Brown Scarf Blues Read Online Free Page A

at the last second. In Madrid, I left it in my room and it ended up raining. Again at the last second I stuck it in my backpack, on the way to Seville. It was useful here because it rained all day, on the bus the young man from the Three Cultures Foundation apologized for the weather as if he controlled it personally and as if the rain were a result of his carelessness.
    I was walking with the umbrella open and each time that I asked whether the scarf belonged to someone, it became more mine, in stages, so after I’d asked fifteen people, half of the scarf was mine, after twenty it was two thirds mine, and so on till we got on the bus to go take a late Andalusian siesta and prepare for the evening program.
    I’ll have to check into why the Spanish word for umbrella sounds plural, why we call it el paraguas and not los paraguas.
    5.
    On the second and final Saturday with the scarf, I went to visit my uncle and as I walked on the Paseo de la Castellana towards his place on the Paseo de la Habana, in that pedestrian-trodden stretch of La Castellana, I finally pissed on the Madrid soil, I couldn’t hold out any longer in that cold weather, and it wasn’t easy, between the four- and five-star hotels and the streets laid out carefully to minimize any hiding places, but just before I reached the Corte Inglés store at Nuevos Ministerios—where two of my books were!—I found a spot and pissed. If I meant to make Madrid mine during this trip, if I meant to take ownership of Madrid on this tenth journey to the city, my piss had marked my territory, my piss and the transient scarf. It wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t help it, so I found a small tree from which I could still see the endless boulevard, and I hope and think no one could see me and I did it fast, like a cat that wants to mark his territory and knows that at any moment someone could show up and scare him away but he has to do it.
    I wore the scarf as I walked up the Calle Embajadores for what would be my first meeting with my publishers, Daniel and Talía, who’d gotten married a week earlier but disliked being congratulated, and there I discovered that the publishing house got its name because it’s four floors up from the street. Daniel asked if I wanted to go up or if he should bring down the books he was going to give me, I said I’d go up, of course, little knowing that it was an exhausting trudge up four flights of old, difficult stairs. Both editors were as I’d imagined them from our email exchanges, I don’t think we’d ever spoken till that moment, I think it had all been through characters and words sent through the web. A web of words. Perhaps poetry is disappearing, but the world is more and more filled with words and writings of all kinds.
    The past is dead, and the future hasn’t been born.
    In the subway station for the line that would take me to my uncle’s place, the green line, a man talking on his cell phone was saying, “Listen, don’t make the same mistakes as last week, cut off the animal’s head first to make sure it’s dead, or shoot it if you like, no, it’s not enough to put it under anesthesia it has to be dead, then you open its guts from top to bottom, right, at the thorax, and cut them all out, you take out the kidneys and heart and put them on ice in the cooler for me, starting with the heart, close it quickly, and move fast, then you can run the rest through the crusher, till hamburger comes out...” We reached the station and got out. On her phone, a woman was telling a man, “Well, your wife should go talk to the school principal since that’s a mother’s job and I want to see you this afternoon, we haven’t seen each other in a week and you see her every day.”
    The world had died and we never even noticed.
    6.
    I reached the Casa del Libro bookstore on the Gran Vía, where I saw many books that interested me but I didn’t buy any, I was afraid of the weight, of putting my luggage over the weight limit, from books