It’s hardly an assignation, a tryst not for love but for words, a repetition of that which already is written.įor Elisa, the protagonist, neither words nor love serve for consolation.
And yet, as before, she mews and caterwauls and demands to mate between dried-out tins in some wasteland. Although it’s a fact: she is different and the times are different and the streets are different and the restless cat vanished in the wind. She longs to go roaming, like a restless cat, as she used to do in other times. Elisa misses the deep night, which is to say she feels its absence. She misses the nights of dingy reddish and yellow lights, when a urine-like amber tints the streets, making them strange, turning them into swamps of mystery. The book I have in my hands seems to have an answer. Magazines, for example, or those disposable books that have the advantage of not adding to your ballast because they get left, forgotten, right where we finish reading them, if we have the patience to finish reading them, if we haven’t just casually leafed through them, like someone who, between flights, wants to step into other worlds, but only with the tip of her toe. I have a good book, I don’t need to go searching for the newsstand in order to settle for just anything. One airport is all the airports in the world. I am in Heathrow, I’ve arrived early against my inveterate custom of leaving everything for the last moment and I’m buried in reading while I sit waiting at the gate. Fleeing is a form of searching I read on page 98, but the phrase doesn’t resonate the way other parts of the novel echoed within me.
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