The Absolute, page 10
Frantisek felt himself struck by the lightning bolt of this unexpected emotion. To feel jealous of a woman he scorned was the deepest humiliation. Jealousy made her indispensable. Desperate, he understood that he had to get her out of there, away from contact with the other. Quickly and in whatever way possible.
“I want more sandwiches,” he said with a hoarse voice, stretching his plate toward his wife.
“More?” she protested.
“Yes.”
“You’re going to turn into a whale,” said Athenea, snatching away the plate and getting up from the couch. Before going to the table of cold delicacies, she tossed out her last comment, addressing herself directly to the newcomer: “Would you like anything?”
“And something to drink too,” Frantisek voided her offer. “And now that you’re standing, why don’t you go check when our host is going to arrive?”
“Anything else?” said Athenea with curt irony.
“Nothing. Yes. You should retouch your makeup.”
“As if you ever looked at me!” she replied, and left offended.
“A woman who knows how to leave knows far better how to return.”
“Are you still here?” asked Frantisek.
“Who, me? Sure.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Don’t worry. I know how to go unnoticed,” the stranger laughed: “I’ve spent half my life in the shade and the other half in hiding. Escapades. But now I am midway through a plan of reform! If I were to tell you . . .”
“There’s no need.”
“It’s no trouble. I’ll take this opportunity to introduce myself. I’m Alyosha Davidov, my esteemed Deliuskin.”
“Do we know each other?”
“Not reciprocally, mister. Ah, here comes your beautiful wife, Deliuskinova, carrying a delicious heap of cold-cut sandwiches and sweet-and-sour pickles! Well, I’ll hook into that group dance and leave you in pleasant company . . .” He clapped my great-great-grandfather on the back, greeted Athenea with a wave and disappeared into the crowd.
Athenea occupied the sofa on precisely the sections of velvet that Davidov had warmed.
“Song Li hasn’t shown up, but a few minutes ago a young man with striking Nordic features knocked on the door, claiming he was his unrecognized son. Incroyable!” said Athenea, who liked to show off her command of languages on special occasions. “Have you noticed the atmosphere? The people are—how to put it?—worked up, in a frenzy . . . I think the sound of wind instruments contributes to it . . . What were you talking about with Alyosha?”
“Do you know that guy?” Another dagger, a new certainty stabbed into Frantisek’s heart.
With the same tone of indifference (a topic in itself) that good actresses often affect in bad works, Athenea answered:
“Davidov . . . But if he . . .” and here an abrupt stylistic turn of the period entered reality, or at least the scene between Athenea and my great-great-grandfather: the interruption used to buy time. Turning her head, suppressing her reply, Athenea cried out: “Franti, the door to the dance floor is open! Let’s see what’s going on inside!”
Frantisek allowed her to drag him along. The hall was blue, and so were the sofas, the plates, the servants’ clothes and the fine tablecloth covering the palo santo wood table, painted the color of lapis lazuli. The members of a string quartet were attacking the first measures of a scherzo. “Just because” music, pointless and incidental music, a crackling of sorrowful cicadas attempting pizzicatos of joy, meant to signal that the party was getting started. Timely masks appeared. “Let’s dance, let’s dance!” shouted falsetto voices. Everyone started to move. Frantisek, sure that this event had been created precisely to add well-defined new episodes to his misfortune, was led, or rather towed, seeing that he was yoked to the neck of his wife. As he rubbed against and was rubbed by her, he also experienced the painful certainty that—even if he was her husband—he was also a convenient substitute for a nearby source, no doubt irradiating waves of stimulating presence.
“Don’t lose the rhythm . . .” gasped Athenea.
My great-great-grandfather couldn’t help but wonder who his wife’s lover might be. Verbose Davidov? The absent master of the house? Someone else? At what point would Athenea disappear with her true love into the crowd? If she was wagering on some base act, her plan was an extraordinary one: to leave him there, practically blind, lost like a scarecrow in a crowd of masked dancers. Such perversity far exceeded Athenea’s requirements, since she could have left him immediately, at any moment, in any corner. All she had to do was let go of his hand, and it was over. “No,” Frantisek told himself, “this plan’s been concocted by her lover.” Driven by bitterness, he decided to complicate or directly prevent the operation by his suspected rival, and he suddenly embraced Athenea as if the situation excited him. It didn’t surprise him that his wife responded in kind: it was the elation that went with the imminence of flight. Sometimes it’s only when we’re moving away from a person that they appear to us in all their radiant charm, like the first time we saw them. So it wasn’t strange that now, on the verge of leaving him, Athenea felt deeply attracted, fully conscious of the reasons she’d once longed to be his woman. They let themselves be swept along, dancing cheek to cheek, bodies pressed against each other within the increasingly compact mass of people. Frantisek monitored the variations in Athenea’s breathing. When he thought that the situation had reached the appropriate temperature, he proceeded to carry out the series of furtive adjustments needed for a fleshly coupling in mobile circumstances. Athenea immediately caught the drift, and as she moved her head, pretending to follow the rhythm of the music, her skillful fingers helped him to liberate his instrument. Frantisek hugged her more tightly, as much to assist the contact of her fingers against his member as to conceal the evidence of exposed goods. In the meantime, she started to wind his crank and whisper to it: “Let me kneel down; I don’t care if I’m stepped on or destroyed. I’ll go to my death sucking the potz.” “Bitch!” answered Frantisek. “Yes, yes,” said Athenea and let out a couple of hot doggy barks in his ear. At that moment, a couple of powerful hands grabbed Frantisek by the neck and turned him a hundred eighty degrees, as if he were a puppet. The music stopped playing mid-note. Amid the silence of the empty space, Frantisek understood he’d been brought out for everyone’s viewing pleasure, a stupid exhibitionist with his piece on full display. Complete humiliation. A foul-smelling rag was clapped over his nose, hiked upward toward his eyes. A blindfold. A shadow to cover his shadow.
“Let’s play blindman’s bluff!” squealed Athenea.
“No,” begged my great-great-grandfather, but the approving shouts of the spectators silenced his protest. Hands spun him around on his feet, again and again, in carousel turns that left him dizzy. He had to stretch out his hands, palms reaching forward, fingers like worms, to keep from falling.
“Cold . . . Cold . . .”
“This is desolation,” he thought, and went toward that mocking voice sustained by an immaterial thread of sound. Did he have his cock out? He didn’t feel it, nor did he hear any surrounding current of murmurs denouncing his nudity.
“Here . . . No . . . Not there . . . Cold . . . Very cold . . .”
Here or there. Now several called out to him. Carried away by a dull growing fury, Frantisek lunged forward with his head down, aiming at the voices.
“Calm there, toro!”
Laughter, shrieks of women, brushes of skin, rustlings of a crowd as it unfolds like a fan. Frantisek charges. I’m a musician, an artist. Contemplate what I’ve become: I can’t even see anymore. My only remaining pride is to keep my mouth shut, not open my jaws to let out the bellow of a bovine splashing in a swamp, of a mammoth sinking deep into the waters of the Pleistocene.
“Ah . . . Now . . . Warm . . . Yes . . . Hot . . . Very hot! No. No, over here! Here . . . Cold . . . No. Warm. Here! Yes . . . Hot. Hot hot hot . . . On fire!”
Frantisek’s hands plunge into something creamy, disgusting. It smears his forehead as he takes off his blindfold.
“What’s this?”
There’s almost no difference. Shadows and lumps.
“What . . . is . . . this?” he shouts.
“Suck on your finger!”
Athenea approaches. My great-great-grandfather can’t see her face, but he knows that she’s smiling. She kisses him, lifts up his hand and sucks his finger:
“It’s a cream cake . . .” she says.
“Everyone’s laughing at me!” sobs my great-great-grandfather.
“. . . a birthday cake . . .”
Frantisek escapes, stumbles down the staircase of the mansion, falls on the sidewalk, ripping his trousers, and, without knowing he’s doing so, runs toward the jetty. Fiery tears slide down his cheeks, carried away by the wind and dissolving in air, each fragmented part bearing a gleaming shard of a nameless god. As he continues to soak in the diluted salts of his pain, visions of his past attack him in gusts, mucus streams from him like the jeweled sputum of tuberculosis, his lungs start to burn, his legs tremble. Who am I? Fran . . . Frantisek . . . Where are you, Frantisek? It’s me, your sweetheart, Jenka. Jenka, light the way for me. I can’t, Fran, I’m dead. The dead aren’t beings of light? No, Fran, it isn’t ash that shines. My glow in this world is already put out. Goodbye, Fran. Old voices. The home where I was born. My family. I’m a child. We’re in front of the bathroom mirror, a framed oval with gold adornments, grape leaves and vines. Vladimir, my father, holds me in his arms. Mama is next to us. I look at myself, then at them. I’m so small I think we’re not here, on this side of the glass, but on the reflected side, and so I reach out a finger to touch us. Mother is serious, Father too. Against my fingertips I feel the horrible cold of the mirror. My father says: “Frantisek, until today you’ve been a cretin, a real half-wit. Starting now, you’ll begin to understand everything, and be a person like the rest.” But I never understood anything, just the opposite, I understood everything in reverse! I’d felt I was pure promise and longing, and now I’m a fraud. A failure, a failure. Human ruin. An idiot, a good-for-nothing. Frantisek. What? Idiot. Me? Yes, you. What is this damp frozen wind? An anticipation of your destiny. You’ve never understood a thing in your life. So now you must cease living.
The current of the gulf, usually gentle and regular, has given way to a true hurricane: waves beat against the pier of stone and wood. His fall in the water barely raises a few more drops. Drowning by immersion is not a salve, and death in general is no caress. Whirlwinds sink and save him, a courtship with his end. My great-great-grandfather swallows water, hears the roar of the storm as his own cry. He doesn’t even faint. All at once, he thinks: Andrei. What am I doing? Son, the sunshine in my music, my complete notation. I abandoned you in the hands of a stranger and launched myself on this frivolous newlyweds’ journey, this bitter honeymoon! I am an egoistic monster. I can’t let myself sink, I can’t die: this self does not belong to me. I owe it to Andrei.
Frantisek’s right foot touches the step of an iron staircase; his hands cling to the bars of salvation. With nothing to lose, he goes back to the party as best he can. “I tripped and fell in a puddle,” he says, to explain his soaked clothes. Athenea looks prepared to make a scene, but a servant claps his hands together and announces the evening must be interrupted: silken Song Li, in the disguise of Cleopatra, has suffered a heart attack.
When they left the place, Frantisek was shivering from fever. In the tilbury carriage, between one fainting fit and the next, Athenea’s explanation came to him confusedly (maybe in just a few words, but he heard them as an interminable string): that the charming young man who’d talked to him at the party, Alyosha Davidov, was in fact Arkady Troitsky, her lieutenant of hussars, dead in the Battle of Kurland. Well, Arkady hadn’t really died in combat, but had deserted before the confrontation, owing to quarrels in strategy with the high command. In reality, Arkady had never been her betrothed. That had been his cousin, whom she’d loved like a brother. Frantisek would never believe how closely the two resembled each other, like drops of water. And to tell the truth . . .
Frantisek didn’t know how they reached the hotel. The sheets were like a flaming rose garden in which he could only be naked. Something of his ardor had infected Athenea, who lay down beside him and asked him to possess her. “This proves I never had you,” he answered, and fainted again. The next morning—in a hallucinatory oasis within the fever that accompanied him for his remaining days—he felt strong enough to decide that the honeymoon was over. They made their way back to Russia.
8
In a display of anger over the interruption of their trip, Athenea remained silent during the return. Back in Crasneborsk, however, she adopted the expansive mode and superior airs of a woman who, after completing her apprenticeship in the school of the world (civilized Europe), can’t help but comport herself as a great lady. With little strength now, my great-great-grandfather tried to adapt himself to the consequences of her choice in lifestyle, which showed itself first in the increase of the service staff, then in the appearance of visitors and guests. From the tone of her voice, he knew that Athenea’s mother had settled into a room on the first floor, where she directed the operations of the house, and sometimes he heard the contemptible whispers and loud laughter of Alyosha Davidov / Arkady Troitsky, who prowled about the pantry or slipped into the maids’ bedrooms.
Deep down, all of this barely mattered to him; even his growing blindness would have seemed only a secondary defect given the circumstances of general collapse in his life, were it not that the progressive annulment of his sense of sight (which had its comings and goings, its shimmerings amid opacity) also went about putting an end to his joy in the contemplation of Andrei’s face. Like a tattoo artist who keeps working despite a lack of materials, Frantisek recorded his son’s every expression in the pavilions of his memory: every curl of every one of his ringlets, the transparency of his earlobes, the exact pigmentation (splatters of gold on petroleum) of his pupils . . . The loss was infinite, and now he would no longer see him grow up. He solaced himself thinking he would at least enjoy the consolation of his nearby presence. Hear him put together his first words, cry at night, climb into a sleigh, shout in the snow, become a man . . . But not even this would be granted to him.
One morning, yearning for a little solitude, he went to Jenka’s studio; the place had remained closed since his wife’s death. In the midst of its cold atmosphere of abandonment, as he revised the materials of her work—which also offered him their ceremony of a visual goodbye—he discovered a roll of canvas, hidden behind some stretcher frames and cans of paint. When he unfurled it, he came across a sketch for a portrait of Andrei. More than the detail of technical knowledge, what was impressive about those pale colors was the sentiment of the ineffable, the joy that had suffused Jenka following her maternity. The image of that creature, just a few days old, was pictorial substance infused by light, and now this light infused his memory of the portrait’s author. Andrei. Andrei by Jenka. Frantisek felt the loving finger of the deceased touching his soul, reminding him he had to protect his son from everything and everyone. Not, obviously, from the small stains of time, which he could make out moderately well with the help of a magnifying glass, but from something less subtle and more macabre, a deliberate work of destruction that had pretended to be time itself, and that had rushed and plunged forward like a Fury, hurrying with treacherous hand to pinch or pluck out Andrei’s eyes, and with irregular erosion, attempting to imitate the work of moths. The canvas was already torn across the heart, which simulated the effect of an incorrect rolling technique, but actually came from the slash of a knife blade.
Fearing for his son’s life, he secretly sent Andrei to the home of Jenka’s parents in Finland.
I won’t dwell on the heavy toll the decision took on him, or linger over the desolation that overcame him as he watched his baby boy setting off. Ten dogs, a sleigh, the wet nurse clutching his little one. A cry, immediately soothed. A speck in the midst of the vast expanse. Then nothing.
And that nothing extended to everything. After the departure of Andrei, Frantisek’s body reacted like a building of wood attacked by termites. Abscesses formed (every tissue was a niche of pus); he suffered from acetonuria in his urine and acetonemia in his blood; in a preliminary examination, articular lesions, anemia, blepharitis and avitaminosis were also detected; later, he presented cases of bronchopneumonia, tonsillitis, cephalea, cramps and cystitis; he lived from fever to fever, which revealed the effects of an abnormal increase in his bone marrow activity; he suffered from an uncoordinated trembling of the cardiac muscle fibers . . . The day he could no longer get out of bed, Athenea sent for Nikolai Gurevich, a doctor recently settled in the area whom all Crasneborsk (except one of its inhabitants) took for a luminary. Gurevich created such demand that at the moment he presented himself at the home of the sick person, the expectation created by his delay preceded him, forming an important part of his aura as a savior. Frantisek could almost no longer see the movement of a crowd, but no doubt he heard the tumult from the entrance of the doctor’s court of followers into his room. Without moving aside the sheet under which my great-great-grandfather was shivering, without lifting an eyelid, sounding him, feeling his stomach, tapping a knuckle against his back . . . without making him cough, spit, exhale, moan, urinate or respire, without even asking him how he felt or the reason for the consultation, Gurevich turned to his students: “Who can correctly tell me what is the matter with this poor fellow?” he said. “Me, doctor.” “No, me, me . . .” “I called dibs!” Gurevich pretended to hesitate, poking a cautionary finger over their heads. “Let’s see, let’s see . . . Orman?” “Painful swelling!” “Nyet. Stulberg?” “General functional impotence, doctor!” “Nyet, nyet. Kuperman?” “I don’t know, maestro.” “A sincere ignoramus. What are you doing next to me, you dunce? Let’s see . . . Sametskoff?” “Brucellosis, doctor?” “Are you confusing a human being with a cow, simpleton? And you, Sznaider? Don’t let me down . . .” “Hepatic cirrhosis, professor? Look at the drunkard’s face he’s got!” Gurevich raised his arms to the sky: “My God, I’m surrounded by idiots! Do I always have to say it?” And putting an overfamiliar paternal hand on Frantisek’s shoulder, he said: “Here we have the classic Tetralogy of Fallot, a condition characterized by four congenital malformations: a) narrowness of the pulmonary artery; b) hypertrophy of the right ventricle; c) interventricular communication (the blood flows as if through a tube, and makes a sound of flatulence); d) displacement of the aorta toward the right. Treatment: at present, none. I don’t know why they make me waste time on incurables.”
