Part II: Lines

At 10 a.m., the buildings around me begin to glow. The gray tenements become an arena. They take in and spit out people, harbor them, give birth to them, shape them, educate them. No one notices them anymore. They are like rocks in the mountains, water in the sea, oxygen in the air. The city is made of them, gloomy, too disgusting for tourists, too familiar for the disgusting inhabitants. We pass from one to the next, and the walls, ceilings, and stairs teach us yet another set of limitations. We're tired of them, yet we can't live without the sense of security they provide. After all, they protect us, from the side from the wind, from above from the rain, from below from the dampness of our own nature.

Every dirty tenement house, sometimes painted the color of damp and soot, becomes a silent witness to how we rise and fall, slowly, imperceptibly, just as their dignity is born in the rain. Every despised apartment building is a womb, an incubator where our fates are shaped. Every window lives in someone's memories. We thrash through the labyrinths of walls, leaving a part of ourselves behind. Milligrams of emotion remain among the sweat, dust, and excrement, settling on the walls along with cigarette smoke, along with cries of pleasure in the middle of the night. There is perhaps no more respectable occupation than the construction of houses, buildings, the magnanimous closing of the ominous sky over people with the firm, strong arm of a roof. So that we can love, hate, ripen like tomatoes in a greenhouse. In them, our fascinations, frustrations, and emotions are born. Within the four walls of every room in a crowded city, events unfold that we revisit for years or that we refuse to remember; our lives unfold there. They remain motionless, yet they create space for our collisions, our thoughts filling the next square meters. You, I, she… we merge into asymmetrical shapes of experiences and emotions amidst shapes calculated to the centimeter. Physics creates space for metaphysics, mathematics for poetry; the inanimate and cold embrace life. Our life. Just as we embrace cigarette smoke, allowing it to destroy us, age us, and make us dizzy. And above us are the walls, windows, and doors. Our microcosm. Exits, entrances, transitions, departures and returns. Moves, partings. Lovers like furniture, friends like paintings, sometimes dusted, sometimes restored. We have become so accustomed to them that we no longer realize their presence. And they, they, crack like the walls around us, imperceptibly decaying, just like us, each day absorbing another dose of metaphysical smoke. It settles on us, leaving streaks like dried drops on a windowpane. And we no longer see the world as it is outside the window. We see only gray buildings. They are there because they have always been there. We fall asleep certain, perhaps even irritated, by their unchanging presence. Unaware of the countless indefinite shapes, forms, manifestations of tragedy and comedy in each morning, each day of our lives. Events sketched by memories on the walls. Minds and feelings, stretched from wall to wall in a spiderweb into which, as we build it, we continually fall.

I opened that window each morning, then, with a slow, cinematic movement belonging to someone else, I lit a cigarette. From the fourth floor, abruptly cut off by a sloping roof, stretched a view of a dark, neglected courtyard. The higher, the better. Here reigned red roof tiles, pigeons and sparrows, and chimneys venting our frustration into the endless wasteland of the sky. Those who couldn't or couldn't climb that high languished in the shadow of their own homes, learning contempt and hatred.

The window had a wide sill, on which I sat with a cigarette, slowly and intently, so as not to knock my hot chocolate into the sinister abyss of the courtyard. Beside it stood an ashtray, gleaming with dishwashing liquid, still innocent, small and innocent, each morning anew immature for the role of the one who accepts all that is worst within herself, forced into obedience, submission, humility. But each morning beautiful anew. And I played the role of her pimp, sending her one long, bored, and stinking cigarette after another. Too bad.

Another morning marked the end of my life. I could already observe certain mechanisms, felt the recurrence of certain situations. Or, conversely, I was aware of their unpredictability, resigned to it. And above all, I remained silent, observing, gathering material for a novel I was sure I would never write.

The next morning of my life began in the same hallway as always. By the window opposite the stairs. To the left, diagonally, the window of my own room, the music of Sigur Rós drifting to my ears. Below me, the expanse of the courtyard. Emptiness. And something else.

A window on the other side of the courtyard, in the attic of the tenement house. The first on the right.

When I was halfway through my cigarette, it opened.

At first, she didn't notice me, but with a slow, cinematic movement, probably belonging to someone else, she lit a cigarette.

Her face was calm, slightly pensive. The freshness of the morning, evenly distributed on her face by the light of the warm, diminishing orange rays, gave her a serene expression. The undeniable delicacy and softness of her movements seemed to leave bright streaks in the air, marking the places where her warm, fragrant body cut through the space.

It seemed to me I could feel that warmth as if she were standing next to me. The scent was undefined, but its presence seemed certain.

She saw me. Her gaze lingered on me, plunging it into my flesh like a knife, as she would do many times from that moment on. I never fully recovered from it. Large, dark eyes filled with concentration, the eyes of a strong, aware person.

Despite the dozen or so meters separating us, I felt self-conscious, unsure of what would happen next.

She smiled. The corners of her thin, slender mouth lifted, forming a subtle composition of trembling lines, a key that unlocked the symmetrical reality of the masses surrounding me. Her mouth was an escape route.

It seemed to me that the poetry of her lips' movements had been absorbed by the walls surrounding me. The air trembled with me. Now, years later, I don't want to think that all this was happening in my head, embellished by the ripening, semi-dry taste of memories.

We looked at each other for a moment, smoking together, in silence. Her company liberated me from the squareness of the morning, from the prosaic, stifling symmetry of the walls.

(The remaining three years of our acquaintance were symmetrical, straight, crisscrossed with thick lines of reality. Lines that became increasingly powerful, recognizable, and shared. With our involvement, they stiffened, turning into rods, hardening like clay. What connected us was too strong to surrender us, even for a moment, to the illusory vibrations of banally straight lines.)