By Night In Chile - pg. 24

And I remember Rosamel del Valle.

3.5 shots of Jameson

at the bar messed me up big time. It was supposed to be quiet, drizzly anonymous Monday night. But there were more people than usual. Don came over about the same time as me. He brought a plastic case of hot sauce with him. His own creation for Jeremy. Some talk of Tabasco followed then a curious looking gentleman came out of nowhere with eyes looking a thousand different shades of darkness. He was before my time in this town so we cascaded our histories of Deer Park and East End in a conversational late-hours, bar room camaraderie. He ordered a green drink that tasted like toothpaste (mouthwash that other girl at the corner said), bought me a drink. Time is not the friend that should ever be trusted. He lived in Wilmington now he said and worked for DuPont. Taxi Driver's mention popped out of somewhere which it turned out he'd seen only recently. I was talking about this character in my novel who was trying to research a news story, had become so obsessed that he couldn't sleep at nights and he kept looking at the notes he had taped on his bedroom wall. Jeremy was trying to say something about Eva the Fugitive. I seriously don't know how can one drop the book once it's opened. I think he started reading it that's what he said. (kill me! kill me! I don't know how long it takes to read that 100 pager). Jeremy said something about an eastern european thing that was a reference to me. The girl who worked at Starbucks across the street during the day asked if I was from there. I mentioned that I was from the east, way east of the eastern europe. I remember this distinctly although I was sure It didn't come off as particularly funny. I don't think I remember anything more about last night except that Jeremy poured that whiskey in a shiny glass and split it neatly into two half-shots. I should have said no there and then. It made up for all that came out during the conversation I had later at the Kitchen Sink.

Eva The Fugitive - Closing

Is it possible to believe in a life that rejects itself? I think I recognize this possibility unconsciously. And, precisely, with reflections from the zone in which the senses multiply there is something that Eva brought me one day into my life.
Surely her warmth lingers on.

SANTIAGO DE CHILE, 1930

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 100

In any case, blind under my lamplight, I apologize to the magic carpet that more than once has raised me among presences not altogether alive but more than radiant. And which the alcohol of each night does not chase away, nor that of each dream in which I have harbored some desire, some anguish, something hated, something loved, something beautiful or something horrible, something living or something dead.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 100

And above all, Eva is it not true that nothing ever happens except in dreams?

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 94

But is this love? I believe firmly that my hand was guided by the presentiment that I had to lose her. What more could have happened after all that? I have seen her come from the netherlands or from the penumbra in which float things and beings of invisible or subterranean life. have seen her approach my lamp without the mediation of any sentiment other than the search for firm ground, disputable and uncertain though it might be. On the other hand I felt that Eva was in me all that mattered, and I discounted any necessity to see her as anything else, that is to say, to see her as a woman, for example, as a person of mere flesh and blood. It is in this way that her shadow holds in these pages a strict similarity to the Eva that appeared suddenly in my life and the Eva who seemed on the verge of entering a space that, in spite of everything, I must not, nor do I wish to, determine.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 89

I see a world in the distance, in a dream white in color. In the center of that world there is something that belongs to me. The knowledge that there is something of mine that is for the moment not within my reach, I know that I owe it to a dream or to a death. The truth is that there is in me a dream or a death. But it is through this experience that I have awakened in a land nourished, indeed, neither by dreams nor deaths, but by oblivion. How can I make you understand, my friend, that when my life is separated from Eva's, a night heavy with prison bars closed in behind.
Etc.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 74

For what purpose? I understand perfectly how difficult her passage is (life is not always a dream) and with what anguish she is forever chasing material existence and extinguishing certain fires to reach a state of sheer oblivion.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 72

Disarmed and happy to hold her close to me, I saw her lying at my side again. Her desire was a small lamp in the darkness of my breast.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 69

Going home is like the beginning of a drama always to be renewed. It is because for us love moans in every bed in the world. Through the windows everybody has seen us abandon Paradise.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 67

I believe in the vigilance of certain flames, not extinguishable at will, whose flicker gives man a sense of truth, the true image of what occurs at all hours in his terrified consciousness.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 65

I observed that it is possible for Eva to live absolutely outside herself. In the way she thinks about certain things, and in the horror with which she discovers certain facts she manages to conceal from me her ill-fated star. And the truth is that her awareness becomes more and more intricate. She invents oceans and vast ships of angels who overrun the world. Her head can create the darkest fantasy without any outside intervention.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 60

Life comes in large gusts of air, and one is drawn into the dance. I see that her country is filled with fiery cities, large factories, trains in the throes of panic, streets teeming with people, etc. I see her pass with her head bowed, still in dream, but attentive to a rhythm that possesses her. "Eva in life!" I exclaim. Her solitude is sustained by a useless and frightening radiance we associate with drugs. It is possible that until love returns ... What can men do with an empty body? And she passes. Passes among people and things, withdrawn into herself.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 50

When she says "I see," she expresses what cannot be seen by simple sight. It is as if one were hearing a "there will be" or "and then." But the seeing state in her is like that of one in contact with a thought that is about to explode.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 42

She seems more beautiful - if that is possible - and converses and joins at times in the music of the birds. Then she leaves the street, and the crowd lets her pass through in the midst of beautiful songs. Eva glides through the crowd and a dove alights on her shoulder, and the night falls upon the heart of the world.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 40

Eva repeated dreamily a poem that begins more or less like this:

I see the day
Only through my night
It is a small soft noise
From a land out of sight

I understand once more that a human being consists of an infinite number of reflections. There is in you, Eva, a kind of "small, soft, noise," which guides you, for instance, along a path that at certain hours, and often, as I suppose, leads you only into a labyrinth. Eva passes the better part of the rest of the day in a maze of poetry, which releases me from any need to comment on this fact. In any case, I could not help telling myself that a very shady tree was preventing me from seeing her entry into that death zone. And moreover, in the name of the most beautiful kind of despair I could not reject this thought.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 39

Now between Eva and myself there no longer exists any sort of absence.

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 33

"There was a time when I loved the cascades of the deep night, all red, and a rain of fine angel blood. The color red. The color of a heart in the throes of despair, and an empty hand that extinguishes death. And the red horses speed, tormented, across the sky. Until finally the ocean bleeds its foam, and boats come and go like those thoughts that have a way of haunting us and in whose presence we do not trust ourselves to set the empty page on fire. Surely we are living at the edge of a precipice. The frozen waters reflect our image like small dots that we are not willing to see completely, in place that we are not anxious to locate. It is toward these distant red spaces that we have to direct the best and worst in us. But we are afraid of the rather heavy windlash, the oozing blood; we fear the great red flower of possibilities. For once, my delirious reailty is no more than a monologue rambling about a woman who has something to do with my existence and about a night when wine was the ultimate coral that my dream extracted from the brilliant heart of the sea."

Stasis Horror

"...William S. Burroughs refers to as ‘stasis horror.’ It’s a condition of excessive fixity that freezes and stops life; del Valle detects asphyxia at work in the reduction of things, living moments, to flat representations or conventional elements, props and characters, in a conformist work of art."

-- Michael Cisco

Eva The Fugitive - pg. 30

Our morning encounter ended in the Restaurant Martini. There I noticed that Eva was totally unaware of the people around us. I observed that her thought was wavering between strange sensations; in fact, I detected a definite anger that shaped (her lips looked as if they were about to bleed) into a tune from the Persian Market, I think - and something that seemed to me to become the reflection of herself; its meaning evaded me completely.