34: History

Three men schemed, a girl dreamed, and a poet wrote volumes of verses. The three were in the government; they worked for an international bank; they had positions in the Catholic Church. They were among the least suspected and their families never learned what happened to them. Meanwhile, a girl in such a family, left too much alone, dreamed of being famous. She read glamour magazines and biographies of the stars. She was pretty, but pale, so she used too much rouge. A poet saw such a girl in a shop, and wrote love poems for her, poems of surprise and fancy, comedies, tragedies, imagistic vignettes, written in a tiny scrawl in volumes bound by hand and, in a cardboard box, burned in a house fire long after they had been forgotten. Never a subject of history, the three men killed themselves with distrust and fear; the girl never did anything as she had hoped; and the poet wrote only for himself in the end, not as he intended.