Geryon couldn’t decide which was more odd—
     
    to be sitting across the table from a grown-up Herakles or to hear himself using
     
    expressions like “a shocker.”
     
    And what about this young man with black eyebrows who sat on Herakles’ left.
     
    They do have a language,
Ancash was saying.
     
    Herakles had explained that he and Ancash were traveling around South America
     
    together recording volcanoes.
     
    It’s for a movie,
Herakles added.
A nature film? Not exactly. A documentary
     
    on Emily Dickinson.
     
    Of course,
said Geryon. He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
     
    “On My Volcano Grows the Grass,”
     
    Herakles went on,
is one of her poems. Yes I know,
said Geryon,
I like that poem,
     
    I like the way she
     
    refuses to rhyme
sod
with
God. Ancash meanwhile was taking a tape recorder
     
    out of his pocket.
     
    He slipped a tape into it and offered the earphones to Geryon.
Listen to