Small Mouth, Thin Lips

6 May

I receive this letter:

You do not ask me, Doctor, to write a text that explains myself to you and my other jailers. No, you demand that I carry on for another, taking up lines stolen from someone who shared my misfortune. Let me tell you right now: it can’t be done. Nothing I have written up until now has served to explain myself. I have no choice but to assume – given that I find myself imprisoned and my death imminent – that there is no hope my prose will ever come close to what I am. How, then, am I to write something that isn’t mine?

Relentless nausea, as well as indifference, prevented me from delivering these pages to you on your last visit. It’s no easy matter, fantasizing behind bars. And it is even more arduous to resign oneself to doing so beneath the light of this lamp, and over the smooth surface of this table, which illuminated and supported Gustavo López in vain. I cannot help but consider it an unwholesome presage, Doctor, your furnishing me with these implements, while revealing to me at the same time their former owner’s identity: a friend murdered in some adjoining cell.

My father taught me that using another man’s personal items, or occupying his recently vacated seat, can prove to be inconvenient. A shameful sensation overwhelms me every time I see that circle of light over the table, Doctor: that of a toilet seat still warm. I said I felt nauseous, but actually what I feel is hatred. Because even once you’ve discovered that my being here is all wrong, an aberration, you will still deliver me up to the firing squad or, at any rate, you won’t lift a finger to keep them from dragging me before it.

Did you attend Gustavo’s execution? Did you look on impassively, serenely, and were you able to smoke a cigar? Did you feel any pain when the volley was fired, even if only that of losing a patient? I force myself to write, still horrified by the heat of the lamp and the sense of the table weighing down my body like a shroud on a cadaver.