Tristano Dies Read Online Free PDF

ones left, and you come in here and tell me we’re ten minutes late – but late for what? – just be patient. For your morphine, she says firmly, and even though I can barely see right now, I sense her stubborn expression, her white hair a halo, with her loose bun … For your morphine: the doctor said you should get it every eight hours, the next one’s in five minutes, so there’s hardly any time, and I want to read your five o’clock poem before you can’t understand a word of it. So go ahead, Renate – read. And she: where’s my child, where’s my roe deer? He’ll come just three more times, then never come again. Renate, I said, please, no nursery rhymes. That’s just how it starts, she says, now be quiet and listen … the dead are cold to the touch, but the living are something else again, when I touched my love I was happy, yesterday I had a vision, my love was in the garden, he was half-man, half-child … I can’t remember the rest, Frau was reading and while she read, she gave me my morphine, I didn’t notice, and so I wound up in a dream world, and I entered the origin of the world, sometimes a person’s lucky and gets to dream what he wants to dream, but that’s rare, a rare privilege, maybe I’ll tell you my dream, if it stays with me, but later: now, I’m tired. What time is it?
    Ferruccio said you mustn’t tell your dreams or you’ll give away your soul. I always paid attention to him, but with you, I don’t think that’s the case, you’ve come to hear my life, come all this way, dropped everything, you also deserve my dreams … I want to tell you about a beach, I don’t know if I just dreamed it or if I dreamed it over the years, but that’s all relative, I’ll tell you about it later, because I think I found a thread of logic, and I don’t want to lose it, it’s so tenuous … I don’t know how Frau holds on so tight. Imagine, since I’ve come back she’s resumed this ritual from when we were children, when she taught me German, with her Sunday poem … like it was yesterday and life hadn’t gone by in the meantime …
    … And in the meantime the years went by, long years, all the same, the same bombs year after year, on trains, in piazzas, in banks … I’m skipping ahead, I’m already getting to the end, I want to be there already, though I can’t get much closer than this … and it’s all the same, like I was saying, trials all the same, defendants all the same, in the sense that there weren’t any – defendants – there were trials but no defendants, strange, right? – in a democracy what’s important is what’s on the outside, what’s on the inside doesn’t matter in the least, it’s the ritual that counts, and if there aren’t any defendants, well, who gives a shit?… everything exactly the same, all the same smiles, oh, all the same enormous smiles around that table of world powers where we were told we had a seat … all of them, puffed up likeroosters, spouses at their sides, because this was the stuff of ceremony, no joke, extremely selective places, embassies, delegations, homes, estates … especially estates, with this minister and that and heads of state and prelates and entrepreneurs and special correspondents and direct envoys, Sunday and every other day, and the banquets … first-rate, delicious, and hanged bankers or bankers to hang, and poisoned bankers or bankers to poison, and some terrorist monks, every once in a while, a nice big crack, crr-aack, and so-called civilization advanced some more, chipping away with its tiny teeth, like a stubborn creature inside the oak, crr-aack, my god what a century, said the rats, gnawing at the framework … that’s what Tristano was thinking, delirious, maybe, but like I told you, I’m getting toward the end, and it isn’t right to end here, otherwise why’d I call for you, just to write the end? But the fact is, when Tristano and Daphne returned, after everything that