Anal
Zero Beats Per Minute

For the claws that as a child had sunk into her leaving visible scars, for the sharp teeth they bared when yawning, for the indifference and opportunism, for the cruelty with their prey: for all this, Sandra hated cats. What terrified her most was the hoarse, alien yet unexpectedly almost human call of the mating season. And from city to city, Sandra always seemed to end up with a room in the vicinity of a cat in heat. There it was, again. The helpless despair of those cries anguished her, and she closed the window. Tony had music in the house; it was his specialty. Yes, a bit of music would do her good. It was a vacation, an escape; that trip was supposed to be fun. She wanted to get out of that bad period at any cost. She picked a random CD. "Made in Wales," proclaimed the cover.

The sounds that started to emerge from the speakers opened the doors to her fear. Rumbles and pneumatics like alien presences, more horrible than five cats in heat simultaneously, brought back to her one by one the terrible truths from which she wanted to distance herself. She examined the CD case more closely: Anal. Anal? She had no intention of being deflowered that way. "Zero beats per minute." On the contrary, her heart rate was increasing with every well-choreographed round of impulses and sustains. Alarms and calls, steps, delays and accelerations, sudden notes along the dark corridors of that industrial, nuclear-annihilation music, brought her back to her obsessions, to the internal chains from which she couldn't free herself. Perhaps, instead, Anal was disco music, and the sounds she was hearing were a side effect of too many pills of too many colors taken all at once. After all, Tony was a pig and thought only about Saturday night and black lace.

Yes, Anal had to be disco music because only the unconscious could know so intimately the sound of anguish, of the light seen at the end of the tunnel, of desperate escape, of a thousand obstacles, of forced or self-induced pauses. Only the unconscious could bring back to her the whirlpools of gray horror in which, night after night, she drowned, and the gurgles of the abyss against the pulse of hope. "Anal plays electronic devices," the cover said. The electronic devices Sandra had seen at concerts launched trains of rhythms in motion and drew stellar circles. These, however, were the sounds of the earth, of geological and psychic depressions. These were perhaps the cruel and indifferent sounds that Dante had heard while writing the "Inferno." The electronic roars became deafening, and Sandra lost control when a beast arched its back with a terrible "Fffff!" of fear and threat. Shortly after, Tony's key turned the lock. She heard a siren very close. She leaned out of the open window: two men in uniform were dispersing a circle of onlookers while a stretcher swayed into the ambulance. Another drug addict, no doubt. But out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of the yellow of Sandra's silk scarf. Sandra? Sandra was not well, but... "Sandra?" He took the stairs four at a time, made his way through the crowd, but with a sharp whistle, the ambulance left. The disturbed and psychotic tones of "Zero Beats Per Minute" flowed from the open window, that black masterpiece of obsession and audiopathological invention. Tony had always thought Sandra had good taste, and not just in men.