Buena Vista Social Club

Ten years ago while aestivating in Paris I devoted an inordinate amount of time to the simple city pleasures of the young and untrammeled, Paris being specifically designed for such lollygagging.  The summer was warmer than it should have been; my interests were split among reading a very long and very famous French novel and logging some quality hours with my cousins; and, as often as I could, I roamed a metropolis that enthralls so many visitors because it has never declared its allegiance.  There are parts of Paris which persuade you that the Revolution against the moneyed and profligate has never ebbed; others which suggest these overlords still reign unrepentant.  Whatever you may think of fashion, trend, or advertising (regular readers will know how I stand – quite aside), Paris must be counted among the freest cities in the world for sustaining a remarkable range of analyses and categories without yielding to any one of them in particular.  And despite its having hosted a series of insurrections, mutinies, and riots, it is the opposite of the boarded-up shanty towns that masquerade as socialist centers of culture.  Now I am all for governmental support of the underprivileged, the weak, and the sick because the rest of us can jolly well take care of ourselves; but what a country's government should never do is banish its citizens to uniformity, unemotionality, and hardscrabble everydayness.  Its soul should never be ripped from it because having a soul means having the choice to do good.  Which makes my discovery that summer of this unusual film all the more appropriate.

The beginning has the taste of legend: people talking about the Buena Vista as if it no longer existed – which, with changing times in Cuba, is and is not the case.  Interspersed with these fragmentary interviews are clips from the group's April 1998 two-night performance in Amsterdam; from the crowd's enthusiasm I initially took the concert site to be Cuba.  The godfather of this project, and the only reason the film exists in the format it does, is American guitarist Ry Cooder who admits "wandering about Cuba with his wife in the 1970s looking for son music."  Melomaniacs will be quick to point out that son cubano is the direct ancestor of this type of popular Latin music, and similarities are audible even to the novice.  We are then introduced to an eclectic group of once-forgotten stars, among them: Compay Segundo, a chain-smoking ninety-year-old responsible for the arrangement of the group's most famous tune, "Chan Chan"; one of their lead singers, Ibrahim Ferrer, seventy years in physical age but imbued with the charisma and swagger of any young superstar; Rubén González, a son pianist considered by his peers to be the best of his kind; Orlando "Cachaito" López, who was told by his family he couldn't become anything but a contrabassist; Omara Portuondo, the diva; and Pio Leyva ("The Cuban Highlander"), a wise-cracking Groucho Marx look-alike whose ego is as deep as his voice.  A director of a fictional documentary would be hard-pressed to cast a more diverse group, especially considering how smoothly they all perform together as if they had always worked as a unit (which of course they hadn't; their familiarity with one another is owing mostly to mutual admiration).  Bits and pieces of their tales are made known, some less fortunate than others, yet the viewer is duly aware that their paths will converge in a harmonious end. 

There is also much music to enjoy.  "Chan Chan," the opening number, is absolutely hypnotic, Ferrer's "Two gardenias" almost as good.  Another striking scene showcases tiny Cuban ballerinas and gymnasts skipping and hopping about with González on piano – a stark contrast to the slum-like images at the film's onset.  It is important to note that none of them is a virtuoso, perhaps because it would be too easy to concentrate our attention on the best musicians of the world, or even the most talented of Cuba; in essence, these are jazzistas.  And although jazz often takes far less technical training, it requires more color and personal spunk to achieve because the aim of jazz is liberation not perfection, freedom from the constraints imposed by conservatory after conservatory, with extended soloing meant to mock the anonymity of the typical orchestra.  The album itself revives many of the forgotten stars, perhaps to remind Cuba of how glorious it once was (which may also remind viewers of this film).  So when the group chants that "the dancers are coming, all the roads are jammed," some might view the masses assembled as Directorian in nature.  What is more interesting, however, are the sideways implications of the film's closing scenes in which band members finally make it to this historical venue: Leyva and a colleague come to a store full of touristic oddities, including dolls of presidents, and posters and figures of famous entertainers, none of whom they can identify by name.  Are they richer or poorer for such a lacuna in general knowledge?  The question is left open since, for them, an answer would mean that they cared more than they possibly could.

Reviews of Buena Vista Social Club were overwhelmingly positive, but I should mention the comments of one famous critic (paraphrased here to keep the Google hounds at bay).  While enamored with every minute of music that is played in the film, our man (not) in Havana derides Wenders's technique of cutting off songs, jiggling his handheld camera, and, most damningly, ending the film not with the band's Carnegie Hall triumph, but with its awed twilight tour of the streets of New York.  There is an obvious political angle to this strategy which either eludes the critic or which he deems of secondary importance – but politics is hardly the point.  All art should seek to wed content to form, to reflect in every atom what its moral foundation would have you describe as its essential elements, and what Wenders achieves in this regard should not be dismissed.  His casual, disorganized, and often impromptu method of capturing tidbits of life and music from these talented individuals will necessarily not result in your typical homage to musical genius – which is exactly what our critic seems to desire.  Odd, fragmented, sad stories deserve to be told in an unwieldy and gritty fashion that bears meaning in the smallest detail, meaning lost if the film were to be recorded and edited as tightly as the film's eponymous soundtrack.  So when Ferrer observes that, "we Cubans are very fortunate. We are small, but I tell you, we are strong. We have managed to resist the good and the bad," one might do well to think of the cinematic tribute to their discipline.  After all, if you can only resist the bad, you'll only be as good as everyone else.

Akhmatova, "Алиса"

A work ("Alisa") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

1

She worried still about the past,          
About her dreams of distant Mays, 
As Pierrette's mind became the last  
Retreat of whole and golden days.

The shards of jug she gathered strewn,  
Not knowing how to piece them back.           
"If only you, Alisa, knew                           
How life is dull, how life is slack!

"At dinner yawns engulf the meal,    
And food and drink I soon forget.   
Be sure oblivion conceals
My brows, which I no longer fret.

"Give me the means, Alisa mine,    
To bring it back, all back to me!   
All that I have is yours with time,             
From house and clothes then set me free.         

"He came to me in dream-like crown,         
Each night I fear, each night lie scared!"   
Do you know whose dark ringlet frowns             
In the locket Alisa wears?   

2

"How late! So tired then I yawn."
"Мignon, lie there, you needn't move,
My reddish hair, coiffed and drawn,
For my coy mistress I improve."

In bows of green with pearly hasp
Amidst her hair, she read the note:
"I'll wait for you by maple's grasp;
For you I'll wait, O Count unknown!"

Beneath a mask of lace I see 
Her stifle laughs of baleful spite; 
Today she even ordered me    
To strangle her with garters tight.   

On blackest dress came morning's face  
From window's corner dark it shone:
"And me I know he will embrace
By maple's grasp, my Count unknown."

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

A special day requires a special topic, and again I turn to a reluctant masterpiece.

In the beginning we see a rainy puddle on a dark city street; the only sound apart from the rain is music from Arab North Africa, music that to the untrained ear seems plaintive, mournful, and bone-chilling.  It will take another scene to show us we are in Germany and a couple more to indicate we are in this city.  Out of the rain comes Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira), a sixtyish charwoman, who enters an estaminet where everyone seems to know each other but not her.  "I walk by every night and hear foreign music," she says with the curiosity typical of old people trying to recall happy memories, "in what language are they singing?"  "Arabic," says the bar owner, a tall, buxom blonde with odd bags beneath her eyes.  Emmi then asks what the usual drink is in this bar, as if she had forgotten how to order a drink and didn't want to offend the regulars by imposing her will upon them.  She gets a cola and the attention of the few people near the bar.  Two tall, swarthy, handsome fellows in their mid- to late thirties, one clean-shaven, the other with a full beard, are clearly not Germans, whereas the territorial behavior of the two women frolicking beside them suggests they have never left Munich.  On a dare, the bearded man approaches Emmi and asks her to dance.  They dance, talk, immediately recognize their mutual solitude in a world not designed for them, and then walk to Emmi's place together.  Later that same night, after the man has missed the last streetcar home, they begin a love affair.

The man's name, on and off-screen, is El Hedi Ben Salem M'Barek Mohammed Mustafa, and his homeland in both realities is Morocco.  He was a boxer before moving to Germany and becoming involved with this director, his strapping muscles displayed in many scenes throughout the film.  On-screen, however, he is an auto mechanic who left his small village  two years ago to seek a better life abroad ("Morocco is beautiful," he explains, "but there are no jobs").  His German is clearly pronounced although his verbs remain unconjugated and his nouns undeclined; even his name is far too unwieldy for Germans, so he is dubbed "Ali," or how many Middle Eastern guest workers (mostly, as it were, Turks) were referred to in postwar Europe.  He accepts this moniker because he is not the same person as he once was at home.  "Ali" has evolved into a perfect metaphor for the thankless work he performs every day for relatively low wages, as well as the lumping categorization that he and his fellow Muslims endure.  The setup for their relationship is abetted by the fact that Emmi's deceased husband was also a foreigner, a Pole by the name of Franciszek, with whom she had three ingrate children before he died twenty years before (as she leads Ali upstairs for the first time, two nosy and appalled neighbors mention her "foreigner" and then concur that "she's not even a real German with that last name Kurowski").  In a way Ali reminds her of the pleasant strangeness that comes with talking to a total outsider, one who has not taken all of Germany's luxuries for granted, one who "always finds her coffee good," one who is thankful for friends, intimacy, and the flotsam of human kindness bobbing about the sea of man.  Ali does not do much with his time ("always working, always drinking, not good"), and is therefore not averse to moving out of an apartment he shares with "five Arab colleagues" and starting a meaningful life with someone who appreciates him.  They get married without telling a soul, then lunch at a restaurant in which Hitler "used to eat all the time."  "Do you know who Hitler was?" she asked during their first evening together, as if warning Ali that the land he has chosen as his home has a history of intolerance.  There is something quietly defiant in Emmi's bringing him there, her ineptitude in ordering fancy cuisine making her out to be as much of an outsider as Ali; the world, we see, is always hostile to the unsophisticated, the simple, the poor.  "Did you know that there is such a thing as golden caviar?" she asks as they splurge for the normal black stuff.  Then she regrets to inform him that, in any case, such delicacies are reserved only for the Shah of Iran and never for people like them.

I have made a habit of emphasizing what careful artists elect to place at the center of their works, and Fassbinder's film is no exception.  At precisely the midway point, Emmi presents Ali to her two sons, her daughter and loathsome son-in-law – the latter played by a snarling Fassbinder – and the looks on their faces are unequivocal.  When a son calls his mother a whore for marrying a foreigner, it is all too clear what kind of ethics these unfortunate vulgarians lack (as it were, Kurowski is similar to the Polish word for whore).  Here Ali realizes that he is a burden to Emmi and tries as hard as he can to make her feel loved, precisely the emotion of which her life has been devoid for almost twenty years.  The rest of the film is devoted to the pulsations of commitment, understanding, and longing that elude many people throughout the course of their lives.  As many critics have observed, Ben Salem has a natural stiffness of manner that blends perfectly into his persona of a man always on his guard, always aware of the impression he makes on others, but a man who never stops being himself.  His political comments ("Arabs are not humans in Germany," "Germans and Arabs are not the same people: German is master, Arab is dog") are oversimplified expressions that reflect his own vulnerability because of his appearance and imperfect German, but they also remind Emmi that there are people in this country of opportunity far worse off than she is.  As they begin pooling their resources and thinking about buying "a little piece of heaven," Ali reverts to his old ways of boozing and cards.  The ending, often seen as abrupt and mere plot contrivance, binds the odd couple closer together because the only thing that really matters is being nice to one another while they still have time.  Otherwise, says Emmi, "life would not be bearable."

The fear in the title, purposely ungrammatical in the original German and apparently an Arabic aphorism, guides the actions of everyone.  The opinions of the cleaning ladies after Emmi's first morning of her new life are not typical of Germans as much as they are typical of the mediocre and talentless of society who only see their own bad intentions in others.  Most people could generally be said to be interested in financial and physical pleasures, which is exactly what they claim foreigners want, yet precisely these luxuries are what most working-class foreigners cannot afford.  And how many Americans or Europeans would leave their families and live abroad in unpleasant conditions without a good or any command of the native language, sacrificing all their earthly pleasures to support their families back home?  "Work is half our life," says Emmi when she first dances with Ali, and for many of the underprivileged, work comprises much more than that.  The fear that provokes racial, religious or other such prejudice is essentially the fear of being outnumbered, and that is the fear common to all cowards.  When Emmi finally breaks down about two-thirds through the film as the couple vacations to the stares of people of little imagination or self-esteem, we don't see Ali's face, just Emmi's face and his back, as if we suddenly perceive the world through his eyes.  She explains away their difficulties through envy.  "What is envious?" asks Ali.  "Envious is when someone doesn't like another person's having something," and often what they don't like seeing is happiness when they themselves are unhappy.  On this marvelously simple premise Fassbinder constructs not only his finest film – which is already saying a lot – but also one of the finest films ever made, a flawless gem whose patience and willingness to allow its characters to trap themselves in the webs they weave almost make us forget we are watching fiction.  "People always say 'but,' in life, and everything remains the same," says Emmi, miserable and lonely for far too long to miss a chance with a handsome foreigner who works because he knows that this is his only chance.  And in this world of ours, he sits squarely with the majority.

Máscaras venecianas (part 4)

The conclusion to the Bioy Casares story ("Venetian Masks").  You can read the original in this collection.

I didn't want to attract anyone's attention or help for fear of getting caught up with some well-meaning Samaritan who would delay me.  Once I felt strong enough I began my search anew.  I tried to advance in the interminable flow of those heading in the same direction and avoid those coming the other way.  I sought the face and attention of every possible woman guised in a domino, and however often I swerved and averted my glance there were so many of them that I might have missed more than one.  The impossibility of looking at all of them was a risk to which I was hardly resigned.  I stepped among the masses: a harlequin appeared on one side, began to laugh, and then screamed something perhaps parodying the gondoliers.  The truth is that I now saw myself as a boat leading its prow through the waters, and in this dream image my head and the prow were interchangeable.  I put a hand to my forehead: I was burning hot.  I began to justify this fact to myself by saying that these strangers were like the beatings of the waves against my hull, and hither came the heat, the incredible heat, and this is where I lost consciousness.

Then came days of confusion, of dreaming as I slept and as I was awake.  I constantly believed that I was really awake and trusted that these dreams, as bothersome as they were persistent, would be completely dispelled.  Soon enough came my disillusionment, perhaps because they were all real facts, difficult to admit, and because they preoccupied me and provoked  in me – with unending fever, which was also real – new deliria.

Making everything all the more frightening and uncertain was the fact that I didn't recognize the room in which I found myself.  I had never before seen the woman who attended to me with maternal efficacy, and who said to me that we were in the hotel La Fenice.  The woman was called Euphemia, and I would call her Saint Euphemia.

I think that on two occasions I was visited by a Doctor Kurtz.  On his first visit he explained to me that he was "just living here, at the heart of Venice," at I no longer know what number on Fiubera street, and that if I needed anything I should call him any time day or night.  On his second visit, he discharged me.  When he left, I noticed that he hadn't asked me for the bill, which gave me a new feeling of anxiety because I was afraid I wouldn't remember his house address, forget to pay him or not find him as if he were a person from a dream.  In reality he was the typical family doctor, of the kind spoken about in other times.  Perhaps he seemed a bit unreal in our day and age, but was there anything in Venice that didn't seem that way?

One afternoon I asked Euphemia how I got to the hotel La Fenice.  She answered me evasively and insisted emphatically that while I had my fever, Mr. and Mrs. Massey would visit me up to two times a day.  Immediately their visits returned to my memory or, better said, I saw Massey and Daniela in a crystal-clear dream.  The worst part of the fever – and, in that sense, everything went on as it was – was the autonomy of my mind's images.  The fact that my will had no power over them scared me as perhaps indicating the onset of madness.  That afternoon I spent remembering one of the Masseys' visits, seeing them as if they were seated at my bedside and seeing Daniela eating chocolates in the opera box, then in a mask reclining over me, talking to me and my identifying her easily.  Reliving or dreaming this scene perturbed me so greatly that I initially didn't hear the words of the mask.  At the precise moment when I asked her to "repeat them, please," she disappeared.  Massey had entered the room.  Her disappearance had made me grief-stricken because I preferred keeping Daniela in my dreams and finding myself without her.  But Massey's presence woke me from all delusions: a form of relief, I suppose, because I began to feel less mislaid, less lost.  My friend spoke to me with his usual frankness as if I were healthy and able to confront the truth, and I tried to pass this test of confidence.  Then he said something I already knew: that after she and I had parted, Daniela was not longer the same woman she was before.  I said:

"I never betrayed her."

"No doubt.  Yet you have to understand that she didn't believe your illness at all until she came across you lying in the street just around the corner."

I was immediately upset and said:

"And she's trying to make up for it with a good nurse and a good doctor."

"Don't ask her for what she can't give you."

"You know what it is?  She doesn't understand that I love her."

He replied that I shouldn't be presumptuous and that she also loved me when I left her.  I protested:

"But I was sick."

He said that love demanded the impossible, then added:

"As you're trying now with your demands that she return.  She won't."

I asked him why he was so sure, and he said that this conclusion was based on his own experience.  I retorted with poorly contained irritation:

"That's not the same thing."

He responded:

"Of course it isn't.  I didn't leave her."

I looked at him astonished because, for a moment, I thought I had heard his voice crack.  He assured me that Daniela suffered greatly and that after what had happened with me, she could no longer fall in love.  At least not like before.

"For the rest of her life.  Do you get it?"

I did not contain myself:

"Perhaps she still loves me."

"Of course she does – like a friend, like her best friend.  And you could ask her to do for you what she did for me."

Massey had regained his swagger.  In the most tranquil tones he began to give horrible explanations, explanations I didn't want to hear and which in my weak condition I barely understood.  He spoke about so-called carbonic children, clones, doubles.  He said that Daniela in collaboration with Leclerc had developed from one of her cells – I believe he used the word cell, but I cannot be sure – children, girls identical to her.  Now I think that perhaps there was only one of them – one was enough for the nightmare that Massey was narrating.  She managed to accelerate its growth with such intensity that in less than ten years she had converted it into a splendid woman of seventeen or eighteen.

"Your Daniela?"  I asked in unexpected relief.

"It seems incredible, but as it were, she is a woman made for me.  Identical to her mother, yet – how should I say this – much more appropriate for a man like me.  I have to tell you something that will seem like sacrilege: I would never swap her for the original, not for anything in the world.  She is identical but at her side I live in another sort of peace, in genuine serenity.  If you only knew how things really were, you would envy me."

So that he wouldn't insist that I ask Daniela to do the same for me, I said:

"I'm not interested in an identical woman.  I want her and her alone."

He replied sadly but firmly:

"In that case you'll never get anything in this world.  Daniela told me that when she saw your face in the bar, she understood that you still loved her.  She thinks that rekindling a past love doesn't make any sense.  To avoid a useless argument when she was told that she wasn't running a risk, she left on the first flight out."

Máscaras venecianas (part 3)

The third part to the Bioy Casares story ("Venetian Masks").  You can read the original in this collection.

Of course, I no longer remembered a thing about the costume competition; thinking of Daniela and the emotion of seeing her were my sole preoccupations.  Now and then in painful stabs my conscience felt what was at stake at our meeting.  After all my suffering I was about to revive pain that had, if not vanished, then fallen silent.  Did I nourish any illusions of finding a way – soon, in an opera box, at an opera gala – to win back Daniela?  Would I do that to Massey?  Why was I pondering a possibility that did not exist ... It was clear that the expectation of seeing Daniela was enough to cast the die.

When I arrived the gala had already begun.  An usher guided me to the box located in one of those so-called balconies.  As I opened the door the first thing I saw was Daniela, wearing a domino and eating chocolate; at her side was Massey.  Daniela smiled at me and behind her mask – which she didn't remove as I would have wanted – her eyes gleamed.  She whispered to me:

"Pull up a chair."

"I'm fine here," I said.

So as not to make a sound I sat in the first seat I could find.

"You won't be able to see anything from there," said Massey.

I was perturbed.  My happiness changed to tacit annoyance at Massey's presence in the box.  A soprano began to sing:

Vieni, deh, vieni

And Daniela, as if fascinated, turned her attention towards the stage and her back to me.  Doubtless unjustly, I felt that the woman of my life, after an interminable separation, had given (I believe the right word here is lent) me her attention for less than a minute.  The most extraordinary thing about this, perhaps the saddest as well, was that I reacted with indifference.  I felt so distant that I was able to learn about the luckless loves of Ana, Walter and Lorelei, who out of spite and with the aim of obtaining  magic powers married a river (the Rhine, if I'm not mistaken).  Initially the only similarity I perceived in the story that was developing and my own tale was that each involved three people; I needed nothing more to follow the performance with any great interest.  At times, true enough, I wallowed in my uncertainty ... I found myself in a unforeseen and shocking situation: Daniela and I were looking at each other like strangers.  Even worse, I wanted to leave.  At intermission Daniela asked:

"Who is the angel who's going to bring me chocolates like these?  They sell them here out front, in the bar of the piazza."

"I'll get them," I hastened to answer.

With disgust I heard Massey's voice declare:

"I'll go with you."

Surrounded by masks and men in formal wear, we slowly descended the marble staircase.  We took off running as we left the theater because out on the square it was very cold.  In the bar Massey chose a table against the door.  Then a girl dressed as an old woman in a crinoline, a "noble" and a "Turk" all came in.  Lost in cheerful banter, they stayed near the open door.

"This draft is getting to me," I said.  "Let's change tables."

We moved to a table at the back.  Then they took our order: a strega for me, coffee for Massey, and, of course, the chocolates.  We hardly spoke at all, as if there were only one topic of conversation and it was forbidden.  When we getting ready to pay there were no unoccupied tables; no matter how many times we called them the waiters kept walking by.  The cold had brought quite a few customers.  Suddenly amidst the rumble of conversation an unmistakeable voice could be heard in all clarity, and the two of us looked over towards the front door.  I don't know why it seemed that we hesitated ever so slightly as if each of us sensed the surprise of the other.  At our original table (others had been placed next to it and pushed together), I saw harlequins, columbinas, and two or three dominos.  Then I knew which one was Daniela.  The gleam in her eyes looking at me through the mask left no room for doubt.

Visibly nervous, Massey consulted his watch and said:

"It's about to start."  Mentally I begged him not to insist on his story about not getting in if we don't arrive on time.  And what he did say annoyed me even more: "Wait for me in the box."

"What is he thinking getting rid of me just because Daniela came?"  I thought, indignant.  A moment later I reconsidered:  everyone sees matters in his own way and perhaps Massey felt he was acting completely within his rights since he married her after I had let her go.

I said:

"I'll bring her the chocolates."

He gave them to me hesitantly as if my request had bothered him.

Once I got to her table, Daniela looked me in the eye and whispered:

"This time tomorrow, same place."

She also said another word, a pet name which only she knew.  In an aura of happiness I left the bar.  It was if a veil had been lifted and I asked myself why it took me so long to comprehend that Daniela had only pretended to be distant in the opera box.  I immediately discovered that I hadn't given her the chocolates and was about to turn around when I realized that reappearing with them in hand might lend a ridiculous flourish to what had been a marvelous moment.  Of one thing, however, I was sure: it was far too cold for me to hang around the piazza.  At La Fenice I went straight for our box.  I didn't dare look at Daniela, seated as she had been before, her elbows on the red velvet of the banister.  One might say that in all this time she hadn't changed positions.  I managed to pass her the chocolates but in reality I was rather bewildered.  A suspicion, a stupid hunch – I remembered that Massey that morning had said "my wife" and not "Daniela" – immediately made me ask her to remove her mask.  To soothe my worried mind, I began to concentrate on the movements of her hands, which first drifted back towards the hood of the domino and then right away straightened her somewhat tussled hair.  How I missed those days!  She didn't need to remove her mask, I thought, because only she possessed such grace.  I tried to dissuade her, but soon enough there was Daniela, her face uncovered.  Even though I had always remembered her as incomparable, as unique, the perfection of her beauty dazzled me.  I whispered her name.

I soon regretted having done so.  Something odd had happened: that word, so dear, so darling, here at this time, made me very sad.  The world had become incomprehensible to me.  Amidst the confusion I had a second hunch which provoked true displeasure: "Twins?"  And so, as if I had discerned a suspicion and wanted to explain it like before, I stood up very carefully so that they wouldn't hear me slip out into the hall.  At the door I wondered whether I wasn't wrong, whether I wasn't behaving badly with Daniela.  I turned and whispered:

"I'll be back."

I ran through the horseshoe-shaped gallery which surrounded the boxes.  At the precise moment in which I was hurrying down the stairs I spotted Massey slowly going up, and I hid behind a group of masks.  Had I been asked what I was doing there I could not have possibly come up with an acceptable response; perhaps my presence remained unnoticed.  Before Massey reached the box entrance, I stepped out from behind the masks and ran downstairs.  Like someone throwing himself into icy waters, I went out onto the piazza.  Arriving at the bar I noticed that now there were fewer people and that Daniela's seat was empty.  I spoke with the girl disguised in a domino.

"She just left, with Massey," she said, and must have noticed my confusion because she then added thoughtfully: "She can't have gotten far.  Perhaps you can catch up to her on the street Delle Veste."

I took on the search resolved to overcome all possible difficulties and find her again.  Since I was healthy, I was able to contort my will to this one purpose.  It was probably the unshakeable anxiety of getting Daniela back, the real Daniela, as well as an impulse to prove that I loved her and that, if I left her once, it was not owing to a lack of love.  To prove all that to Daniela and the world.  At the second street I turned right; I had the feeling that everyone was turning right with me.  I felt pain, a blow that choked the air from my throat: it was the cold.  I have discovered that whenever I recall my illness I actually fall sick; so as to think of something else I told myself that we were not as brave as the Venetians: natives of Buenos Aires did not roam the streets on a night like this.  I tried to reconcile the need to accelerate my pace with the need to look attentively all around.  As much as possible, I had to scrutinize women in black, and of course, women in dominos.  Before a church I was sure I recognized her; when I got closer, however, I found another person.  The disappointment produced in me physical discomfort and unease.  "I can't lose my head," I told myself.  So as not to lose my nerve, I thought that it was funny that I literally expressed what I felt without even wanting to do so.  As it were, I maintained my balance with great difficulty.