The Listener (5 page)

The next morning was a Sunday. She lay in bed for a long time and tried to recall every remark, every silence, every gesture, all the colours and the lighting and the chilly music, but it all flowed together, further and further away, as unreal as in his books. She rolled over in bed and fell back asleep with her arms wound tightly around her body in a caress of quiet respect and expectation.

H
E WAS A PAINTER
. For years, art exhibitions of all kinds had bored or depressed him. But when he walked into a tiny connecting room at the Biennale in Venice, he stopped abruptly and was suddenly wide awake. He stood in sincere and undivided admiration of a representational, almost naturalistic sculpture of a woman’s buttocks – in pink marble, cut off a bit above the knee as in classical representations of the torso, but also just above the navel. The sculptor had not cared about anything other than this free-standing, consummate posterior. Certainly he knew the Callipygian Venus, Venus with the beautiful buttocks who lifts her garment to assure herself with a glance over her shoulder that her derrière is her loveliest feature. But here the buttocks were wholly without props. They stood alone in pink marble, the rounded fruits of the artist’s love and insight.

The sculpture stood on a black pedestal maybe one metre high, in a room with grey walls and northern
light, a tiny room between two doors. The wall opposite the window, the only one that offered enough space for a painting, was occupied by a work in scorched brown plastic. The sculpture was, in other words, completely undisturbed. Surrounded by dark colours, lit by cool daylight, it was like a lustrous pink pearl. The light embraced the marble and filled it with translucence. The painter thought this beautiful backside was the most sensual and respectful symbol of woman he had ever seen. People walked through the room from time to time but hardly paused. They walked on, while the painter lingered deep in thought, lost at last in the adoration of a work of art. He had always wondered what it would feel like.

These buttocks had almost sumptuous contours, which were at once restrained and austere. The two halves rested together like a peach around its groove, the one slightly raised towards the curve of the hips. The shadows were soft, like those on a youthful cheek, and despite the sculptor’s clearly sensual delight his work was oddly out of reach. This backside could have been a symbol of eternity.

The painter didn’t touch the marble. He stood there for so long that the shadows altered on the sculpture as if the woman had imperceptibly moved and turned towards him.

Suddenly the painter left the room and went to ask the price.

He learned that the sculptor was Hungarian, and that the sculpture was very dear.

It is unusual to feel an irreducible and absolute desire, a desire so strong that it sweeps all else aside, for once in your life to be filled with an overwhelming craving. The painter wanted to own these marble buttocks and take them home with him to Finland.

He walked back to the hotel, a very small hotel in one of the narrow streets behind the San Marco palace. The stairs were dark after the blinding sunlight, and he walked upwards slowly, step by step, trying to formulate what he would say. Aina was lying on the bed. It was very hot, and she had nothing on.

“How was it?” she said.

He said, “The same old stuff. Have you been out?”

She reached across the table and showed him a handful of trinkets, seashells and glittering glass, and told him it had cost her almost nothing. “Almost nothing at all!” she repeated. She put the necklaces on her stomach and laughed playfully.

He looked at her, concerned.

“But they weren’t expensive,” she assured him. “You know I don’t throw money away.” She came to him and he put his arms around her the usual way. His hands rested on her warm buttocks, and he couldn’t say a word about the sculpture in pink marble.

When the evening cooled, they went out into the city. They always walked the same way, across the Piazza San Marco, and Aina repeated what she’d heard him say those first few days. She talked about old gold and marble’s patina and their daring in having built the way they had. And then she turned to him and said, in her
own way, “How they must have loved what they were doing, and loved each other! Otherwise, how could they have produced all this?”

He kissed her, and they walked on. They went to the restaurant they liked, which was cheap. They ate spaghetti and drank red wine. There were tourists, but it was genuine all the same. Outside, the evening quickly turned dark blue.

“Are you happy?” Aina said, and he answered honestly that he was. He did not confuse what he longed for with his gratitude for what he had. Extreme desires have their own sanctuary. But while they walked the narrow streets and crossed the bridges, while they ate and talked and gazed at one another, the whole time, the whole evening, he calculated and tried to get the numbers to add up, counted all the cities they hadn’t yet seen and realised that if he bought the beautiful statue they would have to go back home at once.

“What are thinking about?” Aina wanted to know, and he replied, “Nothing in particular.”

They left the restaurant and wandered through Venice along the same lanes and across the same bridges. The city was all curves and labyrinths, they always came back to the same places, and they never knew where they were.

“The palaces are mirrored in the canals!” Aina exclaimed. She was a little drunk. “Look at the green seaweed creeping up the walls. It’s all decaying. That palace is slowly sinking, one row of windows after another … Do you love me?”

“I do,” he said.

“But you’re thinking about something else the whole time.”

“I am,” he said.

She stopped on the bridge to look at him. She was having a little trouble focusing. “Tell me what you’re sad about,” she said slowly and with exaggerated solemnity. She looked comical and earnest, standing there on too-high heels that altered the natural angle of her legs and forced her knees forwards, with her tourist jewellery and the locks of hair on her forehead rolled up individually on pins and her ridiculous little purse. Her overwhelming femininity struck him dumb. People walked over the bridge and past them, slowly in the warm darkness. That’s what’s so remarkable, he thought absentmindedly. There’s no traffic. They just walk, nothing but the sound of footsteps. “Aina,” he said, “I’m thinking about a sculpture I saw at the Biennale. It’s a thing in marble, and I’d like to have it. Own it. Take it home with us. But it’s expensive.”

“You mean you want to buy a piece of art?” said Aina, flabbergasted. “But you can’t be serious!”

“It’s beautiful,” he said angrily. “A fine piece of work.”

“My God,” Aina said. She started walking again, and they continued down the bridge steps.

“It’s expensive,” he repeated vehemently. “The whole grant, all of it. If I buy it, we’ll have to go home.”

They walked past several closed palaces that had their feet in the canal. Gondolas glided by with lanterns and tourists and singing gondoliers, and the moon had risen. She let all this melancholy, heart-rending beauty flow
into her and mix with her familiar love for the painter, and suddenly it felt completely natural to say, “But if you want that sculpture so terribly badly, then it’s probably best to buy it, don’t you think? Because otherwise you’ll just go around thinking about it?” She stopped and waited for his gratitude, and when he embraced her she closed her eyes and thought, How easy it is to love.

“And what’s it a sculpture of?” she whispered.

“A torso,” he said.

“A torso?”

“Yes. Well, actually it’s buttocks. In pink marble.”

She pulled back and repeated, “Buttocks? Just buttocks?”

“You need to see it,” he said. “You can’t understand unless you see it.” He pulled her to him and tried to hold her while he described it, searching for words, but she didn’t want to listen. They walked home in silence. They reached the Piazza and their own street, and the moon shone but didn’t help at all. What a banal story, he thought. I know what she’s going to do. She’ll get undressed behind the screen and get into her bed backwards so I won’t be able to see her behind. It’s all so stupid.

They entered their hotel room. They didn’t usually turn on the light in the evening, because the glow from the Piazza spread into their street and gave the room a lovely reddish half-light. Down on the street, people walked by singing,
bellissima, bellissima …

“Listen,” he said. “They’re not tourists. They live here. And they’re not coming home from a party. They
just feel like singing …” It was a remark he made just for her, because she would like it, but all she said was, “Yes, I know.”

Now it’s bad, he thought. If I go to her bed, that’s bad, and if I don’t that’s even worse. I can’t tell her I don’t want the sculpture. I can’t do anything at all. The painter was so tired he just sat on the edge of his bed, exhausted. Aina undressed behind the screen, quickly and quietly. And then she moved about the room for a long time, fussing and arranging, and finally she came to him with two glasses of wine. She was wearing her robe. She gave him one of the glasses and sat down on the floor in front of him. “I’ve been thinking,” she said earnestly, almost sternly.

“Have you?” he said submissively, already trembling with relief.

She leaned forward and studied his face with wrinkled eyebrows. “We’ll steal it,” she said. “We’ll just go in and simply steal it. I’m not afraid.”

He saw her face in the drifting light from the Piazza and saw that she was serious. He thought quickly and said, “Do you think we can get away with it?”

“Of course,” she cried. “We can get away with anything. It’s the ground floor, I know that, and there’s a park outside. We’ll cut open a pane of glass with a diamond. We’ll have to buy a diamond, just a little one. Can you carry it, or do we have to get a wheelbarrow?”

“Fantastic,” the painter said. He stood and went to the window and listened to the footsteps on the street. He felt like laughing. Suddenly he felt like decamping right
then, at night, taking his woman and travelling on to anywhere. He turned to her and said, gravely, “I don’t think we should. We’ll have to live without the sculpture. Think of the sculptor. He’s Hungarian. How will he know that it’s us who’s got his sculpture in our studio in Finland? And he probably needs the money.”

“That’s true,” Aina said. “Such a shame.” She put her robe on a chair and got into bed.

They lay side by side, and she said, “What are you thinking?”

“About the sculpture,” he said.

“Me too,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll go and look at it together.”

T
HE FIRST TIME
was in the milk shop as he stood looking at the display of cakes under the glass counter, completely indifferent to the ingratiating pastries but eager to avoid looking at the clerk. Suddenly, and with dreadful clarity, he saw himself. Not in a mirror. He actually stood beside himself for an instant and thought quietly, There stands a skinny, timid, stoop-shouldered fellow buying cheese and milk and a piece of ham. The apparition lasted only for a second.

Afterwards he was upset, and on the way home he wondered if he had strained his eyes with the latest lettering – the text was extremely small. He put his food between the windows where it was cold and sat down at his drawing table to finish the commission. He opened his drawing instruments and filled his finest pen with ink. And there it was again, powerfully. With a sharpening of all his senses, he stood beside himself and observed a man drawing tiny, fine, parallel lines, a man he did not like but who aroused his interest. This time, it lasted a little longer, perhaps five seconds.

He felt a slight chill, but his hands weren’t shaking, so he finished the job, cleaned it up and put the sheet in an envelope. The whole time he was writing the address, licking the stamps, closing the metal clasps, he was on the verge of gliding away to stand alongside himself, watching a man prepare a parcel. It was a very close thing. He put on his hat and coat to go to the post office. Down on the street, he started to tremble and clenched his jaws so tightly that they hurt. Nothing happened at the post office. He cashed a money order and bought some stamps. He decided to take a walk along the harbour, although it was raining and quite cold – a calm, purposeful man taking a quick walk to relax and dispel his thoughts. Exhaustion sometimes produces phenomena that can be easily explained. They vanish if you leave them alone and refuse to let yourself be frightened.

He avoided looking at the people he passed. The wind was blowing from the water, and the warehouses along the waterfront were closed. He walked and walked, trying to occupy his thoughts with something of interest. He could think of nothing but lettering. He tried to capture and hold onto the tiniest scrap of usable thought, but the only thing he really cared about was lettering. In the end, he let his troubled mind rest in a large, quiet surface of letters, a text arrangement of perfect beauty to which the key was distance and balance. That’s the way it is with letters – distance and space are what matters. He usually started inking from the bottom up so that he wouldn’t be distracted by the meaning of the words.

By the time he reached the promontory, he felt calmer. A very long time ago, when he still suffered from ambition and disappointment, someone had said that he didn’t love his letters and that it showed. The remark had hurt and troubled him. He had seen text arrangements that were considered vivid and expressive. They struck him as clumsily done – not even retouched. For him, the stamp of quality was objectivity and purity. Lettering and mathematics have exactly the same potential for perfection. There can be only one right answer.

Now he had the wind at his back. He passed a sign at the ferry and noticed in passing that the letters were awkward and ugly. His attention slid away and a quick stab of anxiety swept over him. He tried to look at boats, joints in the stone pier, iron rings, moorings, anything at all, the way a person entering a strange room searches for conversation pieces among the room’s indifferent objects. Finally he tried to think about the daily newspaper, about reports of great and frightening significance, but all he saw was a great blurry text of stocky typefaces, black in the headlines and otherwise completely unreadable. He started to run. It came closer. It came back.

He stopped and took a big step to one side and they walked on together. This time it was very distinct and lasted for maybe a minute. A minute is a long time. He saw his own overcoat flapping about his legs in the wind and caught a glimpse of a pinched profile under his hat, the profile of a gentleman who cared about nothing, a gentleman who was out walking because he didn’t want to go home. His interest was mixed with contempt, and
he wondered if the man who walked beside him was afraid and if he too felt contempt. He felt warm and vaguely impatient.

The phenomenon ended and all he saw was the wet asphalt. Mechanically, he went on walking. His heart pounded rapidly and hard. No one had ever looked at him that way before, with such interest and intensity. He walked into the park and sat down on a bench as if he were waiting for someone. His heart was still pounding and he didn’t dare raise his eyes from the ground. Nothing happened. He waited for a long time and nothing happened. He did not try to understand, he only waited. When it began to rain, he rose in disappointment and went home. It was not yet evening, but he fell asleep at once, hugely tired, and slept straight through to morning.

He woke in an odd mood that he didn’t recognise as expectant. He dressed himself with great care, shaved, tidied his room – listening the entire time. It occurred to him that he might be listening for the doorbell or the telephone, so he turned off both. He did not work today. He moved as quietly and slowly as possible, back and forth across the room, and as he moved, he fussed with the small objects set out for use or decoration, moving them about and putting them back, listening uninterruptedly. He took two pretty glasses out of the cupboard and put them back again. The day passed.

It came at dusk, as he looked out the window. Again they stood side by side, utterly still so as not to upset the balance in this remarkable displacement, confusion, or whatever other name might be given to what they were experiencing. He felt the same sympathetic contempt, but a new warmth and quickness pulsed through the sympathy he felt for the person he was visiting. He was strong. A few minutes later, he was alone again, but for those few minutes he had been very happy.

He was alone all that day and all that week. He prepared himself, but nothing happened. Disappointment and anticipation became almost an obsession. He thought about nothing but the opportunity to stand to the side. That’s what he called it in his head, standing to the side. He returned to the places where they had been together and waited for a long time. He tried to remember books about doppelgängers and dual personalities but could no longer recall their names, and he didn’t want to consult bookshop assistants and librarians. The meeting he was preparing for was extremely personal and secret. It could not be hastened or explained. All he could do was render himself utterly, impersonally receptive. He knew for certain that he was a receiver – he radiated nothing but expectation. So he waited.

Finally he succeeded. He stepped out of himself without even feeling contempt for the person he’d left. They stood there side by side as they’d done before and gazed out the window. He allowed delight and alertness to wash through him like a warm wave. His hands burned, his totally new hands. The whole time he stared
out the window. Then the two of them glided back into one another. This happened with a sense of weary reluctance and left behind it a feeling of disappointment, flaccid and ghastly. He was alone in the room. He ran to the door and back to the window, at his wit’s end from abandonment. Again and again he thought, bitterly, He doesn’t look at me any more, why doesn’t he look at me? He remembered the story about the doppelgänger who killed himself. He couldn’t work.

The rain had stopped, and the weather was chilly and clear. He put on his boots and a warm coat, left the house and took a bus out to where the city came to an end. Day after day, he wandered around in the borderland where the buildings thin out and lose themselves in arbitrary ugliness. He returned to the area every morning and walked incessantly, occasionally resting on a bench or in some café by a railway crossing or a factory. The impersonal, undefined environment was perhaps a preparation for his meeting the other, perhaps a challenge. Spring came closer, a work in progress, much like the area he wandered through, as muddy and melancholy in every way. He didn’t know what he felt for the one he expected, for the one he made a place for and opened himself up to – at times he was an enemy, at times a friend. In the cafés, he sometimes ordered two cups of coffee, which was also a challenge. Sometimes someone tried to speak to him, more often here than in the city. When that happened, he would immediately stand up and leave.

In these unpopulated, half-built, discarded outlands, he felt he could see the city’s discharge, the wave of
dirty foam that flows over the rim and settles. Letters and words had also been flushed out; he could see them everywhere in signs, posters, placards. Every fence and wall, even the trees, carried black words that pursued him. But he didn’t read them. Chalk and knives and tar had written words that screamed at him and drove him on down a gauntlet between fences and walls and trees, all bearing the impress of the written word. He walked in circles and found distance and space nowhere, balance nowhere. He had begun to think of himself in the third person, “he”. He wanders here, waiting, he is waiting for me, walking among these horrible words and these great fields lined with wooden houses and rubbish tips. He walks quickly past the people he encounters and waits only for me to see him and take him under my wing. He passes long murals of barracks and streets and crossroads, again and again, and they are all alike, ceaselessly and sadly repeating, like lost time.

The last snow melted. One day he walked through a thin grove of birches somewhere between two highways, and there, finally, he stood to the side. In a state of great joy, he stood ready to walk on, but now it was not only his hands that felt alive but also his head, his stomach, all of him. His whole body burned with an enormous unused power. Behind the copse of trees by the main road, he could see large black letters. He wanted to read them and understand them, and he started walking, just then I started walking. I wanted to move on, and I started to walk, faster and faster, I hadn’t known I could feel like this. I was mad with joy and impatience and I
knew there wasn’t much time and there was too much to do. I looked back one single time, and there he came, running, stumbling across the marshy ground, stoop-shouldered, his mouth agape as if he were calling to me to wait. I had no time for him, because he was only one person but I was seeing him. I did not reach out to him, I’m sure I didn’t, but he threw himself forwards, towards my hand and grabbed it, and before I had time to despise him it was too late – we were just one person, a single figure standing stock-still beneath the birches, waiting.