Stage

… And yet your shadow isn't following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don't notice, but you have, you're missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become apparent, wounded vanity, the desire just for once in your life to be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily, forget it. And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret or sing it. The stage is really a proscenium and upstage there is an enormous tube, something like a mineshaft or the gigantic opening of a mine. Let's call it a cave. But a mine works, too. From the opening of the mine come unintelligible noises. Onomatopoeic noises, syllables of rage or of seduction or maybe just murmurs and whispers and moans. The point is, no one sees, really sees, the mouth of the mine. Stage machinery, the play of light and shadows, a trick of time, hides the real shape of the opening from the gaze of the audience. In fact, only the spectators who are closest to the stage, right up against the orchestra pit, can see the shape of something behind the dense veil of camouflage, not the real shape, but at any rate it's the shape of something. The other spectators can't see anything beyond the proscenium, and it's fair to say they'd rather not. Meanwhile, the shadowless intellectuals are always facing the audience, so unless they have eyes in the backs of their heads, they can't see anything. They only hear the sounds that come from deep in the mine. And they translate or reinterpret or re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they sense a hurricane, they try to be eloquent where they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there is only deafening and hopeless silence. They say cheep cheep, bowwow, meow meow, because they are incapable of an animal of colossal proportions, or the absence of such an animal. Meanwhile, the stage they work on is very pretty, very well designed, very charming, but it grows smaller and smaller with the passage of time. The shrinking of the stage doesn't spoil it in any way. It simply gets smaller and smaller and the hall gets smaller to, and naturally there are fewer and fewer people watching. Next to this stage are others, of course. New stages have sprung up over time. There's the painting stage, which is enormous, and the audience is tiny, though all elegant, for lack of a better word. There's the film stage and the television stage. Here the capacity is huge, the hall is always full, and year after year the proscenium grows by leaps and bounds. Sometimes the performers from the stage where the intellectuals give their talks are invited to perform on the television stage. On this stage, the opening of the mine is the same, the perspective slightly altered, although maybe the camouflage is denser and, paradoxically, bespeaks a mysterious sense of humour, but it still stinks. This humorous camouflage, naturally, lends itself to many interpretations, which are finally reduced to two for the public's convenience or for the convenience of the public's collective eye. Sometimes intellectuals take up permanent residence on the television proscenium. The roars keep coming up from the opening of the mine and the intellectuals keep misinterpreting them. In fact, they, in theory the masters of language can't even enrich themselves. Their best words are borrowings they hear spoken by the spectators in the front row. These spectators are called flagellants. They're sick, and from time to time they invent hideous words and there's a spike in their mortality rate. When the workday ends and the theatres are closed and they cover up the opening of the mines with big sheets of steel. The intellectuals retire for the night.

• From 2666 by Roberto Bolano, p121 – 123