The Shape of a Pocket

modern prison of which the local authorities are proud. They call it a model prison. He is chatting with a long-term prisoner. Finally, still taking notes, the journalist asks: And what did you do before? Before what? Before you were here? The prisoner stares at him. Crime, he says, crime …
    Talking of model prisons, a new women’s prison has just been built in Britain. Each cell measures 3 steps by 3 steps. A zoo director commented on the smallness of the space. ‘No zoo would confine an ape in an area measuring this. It would damage both the psychological and the physical well-being of the animal. It would not be allowed in any professional zoo.’ A third of the women prisoners in Britain are there for not paying fines or TV licences.
    Arno Schmidt in one of his books quotes from a poem in English:
    I go towards my likeness, and my likeness goes towards me.
    She embraces me and holds me close, as if I had come out of prison.

    It is a new day, and Goya is taking the dog for a walk. They are both in exile. In the town of Bordeaux which, when there is a west wind, smells of the Atlantic.
    As the Nikkei Stock Average breaks through the 2,000-point mark, European money managers brim with confidence that the market to watch next year will be Japan.
    An eye with a perfect retina, going, going, gone!
    ‘In these parts it is a miracle the people are still alive,’ said Moisés, a young man who joined the Zapatista insurrection in south-east Mexico. ‘Families of seven to twelve people have been surviving on a hectare or half a hectare of infertile soil … We have nothing, absolutely nothing, no decent roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health, no food, no education …’ The year was 1994.
    Now I’m going to send you by radio a strange likeness – that of a man whose face we do not know. Whenever he’s in company, he wears a black ski mask. ‘Here we are,’ he says, ‘the forever dead, dying once again, but now in order to live.’ His assumed name is Marcos.
    A terrorist! It was agreed that this was a radio talk about economics, and you contrive to introduce a terrorist. An expert in violence!
    I’m transmitting his likeness. A likeness created by his own words:
    I have the urge to write to you and tell you something about being ‘the professionals of violence’, as we have so often been called. Yes, we are professionals. But our profession is hope … out of our spent and broken bodies must rise up a new world … Will we see it? Does it matter? I believe that it doesn’t matter as much as knowing with undeniable certainty that it will be born, and that we have put our all – our lives, bodies and souls – into this long and painful but historic birth.
Amor y dolor –
love and pain: two words that not only rhyme, but join up and march together.

    Empty leftist rhetoric!
    Here is the rest of the likeness:
    There is something else about this passionate moving of words, something that does not appear in any postscript or any communiqué. It is the anxiety, the uncertainty, the galloping questions that assault us every time one of the couriers leaves with one, or several, communiqués. Questions and more questions fill up our nights, accompany us on our rounds to check the guards, sit beside us on some broken tree trunk looking at the food on the plate … ‘Were these words the best ones to say what we wanted to say?’ ‘Were they the right words at this time?’ ‘Were they understandable?’

    A likeness is a gift and remains unmistakable – even when hidden behind a mask.
    A likeness can be effaced. Today Che Guevara sells T-shirts, that’s all that is left of his likeness.
    Are you sure?
    [Silence]
    Silence, you know, is something that can’t be censored. And there are circumstances in which silence becomes subversive. That’s why they fill it with noise all the while.
    * * *

    Goya is walking with his dog by the ocean.
    The other day I was listening to Glenn Gould playing Mozart’s Fantasy in C Major. I want to remind you of how Gould plays.
He plays like one of the already dead come back to the world to play its music.
And that’s how he played when he was alive!
    Three nimble hands.
Why three?
One of the two women had an accident at work.
Bought.

    I’ll tell the story of the best likeness ever made. John is the only one who tells the story. The other Evangelists don’t refer to it – though they refer to Martha and Mary. The two sisters had a brother, Lazarus, who fell sick