FEVER

Fernando Correia Pina

I know I`m on a train and this all I know. I deduce it from the cyclic clickety-clack of the
wheels as they cross the expansion joints of the rails and from the way the long,
disguised curves push my body from one side to the other on the wooden bench and
this is all, and everything else is strangeness.
The carriage walls are made of whitewashed masonry, with no visible doors, just one
small, unreachably high stained glass window, portraying the four faces of the
cherubim, hidden behind a colorless curtain, hanging loose like tattooed skin tanned by
time and boredom. Hanging from the center of the ceiling, at the end of a once white
wire, a solitary pendulous bulb strives to fill the void with an eerie light of anemia. I`m
all alone.
Suddenly, someone draws the curtain open. With a familiar sound, the brassy curtain
rings slide along the iron rod. The conductor is leaning out of the window, staring into
the void. Most politely he addresses me: Pardon me for interrupting your thoughts, sir,
but I must notify you that you`re dead, in case you havent noticed it yet.
Out of his sight, hidden by the curtain, almost melting into her own shadow distorted by
the solacing volume of the ceiling joists, a woman is floating and this expression
comes to my mind in aerial ventral decubitus, her arms perfectly stretched, her long
hair casting shadows over her face and breasts; a woman wearing nothing but a high
heel shoe on her left foot.
From the vertex of the coating of tiny green algae soft as the humble December moss
covering her pubis, a translucent thread of honey flows onto the floor, feeding a
corrosive pool on the pavement, making an unfathomable hole in the well-worn slate
slabs. I kneel down to take a better look inside while my mother, just appeared out of
thin air, rests her hand on my forehead.
There is a sound, similar to the high-pitched whine of a dentists drill, somewhere
above. I raise my head: the heel of the womans shoe had become lodged in a crack in
the wall and her body is spinning vertiginously around the major axis of the living
crucifixion, reducing her anatomy to a long spiral strip, like that of orange peel taken
with one single cut, from pole to pole. Only when the movement ceased I could notice
that all along the garland of skin, chance had written, in blood, the eight times table.

Out of curiosity I take a second look at the hole in the floor. Cautious, I kneel down by
its rim and dive up to my shoulders into It, straining to see through the oil thick
darkness beneath.
The room, only of which one corner is visible, vanishes in the distance, exhaling a stale
breath of sullen decay and there I am, my face unfamiliar, seated, unflappable, upon a
purple velvet sofa, holding a black wax candle in my trembling right hand.
To the north of me, with ragged sails like pennons of dried skin hanging from brownish,
barren bones, a Spanish galleon lays portside, raising under its dead weight the
checkered marble pavement in a shattered, frozen wave of stone. Through a breach in
the wooden hulk pours out a torrent of emeralds and golden doubloons with the
unrecognizable effigy of the one and only true god.
The master of the ship, sole survivor of the wreck, his legs crushed by the fallen
mizzen, creeps up to me leaving behind a trail of blood and, coming within the reach of
my hand that promised the resurrection of the flesh, solemnly chanted: Et in arcadia
ego.
The candle melted away but the wick is still burning in the shell of my hand, draining its
light from my flesh and blood. Its heat consumes my entrails. I`m sweating. My clothes
glued to my skin and my tongue dry as a monolith of salt in a barren cave, I drag
myself in the endless queue of the just arrived in hell. Between two lashes of a whip the
guards ask me my name.
I cant recall, I answer, but its something like the sentence opposite to the handrail of
the stairways.
A prophet! They exclaim in fury, bursting into a convulsive cry. Summon the Collectors!
This is my room, I think while the praying mantises sew between their green ulnas the
pearls of sweat into a rosary from which are hanging the three fingers of childhood. My
bed is in the center of an infinite snooker table. Balls, huge as planets, pass by me,
swirling, colliding with hollow sounds of doom. They all bear strange symbols which I
happen to know to be the ancient dimple whole numbers that formerly orbited between
the six and the seven in the fruitful days of creation.

And then he came. All the others bow down and make way to give him passage. He
sits by my side and listens to the kettle of my chest with the blank stare of a blind man.
One hundred and seven. He mutters, while dropping the ambrosia into my mouth, a
dust whose label proclaims to be extracted from the ground clavicles of Adam and Eve.
I swallow the white, diluted essence. In spite of its utmost sour taste which welds my
eyelids tight, the liquid brings me an ephemeral relief.
When I open them again I find myself back in school, seated in the front row. Behind a
table, on a high wooden dais, both elbows planted on the glass top, the teacher is
reading a Hebrew text. Over his head, slowly rotating, hovers the letter aleph.
Concluding his lecture, he carefully wraps up the parchment in a piece of silk he hides
in a hole in the wall. Then, he stands up, holding a spear he throws in my direction. The
rusty iron head penetrates my right flank, without pain or discomfort. Its the Spear of
Destiny.
Trying in vain to stanch the bleeding by pressing with my hand, I make my way out,
heralded by the insistent sound of the bell.
Beyond the door a light blue breeze caresses my pallid face. The sea is somewhere
near. I erratically wander along the dunes. Among the derelicts given birth by the tides
of delirium I view my bedside table lamp, my bookshelf, and one or two familiar faces
half-buried in the hot humid sands of nightmares.
Echoing in the distance, friendly voices call me by my name. With effort I manage to
move my lips and whisper the word water and like a spell, the liquid syllables cause a
cramp in time, intertwining all its threads again in one single cord.
I am lying in bed, in my bedroom. In the mirror, where a while ago the square of the
hypotenuse was masturbating, I can see nothing but my reflection and I slowly break
loose of that maddening tangle of dreams and reality.
Dressed in feathers and placenta I find myself reborn out of the demented entrails of
that womb engendered by the fever, free from the solar furnace of the horoscope
carved in molten lead and cinnabar on the red hot sponge of my brain.

Im lying in bed. In my bedroom. A cool blessing descends upon me as I contemplate,

once more, my exhausted portrait in the mirror and I say to myself: it is I.
And, like an anchor, that solitary word sinks into the deepest of me rebuilding the circle
and the center.