With My Dog Eyes: A Novel (5 page)

Mathematics. Fervor and vigor. And in university meetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, megalomanias. He’d leave, totally spent, despondent after listening to so many drawn-out tiffs. At night returning to his studies, searching, searching principally for order, mind and heart integrated once more in those magnificent suns of ice formulas expansions expressions, Amós would drift sublimely over some pages, and wasn’t it in a sudden burst that everything was no longer? Like if you thought you knew every little corner of your own house and then discovered, for instance in the hall through which you’d passed many times, in the hallway my God, you discovered a crag with mirrored surfaces or a black prism. But they weren’t there, I shout, they weren’t there. And everything is a beginning-anew. This strangely distant look I let fall on my son is also a beginning-anew? As if the kid had nothing to do with me, and the yard and the hibiscus fence and the hour, I’m not even sure of the time, a light illuminating and shading my son’s face, he on the bicycle, now going slower around through the arbor, and this sofa where I’m still stretched I pass my fingers over the cloth, I cross my hands. Am I still alive? and one day I will leave this house, the sofa for sure, I’ll never see
the boy or the man again, and the hibiscus and the arbor and I’ll stop seeing any kind of light or any kind of shade. Or will I myself be a shade? And I will stop feeling you, Amós, and I will never again touch paper and books, nor anybody’s flesh, not even my own flesh. I swallow as though I were sighing and swallowing at the same time, I get up and shout from the room: son, I’m leaving, stay here and I’ll be back in a little bit. You too? he says. Me too? I say to myself.

I can tell my head is inclined too far to the left. I try to center it. It keeps leaning gradually to the left. And the fact that I am standing also worries me. How is it possible that I can stay standing up? I’d be more comfortable on all fours, my eyes scraping the floor, my hands wide-open
and stuck to the surface of the streets. It would be safer for me. Now I should get in the car. I’m going to Isaiah’s. We always understand each other even though we almost never speak. It’s true he lives with a sow and he seemed to be doing fine the last time. And why not live with hilde? A Germanic name. She must be blonde. What I mean is she must be a white sow. They’re rare. And what will I say to Isaiah? About all that. He’s going to ask: does it tend to zero? The moving streets. Five o’clock in the afternoon, I see from a clock on the avenue. I stop at a signal. An old man carrying books and papers is doubting if he should cross. One of the papers falls to the ground. Another man stoops to help him. Maybe they know each other? They smile. They exchange a warm handshake. The one who knelt places his hands on the old man’s shoulders. People swerve around the two and make annoyed faces. The old man seems to be explaining something about the papers. He’s upset. It’s not possible, he’s crying. The horns behind me. I advance. I look in the rearview. The one who knelt points for the old man, to what? The bar on the corner. I lose sight of them. I am affected and tense. Am I showing my papers to somebody else, and also in such despair? My equations. Hopes: Amós Kéres, mathematician, proved today by scientific methods his conception of the univocal universe. He’s being hailed by physicists and
mathematicians, more later on the eleven o’clock news. I almost run over a dog. Finally, Isaiah. His pants threadbare, his sweater black. hilde comes along behind. Various pairs of eyes upon us. The neighbors. hilde’s eyes on me. Isaiah: come on in, my friend, come on in. hilde comes in too. You remember her, right? hilde brushes against my legs. Just like a cat. I say amazing and always this charming? Oh always, says Isaiah. Acrylic triangles suspended from the ceiling. A huge desk and lots of papers filled with purple ink. I’m not bothering you? It’s been twenty years since anyone bothered me, Amós, twenty years of these purple hopes and the only surprise resolution was hilde. A beautiful nonobvious. Immediately: what’s up with your head, there a crick in your neck? c’mere, sit down, would you like some wine? I say okay and tell him everything: the hill, the tips of my shoes, the ants, the pondering of sounds, and all that about incommensurable meaning.

I had something like that once. But I saw shapes.

What kind?

Polyhedrons. Shining.

And then?

And then I understood that only polyhedrons exist. I myself do not exist. I’m certain of it to this day.

Of what?

Certain that I don’t exist. It was a relief. That’s why I can
live with hilde. She, as you can see, is also a polyhedron. We don’t exist, get it? We’re very happy. Drink, Amós. Hope. Don’t pluck green fruit. Drink. This one here’s imported. Kadek left me his whole cellar, remember? Poor guy, always yearning for similarities. He used to say the thing was to get as drunk as everybody else around here. Only cachaça. I stood to gain. Even without existing, I’m enjoying it very much. Drink. Tomorrow you can come back for your car. I drink. On the fifth glass, I try out a few poems. On the tenth glass, I finish them. Then I read them aloud:

Amazing, Isaiah says, amazing. I’m leaving. Walking will do me some good, bye-bye hilde good-bye my friend, he smiles, she opens her little eyes, stretched out, dreaming.

Dreaming of God.

The green fruit was plucked? Is that what he said? The wall on the other side of the street. There are certain walls that should never be seen before we grow old: moss and ocher, dahlias across some of them, lacerated, sounds that should never be heard, pulsations of a lie, the metallic sounds of cruelty echoing deep down to the heart, words that should never be pronounced, hollow eloquences, the vibrations of infamy, the throbbing ruby-reds of wisdom. Frights. How do I feel? As if they’d placed two eyes on the table and said to me, I who am blind: this is that which sees. This is the material that sees. I touch the two eyes on the table. Smooth, still tepid (recently wrenched out), gelatinous. But I don’t see the seeing. That’s how I feel trying to materialize in narrative the convulsions of my spirit. Cursing and cruel, stained in inks, those dark-dusks of not knowing how to say it, I attempt an amputee’s step forward, a blind knowledge of light, an armless embrace of you, Knowledge. I go about drunk. Someone will some day discover part of my trajectory if they apply the Law of Disorder (I’m still able to smile), I vomit in the gutter (smile’s gone), I take a piss against a lamppost. I’m filthy
and alone. Dark, sinister, mute, and alone. Someone: you sick, brother? I eject three acid heaves onto the sidewalk and make a motion to whoever asked that everything’s just fine.

Warmth in my bones. The sun’s coming out. I grapple with myself, I set off a fight. I and my someones, the ones they say have nothing to do with reality. And it’s only this I have: I plus I. I understand nothing. My nothings, my vomits, to exist and understand nothing. To have existed and to have suspected an iridescence, a sun beyond all selves. Beyond all yous. Amós Kéres. Frank and fervent but renouncing in this instant Amanda, kiddo, university.
Kiddo, yes, like a little goat-doe. Kiddo’s a word I owe to Márcia, that colleague of mine from the university, mathematician and politician, did field work in Paris, later said to hell with it, got married and was always saying: kiddos, Amós, kiddos are the sum of life. As I saw. I saw Amanda’s breast sucked dry, the kid a little animal, little digging hands. Is God a woman? How I’ve sucked the breast I can’t see. I go it alone, leprous. The sow is God. All stretched out too. Dreaming. hilde and her little eyes the color of artichoke. Smooth-ribbed and innocent. The artichoke has everything to do with God. They forget. Models of interpretation. The logos is this: pain old age neglect of the living, then death. I was lucid and alert. And almost pious. I understood little of men and women. Of kiddos too. Little. Incomplete beings repeating idiocies. I am a child-person, lucid geezer, compassionate and sweet. Amós Kéres. Innocent as a little animal-child gazing On High. But they say the On High is nothing and that you need to watch your step. Your ass too. With a mirror. I’m looking. Unforgettable grotesque condition. Oh, I want the face of He who lives inside Amós, the Immortal, the Iridescent-Shining, the perceiver-Perceived. I’ll say with precision what my non-comprehending is. Of majestic meaning. Colorful. Dilated. Wearing gloves too. The ones that are elbow-high. Amanda wore them one night. You could see only smooth
kid leather. Nothing of flesh. Even less of bone. A worm at the core someone said. That scary Otto Rank? The no less frightening William James? I go on: they keep beating off, reading the newspaper, or fucking and reading the newspaper, or trying to do business, acting. Or stealing. Always acting. And they’ll have expenses fridges houses TVs airplanes. Later more cars more fridges freezers houses computers robots gold dollars, leisure and pleasure. Amós. The sparkling mirror. Is there blood here? Apparently not. There’s only blood after. Like a tried-and-true formula. Blood at the core of the Unfounded. There’s blood there too. That order from above, that non-clarity reaches me, and at bottom the rivering blood, roiling. I descend into the glassy gorge. Amós Kéres. From here I can hear him comparing the lucidity of an instant to the opacity of infinite days, I can hear him thinking of the various manners of madness and suicide. The madness of the Search, which is made of concentric circles and never arrives at the center, the obscuring, incarnate illusion of finding and understanding. Madness of the refusal, one of saying everything’s okay, we’re here and that’s enough, we refuse to understand. The madness of passion, the disordered appearance of light upon flesh, delicious-tasting chaos, idiocy feigning affinities. The madness of work and of possession. The madness of going so deep and later
turning to look and seeing the world awash in vain slaughter, to be absolutely alone in the depths. Is Amós? From here can I hear him thinking how should I kill myself? or how should I kill in me the various forms of madness and be at the same time tender and lucid, creative and patient, and survive? How can the old love live in me if I understood the instant of Love and now belong to the world of mutes, my fingers wriggling with anxious signals and my throat wide with blanks? How should I kill myself? What sort of signs should Amós transmit before his fingers fall to rest for all eternity? Mute. And man. Lucid and mute. And man. He goes into a bar full of these unsayings, these so called whimsyings, alienations, illnesses, endocrine glands, Amós’s struggle is only that, perhaps the pituitary, you see, perhaps the pituitary isn’t getting on so well. A beer please? Sure, any kind? any kind. A big galoot sidles up: could you get mine, sir, I’m hard up. Yeah, I’ll get it. Six kids and no job. Hard, Amós says, that must be hard. My cock is what’s hard, sir, when I’m in shape, even harder. I bet, says Amós, it must be pretty hard. Real hard is the best way to go, sir, way better than hard up. I get it, says Amós. No, you didn’t get it, says the big galoot, only I get it. Fine, I’m going, says Amós, leaving the money on the counter. Where you think you’re going, dumbass, you afraid you can’t keep up with me? No, it’s not that, I’ve just got to get going. The
guy at the counter: that’s enough, Meathead, the guy buys you a beer and you’re getting on his case? Meathead pulls a knife, Amós lifts his arm to protect his face. Asks: why? Meathead takes a second to brandish the knife, takes a few leaps backwards and shouts from the pavement: because it’s harder, dumbass, way harder than hard up, and you there laughing at me the whole time. (And so that was it, I’m still smiling in that way I don’t notice.) The man takes off. It’s over. Are you hurt? No, he didn’t even graze me. Full of crazies around here, man, the world is full of ’em. Yeah, seems so, says Amós. You’re pretty calm, a little pale but calm and in a good mood, you’re always smiling, huh? I’m going. Home.