The Absolute, page 2
4, and to sum up) How can I create works like the ones burning in my imagination? It is not enough to trace invisible ligatures between these fleeting arpeggios (married women): I must assemble all the elements of a repertoire, fully prepared to comply with my demands.
Since his father’s economic assistance had reduced difficulties of a material order to the minimum, it was easy for Frantisek to turn his mansion into a kind of phalanstery, where somewhere between twenty and thirty women, generously compensated, submitted to his investigations. Without being aware of it, Frantisek was decidedly an anti-sadist. In advance of his experiments, he prohibited any violence, denigrating act, habit in poor taste or other excess that might distract from his aims of a hedonistic character, celebrating the joys of life. The garments were made of a soft, light material, the kind that clings to the touch; the meals were served on dishes of the best quality and arranged in a way that was pleasing to the eye and sense of smell. Every morning and afternoon, dressed in the costume of the high priest of some fantastic cult, given to him by a designer friend at the Krasnoyarsk Theater, Frantisek presented himself in the secluded premises of the main hall (the windows boarded up, the walls adorned with red velvet tapestries, the sheets woven from linen and silk). Even though during the precise ritual he had organized for his system of compositional coitus, these garments were almost the first thing my great-great-grandfather removed, the outfit stimulated the impulse for profanation in his feminine “instruments,” so that a spirit of chance always animated the encounters. In the worst case, it might be a flurry of melancholy, a breeze from another world that enveloped Frantisek in the midst of his coven. But usually it came from something difficult to define, the anticipation of pleasure that transported a woman . . . We won’t go into details. In the essentials, Frantisek held to his scheme, which he defined as a “program.” Convinced that the simple came before the complex, he began his rituals in the very simplest way, dedicating himself to one at a time.
Knowing by now, from sheer repetition, each woman’s ability to become a theme (the personal limits of her amorous capacity), Frantisek decided to investigate whether he could organize these themes into a succession of melodies. His method was so obvious it was even comical. While attending a music hall performance, he’d developed certain fantasies, as aesthetic as they were sensual, around the symmetric revelation of the French dancers’ row of panties. And so he decided to line up his partners in a row, hips pressed against hips, waists bent over, backs rigid as planks, hands on knees, breasts dangling. A fragment from his diary: “. . . Sometimes I’d go for the first in a row of twenty, starting from the left, and once I’d drawn the maximum of pleasure from my chosen instrument, I’d move along in order of proximity until reaching the end of the row. Other times, I’d start with the third in line, and pass to the fifth and then the seventh, leaving all those in the middle increasingly excited, before, suddenly and without warning, I’d repeat the procedure with one of those who thought she’d already had her chance, and was beginning to feel the elixirs of her shudders fade away.”
My great-great-grandfather referred to his procedure as “the xylophonic performance technique,” but didn’t linger over it for more than a few days. Interested in the riches that developing two themes in parallel might offer, he applied himself to evaluating them by performing upon two women in the same bed. The results seem to have been promising but inadequate, because very soon he increased the number of women he employed. But now, since it was no longer the concept of succession but simultaneity that dominated, these apparent bacchanals ended up being a work of experimentation as tiring as it was exhaustive.
“The polyphony of voices that sings different things at the same time is what interests me. It’s like living in a heaven that flows with scents and skins and moans,” he wrote. Soon, however, his enthusiasm began to dull. The multiplicity was overwhelming. Every system of the senses became a chromatic range and long melody of its own, the superpositions of which created new polyphonies. And so, in the long run, his attempt to arrive at the conceptual entirety of the harmonic process had to enter into crisis due to the impossibilities of achieving a totality in perception, and not just in terms of musical production and notation. Not to speak of the limits of his body itself. After this long journey, Frantisek thus came back to the beginning, and he didn’t know whether he was turning into a fabulous composer, an undistinguished performer of banal improvisations or a sad degenerate. The system had revealed itself to be a lack of system.
The crisis paralyzes him and Frantisek decides to close the phalanstery. As a good spendthrift who doesn’t think about the future, when he says goodbye to his women-instruments, he compensates them with quantities that would be the envy of a king given to lavish splurges. Some use the money to set up their own establishments: restaurants, fashion boutiques, guesthouses, love villas, even musical instrument shops.
His abode now empty, Frantisek mournfully wraps himself in the vestments of solitude. His rhythm of life becomes irregular, no longer respecting the schedules of sleep and food; he spends hours staring with absent gaze at the mounds of cold ash in the fireplace and the advance of damp over the walls. He doesn’t answer when people speak to him, or does so with an impossible delay, replying to questions they haven’t asked. Human company irritates him, but occasionally a random commentary or gesture can move him to tears, and he ends up hugging the cook or whoever else happens to be near. He suffers from fits of mysticism, although he isn’t precise about his devotional object; he surrenders to a confused pantheism that finds divinity in a vase, a glass of water, the broken branch of a larch tree, a couple of dirty socks, tweezers for eyebrow plucking, a Bible, a blazing fire or a pair of jade handcuffs kept in an ebony box.
From this period come the most moving entries in his Diary, the ones in which, having lost all reserve, his personality shines through. He writes: “The glances of my fellow men do not escape me, and by their reflection I am given a terrifying idea of my mental state. In the mornings I wake up and hear ‘ti-tú, ti-tú’ (high, low, high, low). At night the bed gives me no rest, because within my brain’s recesses the monsters of dream crouch and mutter inanities.”
Frivolous then serious, serious then frivolous, my great-great-grandfather speculates for a time about putting an end to his life. He’s convinced of the need to do so, but delays it out of fear of an ugly mutilation. To hide this display of intimate cowardice of an aesthetic kind, and without anything in particular to do, he embraces the cause of dispossession. He survives only with great pains; he sleeps hugging a mangy sheep, shares his food with the poor, turns into an obsessive Saint Francis of Assisi. But in his attitude, there’s a remainder of arrogant anticipation, a lust for contrition. He says: “I want them to forget me,” in the vain belief he’s done something to be remembered. In the end, he must recognize that his entire peacocking tour through the territories of spiritual humility has done nothing to protect him from the risk of growing resentful—that is, admitting he’s failed.
One day he learns of the existence of Afasia Atanasief, a miraculous healer from Murmansk, a small coastal town on the Barents Sea. To visit her, one must cross the entire breadth of Russia, a task for the desperate; therefore, perfect for him. The very idea of sickness is inherently optimistic, because it assumes the idea of its complement, recovery. As soon as he decides to travel the distance, Frantisek’s mood improves, which automatically renders the fulfillment of his aim superfluous. But the fantasy of the trip stimulates him, and he writes a long letter to the healer, in which he explains the whole drama of his existence blow by blow; in reply, he receives a telegram with the single word: “Come.”
Frantisek makes the appropriate arrangements, leaving Dutchansky in charge of the property, and sets out.
2
The rustic nature of the trip distracted him a little from his obsessive thoughts. The Siberian dogs pulling the sleigh barked in harmony, and transformed their meter into notation by flinging small bubbles into the air of condensed breath, foam and drool. Wrapped in sable skins, Frantisek was lulled to sleep by the shouts of the driver or woken by leaps of the vehicle. It was like a spatial return to his past, when he’d been forced to spend whole days standing next to his father, feigning interest as the latter kept busy extracting his hairy gems from the depths of the lakes, except this time the travel was over the surface; according to his calculations, at one point he’d even have to pass a few kilometers from the place where Vladimir was living out his final days as explorer and tycoon. A beautiful chance to dodge the meeting. But Frantisek was too sensible to the warm radiance of the word “family,” which evoked a feeling of belonging in his heart not experienced beyond language, so that when his sleigh was on the verge of making a detour to avoid the town of Lubyanka, he changed his mind and decided to visit his father.
During this period, Lubyanka was barely more than a suburb frayed away from a center that was nowhere. If enemy troops had wanted to stop for food and rest in their transit toward Moscow, they’d never have chosen to stay in the place. The few building structures that went beyond the average level of a shack still had a cow in the kitchen and a dirt floor trampled by pig hooves; yet from a distance this landscape was an invitation to dreaming, ideally contemplated from the heights of Suiski Hill: the winding glints of the Ubsk River, mute rocks shimmering with mica, surly pine trees tickling the sky, a wicked young thing stealing eggs from the farms, a landowner’s bullet setting the henhouse aflutter.
In the midst of this touristic squalor, Vladimir Deliuskin’s property on the outskirts of town stood out. Its distinction was rooted less in the lavishness of the house itself than in the difference of size between his place of residence and place of work. When he began to grow hard of hearing after so many years of explosions, Vladimir left the “fieldwork” in the hands of Piotr, his trusty foreman, and built a storehouse comparable in height to some railway stations, with a sheet-metal roof and thick logs from barely planed trees; there, when he had nothing better to do, which was nearly all the time, he dabbled in new methods of “flaying” the mammoths, which faithful Piotr extracted by means of the traditional system and sent along to him. Due to the low temperatures prevailing, even if a month or more had passed since the extraction, at the time of their arrival the mammoths seemed freshly culled. They even let off the vapor of dry ice.
Once the material had been received, Vladimir chiseled the blocks until they took on a zoomorphic shape that vaguely approximated the original; the next step was to pass thick chains over the front and back quarters. Then, through a pneumo-mechanical apparatus of winches, he hoisted the iridescent beast and left it dangling three meters over the ground. When each quarry had been hung up by means of a colossal bellows, connected to a bronze basin, he sent it periodic blasts of hot air that collided with the ice walls, submitting it to a uniform movement of rotation. The result, if we leave out natural asymmetries, was that the ice melted gradually and evenly; of course, this process lasted for weeks, during which the trapped animal began to show inklings of its form, revealing itself in accordance with the differences in surrounding pressure and densities of ice to be a threatening beast or faint ghost; the latter was especially favored on moonlit nights, when the dark blue of the sky bounced off the deep blue of the oldest ice layers; this blue brought out every shadow in silhouette and made the beasts dance to the delicate music of countless water droplets, which skimmed through the cold air and burst against the ground. Mud and specters. The result of all this, once the unfreezing was completed, was those swollen, hairy, foul-smelling masses that Vladimir butchered and sold without wasting a single piece of bone or flesh.
As soon as he reached his father’s place, Frantisek headed for the storehouse. Those bulks had always impressed him, and this time the idea of seeing them submitted to such engineering affected him even more. Now that he wasn’t forced to accompany his father in his work, and thanks to the distance created by the development of his own activities and the emotional contamination produced by the expectation of meeting again, Frantisek began to discover a link between them going even deeper than the one generated by blood and surname. Beyond the apparent differences in their respective interests, it was enough to observe these beasts hoisted up and submitted to a process that, albeit barbaric, was also wise, an unhurried and painstaking cycle of transformations, to understand that like himself, Vladimir had never accepted things in just the way they were given. “My father, like me, is a slave to form,” he told himself, and felt the impulse to run and give him a hug. Obviously, in order to do so, he had to find him first. He shouted his father’s name. His voice echoed off the roofs and came back to him muffled, but no one answered. For a few minutes, as he continued to search across the length and breadth of the storehouse, he entertained himself by imagining some explanation for the absence. Just as Vladimir had built a discreet but visible laboratory for his investigations into the revelation of being (the extraction of mammoths from icy masses), it was possible he’d also set up another laboratory, still more secret and difficult to find, where he was giving himself over to new kinds of tests, perhaps to reorganize the parts that he’d obtained in combinations never before imagined (a beast with three legs, five fangs and one eye, with a ridiculously small tail sprouting like a mustache from its face), combinations into which, by means of unknown techniques, he’d later breathe life. What could he do with such things? Give them to the world as foul-smelling golems, perhaps, to see what effect they produced . . .
Frantisek smiled at the excesses of his fantasy. He knew perfectly well that his father possessed too practical a spirit to invest time in playing the demiurge . . . Golems? Only the Jews created those things! But where was Vladimir? Frantisek stopped short. A horrible suspicion, a cold that didn’t come only from the hanging mammoths, paralyzed his mind: His father was dead. The thought wasn’t capricious, even if the associative logic that had brought him to this conclusion seemed a rarefied flourish, a system of legatos akin to those found in a musical caprice. In the beginning was the word “mammoth.” In some remote area of Frantisek’s brain, this word sent its association tapping along two different channels and from three languages in a single unique direction: “My mother.” In effect, “mammoth” can be separated into two syllables, “ma-” and “-mmoth.” In French, “ma” is the possessive pronoun “my,” while phonetically “-mmoth” becomes “mmouth” sounds the same as the noun “Mutte” (“mother”) in German.1 And in some sense, mammoths had been and were Frantisek’s mother, owing to the fact that, conveniently exploited by Vladimir, they had turned out to be his primary source of nutrition. This is why, when establishing the relationship between “mammoth” and “my mother,” he had inevitably linked the early absence of the latter—a death from typhoid fever when he was just a few months old—with the death of his own father; yet because he had no memory of the first death and his own parallel transformation into an orphan, and given that a wet nurse had substituted immediately for the missing woman, this connection could work only in an indirect form, as the poor mother had never been a real presence for the abandoned child. The mental link that made him suddenly think Vladimir was dead could therefore not be simply the word “mammoth” (my mother). The word that gave the last turn to the pirouette was “Jews.” And for this reason, no translation had been needed: when he thought his father could not possibly make golems like the Jews—whom the tsarist authorities during this period had prohibited from all commercial activity—what Frantisek really thought was his father couldn’t have behaved like just another Jew. If for childish and primitive mentalities—which are identical—every father is a God, that is to say, the one to whom everything is given and whom no negation limits, then in Frantisek’s lightning-quick associative system, not being just another Jew was equivalent to being the king of the Jews: Christ. The Messiah. God, the One and Only, the Anointed One. And how had Christ died? Crucified. Thus Vladimir, who substituted for Frantisek’s mother—ma Mutte—had, in the process of occupying himself with subsistence—mammoth—spent his entire life, despite himself and without knowing it, in adoration of the absent one, rendering her tribute. Every mammoth rescued from the depths of the lakes was a triumph, even if only partial, over the destiny that had prematurely snatched his wife from his side. And in the process of improving the methods of extraction, in their eternal perfecting, what he was doing was building a saga from the perishable yet successive monuments that evoked her. And—here came the conclusion of the thought, of Frantisek’s horrible fear—after spending his life in this nostalgic and necrophiliac celebration, immersed in the compulsive repetition of a behavior he couldn’t stop, Vladimir had decided to pass to the sentimental act par excellence, becoming one with his lover and fusing with her. In this sense, a destiny that involved “mama”—that is, “mammoth”—which ended with a hanging from hooks, was equivalent to a fulfillment of divine fate and a death crucified like the king of the Jews—in other words, the God of the Christians.
Of course, having arrived at this conclusion, Frantisek wasn’t going to pause to notice the logical and theological inconsistencies of his reasoning. Convictions always well up from the soul. Eyes brimming with tears, he lifted his head toward the low ceiling bounded by sheet-metal roofs and looked in every direction for his father, hanged dead. I go toward you, father, and you abandon me. The tapping of the water droplets had now lost any festive quality and was the repeated funereal “plop” of endings. Worms garlanded the puddles, bathing in this rain.
“Father!” shouted Frantisek, and let his head fall on his chest, his knees into the mud.
When he looked up again, Vladimir himself was standing before him. If this was a specter, then it was one who seemed to have passed with great realism through the corresponding periods of life: he was fatter, nearly bald, with a black beard sprinkled with white hairs and an alcoholic’s nose furrowed by veins. Beyond a doubt, he had aged. From his shoulder there hung a bundle of dead bustards; Vladimir was returning from the hunt.
