The Absolute, page 3
“Son!” he said, crouching down, picking up Frantisek and submitting him to every display of Russian effusiveness: a hug hard enough to dislocate a joint, a loud wet kiss on the mouth, a rubbing of noses imported from the Eskimos, a friendly fist bump against the chest and a series of cheek pinches and twists, accompanied by the typical phrase:
“Dorogoy drug! I cannot believe what this gaze is seeing! My son, light of my eyes, extract of my testicles, adored one never forgotten . . .”
“Yes, your Frantisek,” the so-alluded helpfully supplied, knowing that in these moments of emotion, as in so many others, Vladimir suffered from momentary lapses that prevented him from remembering names.
“Bozhe moi! Do you think I am a heartless scoundrel, one who does not even know the fruits of his blood?” And stretching out an arm in the attempt to encompass his whole domain, he ended up pointing a finger at the nearest mammoth: “And? What do you think? Gems from the abysses of time! And? Are you coming back to live with your poor father or not?”
To fête his son, Vladimir organized a dinner that from the start threatened to end up a bacchanal. On the pine table from Slavonia all kinds of treats could be found, national and foreign. Among the local delicacies were schmaltz, sweet-and-sour pickles, kimlbroyt, smoked mullet fish, hot and juicy pastrami with sides seasoned with red pepper, tart sauerkraut just drawn from wood barrels, pletzel, little balls of white cheese with miniature green onions or paprika, fresh smetana, duck sausages, debrecener sausages, smoked sprät from the Baltic, fat and slippery úlikes, and hot, just slightly bitter liverwurst, stuffed with black olives and walnuts. From the rest of the world: Greek halva, Polish vodka, Norwegian bacalao, Czech slivovitz, Uruguayan guindado, Portuguese anchovies, Danish sardines . . .
Suffocated by the heat of the logs burning in the fireplace, overwhelmed by the aroma of food and the smell of the bodies of the serving staff who approached to fill his glass or change his plates, Frantisek couldn’t help but wonder why the closest person in the world to him, the most intimate and dearest, had always seemed strange. His father went out of the way for him, yet he couldn’t help but perceive the involuntary and devastating effect of the chasm that separated them. In fact, he understood, he’d gone to live far away from Vladimir not to build a life tailored to personal necessities, but instead to recuperate, by means of distance and the ennobling effect of time, the sentiment of filial love that proximity had denied him. “I am filth,” thought Frantisek, and pitying himself, he once again forgot about his father, who had begun a new monologue by his side:
“What a joy to see you, my son! I didn’t expect it. What can we talk about, let’s see? Topics. The government. A band of thieves, except for our big boss, the Tsar, who has no clue about anything. The fate of our Holy Russia scares me a lot. Do you go to mass? No? A shame. Anyway. How have you been keeping busy lately? You don’t want to talk about it? Even better. Work means problems, and right now we have to enjoy ourselves.”
Vladimir gave two claps:
“Music and dance!” he shouted.
From the left side of the gallery came the classic: two bearded old men with fur caps, silk dress coats, wide pants and boots entered jumping and shrieking “Oy, oy, oy!” while they played the accordion and balalaika. From the right side, first came the little foot, then the rosy ankle, then the thick calves and hammy thigh, and finally the rest of the body of the first of five Graces, dressed in transparent tunics that let one see the heavy swaying of their mammary glands to perfection. Vladimir elbowed Frantisek:
“You can sleep with the fat one if you like. Or with two or three of them, even. They sometimes warm my own bed, of course. I won’t say they’re pure, but I guarantee you they’re affectionate. I don’t know if you get my drift.” Elbow to rib. “If happy coincidence permits, within nine months I might be able to say I’m either the grandfather of a new son or the father of a grandson. No? You’re not interested? Do such trifles really worry you? You’re not . . . ? Ah, you’re taking a purge. What luck, unfortunately. In any case, I don’t think any of them are the cleanest. Plague neutralized by plague. Even so, in your place, I wouldn’t look down on turning a few over and, with a little ash-tree oil or goat butter, trying out, for example . . .”
While Vladimir babbled away in a kind of alcoholic ode to the charms of his creatures, one of them—laurel crown on her forehead, eyelid drooping over a sclerotic halo of cataracts—recited:
Prodigal son, son prodigal
Male son, son most dear
In the steppes I lose myself
To Father’s house come I near
Poem with assonant rhyme. Anonymous Russian author.
Over the course of the night, helped along by libations, Frantisek and his father managed to achieve an imitation of the primordial connection. The son could confide his secret and the reasons for his crisis to his father, and the father pledged to accompany him on the pilgrimage in search of a word from Afasia Atanasief. Comforted by this promise, Frantisek went to sleep as early as he could and left Vladimir, after submitting to all the excesses of his goodnight kiss. But midmorning, when he went to wake him up before departure, he realized his father was totally incapable of any movement. In fact, the vigorous but already senile Vladimir spent twenty-five minutes saying, “Who are you? What do you want? Spiders! Get this filth off me!” and could recognize his son only after half an hour.
The sleigh had been prepared, the dogs were barking. In the distance, on the horizon, black clouds could be seen, increasing in size. The wind was torquing the treetops into right angles. It was time to go. But Frantisek had a question:
“Father, what was Mama like?”
Vladimir made an effort, rubbed his eyes and peered at the deepest spiderweb in the trunk of his memories . . .
“Cintila Alexeievna?” he asked, in a voice tormented by pain or fury. “What was Cintila like?” And instead of having the mercy or decency to say, “She was a fine woman,” or “She was the great love of my life,” or even “I don’t remember her anymore,” Vladimir exclaimed: “Your mother was an insufferable beast! What do you want, for me to tell you the truth or a lie? She made my life impossible. With her I wasn’t the master of my own house. I had to take off my muddy boots and wear slippers, the drink was rationed . . . She held me in contempt. I had to tolerate that nit, that scrawny pollywog! She thought she was the bee’s knees. As if she had a great destiny written out for her beforehand . . . That bloody Polish woman . . .”
“Goodbye, Papa . . .”
“Goodbye? Listen, son . . . When I got sick, your mother, the saint, said to me: ‘Flea-ridden dog, when will you have the decency to go ahead and die?’ Do you know why you’re called Frantisek? Because that was the name of the lover of your mother’s mother. I wanted to give you another name, a truly Russian one. But no. She insisted, insisted, and there you have it, see? A Poilish name. Humiliation! Why Frantisek and not Volodia or Piotr or Alexei, eh? And what was the problem with naming you after your father? Or isn’t it a pretty name, Vladimir? The worst thing about that woman is she never loved me. Frantisek! Listen . . . Where are you going? Never, not for one minute did she love me, your mother! Are you listening? Son . . . !”
Frantisek leaped into his sleigh. Incidental beauty of the tundra. The stormfront pursued him for three days and then dissolved into rain and hail before the very gates of Murmansk. Like the symbol of a good omen, the gentle miracle of an aurora borealis stretched over the town. Frantisek didn’t take long to find out the address where Afasia Atanasief attended to patients. It was a modest but spacious house, just overlooking the Barents Sea. On the façade, a worn inscription gave heart to visitors: “Here all suffering ends.”
Frantisek went into a kind of waiting room; there were a good number of people there, all miserable, in a typically pious attitude (heads bowed down, hands arranged in prayer). The new arrival leaned over the closest patient and asked whether it would be long. Astonished, the other replied: “Usually it takes a few days.” “My God,” answered Frantisek, and fell asleep.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that without noticing it, he’d shifted to another space. He was in an empty room, leaving out a couple of chairs, a desk and a middle-aged man observing him in silence. Frantisek felt the intensity and brilliance of this gaze examining his very soul. His life was a skein being unspooled by the man’s mind.
“I . . .” he began. “I came here . . .”
“You don’t need to explain to me,” said the other, and served him a strong brew in a cracked teacup. “Tey mit limene.”
“Yes, thank you,” said Frantisek, distracted, excited. He took a sip, and it burned him. “You don’t need to explain to me.” How much wisdom there was in seven words! But he had to express, to justify himself. He set the cup aside and began:
“I’d like to discover the reasons for my crisis,” he said. “It requires some kind of introduction.” Frantisek waited a few seconds for the other to say, “Go on,” or “Continue,” or at least “Aha.” But his interlocutor remained quiet. Judging that this silence wasn’t disapproving (although it wasn’t very stimulating either), he decided to proceed at his own risk: “Over time, I’ve been able to confirm that on every occasion I show up to an activity, a part of me flees. Now then: absence in one place is presence in another. What happens for me, and this is a part of what concerns me, is my presence in this other place is not perceived by me as such, which, in conclusion, leaves me emptied of myself. I want to be cured of this unreality.”
“Obviously,” said the host, “what you need is to be cured of your ignorance about where your being dwells. Your tea is getting cold.”
“I see you’ve grasped the heart of the matter,” said Frantisek, and took a polite sip. The shrewdness of his interlocutor freed him of half his problem; feeling relieved, he was driven to elaborate, to thoroughly analyze his conflict: “How does what’s happening to me relate to the music I cannot create? Is it a mystery? At a certain level, it seems very easy to understand . . . Just as I described in my letter of introduction, I don’t know whether you remember”—the other nodded—“my fornications were the experimental field, let’s call it ‘practical,’ within an abstract operation of a nature both sensitive and intellectual. It consisted of not the slow development of an idea, limited to, say, the measurement of a plane of melodic thought, but instead was the representation of a figure from different and overlapping visual perspectives . . . What I mean is that as a composer, and I hope you’ll take what I say as an element of critical illustration, rather than as a show of presumptuousness, I am characterized by the use of extraordinarily rich, complex polyphonic mechanisms . . .”
Taking advantage of the fact that his interlocutor had deeply inhaled and sighed, Frantisek himself took a breath and drank the rest of his tea. In those seconds of repose, he found that the infusion had an exquisite taste. There were a few small drops of lemon, to be sure, but also something else, something strong and fragrant, which was neither mint nor a camphorated essence of the kind used by old ladies to perfume their bodices and keep their bitches virgin. In the form of steam, the smell of this essence rose from the bottom of the teacup and flooded his nostrils, producing a revitalizing and mentally stimulating effect:
“Clearly the simultaneity of the planes in my creative modus operandi,” he went on, “could have been more complete if, at the same time as I spread myself horizontally over the epidermis of my companions, I’d submitted them to the in-depth treatment of relief sculpture—that is, to dissections, trepanations, dismemberments, new assemblages . . .” For a second Frantisek contemplated the landscape of bloody operations that his words spread before them and gave a shiver of pure humanism. “It’s obvious that this idea equates absolute aesthetic rigor with universal sacrifice in a dangerous way, and yet . . . I don’t know. To sum up, I’m not sure whether my crisis is aesthetic, ethic, vital . . .” Frantisek went silent. All his euphoria had been replaced by a sudden fatigue; it was difficult for him to go on with his explanation: “There’s something else too . . . To touch a body, even in the same place where it’s been touched on another occasion, is to generate a new moment and at the same time evoke the previous one. It’s remarkable: in this repetition, the instrument, the woman, sees emphasis and passion, while the man . . .”
“Please don’t explain anything else to me,” interrupted the other. And with such authority that Frantisek was sure he’d found a solution to his problem.
“What’s wrong with me, maestro?” Frantisek pleaded.
“What’s wrong is that you don’t even know where you are. And don’t call me maestro. Come along.”
“Where?”
“To the treatment room. The distinguished Afasia is expecting you.”
“Not you . . .”
“Nyet. The distinguished is illiterate. I’m the one who reads her letters.”
* * *
1 Although one writes “Mutter,” in everyday speech the “r” is aspirated.
3
Time passed, generations passed, but no one can claim to know in detail what happened during the meeting between my great-great-grandfather and the distinguished Afasia Atanasief; Afasia never made the slightest comment about it, just as she kept silent about all her patients, and Frantisek, after this meeting, which in some way forms the central experience of the first stage of his life, deepened his tendency to reclusion to the point that any knowledge about what happened can be deduced only indirectly, through analysis of the language to which he felt closest.
If in the few surviving musical writings of his first period one can make out a driving will to grasp a sensible and conceptual whole through an intensity and proliferation of experience, then after this encounter with the healer, the compulsion to “tell all” drifts into a far more sweeping and poised form of clear symphonic bent, one that might even sound fatuous and conventional to ears used to the prior saturation. But it’s not all arpeggios and glissandos either. In his creation, there is no longer anything that reeks of anguished exhibitionism or a mysterious faith in some deep “inner life.” What comes over him is no more and no less than the explosion of maturity, and its effect is that his posterior productions will be marked out by sobriety and an apparent sense of loss, not to do with indifference, but with a feeling of quiet serenity when facing the cosmos.
In accordance with this new attitude, my great-great-grandfather decided to migrate to less traveled landscapes. He left Volodia Dutchansky in charge of his property in Irkutsk and settled on a small farm in Crasneborsk, a region located in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. For those who knew him, this decision revealed that for mysterious reasons he had chosen to flog his consciousness, submerging himself in the idiocy of country living. Yet although it’s true that the farm was bursting with chickens, it’s also true that in general Frantisek didn’t concern himself with domestic tasks. At most, during the winter season he would put on boots and splash around in the mixture of red earth and mud, an inverted twilight, as he went looking for wood. The rest of the time he spent shut away in his cabin, dedicating himself to new works. To compose, he made use of a battered violin he’d procured from a muzhik in the area, swapping it for two very beautiful, just weaned suckling pigs. Despite the difficulty of tuning it and replacing the strings, he fell in love with the instrument: its severe limitations for performance stimulated an unexplored aspect, an extremely austere lyricism. Frantisek was anything but a popular composer, but his innate taste for contrasts had led him to absorb the atmosphere that one breathed in Crasneborsk (sun hitting the eternal white mountain ranges, dawn, mist in the valley) in such a way that sometimes, while practicing his pieces on the violin, the music streaming from those clumsy strings filtered through the treetops and directly entered the souls of those living in the region. As an unexpected effect of this communion between complex beauty and simple spirits, the first caress of his fame arrived. In a progression not worth dwelling upon, the composer of rustic life awoke the curiosity of the big cosmopolitan cities, and precisely because of his absence and reluctance, quickly transformed into the “unmissable” act of the official season. “Ha!” said those in the know, walking along the promenade outside the Saint Petersburg theater where the first concert featuring his music had been offered. “Ha! And to think we’d been about to pass him over . . .”
Of course, the way that my great-great-grandfather presented himself as a rural phenomenon might be seen as an abusive procedure to impose a strong prior belief in the masses about the value of his work, which would create the illusion in most music lovers that they had “instinctively” appreciated his value. At heart, this is how the system of fashion works: as a terrifying model of production for meaning, which dispenses with any reflection about the complex aspects a judgment of quality would entail. Luckily, this wasn’t the case with my great-great-grandfather, who was never a social climber and always utterly disregarded the opinions of others about his work. Not only that: so uninterested was he in any expectation of worldly triumph that on the day of his premiere, oblivious to every consideration of an aesthetic order, he walked in his robe and slippers through the city streets, pondering the reasons why he was living through a sentimental revolution.
She: twenty-five years old, daughter of a famous oboist from La Scala in Milan. Sofia Quatrocci. Ugly, a few pounds overweight, with moles, warts and boils scattered all over her dull skin. But intellectually brilliant, with luminous eyes, an imaginative character, an expansive sense of humor and a broad general culture, along with a prodigious memory capable of reproducing to the letter any phrase she found amusing. If any of her admirers presented himself with a worn-out formula, she’d immediately produce a mirror reply:
