There was a yellow field of rapeseed, and then he had to change in Winnipeg.
They pulled out of Winnipeg at ten, the sky still blue but losing color, the lights on in the houses and buildings across the river. Contingent memories followed him like twin blotches of sunlight keeping a train company along the adjacent rails. Hegel writes about shapes of consciousness which have not yet attained to the perfect abstraction so dear to him; that was one way to characterize them; another was as simple crumbs and scraps one held onto, remnants of life's ceaseless giving, like the wasted golden light on the corners and in the veins of the ranked black concrete squares which floored the platform at the train station at Rome, goldness exploding upwards in tiny occasional spangles when a raindrop hit, while the black railings, though they shone as if varnished, remained still. Now the train began to move; the atlas opened, chancy shapes of light rushed down into the seams perpendicular to the direction of travel to make lines of light; then the bright entrance crept by, and then he was speeding on gravelly tracks between fences and trees, observing the widening slices of Italy between train-tracks. . There was Arabic neon under a hand-painted mouth, the yellow letters crawling like dotted inchworms, policemen in black with white belts and flat black caps and white-striped sleeves, black boots, black moustached faces (Venetian red with a touch of yellow ocher). That was Cairo.
The woman who'd respectfully returned her ticket wanted to get rid of ill-made furniture, too. How could he blame her for doing that? First of all, he didn't love her more than the others. She needed to be loved exclusively, because she was sad in a different way than he was. While his incompleteness and emptiness made him so lonely that he sometimes couldn't sleep outside of a woman's arms, her own disease was self-hatred. Once he sent her a photograph in which, so he'd thought, her beauty had been definitively proved, and she thought it ugly, although at least she didn't throw it away. Some gray and cloudy species of dreariness, some foreign chemical or trace, had invaded her and inflamed her with listless sorrow long before they'd ever met, clinging to her like a poisonous mucus, and although he wanted to brush it away he couldn't; he didn't know how. His own need-driven selfishness, which she'd later name his culpability, only added to her hurt. Because she could not see her own excellence, his compliments rang sarcastic in her ears; sometimes he felt so guilty for hurting her that he wanted to kneel down and give her a revolver and respectfully request that she shoot him. How could he make her see how rare she was, how specially strange? Sometimes for a moment she'd smile at him through her guardedness and pain. But he could not be loyal only to her, and when he was with her he couldn't leave her alone. He'd take her hand on the subway, for instance, until she became angry, interpreting this as a kind of exhibitionistic possessive-ness or territorialism, like a dog marking ownership by means of pungent liquid irrelevancies, when in fact his was a different kind of selfishness, that same desperate loneliness which compelled him to take her hand again and again until she practically shook him off. He was not really bad, just greedy and unmeritorious. (She wasn't perfect, either.) Behind his screen of consideration, sincere though it was, he operated almost ruthlessly, so that his filthy love-claws hurt her again and again.
