"THE MAN WITH THE FLOWER IN HIS MOUTH" "Well, I was just saying..." "Here you are, a law-abiding sort of man..." "You missed your train?" "By one minute." "I get to the station and see the damn thing just pulling out." "You could've run after it." "Sure." "It's silly, I know." "Sure, but for those damn packages." "I looked like an old packhorse." "You know women: errands, errands!" "You're never done." "Just think, it took three minutes to get my fingers on all those packages when I climbed out of the cab." "Two packages for each finger." "What a sight!" "Know what I'd have done?" "Left 'em in the cab." "How about my wife?" "And my daughters?" "And all their friends?" "They'd squawk." "I'd enjoy that." "Maybe you don't know how women carry on when they get into the country." "I know exactly how they carry on." "They tell you they won't need a thing." "That's how it is." "They pretend they live there to save money." "Women, my dear friend..." "My problem is what do I do in those three hours?" "I didn't bring the keys to our house here in town." "So...?" "I went.., to the parcel room at the station." "I left all my packages." "I went to a restaurant for supper, and then..." "I went to the theater to blow off some steam." "The heat nearly killed me." "Coming out, I say," ""What now?" "It's after midnight." "There isn't a train till four."" ""All this fuss for a few hours of sleep?" "It's not worth the ticket price."" "And so here I am." "This is open all night, isn't it?" "All night." "So you left your packages in the parcel room?" "Why do you ask?" "Don't you think you're safe?" "They were tied up well." " It's not about that." "I feel sure they're well tied up." "I know how well these clerks tie their cloth." "They make quite a specialty of it." "What hands!" "They take a good big piece of paper, doubly thick, with wavy lines..." "A pleasure just to look at it!" "So smooth, you could press it against your face and feel how cool and delicate it is." "They roll it out on the counter, then place your cloth in the middle of it with such agility." "Fine cloth too, neatly folded." "They raise one edge of the paper with the back of one hand, while lowering the other one, and bring the two edges together in an elegant fold" "Then they fold the corners down into a triangle with its apex turned in like this." "Instinctively pulling off exactly just enough, to tie up the parcel so quickly, you haven't even time to admire their virtuosity, and the little loop is ready for your finger!" "Anyone can see you've given a lot of attention to this matter." "Me?" "I spend whole days at it." "I can spend a solid hour at a single store window, admiring the bravura of the young clerks." "I lose myself in it." "I seem to be..." "I'd like to be that piece of silk, that bit of braid, that ribbon-red or blue that the clerks are measuring with their tape... you've seen what they do?" "They twist into a figure eight around the thumb and pinky of the left hand." "I look at the shoppers as they come out of the store with their bundles on their finger, left hand or under the arm." "My eyes follow them till they're out of sight." "I imagine..." "The things that I imagine!" "You have no idea." "But I need it." "I need this." "What is it that you need?" "Latching onto life with the imagination." "Like a creeper around the bars of a gate." "Giving it no rest, my imagination." "Clinging, clinging with my imagination... to the lives of others." "Not people I know, of course." "I couldn't do that." "That'd be annoying." "It'd nauseate me if they knew." "No, just strangers." "With them my imagination can work freely." "Not capriciously, though." "I take account of the smallest things I can find out about them." "You've no idea how my imagination functions." "I work my way in." "I get to see this man's house or that man's, I live in it." "I feel I belong there." "And I begin to notice... you know how a house, any old house, has its own air." "Your house?" "Mine?" "Of course, in your own house, you don't notice it any more, because it's the breath itself... of our life." "Am I clear?" "I see you agree." "I only meant... well, I was thinking what a good time you must have imagining all this!" "Good time?" "Me?" "Yes." "I can just see you..." "Tell me something." "Did you ever..." "Did you ever consult an eminent physician?" "Me?" "Why should I?" "I'm not sick!" "Don't be alarmed." "I only ask to know if you ever saw a fine doctor's waiting room, full of patients waiting their turn?" "Well, yes." "I once had... to take my little girl." "She suffers from nerves." "Okay." "You needn't tell me." "It's the waiting room..." "Have you ever given it much attention?" "The old-fashioned couch with dark covers, the upholstered table chairs that don't match as a rule, the armchairs?" "Staff bought at sales and auctions, for the convenience of the patients." "It doesn't belong to the house." "The doctor has quite another sort of room for himself, for his wife, his wife's friends, lavish, lovely." "If you took one of the chairs from the drawing room and put it in the waiting room, why, it'd stick out like a sore thumb." "The waiting room is quite proper, quite respectable." "I'd like to know if you, when you went with your little girl, if you took a good look at the chair you sat in?" "Well, um, no, I guess I didn't." "Of course not." "You weren't sick." "But often even the sick don't notice." "They're all taken up with their sickness." "How many times, some of them sit, staring intently... at a finger as it makes meaningless markings on the polished chair arm." "They're thinking, so they don't see." "And what an impression you get, when you get out of the doctor's office and cross the waiting room and see the chair you'd been sitting in awaiting sentence on the as yet unknown sickness just a short time before." "Now, there's another patient on it and he's hugging his secret sickness too." "Or it's empty, impassive, waiting for Mr. X to come and sit on it." "What were we saying?" "Oh, yes." "The pleasure of imagining things." "Who knows why I suddenly thought of one of those chairs in the doctor's house, where sick people are waiting!" "Yes, it certainly..." "You don't see the connection?" "Neither do I." "You recall an image, you recall another image, they're unrelated, they're unrelated, and yet, they're not unrelated, for you." "Oh, no, they have their reasons, they stem from your experience." "Of course you must pretend they don't when you talk, you must forget them." "Most often they're so illogical, these analogies." "The connection could be this, maybe." "Do they get any pleasure... those chairs from imagining which patient will sit on them next?" "What sickness lurks inside him?" "What will he do after the visit?" "Of course they don't." "And it's the same with me." "I get no pleasure from it." "Many clients come... and they are there, poor chairs, to be occupied." "I occupy myself in a similar way." "With this one or that one." "You for instance." "I get no pleasure at all from the train you missed, the family waiting for that train in the country, your other little troubles..." "I've plenty, you know that?" "You should thank God, they're little." "Some people have big troubles, my dear sir." "I feel the need to latch on, by the skin of my imagination, to the lives of others." "Yet..." "I get no pleasure from this." "It doesn't even interest me." "Quite the reverse." "One wants to see what their troubles are just to prove that life is idiotic and stupid!" "So that one won't mind being through with it!" "Proving that to yourself takes quite a bit of doing, huh?" "You need evidence, you need a hundred and one instances, and you must be implacable!" "Because, my dear sir, we don't know what he's made of, but it exists, and we all feel it, we feel it like a pain in the throat, it's the hunger for life!" "A hunger that is never appeased, that never can be appeased, because life as we live it from moment to moment, is so hungry itself, hungry for itself, we never get to taste it even!" "The taste of life is all in the past, we carry it inside us." "The pleasure of life comes from that." "From the memories which are tied to." "But tied to what?" "To this idiocy here..." "to these irritations... so many silly illusions, mad pursuits..." "Yes..." "What today is an idiocy..." "What today is an irritation... what today is a misfortune." "A true misfortune, sir." "Four years pass, five years, ten, and who knows what taste it will have, what tears will be shed over it!" "Life, oh Lord!" "You only have to think of giving it up... especially... if it's a matter of days." "Look!" "See that?" "At the corner!" "See that woman, that shadow of a woman?" "She's hiding now." "What?" "Who was it?" "You didn't see?" "She's hiding now." "A woman?" " My wife." " Ah!" "Your wife?" "She keeps an eye on me." "Sometimes, I could just go over and kick her!" "It wouldn't do any good, though." "She's as stubborn as a lost dog:" "the more you kick it, the closer it sticks to you." "What that woman is suffering on my account you couldn't imagine." "She doesn't eat, doesn't sleep any more." "Just follows me around, night and day." "At a distance." "She might brush her clothes once in a while... and that old shoe of a hat." "She isn't a woman any more." "Just a rag doll." "Her hair's going gray, yes, the white dust has settled on her temples forever." "And she's only thirty-four." "You wouldn't believe how much she annoys me." "Sometimes I grab hold of her and shake her." ""You're an idiot!" I shout." "She takes it." "She stands there looking at me." "Oh, that look!" "It makes my fingers itch." "I feel like strangling her!" "Nothing happens, of course." "She just waits till I'm a short way off." "Then she starts following me again." "Poor woman!" "Poor woman?" "You know what she wants?" "She wants me to stay and take it easy at home... all cozy and quiet, and let her be nice to me, look after me, show me wifely tenderness..." "Home!" "The rooms in perfect order, the furniture elegant and neat, silence reigns..." "It used to, anyway." "Silence, measured by the tick-tock of the dining room clock!" "That's what she wants!" "I just want you to see the absurdity of it!" "Isn't it absurd?" "It's worse:" "it's cruel, it's macabre!" "Don't you see?" "Think of the houses in Messina." "Or in Avezzano." "Suppose they knew an earthquake was coming." "Could they just sit quietly in the moonlight, lined up in a row along the streets and squares, not daring to deviate one inch from the plans of the City Planning Commission?" "Those cities would drop everything and take to their heels!" "Imagine the citizens of Avezzano and Messina." "Would they calmly get undressed and go to bed?" "Fold their clothes and put their shoes outside the door?" "And creeping down under the bedclothes, enjoy the freshly laundered sheets?" "Knowing that in a few hours, they would be dead?" "You think they might?" "Maybe your wife..." " Let me finish." "If death, my dear sir, if death were some strange, filthy insect... that just settled on you as it were, took you unawares." "You're walking along." "All of a sudden a passerby stops you, and, with finger and thumb cautiously extended says," ""Excuse me, sir, but death has settled on you!"" "And with finger and thumb cautiously extended, he throws it away." "Wouldn't that be wonderful?" "But death is not a filthy insect." "Many." "Many passersby, no matter how carefree, have it on their backs." "They don't see it." "They're thinking what they'll be doing tomorrow or the day after tomorrow." "Look, my dear sir, come here..." "Come under the lamp." "Come over here..." "I'll show you something." "Look." "Under this side of my mustache." "See that little knob?" "Royal purple?" "Know what they call it?" "It has such a poetic name." "Sweeter than caramel." "Epithelioma, they call it." "Try it, isn't it soft and sweet?" "...Epithelioma..." "Death..." "Understand?" "passed my way." "He stuck this flower in my mouth and said," ""Keep it, old chap." "I'll stop by again in eight months, or maybe ten."" "Now you tell me, if with this flower in my mouth," "I could remain calmly and quietly at home, as that unhappy girl would like?" "I yell at her. "So you want me to kiss you, do you?"" ""Yes, kiss me!"" "You know what she did last week?" "She took a pin... and cut herself here on the lip, then she took hold of my head and tried to kiss me." "Tried to kiss me on the mouth." "She said she wanted to die with me." "She's insane." "I'm not home!" "Ever!" "What I want... is to stand at store windows, admiring the virtuosity of clerks!" "Because, you see, if ever I feel empty..." "I could destroy, as if it were nothing, the life of someone I don't know!" "I'd take a gun and kill someone, like you maybe, who's missed his train." "Of course, I'm only joking." "I'll go now." "It'd be myself I'd kill." "But..." "At this time of year, there's a certain kind of good apricot." "How do you eat them?" "Skin and all?" "You cut them in exact halves, you take hold with finger and thumb," "Like a woman's lips!" "How succulent!" "I wish to send my best wishes to your good lady and her daughters, in your country home." "I imagine them dressed in white and light blue in a lovely green meadow in the shade." "Will, you do me a favor when you arrive tomorrow morning?" "As I figure it, your village is a certain distance from the station." "It'll be dawn." "You'll be on foot..." "The first tuft of grass you see by the roadside..." "Just count the blades of grass...." "However many blades of grass there are... will be the number of days I have left to live." "One last request:" "Pick a big tuft!" "Please." "Good night, dear sir."