Severo Sarduy
I’m Listening
Translated from French to Spanish by Enrico Mario Santi, and from Spanish by
Enrico Mario Santi and Suzanne Jill Levine
I: Listening
She: I came to listen.
He: I can’t tell you anything. Nothing existed before. Everything happened
during the game, all the while questions were being asked.
She: What questions?
He: I don’t know. Whoever ran the game made them up. He arranged the décor, produced the script, directed the play using whatever he could find, like an old radio show, and whatever he heard there by chance, also a voice.
She: And the others?
He: According to the questions. According to the rules. The main thing was to change, to dress up, to become someone else. We’d make masks, white eyes upon a white face. We’d make up anything: a crime, an empty ritual, a sacrifice.
She: Who asked the questions?
He: He did. Always him. And you didn’t know why. It was just like a detective story: a story that took place in Tangiers simply because Arab music played on the radio. And then in the marketplace an old hawker sold us a clean cassette, only it wasn’t. A voice was on it. A commanding voice, maybe a dictator. We called him the Sacrificer.
She: And that’s how the game started?
He: Yes. Until the questions began, which laid out the rest.
She: What was it about?
He: We needed to forfeit something, to make something disappear . . .
She: Kill someone?
He: Yes. So, we wore masks. White face, white eyes, alum eyelids and lips. We became voracious giant insects, or evil dolls dressed up in chiffon, or crazy people. Once we were all dolled up, bedecked in silk, unrecognizable, we’d start the game. He said: “Isn’t not to be born the worst hieroglyph?” He just wanted to disappear, to be erased, to become a rock. We became the others.
She: And the play?
He: He was the one who made everything, directed everything.
She: Like a detective story?
He: Yes. At the end, we needed to withdraw. He wore a hat. And a white overcoat. Everything took place in the Tangiers casbah. Popular music in the background. And more: a menacing voice. A pleading drug addict, or a witch. An old man. Unintelligible words in French. A threat for sure.
She: Can I listen to it? (Cassette). But why pursue this. Why did you need to kill him?
He: He wanted to know how he’d be killed. He was the one who asked all the questions about his made-up death. To answer him we invented some story. Any old story, so long as he died at the end. Almost always about a drug addict, or death by overdose. Or else an obscure, inexplicable disappearance in a whorehouse, in the middle of a circle of boys waiting for . . .
She: A sacrifice.
He: Or rather, a slave auction. We’d take them there, naked and in chains. The traffickers licked their sweat to see if they were strong and in good health. And then we bought them cheap and resold them in the south, far away in the south, on the border of the desert.
She: Everybody joined the game?
He: He ́d ask the questions. The others played along according to the answers. It was the end that counted. Once the questions were done, the game started.
She: Okay, let’s start the voice again (cassette).
He puts his hand over her face.
II. Seeing
She: You called me.
He: A pale light, dirty mustard yellow, came down from the center skylight in
the big empty room. Remember?
She: No, I don’t. I don’t remember. In an empty room?
He: Yes, a pale light shining down like a whitish cone from the skylight.
She: And around it?
He: You know. You remember. The rooms. The smell of the bedrooms.
She: No, I don’t see. I don’t remember.
He: That’s where he disappeared.
She: Disappeared. The smell of the sheets. Yes, people had gone there to go to bed. People would go to bed with each other there. I remember.
He: Then that cloying sweet radio music. Always the same. Remember?
She: One could hear it from the square, right outside the house with the sky-light. The smell. I remember the smell in the square. Mint. Mint tea. I remem- ber now: burnt grass, the smell of hashish.
He: And inside the house? It smelled of spices. And sweat. People would come to go to bed with each other. All night long. Even until the late afternoon. A mustard-colored light. A light, sometimes milky, would come down from the skylight, like a cone-shaped mobile.
She: Yes, and the radio was always on. I remember.
He: It was there that he disappeared. In that smell. While they were shaking out the sheets, as if to dry them. The smell of sex. It was raining. Boys sitting in the dark room that was still damp, under the yellow light of the skylight. Sitting there. Waiting for something, or someone. They weren’t drinking. Some of them smoked. In silence. Some had taken off their shirts. Sweating. Drops of sweat sliding along their skin. Spice stink. Silence of the siesta, and suddenly a voice in Spanish. A scream. Someone looking for something. Or someone didn’t understand, was trying to understand. Music. The radio was turned low. It was inside that circle, under that light, listening to that voice in Spanish. Sweat, bare chests, in that house, while they were shaking the sheets, as if to dry them, that he disappeared.
She: I don’t know. I don’t remember. There were soldiers who came down from the mountain. There were some who waited all afternoon. The same music. The radio was on the floor, in the center of the circle.
He: You remember now?
She: Yes. There’s a moment when it all becomes clear—a drugged hazy light, unbearable, like just before one passes out, passing into the void, like a temporary death. Yes, that’s it: a temporary death. Later, everything that happened, remains.
He: The moment has disappeared.
She: No, not disappeared.
He: Destroyed, annihilated.
She: No, more like . . . erased. That’s it, erased. Someone entered this house. Beneath the skylight. In the large waiting room. Always listening to the same music. And then, yes, I remember a man’s recorded voice. Someone entering the circle, in the middle of the circle. And someone who’s erased. Listening to a man’s voice. This one. [cassette].
He: In the middle of the circle of boys. Bare chests. Some had taken off their jeans, or their flies were open. Underneath, one could see red or green briefs. A gaudy red, crimson, dried blood. A cool grassy green. A light Japanese green. Some of them were rubbing their penises, absent-mindedly, in the penumbra. Listening to the same music, smoking hashish. He entered the center of the circle. He said: “Who called me? Why?”
She: They called him over to make him disappear. They made him appear to precipitate his disappearance. To turn him into . . . what? I don’t know. I don’t remember. An intense light. Inside the circle. The recorded voice. And then, immediately, zero. Erased. Crossed out. Under the skylight.
He: Lost in the circle. A transference. A sacrifice. In the center of the circle, near the radio, was there a hole, a hatchway?
She: No.
He: Toward the back of the large room, a staircase? He came out of there in chains, his mouth covered with a band, sold like a slave in the open market in the square?
She: No.
He: They would taste the slaves’ sweat to know if they were healthy. A smell of sweat and mint. Smell of shaken sheets. I remember. Then we heard the radio and also the tired, trembling voice, the voice of a lost old man, gone astray, weary, a man who doesn’t understand . . . Then, he showed up in the waiting room. The owner of the house. A guy from Andalucia shouted something in Spanish. That’s when he disappeared in the circle, near the radio, under the skylight.
She: Passage into the void. Lost in its vast emptiness.
He: The voice, the smell of sheets. Sweat, semen, mint. Alcohol?
She: No.
He: The music. Always the same.
She: I remember. I entered the shadowy circle in the large room.
He: Yes, I remember.
She: A pale light that came down from a dirt mustard yellow, from the central skylight in the grand room. Boys sitting in a circle. And he in the middle. Silent. Exhausted. Dejected.
He: Sketched or drawn too vividly?
She: Erased.
FIN