The Girl with a Red Sweater in Babel

Far, far back in time: ancient Andalusia and the verses of the poète maudit, the ill-starred poet exiled from Cordoba, his Necklace of the Dove. Far back, centuries and centuries ago... Jericho in Palestine, with the desert so near... Coffins for Sarajevo, seagulls shriek from wave to wave at those sons of bitches going to war and young soldiers fall, always crying “Mommy!”

Today, there are automobiles in Babel. A thousand, ten thousand, thirty thousand, day and night. In a thousand and one nights, how many? There is the storm, and the wind, the rain, the mud on the strip of lawn lining the avenue, with its four lanes of permanent traffic.

A poor landscape for poor people.

You can look at the gray of the sky for a long time. You can look at the gray of the trees, of the asphalt, the project blocks and the long lines of project housing, and tell yourself: “It’s gray. The gray will always be gray. How can you see what is gray? You can be born, live, cry, laugh and die, gray on gray.” But if melancholy hasn’t completely eaten up your liver, with your eyes open you can see there’s some red, way off in the distance, running down the avenue.

Perplexed, you wait at the far edge of the cement, where the green mud stops. You wait, like a woman impatient at her window. You don’t have to close your eyes; the noise of the traffic can’t reach the tallest high-rise. It’s like being in the desert.

The girl is wearing a red sweater.

Cropping up here and there along the avenue are yellow shacks, gypsy wagons shut in on themselves, abandoned to the grass of mud and rain. They spit out strange, foreign words.

The girl in the red sweater is running.

From one language to the next: Babel is spiraling, the mud spattering her billowy black pants. The red sweater leaps from Tokyo to Bamako, from Algiers to Berlin, from Moscow to Teheran, Peking, New York, Alexandria, Paris... A confusion of languages where the words bump into each other, where meaning gets lost in laughter.

Babel: heaven or hell?

On her fist the girl holds a white, chatty dove. The avenue becomes a river, the wagons become sailboats, and the girl in the red sweater the captain of a drifting fleet. The giant billboards are sails that tell of dragons in the forest, of monster and labyrinth, of slaves and pelicans. From the East to the farthest West, the letters, orchestrated by the girl, follow the river down to the sea.

—November, 1994