Adventures In Immediate Irreality (4 page)

In an internal dialogue that I believe never ceased I would defy the evil powers
around me one day and flatter them basely the next. I would indulge in certain odd
rites, though not without motivation.

Whenever I went out and took different streets, I would retrace my steps on the way
home. I did so to avoid making a circle in which trees and houses would be
inscribed. In this respect, my walks were like a thread which, once unwound, I
needed to rewind along the same route, and had I not done so the objects caught in
the loop would have forever been closely attached to me.

Whenever it rained, I would be careful not to touch the stones in the path of the
streams of water. I did so to add nothing to the water’s activity and to enable it
to exercise its elemental powers unimpeded.

Fire purifies all. I always had a box of matches in my pocket, and when I felt
particularly sad I would light a match and pass my hands through the flame, first
one, then the other.

All this bespoke a melancholy of existence, a kind of normally organized torture in
the course of my life as a child. In time the crises disappeared by themselves,
though not without leaving behind a powerful memory. And although they were gone by
the time I reached adolescence, the crepuscular state preceding them and the deep
sense of the futility of the world coming after became, so to speak, my natural
state.

Futility filled the hollows of the world like a liquid spreading in all directions,
and the sky above me—eternally correct, absurd, and obscure—turned its own color
of despair. Surrounded by that futility and beneath that sky, I wander eternally
cursed to this day.

Chapter Two

The doctor I consulted about my crises pronounced a strange
word: “paludism.” I was amazed that my secret and intimate afflictions could have a
name, and a name so bizarre to boot. The doctor prescribed quinine—another
cause for amazement. I could not comprehend how an illness,
it
, could be
cured with quinine taken by a person,
me
. But what disturbed me most was
the doctor himself. Long after he examined me, he continued to exist and bustle
about my memory with those minute, automatic gestures I could not stop him from
making.

He was a short man with an egg-shaped head, the pointed end of the egg lengthening
into a black beard continually in motion. His small velvet eyes, fitful gestures,
and thrust-forward mouth made him look like a mouse. The impression was so immediate
and so strong that I thought it perfectly natural that he should give his
r
’s a long and sonorous roll as if he were munching something in secret as
he spoke. The quinine he gave me only increased my conviction there was something
mouse-like about him, and the confirmation of said conviction proved so strange and
touched on facts so central to my childhood that I believe the incident worthy of
recounting.

Not far from our house there was a shop that sold
sewing machines. I spent hours there every day. The owner was a young man by the
name of Eugen who had just completed his military service and hoped to earn a living
from the shop. He had a sister, Clara, who was a year younger than he. They lived
together on the outskirts of town and spent all day in the shop, having neither
friends nor relatives.

It was a rented room and had never served as a place of business. The walls had not
been repainted and were covered with garlands of violets and faded rectangles where
pictures had once hung. A bronze lamp, also left from before, hung from the middle
of the ceiling. It had a dark-red majolica lampshade decorated along the rim with
green porcelain acanthus leaves in relief. It was highly ornamented, old and
old-fashioned, but imposing. It looked something like a gravestone or a retired
general wearing his former uniform in a parade.

The sewing machines stood in three rows separated by broad aisles running to the back
of the room. Every morning Eugen took pains to wet the floor with water using an old
tin he had made holes in. He deftly coaxed the dribble that emerged into clever
spirals and figure eights and occasionally signed his name or wrote out the date.
The paint on the wall clearly called for such finesse.

At the far end of the room a wooden screen separated the shop proper from another,
smaller area, the entrance to which was covered by a green portière. Eugen and Clara
spent much of their time in this back room and always had lunch there so as not to
leave the shop unmanned. They called it “the green room,” and I once heard Eugen
say, “It really is like the room where actors await their entrances. When you go out
into the shop and spend a half hour selling a sewing machine, are you not
playacting?” Then, using a more learned inflection, he added, “Life as a whole is
pure theater.”

Behind the portière Eugen would play the violin. He laid the music out on the table,
then bent over it, patiently deciphering the staves of complicated notes as if
trying to unravel a skein of knotty thread into one long, slender strand, the thread
of the melody. A small petroleum lamp on a trunk would burn all afternoon, filling
the room with a dull light and throwing the violinist’s distorted shadow on the
wall.

I went there so often as to become part of the furniture, so to speak, a kind of
extension of the old oil-cloth sofa I would sit on, motionless, heeded by and
bothering no one. I went because Clara would make her afternoon toilet in the back
room. She kept her wardrobe in a small armoire and looked at herself in a broken
mirror that she leaned against the lamp on the trunk. The mirror was so old that the
polish had completely worn off in places and actual objects showed here and there
through the back of the mirror, merging with the reflected images as in a double
exposure.

Sometimes she took off nearly all her clothes and rubbed cologne into her armpits,
lifting her arms with no embarrassment, or between her breasts, sticking her hands
between her shift and her body. The shift was short, and when she leaned over I had
a full view of her shapely legs tightly encased in their black stockings. She looked
very much like a half-naked woman I had seen on a pornographic postcard that the
park pretzel vendor had shown me. She aroused the same vague swoon as the obscene
picture, a kind of vacuum in the chest and a fierce pang of desire in the groin.

I always sat in the same place—behind Eugen on the back-room sofa — waiting for
Clara to complete her toilet, because then, on her way into the shop, she would have
to pass between her brother and me in a space so narrow that her calves could not
help rubbing against my knees. I looked forward to that moment every day with the
same impatience and the same torment. It depended on any number of trivial
circumstances that I observed with a combination of exasperation and acute
sensitivity. All that had to happen was that Eugen should feel thirsty or tire of
playing or that a customer should come into the shop and he would abandon his place,
thereby leaving Clara room to pass without touching me.

Every afternoon as I approached the door of the shop, my long, quivering antennae
would come out and test the air for the sound of the violin. The moment I heard
Eugen playing, I breathed a sigh of relief. I would enter slowly and shout out my
name from the threshold so he would not think I was a customer and interrupt his
piece. If he paused so much as a second, it might check the flow and magic of the
melody and induce him to put down the violin for good that afternoon. But this was
not the only unfavorable adventure possible. All kinds of things could go wrong in
the back room . . .

As long as Clara was still at her toilet, I kept an ear out for the faintest of
noises, an eye out for the slightest of movements. Eugen might give a cough, for
instance, and, swallowing a bit of saliva, announce that he was off to the café for
a pastry. A trifle like that, a single cough, could herald the monstrous calamity of
a wasted afternoon. Indeed, the whole day would have gone to waste, and that night
in bed, instead of turning over leisurely in my mind (and pausing over each detail
to “see” and savor it as it deserved) the moment when my knees touched Clara’s
stocking, instead of delving, molding, and caressing the thought, I would toss and
turn feverishly in the bedclothes, unable to sleep and impatiently awaiting
daybreak.

One day something totally out of the ordinary occurred. The adventure presaged
disaster at first, but had a surprise ending, one so sudden and dependent on such a
minor incident that the pleasure it subsequently gave me was like a construction
made of incongruous objects that only a prestidigitator could hold together. In one
fell swoop Clara radically altered the tenor of my visits, gave them a new meaning
and new titillations. It was rather like the famous chemistry experiment in which a
crystal dropped into a red liquid instantly transforms it to a bright green.

I was sitting on the sofa in the usual place, waiting with my usual impatience, when
the door to the shop opened and in came a customer. Eugen immediately left the back
room. All appeared to be lost. Clara proceeded with her impassive toilet while the
conversation in the shop dragged on interminably. The question was whether Eugen
would return before Clara had finished dressing. I found it painful to follow the
two events, Clara’s toilet and Eugen’s conversation, realizing that they would run
parallel to each other until Clara went out into the shop or they came together in
the back room like trains in a film racing madly toward each other, about to crash
or speed past depending on whether a mysterious hand intervenes to shunt one of them
onto a siding at the last moment. Meanwhile, the conversation kept on its course and
Clara kept powdering her face.

I tried to help fate by pushing my knees close to the table, but to reach it I would
have had to perch at the very edge of the sofa—an awkward position or, at the
very least, comic. I had the feeling that Clara was looking at me in the mirror and
smiling.

Shortly thereafter she finished rounding her lips with lipstick and gave her cheeks a
final dab of powder. The perfume floating through the room made me dizzy with desire
and despair. It was when she walked past me that the thing I least expected took
place: she rubbed against my knees as she did every other day (or perhaps even a bit
more, though surely that was only my imagination) with an air of indifference
implying there was nothing between us.

Vice involves a complicity more profound and immediate than any verbal communication.
It suffuses the body instantaneously like an inner melody, completely
transmogrifying mind, flesh, and blood. In the fraction of a second that Clara’s
legs touched mine, vast new hopes, vast new expectations were born in me.

With Clara I understood it all from the first day, the
first instant. She was my first complete and normal sexual adventure. It was an
adventure full of torments and misery, fears and the gnashing of teeth, yet it could
have come close to love had it not also been a long, painful bout with impatience.
Clara was as calm and capricious as I was bold and impulsive. She had a violent way
of provoking me and took a sordid joy in watching me suffer, a joy that always
preceded the sexual act and was part of it.

The first time the thing I had so long awaited came to pass, the provocation was of a
simplicity so elementary (brutal almost) that the words she used—especially
the anonymous verb—retain much of the virulence they had then. All I need do
is think back on them and my present indifference is eaten away as if by acid.

Eugen was away on errands. The two of us were alone and
silent. Clara—in her afternoon dress, her legs crossed, her back to the shop
window—was knitting away at something. Several weeks had passed since the
back-room adventure, which had immediately created an icy atmosphere between us, and
the ensuing tension found expression in utter indifference on her part. We would sit
facing each other without exchanging a word for hours, yet hovering above the
silence was a secret accord, a perfect understanding threatening to explode. All
that was wanting was the mysterious word to break through the cloak of convention.
At night I would make dozens of plans, and the next day they would come up against
the most basic obstacles: she had to finish her knitting, the light was wrong, the
shop too quiet, the set-up of the sewing machines too important to be disturbed,
even for motives of sentiment. I kept my jaws clenched the whole time: the silence
was terrible, a silence that for me had all the force and shape of a scream.

It was Clara who broke it. Speaking in what was nearly a whisper and never lifting
her eyes from her knitting, she said, “If you had come earlier today, we could have
done it
. Eugen left right after lunch.”

Until that point there had been no trace of sexual allusion between us, and from
those few words a sudden new reality burst forth. It was as extraordinary, as
miraculous as if a marble statue had sprung up out of the floor in the midst of the
sewing machines.

I was at her in a flash. I grabbed her hand and stroked it violently, kissed it. She
pulled it away. “Let me go,” she said, annoyed.

“Come to me, Clara. Please . . .”

“It’s too late. Eugen is on his way back. Let me go, let me go.”

I touched her feverishly all over—her shoulders, breasts, legs . . .

“Let me go,” she protested.

“There’s still time,” I begged.

“Where?”

“In the back room. Come on. It’s perfect.”

As soon as I said the word “perfect,” my chest welled with hope. I kissed her hand
again and pulled her off the chair by force. She let me drag her along the
floor.

From that day on, our afternoon “habits” underwent a change. There was still the same
Eugen, still the same Clara, still the same sonatas (though I could no longer stand
the violin and could hardly wait for Eugen to leave); I was in the same room, but my
concerns were different. It was if I were playing a new game on a board designed for
a game I had outgrown.

Each time Eugen left, a period of waiting began, one much more arduous than what I
had known till then. The silence in the shop was like a block of ice. Clara would
sit by the window, knitting. This was the “beginning” to each day, the beginning
without which our adventure could go no further. Sometimes Eugen left when Clara was
in the back room half-naked, and at first I thought that would speed things along. I
was wrong: everything had to begin in the shop. I had to wait until she put her
clothes on and went over to the window so she could open the afternoon book to page
one.

I would sit opposite her on a stool and talk to her, beg her over and over, implore
her. I knew it was in vain: Clara did consent but rarely, and even then she would
resort to a ruse to rob me of complete acquiescence. “I’m going into the back room
to take an aspirin. I’ve got a splitting headache. Please don’t follow me.”

I swore I wouldn’t and immediately ran after her. A veritable battle would ensue, but
Clara was clearly inclined to yield: she would fall on the sofa in a heap as if she
had just tripped over something, then put her hands behind her head, close her eyes,
and pretend she was going to sleep. It was impossible for me to move her body so
much as an inch. I had to pull her dress down over her legs before I could press
against her. She put up no resistance, nor did she give me any assistance: she
remained as immobile and indifferent as a piece of wood, and had it not been for her
intimate, secret warmth I would never have known that she “knew.”