Adventures In Immediate Irreality (12 page)

The materialization of the thoughts running through my head as I gazed at Edda at
that moment would have resulted in the simple gesture haunting me: I would have
picked up the paperweight on the desk (I could see it out of the corner of my eye, a
medieval helmet resting on a pile of paper) and hurled it at her. The immediate
consequence would have been a formidable stream of blood—vigorous as a torrent
from a tap—issuing from her breast and filling the room little by little until
my feet, then my knees would be sloshing through a warm, sticky liquid, and
finally—as in those American horror movies where a character ends up in a
hermetically sealed room with the water level constantly rising—I would feel
it entering my mouth and I would drown in its pleasant, salty taste . . .

My lips started moving impulsively, and I gulped.

“Are you hungry?” Edda asked.

“I . . . No . . . no . . . not hungry. I was just thinking of something absurd.
Utterly absurd.”

“Tell me what it is. Please. You haven’t said a word since you’ve come, and I haven’t
asked you to. But now I am. Please.”

“Well,” I began, “it’s actually quite simple, couldn’t be simpler . . . I hope you
won’t mind my telling you, but . . .”

What I wanted to say was “I am a tree,” but it no longer meant anything now that I
was in the mood for blood. It was now lying dead and buried in the recesses of my
soul, and I could scarcely believe it had ever had any importance.

I began again.

“The thing is, I wasn’t well. I was feeling weak and miserable. Being with you always
does me good. All I have to do is see you . . . Does it bother you to hear
that?”

“Not at all,” she answered, and started to laugh.

Now I really felt like committing some absurd, bloody, violent act. I quickly picked
up my hat. “I’ll be going,” I said. And in no time I was running down the
stairs.

What was now clear was that the world I had fallen into by mistake would never let me
be a tree or kill anyone, nor would there be any waves of blood. All things and all
men were hemmed in by their petty, pathetic obligation to be precise, nothing more
than precise. What good did it do me to see a vase full of dahlias when the only
thing there was a scarf? If the world was so limited by its petty passion for
precision that it could not permit itself the luxury of taking that scarf for a vase
of flowers, then it lacked the ability to undergo the slightest change.

I suddenly felt as if my head had been crammed into my cranium and held prisoner
there. A painful captivity.

Chapter Fourteen

That autumn Edda fell ill and died. All those days of
aimless wandering and agonizing, debilitating questions were compressed into the
pain and misery of a single week just as several ingredients mixed together in a
solution may suddenly condense into a powerful poison.

The silence in the upper story increased another notch. Paul had come upon an old
overcoat and a threadbare tie in one wardrobe or another. He knotted the tie around
his neck like a string. It was purple, like a thin veil left on his face by
sleepless nights.

“She had a terrible night,” he told me. “Yesterday I again asked the doctor what he
thought, and he told me everything, the whole truth. ‘It’s as if her kidneys had
exploded,’ he said. ‘It is extremely rare for the disease to be so acute and to come
on so abruptly. It usually insinuates its way into the system, making its presence
known by this or that symptom long before it becomes serious. What we have here is
an explosion, a veritable explosion.’” Paul spoke fast but with long pauses, as if
he wanted to leave time for the terrible pain he felt to flare up and die down.

The downstairs office was as dark as a cave, but old man Weber, his nose in the
accounts, feigned work. Every morning the doctor came to the house and tiptoed
through the rooms with the three Webers in tow. I would follow, engaging Ozy in
conversation. It had been a long time since we played the game we invented, and now
we had the perfect opportunity, though how much better it would have been if we
could have talked about Edda’s illness as though nothing had happened.

Going up the stairs, I began to think this might merely be one of our games, directed
by Ozy and including the doctor, Paul, and the old man: the hunchback might merely
have made the whole thing up. By the time I had reached the top, I felt like crying
out, “Enough! It’s over now. Paul’s mask was impressive, and old man Weber was the
picture of suffering, but we’ve had enough. The game is over. Tell them, Ozy. Tell
them you don’t want to go on with it . . .” But things had gone too far for them to
stop at the top of the stairs . . .

When the doctor entered Edda’s room, old man Weber, Ozy, and I went next door. It may
have been the first time old man Weber had tried to keep a major emotion under
control. Leaning back into the armchair, he looked out of the window with the vague,
detached stare of someone who knew nothing and expected nothing. Then, like an actor
embellishing a role, he went over to a picture on the wall to have a better look at
it. And like the actor who, raising the volume of his voice for a tragic tirade,
overshoots the mark and produces a howl worthy of even the gallery’s disdain, he
spoiled the effect by drumming a finger angrily on the back of a chair while
supposedly lost in the picture.

Paul took me by the hand and said, “Edda wants to see you. Follow me.”

Edda was lying in the white sheets, looking in the direction of the window. Her hair
was spread out over the pillows, blonder and finer than before: an illness can
trigger subtle changes. The room was imbued with a kind of white decomposition of
things, its light so radiant that Edda’s face had disappeared in it.

Suddenly she turned her head.

So it was true . . . At that moment I had made a discovery so surprising yet so plain
that it could have been a truth come from without: Edda’s head was identical with
the ivory head of my feverish nights. Stunned by how obvious it was, I almost
thought I had devised the precise form of the porcelain head there and then, as one
contrives an episode in a dream with the speed of a pistol shot. Now I was certain
that something violent and evil was soon to befall Edda, or did I imagine it only
later? In matters concerning Edda I was unable to distinguish what came from me and
what from her.

She tried to meet my eyes but, exhausted, soon closed her own. As her hair was
brushed to the side, I could see the block of yellow wax her forehead had become.
Again I was hermetically enclosed in her presence, in what she represented now and
during my nights of delirium. In not one of my walks, not one of my meetings, had I
thought of anything but myself. It was impossible for me to conceive of another’s
sufferings or even another’s existence. The people I saw around me were purely
decorative, ephemeral, and as material as any object, as houses or trees. But in
Edda’s presence I felt for the first time that my concerns could move beyond me,
resonate in new depths and a new existence, to return in disturbing and enigmatic
echoes.

Who was Edda? What was Edda? The one who, because the meaning of my life resided in
her presence, enabled me for the first time to see myself from the outside. And in
the moment of her death she moved me in the most profound and genuine way: her death
was my death, and everything I do now, the life I live now, is a projection of my
future death and its cold, dark immobility as I perceived it in Edda.

I arose that day at dawn, stone-heavy, ruffled by the
presence of someone at my bedside. It was my father, waiting silently for me to
awake. When I opened my eyes, he walked across the room and returned with a crock of
water and a white basin. My heart was gripped by a painful convulsion: I realized
what this meant.

“Wash your hands,” my father said. “Edda is dead.”

It had begun to drizzle. The rain went on unabated for three days. On the day of the
funeral the mud was more aggressive and more filthy than ever. The wind hurled gusts
of water upon the roofs and windows. All night one window remained lit in the
Webers’ upper story, the room where the candles were burning.

Old man Weber’s study was in shambles: everything had been pushed aside to make room
for the coffin to pass through. Mud had made a triumphal entrance into the office,
insinuating its way like a hydra with myriad tentacles: spreading over the walls,
climbing up the people, even attempting to scale the coffin. When the oilcloth on
the floor was taken up, the wood showed long wrinkles of dirt resembling the black
wrinkles that furrowed Samuel Weber’s cheeks. The mud—sticky, heavy,
filthy—rose slowly but tenaciously around his elasticized shoes, penetrating
skin and, doubtless, soul. It was mud and nothing more, the floor and nothing more,
candles and nothing more. “My funeral,” Edda had once said to me, “will be a
succession of objects.”

Something deep inside me was struggling to find confirmation of a truth—as
distant as it might be—superior to mud or even merely different. In vain. My
identity had long been established and was now, as usual, simply reaffirming itself:
there was nothing in the world other than mud. What I perceived as pain was nothing
but a weak bubbling of mud, its protoplasmic prolongation in words and thought.

The rain poured down over Paul as if he were a bottomless barrel. It covered his
clothes, his heavily dangling arms; it bent his back; it mixed with the tears
running down his dirty cheeks in rivulets like the raindrops on the windows.

Swaying slowly on the men’s shoulders, the coffin passed Samuel Weber’s steamer, the
old ledgers, and any number of ink and medicine bottles that had come to light when
the office was being tidied up. The funeral was a mere succession of objects . .
.

Later a few incidents connected with the life here below occurred. In the cemetery,
for example, when the corpse in its white shroud was lifted from the coffin, the
shroud showed a large patch of blood. Such was the last and least significant
episode before the coffin descended to the hold of the cemetery, its warm, moldy
basement full of yellow, gelatin-like, purulent bodies.

Chapter Fifteen

Whenever I return to these matters, trying in vain to fuse
them with what I might call my person; when I revive them in my memory and old man
Weber’s office suddenly becomes the room I am in, inhaling the musty odor of old
ledgers, only to vanish in a flash and leave me to ponder the painful age-old
problem of how people spend their lives: living in rooms, for instance, or—like
strange bodies with the ramified fronds of a fern or the inconsistency of smoke—
sniffing an unusual odor like the deeply enigmatic odor of mold; when people and
events open and close within me like fans; when my hand attempts to write these
strange and incompressible simple truths, then for an instant, like a man condemned
to death who unlike everyone surrounding him has a quick glimpse of the death in
store for him (and hopes that his struggle is unlike any other in the world and will
lead to his release), I feel that one day an authentic new truth will emerge from
all this, a truth warm and intimate, capable of summarizing me clearly, like a name,
and striking an entirely new, unique note in me, and it will be the meaning of my
life . . .

Why else does this fluid—intimate yet hostile, proximate yet jealous of its freedom
— persist in me, turning capriciously into the vision of Edda, into Paul Weber’s
hunched shoulders or the over-precise detail of the tap in a hotel corridor? Why
does the memory of Edda’s last days revisit me with such clarity? Or why, to put it
another way (and questions can go off chaotically in thousands of directions as in a
game we played as children—folding a piece of paper with an ink spot in the middle
and leaning down heavily on it to make the ink spread, then opening it to find the
most fantastic, never before imagined contortions of a design bizarre to begin
with), why, to put it, I repeat, in another way, does
this
memory come back
to me and not another?

Each memory, incomprehensible yet precise, demands my complete attention. Like a
sharp pain it pushes all minor inconveniences—the pillows’ lumping together, a
pill’s bitter taste—into the background and, encompassing all my doubts and
worries, demands my complete attention, petty and vague as it might be. For every
memory is unique in the poorest sense of the word: it is only one in a linear series
of events in my life, each with its precise character and lacking the possibility of
change, of departing in the slightest from that precision. “That is your life, that
and nothing else,” it says, a statement replete with nostalgia for a world,
hermetically sealed as it is in its lights and colors, from which no life is allowed
to extract anything but the precise image of its banality, a statement redolent of
the melancholy of being alone and limited in a world of solitude, pettiness, and
aridity.

There are nights when I awake from a terrible nightmare, my simplest and most
frightening dream. I am lying in a deep sleep in the bed I lay down in that evening.
The setting and time are the same as the actual setting and time. If the nightmare
begins at midnight, for instance, it places me in precisely the degree of darkness
and silence reigning at that hour. I can see and feel my position; I know the bed
and room I am sleeping in. My dream stretches like a fine skin over my body and over
the state of my sleep at the moment. One might even say I am awake. I am awake
though asleep and dreaming my wakefulness at the same moment I am dreaming my
sleep.

Suddenly I feel the sleep growing heavier, trying to drag me down. I would like to
wake up, but it weighs heavy on my eyelids and hands. I dream that I am tossing,
flailing, but it is stronger than I am and after battling it for a while, I feel it,
tenacious, taking hold. I begin to scream; I want to resist, want someone to awaken
me; I slap myself as hard as I can: I am afraid sleep is going to drag me too far
down, to a place from which there is no return; I beg for help, for someone to shake
me awake . . .

My last scream, the most powerful, finally rouses me. I am suddenly in my actual
room, which is identical to the room in my dream, and in the position I dreamed I
was in while struggling with the nightmare. What I now see around me differs little
from what I saw a second ago, but there is a feeling of authenticity in the air—
about objects, about myself. It is like a sudden winter frost that magnifies the
sound of things . . .

What does the feeling of my reality consist of? That the life I shall live until my
next dream has returned. Current memories and sorrows weigh heavily on me, and I
wish to resist them, to avoid falling into their sleep, a sleep from which I might
never return.

Now I am struggling with reality. I scream, I beg to be awoken, to awaken into
another life, my true life. True, it is broad daylight and I know where I am, I know
I am alive, but there is something missing, as there was in my nightmare.

I struggle. I scream. I flail. Who will awaken me?

That precise reality around me is dragging me down, trying to sink me. Who will
awaken me?

It has always been like this. Always.
Always.