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tourist’s pace, walking by the Dobrina, the map in the pocket of my blue suit (in this freezing weather and to leave my coat in the Burglos), until I come to a plaza next to the river, nearly in the river thundering with broken ice floes and barges and some kingfisher which is called there
sbunáia tjèno
or something worse.
    I supposed that the bridge came after the plaza. I thought that and did not want to go on. It was the afternoon of Elsa Piaggio de Tarelli’s concert at the Odeón, I fussed over getting dressed, unwilling, suspecting that afterwards only insomnia would be waiting for me. This thought of the night, so much of night … Who knows if I would not get lost. One invents names while traveling, thinking, remembers them at the moment: Dobrina Stana,
sbunáia tjéno
, the Burglos. But I don’t know the name of the square, it is a little as though one had really walked into a plaza in Budapest and was lost because one did not know its name; if there’s no name, how can there be a plaza?
    I’m coming, mama. We’ll get to your Bach all right, and your Brahms. The way there is easy. No plaza, no HotelBurglos. We are here, Elsa Piaggio there. Sad to have to interrupt this, to know that I’m in a plaza (but that’s not sure yet, I only think so and that’s nothing, less than nothing). And that at the end of the plaza the bridge begins.
    N IGHT
    Begins, goes on. Between the end of the concert and the first piece I found the name and the route. Vladas Square and the Market Bridge. I crossed Vladas Square to where the bridge started, going along slowly and wanting to stop at times, to stay in the houses or store windows, in small boys all bundled up and the fountains with tall heroes with their long cloaks all white, Tadeo Alanko and Vladislas Néroy, tokay drinkers and cymbalon players. I saw Elsa Piaggio acclaimed between one Chopin and another, poor thing, and my orchestra seat gave directly onto the plaza, with the beginning of the bridge between the most immense columns. But I was thinking this, notice, it’s the same as making the anagram
es la reina y
 … in place of Alina Reyes, or imagining mama at the Suarez’s house instead of beside me. Better not to fall for that nonsense; that’s something very strictly my own, to give in to the desire, the real desire. Real because Alina, well, let’s go—Not the other thing, not feeling her being cold or that they mistreat her. I long for this and follow it by choice, by knowing where it’s going, to find out if Luis María is going to take me to Budapest. Easier to go out and look for that bridge, to go out on my own search and find myself, as now, because now I’ve walked to the middle of the bridge amid shouts and applause, between “Albéniz!” and more applause and “The Polonaise!” as if that had any meaning amid the whipping snow which pushes against my back with the wind-force, hands like a thick towel around my waist drawing me to the center of the bridge.
    (It’s more convenient to speak in the present tense. This was at eight o’clock when Elsa Piaggio was playing the third piece, I think it was Julián Aguirre or Carlos Guastavino, something with pastures and little birds.) I have grown coarse with time, I have no respect for her now. I remember I thought one day: “There they beat me, there the snow comes in through my shoes and I know it at that moment, when it is happening to me there I know it at the same time. But why at the same time? Probably I’m coming late, probably it hasn’t happened yet. Probably they will beat her within fourteen years or she’s already a cross and an epitaph in the Sainte-Ursule cemetery.” And that seemed to me pleasant, possible, quite idiotic. Because behind that, one falls always into the matching time. If now she were really starting over the bridge, I know I would feel it myself, from here. I remember that I stopped to look at the river which was like spoiled mayonnaise thrashing against the