One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; 

so many things seem filled with the intent 

to be lost that their loss is no disaster. 

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster 

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: 

places, and names, and where it was you meant 

to travel. None of these will bring disaster. 

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or 

next-to-last, of three loved houses went. 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, 

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. 

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident 

the art of losing’s not too hard to master 

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Labyrinth of lies (2014)

Major Parker: You were all Nazis. In the Eastern sector, now you are all communists. Jesus, you Germans! If little green men from Mars landedtomorrow, you would all become green.

In treatment

Acceptance, Psychologies

Aureliano & Amaranta Úrsula 1

So Aureliano was still a virgin when Amaranta Úrsula returned to Macondo and gave him a sisterly embrace that left him breathless. Every time he saw her, and worse yet when she showed him the latest dances, he felt the same spongy release in his bones that had disturbed his great-great-grandfather when Pilar Ternera made her pretexts about the cards in the granary. Trying to squelch the torment, he sank deeper into the parchments and eluded the innocent flattery of that aunt who was poisoning his nights with a flow of tribulation, but the more he avoided her the more the anxiety with which he waited for her stony laughter, her howls of a happy cat, and her songs of gratitude, agonizing in love at all hours and in the most unlikely parts of the house. (...)

Aureliano, whose world at that time began with Melquíades’ parchments and ended in Nigromanta’s bed, found a stupid cure for timidity in the small imaginary brothel. At first he could get nowhere, in rooms where the proprietress would enter during the best moments of love and make all sorts of comments about the intimate charms of the protagonists. But with time he began to get so familiar with those misfortunes of the world that on one night that was more unbalanced than the others he got undressed in the small reception room and ran through the house balancing a bottle of beer on his inconceivable maleness. He was the one who made fashionable the extravagances that the proprietress celebrated with her eternal smile, without protesting, without believing in them just as when Germán tried to burn the house down to show that it did not exist, and as when Alfonso wrung the neck of the parrot and threw it into the pot where the chicken stew was beginning to boil.

Aureliano & Amaranta Úrsula 2

“Hello, cannibal,” she said to him. “Back in your cave again?” She was irresistible, with a dress she had designed and one of the long shad-vertebra necklaces that she herself had made. She had stopped using the leash, convinced of her husband’s faithfulness, and for the first time since her return she seemed to have a moment of ease. Aureliano did not need to see her to know that she had arrived. She put her elbows on the table, so close and so helpless that Aureliano heard the deep sound of her bones, and she became interested in the parchments. Trying to overcome his disturbance, he grasped at the voice that he was losing, the life that was leaving him, the memory that was turning into a petrified polyp, and he spoke to her about the priestly destiny of Sanskrit, the scientific possibility of seeing the future showing through in time as one sees what is written on the back of a sheet of paper through the light, the necessity of deciphering the predictions so that they would not defeat themselves, and the Centuries of Nostradamus and the destruction of Cantabria predicted by Saint Milanus. Suddenly, without interrupting the chat, moved by an impulse that had been sleeping in him since his origins, Aureliano put his hand on hers, thinking that that final decision would put an end to his doubts. She grabbed his index finger with the affectionate innocence with which she had done so in childhood, however, and she held it while he kept on answering questions. They remained like that, linked by icy index fingers that did not transmit anything in any way until she awoke from her momentary dream and slapped her forehead with her hand. “The ants!” she exclaimed.

Aureliano & Amaranta Úrsula 3

It had not occurred to her that she was arousing something more than fraternal affection in Aureliano until she pricked her finger trying to open a can of peaches and he dashed over to suck the blood out with an avidity and a devotion that sent a chill up her spine.

“Aureliano!” She laughed, disturbed. “You’re too suspicious to be a good bat.” Then Aureliano went all out. Giving her some small, orphaned kisses in the hollow of her wounded hand, he opened up the most hidden passageways of his heart and drew out an interminable and lacerated intestine, the terrible parasitic animal that had incubated in his martyrdom. He told her how he would get up at midnight to weep in loneliness and rage over the underwear that she had left to dry in the bathroom. He told her about the anxiety with which he had asked Nigromanta to howl like a cat and sob gaston gaston gaston in his ear, and with how much astuteness he had ransacked her vials of perfume so that he could smell it on the necks of the little girls who went to bed because of hunger. Frightened by the passion of that outburst, Amaranta Úrsula was closing her fingers, contracting them like a shellfish until her wounded hand, free of all pain and any vestige of pity, was converted into a knot of emeralds and topazes and stony and unfeeling bones.

“Fool!” she said as if she were spitting. “I’m sailing on the first ship leaving for Belgium.”