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Chickasaw
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The Eyes of
a Blue Dog
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Then she looked at me. I thought that she was looking at me for the first time.
But then, when she turned around behind the lamp and I kept feeling her
slippery and oily look in back of me, over my shoulder, I understood that it
was I who was looking at her for the first time. I lit a cigarette. I took a
drag on the harsh, strong smoke, before spinning in the chair, balancing on one
of the rear legs. After that I saw her there, as if she'd been standing beside
the lamp looking at me every night. For a few brief minutes that's all we did:
look at each other. I looked from the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs.
She stood, with a long and quiet hand on the lamp, looking at me. I saw her
eyelids lighted up as on every night. It was then that I remembered the usual
thing, when I said to her: "Eyes of a blue dog." Without taking her
hand off the lamp she said to me: "That. We'll never forget that."
She left the orbit, sighing: "Eyes of a blue dog. I've written it
everywhere."
I saw her walk over to the dressing table. I watched her appear in the circular
glass of the mirror looking at me now at the end of a back and forth of
mathematical light. I watched her keep on looking at me with her great hot-coal
eyes: looking at me while she opened the little box covered with pink mother of
pearl. I saw her powder her nose. When she finished, she closed the box, stood
up again, and walked over to the lamp once more, saying: "I'm afraid that
someone is dreaming about this room and revealing my secrets." And over
the flame she held the same long and tremulous hand that she had been warming
before sitting down at the mirror. And she said: "You don't feel the
cold." And I said to her: "Sometimes." And she said to me:
"You must feel it now." And then I understood why I couldn't have
been alone in the seat. It was the cold that had been giving me the certainty
of my solitude. "Now I feel it," I said. "And it's strange
because the night is quiet. Maybe the sheet fell off." She didn't answer.
Again she began to move toward the mirror and I turned again in the chair,
keeping my back to her. Without seeing her, I knew what she was doing. I knew
that she was sitting in front of the mirror again, seeing my back, which had
had time to reach the depths of the mirror and be caught by her look, which had
also had just enough time to reach the depths and return--before the hand had
time to start the second turn--until her lips were anointed now with crimson,
from the first turn of her hand in front of the mirror. I saw, opposite me, the
smooth wall, which was like another blind mirror in which I couldn't see her--
sitting behind me--but could imagine her where she probably was as if a mirror
had been hung in place of the wall. "I see you," I told her. And on
the wall I saw what was as if she had raised her eyes and had seen me with my
back turned toward her from the chair, in the depths of the mirror, my face
turned toward the wall. Then I saw her lower he eyes again and remain with her
eyes always on her brassiere, not talking. And I said to her again: "I see
you." And she raised her eyes from her brassiere again. "That's
impossible," she said. I asked her why. And she, with her eyes quiet and
on her brassiere again: "Because your face is turned toward the
wall." Then I spun the chair around. I had the cigarette clenched in my
mouth. When I stayed facing the mirror she was back by the lamp. Now she had
her hands open over the flame, like the two wings of a hen, toasting herself,
and with her face shaded by her own fingers. "I think I'm going to catch
cold," she said. "This must be a city of ice." She turned her
face to profile and her skin, from copper to red, suddenly became sad. "Do
something about it," she said. And she began to get undressed, item by
item, starting at the top with the brassiere. I told her: "I'm going to
turn back to the wall." She said: "No. In any case, you'll see me the
way you did when your back was turned." And no sooner had she said it than
she was almost completely undressed, with the flame licking her long copper
skin. "I've always wanted to see you like that, with the skin of your belly
full of deep pits, as if you'd been beaten." And before I realized that my
words had become clumsy at the sight of her nakedness she became motionless,
warming herself on the globe of the lamp, and she said: "Sometimes I think
I'm made of metal." She was silent for an instant. The position of her
hands over the flame varied slightly. I said: "Sometimes in other dreams,
I've thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some museum.
Maybe that's why you're cold." And she said: "Sometimes, when I sleep
on my heart, I can feel my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate. Then,
when the blood beats inside me, it's as if someone were
calling by knocking on my stomach and I can feel my own copper sound in the
bed. It's like- -what do you call it--laminated
metal." She drew closer to the lamp. "I would have liked to hear
you," I said. And she said: "If we find each other sometime, put your
ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you'll hear me echoing. I've
always wanted you to do it sometime." I heard her breathe heavily as she
talked. And she said that for years she'd done nothing different. Her life had
been dedicated to finding me in reality, through that identifying phrase:
"Eyes of a blue dog." And she went along the street saying it aloud,
as a way of telling the only person who could have understood her:
"I'm the one who comes into your dreams every night and tells you: 'Eyes
of a blue dog.'" And she said that she went into restaurants and before
ordering said to the waiters: "Eyes of a blue dog." But the waiters
bowed reverently, without remembering ever having said that in their dreams.
Then she would write on the napkins and scratch on the varnish of the tables
with a knife: "Eyes of a blue dog." And on the steamed-up windows of
hotels, stations, all public buildings, she would write with her forefinger:
"Eyes of a blue dog." She said that once she went into a drugstore
and noticed the same smell that she had smelled in her room one night after
having dreamed about me. "He must be near," she thought, seeing the
clean, new tiles of the drugstore. Then she went over to the clerk and said to
him: "I always dream about a man who says to me: 'Eyes of a blue
dog.'" And she said the clerk had looked at her eyes and told her: "As
a matter of fact, miss, you do have eyes like that." And she said to him:
"I have to find the man who told me those very words in my dreams."
And the clerk started to laugh and moved to the other end of the counter. She
kept on seeing the clean tile and smelling the odor. And she opened her purse
and on the tiles with her crimson lipstick, she wrote in red letters:
"Eyes of a blue dog." The clerk came back from where he had been. He
told her: Madam, you have dirtied the tiles." He gave her a damp cloth, saying:
"Clean it up." And she said, still by the lamp, that she had spent
the whole afternoon on all fours, washing the tiles and saying: "Eyes of a
blue dog," until people gathered at the door and said she was crazy.
Now, when she finished speaking, I remained in the corner, sitting, rocking in
the chair. "Every day I try to remember the phrase with which I am to find
you," I said. "Now I don't think I'll forget it tomorrow. Still, I've
always said the same thing and when I wake up I've always forgotten what the
words I can find you with are." And she said: "You invented them
yourself on the first day." And I said to her: "I invented them
because I saw your eyes of ash. But I never remember the next morning."
And she, with clenched fists, beside the lamp, breathed deeply: "If you
could at least remember now what city I've been writing it in."
Her tightened teeth gleamed over the flame. "I'd like to touch you
now," I said. She raised the face that had been looking at the light; she
raised her look, burning, roasting, too, just like her, like her hands, and I
felt that she saw me, in the corner where I was sitting, rocking in the chair.
"You'd never told me that," she said. "I tell you now and it's
the truth," I said. >From the other side of the lamp she asked for a
cigarette. The butt had disappeared between my fingers. I'd forgotten I was
smoking. She said: "I don't know why I can't remember where I wrote
it." And I said to her: "For the same reason that tomorrow I won't be
able to remember the words." And she said sadly: "No. It's just that
sometimes I think that I've dreamed that too." I stood up and walked
toward the lamp. She was a little beyond, and I kept on walking with the
cigarettes and matches in my hand, which would not go beyond the lamp. I held
the cigarette out to her. She squeezed it between her lips and leaned over to
reach the flame before I had time to light the match. "In some city in the
world, on all the walls, those words have to appear in writing: 'Eyes of a blue
dog," I said. "If I remembered them tomorrow I could find you."
She raised her head again and now the lighted coal was between her lips.
"Eyes of a blue dog," she sighed, remembered, with the cigarette
drooping over her chin and one eye half closed. The she sucked in the smoke with
the cigarette between her fingers and exclaimed: "This is something else
now. I'm warming up." And she said it with her voice a little lukewarm and
fleeting, as if she hadn't really said it, but as if she had written it on a
piece of paper and had brought the paper close to the flame while I read:
"I'm warming," and she had continued with the paper between her thumb
and forefinger, turning it around as it was being consumed and I had just read
". . . up," before the paper was completely consumed and dropped all
wrinkled to the floor, diminished, converted into light ash dust. "That's
better," I said. "Sometimes it frightens me to see you that way. Trembling beside a lamp."
We had been seeing each other for several years. Sometimes, when we were
already together, somebody would drop a spoon outside and we would wake up.
Little by little we'd been coming to understand that our friendship was
subordinated to things, to the simplest of happenings. Our meetings always
ended that way, with the fall of a spoon early in the morning.
Now, next to the lamp, she was looking at me. I remembered that she had also
looked at me in that way in the past, from that remote dream where I made the
chair spin on its back legs and remained facing a strange woman with ashen
eyes. It was in that dream that I asked her for the first time: "Who are
you?" And she said to me: "I don't remember." I said to her:
"But I think we've seen each other before." And she said,
indifferently: "I think I dreamed about you once, about this same
room." And I told her: "That's it. I'm beginning to remember
now." And she said: "How strange. It's certain that we've met in
other dreams."
She took two drags on the cigarette. I was still standing, facing the lamp,
when suddenly I kept looking at her. I looked her up and down and she was still
copper; no longer hard and cold metal, but yellow, soft, malleable copper.
"I'd like to touch you," I said again. And she said: "You'll
ruin everything." I said: "It doesn't matter now. All we have to do is
turn the pillow in order to meet again." And I held my hand out over the
lamp. She didn't move. "You'll ruin everything," she said again
before I could touch her. "Maybe, if you come around behind the lamp, we'd
wake up frightened in who knows what part of the world." But I insisted:
"It doesn't matter." And she said: "If we turned over the
pillow, we'd meet again. But when you wake up you'll have forgotten." I
began to move toward the corner. She stayed behind, warming her hands over the
flame. And I still wasn't beside the chair when I heard her say behind me:
"When I wake up at
Then I remained with my face toward the wall. "It's already dawning,"
I said without looking at her. "When it struck two I was awake and that
was a long time back." I went to the door. When I had the knob in my hand,
I heard her voice again, the same, invariable. "Don't open that
door," she said. "The hallway is full of difficult dreams." And
I asked her: "How do you know?" And she told me: "Because I was
there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on
my heart." I had the door half opened. I moved it a little and a cold, thin
breeze brought me the fresh smell of vegetable earth, damp fields. She spoke
again. I gave the turn, still moving the door, mounted on silent hinges, and I
told her: "I don't think there's any hallway outside here. I'm getting the
smell of country." And she, a little distant, told me: "I know that
better than you. What's happening is that there's a woman outside dreaming
about the country." She crossed her arms over the flame. She continued
speaking: "It's that woman who always wanted to have a house in the country
and was never able to leave the city." I remembered having seen the woman
in some previous dream, but I knew, with the door ajar now, that within half an
hour I would have to go down for breakfast. And I said: "In any case, I
have to leave here in order to wake up."
Outside the wind fluttered for an instant, then remained quiet, and the
breathing of someone sleeping who had just turned over in bed could be heard.
The wind from the fields had ceased. There were no more smells. "Tomorrow
I'll recognize you from that," I said. "I'll recognize you when on
the street I see a woman writing 'Eyes of a blue dog' on the walls." And
she, with a sad smile--which was already a smile of surrender to the
impossible, the unreachable--said: "Yet you won't remember anything during
the day." And she put her hands back over the lamp, her features darkened
by a bitter cloud. "You're the only man who doesn't remember anything of
what he's dreamed after he wakes up."
The
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