Read Online Stolen Pleasures by Gina Berriault - Free Book Online

around his neck, do you see him waking up happy, hallooing the sun? Same thing.”
    â€œSame thing as what?”
    No answer, only another cough, probably called up to cover his amusement over an obtuse librarian with a silk tie around his stiff neck.
    â€œYou know anything about the guy who wrote it? The bear didn’t write it, that I know.”
    â€œNo, the bear did not write it. Darío wrote it. A modernist, brought Spanish poetry into the modern age. Born in Chile. No, Nicaragua. Myself, I like Lorca. Lorca, you know, was assassinated by Franco’s Guardia Civil.” Why that note? Because, if it happened to him, Alberto Perera, here and now, his death might possess a similar meaning. An enlightened heart snuffed out.
    â€œWhen he says like, Spider, greet the sun, where do you figure he was lying?” Slyly, the fellow waited.
    â€œWas he lying?” Always the assumption that poets lie. Why else do they deliberately twist things around?
    â€œWhat I mean is,” grudgingly patient, “where was he lying when the sun came up?”
    â€œThe spider, you mean?” asked Perera. “Lying in wait?”
    â€œThe poet.”
    â€œThe spider was in its web. I don’t know where the poet was.”
    â€œI’ll tell you. The poet was lying in his own bed.”
    â€œThat’s a thought.”

    â€œThat’s not a thought. That’s the truth.”
    â€œA poem can come to you wherever you are,” Perera explained. “Whatever you’re doing. Sleeping, eating, even looking in the fridge, or when you think you’re dying. I imagine that in his case he wakes up one morning after a bad night, takes a look at the sun, and accepts who he is. He accepts the enigma of himself.”
    â€œAre you?”
    â€œAm I what? An enigma?”
    â€œAre you glad you wake up who you are?”
    â€œI can say yes to that.”
    â€œYou give thanks to God?”
    â€œMore or less.”
    â€œGreat. I bet you wake up in your own bed. That’s what I’m saying. What’s-his-name wouldn’t’ve thought up that poem if he woke up where he was lying on the sidewalk.”
    â€œDarío,” said Perera, “could very well have waked up on a sidewalk. He pursued that sort of life. Opium, absinthe. Quite possibly he was visited by that poem while lying on the sidewalk.”
    â€œThen he went back to his own bed and slept it off.”
    With trembling fingers the fellow gathered up his scraps from the desk. Trembling with what? With timidity, if this was a confrontation with a guardian of the virtues of every book in the place? As he bent to the floor to pick up his scraps, the crown of his head was revealed, the hair sprinkled with a scintilla of the stuff of the streets and the culture. How old was he, this fellow? Not more than thirty, maybe younger. Young, with no staying power.
    By the door a coughing spell took hold of him. With his back to Perera he drew out from yet another pocket in the murky interior
of the parka one of those large Palestinian scarves that Arafat wore around his head and were to be seen in the windows of used-clothing stores, and brought up into it whatever he had tried to keep down. Voiceless, he left, his bare ankles slapped by the grimy cuffs of his pants.
    Perera imagined him shuffling down the hall, then down the wide white marble stairs, the grandiose interior stairs, centerpiece of this eternal granite edifice. As for Darío’s admonition to the spider to show no rancor, that fellow’s rancor was showing all over him. Yet his voice was scratchily respectful and his fingers trembled. Anybody who inquires so relentlessly into the meaning of a poem, and presses the words of poets into the ephemerae of the streets, would surely return, borne up the marble stairs by all those uplifting thoughts in his pockets.
    Â 
    ALBERTO PERERA, A librarian if for just a few months more, shortly to be retired, went