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Show father and a mother from San Marino. I thought of my father, the blood pouring from the hole in his skull, mingling with his beard, coagulating there. I thought of my mother whom I never knew. I tried to listen to the recorded words, my story, but after a short time all I could hear was the incessant bleat of the American radio music. It came from the tape recorder and it came from the loudspeakers suspended on poles above the sand. It came from beneath the ground and from long ago and it reached out for me from across the water, forcing itself against me like the blade of an old knife, dull but insistent. When I noticed that my words had stopped, I turned the machine off. And then, as though he had heard the click from afar and rushed forward, the sallow-faced young man emerged from the mass of dark glistening bodies. "Well?" he asked. "It's over," I said. "Nothing to change, or to add?" "Nothing." "There's half a tape left," he said. I could see that he still hoped to question me further, to try again. But I put the palm of my hand in the air between us. I was done. He shrugged. He packed up his tape recorder, but made no move to leave. He sat uneasily on his chair, eyeing the beach, and me, and from time to time glancing back over his shoulder at Tiede, looming there above us and smoking, reaching for the clouds. |