Blow-Up Read Online Free

That’s the part they don’t like and as it doesn’t suit me to be rent to pieces inside and to feelthey are beating me or that the snow is coming in through my shoes when Luis María is dancing with me and his hand on my waist makes the strong odor of oranges, or of cut hay, rise in me like heat at midday, and they are beating her and it’s impossible to fight back, and I have to tell Luis María that I don’t feel well, it’s the humidity, humidity in all that snow which I do not feel, which I do not feel and it’s coming in through my shoes.
    J ANUARY 25
    Sure enough, Nora came to see me and made a scene. “Look, doll, that’s the last time I ask you to play piano for me. We were quite an act.” What did I know about acts, I accompanied her as best I could, I remember hearing her as though she were muted.
Votre âme est un paysage choisi
 … but I watched my hands on the keys and it seemed to me they were playing all right, that they accompanied Nora decently. Luis María also was watching my hands. Poor thing, I think that was because it didn’t cheer him up particularly to look at my face. I must look pretty strange.
    Poor little Nora. Let someone else accompany her. (Each time this seems more of a punishment, now I know myself there only when I’m about to be happy, when I am happy, when Nora is singing Fauré I know myself there and only the hate is left.)
    N IGHT
    At times it’s tenderness, a sudden and necessary tenderness toward her who is not queen and walks there. I would like to send her a telegram, my respects, to know that her sons are well or that she does not have sons—because I don’t think there I have sons—and could use consolation,compassion, candy. Last night I fell asleep thinking up messages, places to meet. WILL ARRIVE THURSDAY STOP MEET ME AT BRIDGE. What bridge? An idea that recurs just as Budapest always recurs, to believe in the beggar in Budapest where they’ll have lots of bridges and percolating snow. Then I sat straight up in bed and almost bawling, I almost run and wake mama, bite her to make her wake up. I keep on thinking about it. It is still not easy to say it. I keep on thinking that if I really wanted to, if it struck my fancy, I would be able to go to Budapest right away. Or to Jujuy or Quetzaltenango. (I went back to look up those names, pages back.) Useless, it would be the same as saying Tres Arroyos, Kobe, Florida Street in the 400-block. Budapest just stays because
there
it’s cold, there they beat me and abuse me. There (I dreamed it, it’s only a dream, but as it sticks and works itself into my wakefulness) there’s someone called Rod—or Erod, or Rodo—and he beats me and I love him, I don’t know if I love him but I let him beat me, that comes back day after day, so I guess I do love him.
    L ATER
    A lie. I dreamed of Rod or made him from some dream figure already worn out or to hand. There’s no Rod, they’re punishing me there, but who knows whether it’s a man, an angry mother, a solitude.
    Come find me. To say to Luis María, “We’re getting married and you’re taking me to Budapest, to a bridge where there’s snow and someone.” I say: and if I am? (Because I think all that from the secret vantage point of not seriously believing it. And if I am?) All right, if I am … But plain crazy, plain …? What a honeymoon!
    J ANUARY 28
    I thought of something odd. It’s been three days now that nothing has come to me from the distances. Maybe they don’t beat her now, or she could have come by a coat. To send her a telegram, some stockings … I thought of something odd. I arrived in the terrible city and it was afternoon, a green watery afternoon as afternoons never are if one does not help out by thinking of them. Beside the Dobrina Stana, on the Skorda Prospect equestrian statues bristling with stalagmites of hoarfrost and stiff policemen, great smoking loaves of coarse bread and flounces of wind puffing in the windows. At a