The Absolute, page 35
I remember, as if it were today, the feeling of watching the open countryside pass with its contrasts and delights—pastures, dopey cows, wheat fields—visible through the fogged-up windows. At the time, every wagon had a small firewood brazier, the only thing needed to heat the compartment. My father remained in silence, though he smiled at me now and then. We got down from the train at nightfall. Someone had come to pick us up at the end of our journey, the representative of a local cultural committee, cap removed, exposing his baldness to the air, a bouquet of flowers in hand to receive the distinguished pianist and his little daughter. Except for the local details of chickens pecking by the side of the road and dogs sprawled out licking each other, the place seemed deserted. We prepared ourselves while walking toward the venue, the salon at the club. I can’t say anything specific about the concert that night, referred to by the presenter as a “musical potpourri”: neither what my father played, nor the size of the audience, nor the quality of the piano, nor its temperature and tuning. But I do vividly recall the sadness of the hotel we were given for the night: the fake alpine exterior with broken tiles and a dry branch poking out of the drainage pipe, the faded red carpet in the reception hall where a ghost who’s seen better days glances at the cuckoo clock just as the little wood bird sings, then scratches an ear with a pencil before filling in the form with our names and guiding us up the spiral staircase, pointing out the black hole of a bathroom (with broken lavatory, without toilet paper or mirror) at the end of the corridor, and the door of room 313, where squeaky spring mattresses, a vase with dirty plastic roses, damp sheets, and a fly-spattered hunting scene knit from wool await us. My father and I, alone. Our suitcase leans against one of the two beds. As he changes clothes for dinner, I glance toward the street. A tube of violet light snakes around a metal cross: “Vivoratá Drugstore.”
For a time I kept believing our tours around the country were an excuse to look for my mother. Wrapped with a golden aura I polished in my mind, Mama came back again and again, a serious, elevated, noble figure and the deity of my repeated dream, although at the center of that radiance was a face whose features I couldn’t summon. Details I’d have been able to retain were I to have had a photograph, even one tiny enough to press under the hair snippet of a locket. But I didn’t have one, and it seems my father’s were lost with the rest of his belongings. As with so many other things, he couldn’t remember where and with whom we’d been living before he suffered the accident. Of course, I trusted that if doctors had given him the all clear, it was because they were sure at some point the lacunae of his memory would fill in, and we’d get hold of the missing information. What I didn’t know was that they’d allowed him to go only because they thought they’d done everything possible.
And in the meantime, we traveled. We presented ourselves at hotel dining rooms, trade union assembly halls, social clubs, concert venues shut down from lack of use and reopened for the occasion, and homes of retired lady piano teachers, encouraged by the renown of the performer and the news his marvelous abilities could be hired at a discount. I’ve seen more than one variety show huckster bargain down to a cut-rate offer with my father, drawing on arguments about his reduction of musicality (pianissimo) and his imbalance and fluctuation of intensity, demonstrating it with a wavering left pinky.
What made my father at first accept these shameful fees, then later complain they’d swindled him? The throbbing red vein in his temple, the threats . . . It’s true that more than once his protests led to an improvement in payment, but they also left the link with his employers in a jittery state of nervous tension and, in the long run, put our sources of income at risk.
Somehow my father considered such scenes to be a part of the concert. But these gestures, frequent in star performers and contemporary musicians, met with an inappropriate public in his case, unable to appreciate his kind of aesthetic wager. How much is a concert worth? How much is the uniqueness of a performance worth? Maybe he no longer noticed the difference, or maybe he knew too much, and what everyone—including me—thought of as the effects of his stroke were no more than the mark of that devastating singularity, that sign of genius now transformed into stigma. Only he knew the enormous distance that existed between his current reality as a pianist touring the provinces, and what he truly represented. With his brother dead, Sebastian Deliuskin was the world’s only standard bearer of something that had changed everything but gone unnoticed, or that hadn’t yet revealed itself.
3
On free days between concerts, if the weather was good, my father would dress me as a princess and take me for ice cream. We’d sit on the wood benches in some plaza and look at the fancy people walking their dogs. We never talked about my mother, but for me those outings were like meetings glued together with hope. At the end of the afternoon, the chill forced us to go back to our hotel room.
I remember a few outings in particular. Something like the anticipation of a realization—or maybe the simple wish to forestall deception—made him alter the route. We would change plans and go to the cinema. In one of those warehouses turned into projection halls, sliding roofs had been installed. On summer nights, between films, the electric humming of the motor could be heard as it started to operate cables and pulleys, then the structure of iron and sheet metal slid aside to display a piece of gleaming and rectangular architecture: the landscape of the sky with its constellations. I don’t really know what he was thinking about then, maybe the music he’d composed with Alexander Scriabin that continued ricocheting through the faraway galaxies, but in those moments he almost seemed happy. Even his feverish finger grew calm on the armrest of his theater seat. He didn’t care about the films. He closed his eyes, and instead of following the moving images of the story, he listened to the actors’ voices as formless noise, or random uncomposed music.
4
Even in the first months after he was authorized to leave the hospital, my father knew his cerebral processes remained irregular. If memory is like a tapestry woven with different colored threads, which intertwine to create a general shape and complete design for the past, what happened to him is that the most fragile connections, which he’d supposed would be restored over time, saw themselves instead damaged by erosion. The threads were cut, consumed by the termites of that process of deterioration. Even though he still recognized the “general shape” in broad strokes, a moment would come when the image could no longer be made out. In some of his notes (which I won’t transcribe), he mentioned that instant as the one when his consciousness would cease to recognize its own being. He was worried not so much about losing himself, as about at some point not remembering I was his daughter. His deepest fear was that he’d even forget he loved me, and this terror drove him to love me with desperation. I was his precious thing, fragile and fleeting. Above all he dreaded losing his mind for good before I was ready to live without him. That’s why he hunted for ways to delay this point in time and space, in which he’d no longer know what the world was, or who I was, or what he himself would be. His notes were a method of safekeeping: there he wrote descriptions, included pictures and registered the way his mind organized and cataloged memories, which he tried to mark off clearly from dreams and nightmares, anticipating the final period. A few months ago, going through these papers, I found an old photograph stuck to one of the pages. We are at the zoo in La Plata, and I’m wearing a heavy dark wool jacket and cap with earflaps. He, in contrast, has on a short-sleeved shirt and is crouched down so our heads are the same height. My little arm hangs from his shoulder as I look at the camera and Dad looks at me. His emotions are difficult to read, the hieroglyphs of an absent mind, but in his look I now think I see an infinite gentleness, an infinite sadness. Next to the photo, in shaky handwriting: “This is me. This is my daughter. Alejandra Deliuskin-Scriabin.”
Obviously . . . obviously in this process of decomposition that swept away everything in its tides of blood and neurons, its eddies of knowledge and memories, one might assume that someday he wouldn’t be able to read what he’d written either. That’s why, in his struggle against the inevitable, my father drew up a series of unusual procedures for each one of his concerts. How can you play something without remembering the music? How can you sit in front of the audience knowing that someday you won’t even recall the words that name what you’re doing? Of course my father was an extraordinary pianist, perfectly conscious of the significance of instrumental technique, which is why he knew that after the worst happened, the imprint of his learning would let him keep playing for a time, even if only like a sleepwalking pianist or a machine gone haywire, unaware of what it spits out. That extra time would have its duration and end too, but my father trusted he could stretch out the period. So his concerts began to give way to a deeply considered strategy: improvisation as second memory. Instead of what the programs announced, what he performed was a subtle web of deviations that in their melodies and harmonies progressed a very long way from acoustic and conceptual repetitions, those limits that allow one to recognize a composer’s “personal style”: while leading others to believe he was strictly adhering to his repertoire, he was performing in austere solitude the music of the future.
5
I don’t know exactly when I realized that what affected my father wasn’t characteristic of every adult, but a trait particular to him. Darkly I intuited that the tours were no longer aimed at reuniting with my mother and rebuilding the family, but formed part of his desperate attempt to get hold of some protection for me before illness claimed him forever. At night, when he thought I was asleep, he wrote letters: to acquaintances, to child welfare services. In the morning we tossed them in mailboxes, waiting for answers that never came, because he gave no return address. Maybe he assumed that anyone interested could trace us through the reviews in local newspapers, the posters stuck on the doors of little theaters, the voices in the air broadcasting his name over radio stations in the provinces.
I understand his pain at the certainty he’d never know where his daughter would end up. Even then, I was sometimes able to sink deep into the orbit of his thoughts, advancing in a connection made possible by our flesh and blood, the community of our being. Those thoughts might be described as impressions and tonalities, letters and sounds, moving shapes. My vital risk, the scenario I’d have to face when he was no longer with me, could be heard as something throbbing in the silence, forever about to be performed. That devastated him: to read my thoughts (as I was doing with his) and know I was starting to realize everything. That’s why he turned to irrational methods in the attempt to preserve my innocence. As if he could veil himself from the excess light that displayed his mind for my scrutiny, he surrendered to music, in order to stun himself, and to drink, in order to avoid suffering. It’s clear he maintained enough control that no one noticed (except me). Inebriated, with his neurons bloated and moving in all directions thanks to the alcohol, he forgot about time and was able to climb onstage: there he felt every note achieved its own weight and duration, vibrating in the ether, radiant, while the transitions between them took on a lively and exultant spirit, as in a Christmas carol. Of course, for this effect to maintain its intensity, he had to drink more each time, and once the moment of initial splendor had passed, the effect of the alcohol faded and everything sounded hollow. No one understood better than he did how awful the situation was. Canceled performances, migraines, shaking hands. Without seeking it, that brief period gave him an artificial preview of what everything would be like when I’d have to look after him. Of course, there were things I couldn’t do, like pick him up in my arms and lay him in bed, although I was able to take off his shoes, serve him a glass of water, tuck him in and stay up at night to watch over his sleep. When he caught on to this, my father stopped drinking. His attempt at recovery went beyond the limits of mere abstinence; he tried to climb back up the hill.
He started to take notes on everything. As if each letter could inscribe a new order in his mind, he became an obsessive of the systems that govern the connections between things: limits, signs, ratios. He wrote the distances between one town and another, the slight variations in landscape, the names of hospitals, the number of trees on each street, what he put in his suitcase for each trip, the items of clothing we wore, the color of each anti-seizure pill, the description of a golden patch in the pupil of my left eye, the letters of my name. At night he went over these jottings: with a fine-tipped pen, he even traced a few faint lines that joined an address to an object, an object to a number, a number to an unfinished word; the design of those geometries may not seem to have pointed toward any specific meaning, but such mechanics of habit no doubt led him to engage in certain forms of thinking. That visual grammar was his last effort to conserve the world, his final truly organic and conscious attempt at healing.
6
I think this account of his life—of our joined lives—should come to an end like a coda interrupted by the unexpected end of its composer. But like him, I resist the end. With his deteriorated abilities, my father occasionally sat in front of the blank music paper and tried to write something, I don’t know what, though I suspect he was trying to complete the Mysterium, a task whose fulfillment had been postponed or interrupted after Alexander Scriabin’s death. Of course, as we know, the first draft, the Preparatory Action, might have worked to prevent the Apocalypse—or at least defer it. But the fact that in his condition Sebastian Deliuskin attempted to take on a venture like this one, that with disturbed faculties he tried to continue and conclude the project of transforming the Universe . . . that speaks to a particularly human attempt to cross through the barriers of the possible to reach the dimensions of holiness.
The ancient mystics, musicians and mathematicians would never have thought of their words, formulas and compositions as being linked with objects in the physical world, and much less with totality; instinctively they believed that their practices were parallel worlds that didn’t align with the workings of the material spheres. Only the Gnostics, before Alexander Scriabin and Sebastian Deliuskin, showed themselves capable of discovering in each word of their religious books a sign or the name of one of the “spiritual places” whose relations determine the law of the cosmos. My uncle and my father were the ones who found a way to read the Absolute as a sheet of music with notes in the wrong places, and set their minds to ordering them by means of a work and an action destined to endure. In that sense, both are the highest point of the family evolution, the geniuses of geniuses, the ones who reached the furthest by traveling along the path of their predecessors. In their case, it was no longer just about composing a symphony that gave voice to a powerful intuition, a tide of exceptional music that interpreted the meaning of life and situation of man in the world (Frantisek), or about reading religion in a political key and drawing up a plan of action (Andrei), or about trying to carry it out in the world (Esau), but rather about directly taking the intimate structure of the Universe by storm and submitting it to a colossal transfiguration.
But what if that is what the Mysterium does? And what if I myself, driven by the same ambition that inspired my family, have also tried to change reality and the perception of it, even if just in the minds of readers? This chronicle: a series of ascending and descending scales, glimmers of information made possible by old family archives, a few books, Stravinsky’s bold and timely question—“Who is Scriabin? Who are his ancestors?”—and my will that everything change once and for all, or if not, explode into eternity.
Maybe that’s how it is, how this is. Maybe my father’s dying life was plotted like an encrypted composition, a work capable of being read only when the world was prepared to understand it. Sometimes I imagine that if I could manage to sink deeply enough into the damaged abysses of his consciousness, if I could reconstruct the meaning of his experience, I’d be able to deduce the complete Mysterium, its purpose and significance. Then I concentrate on the final moment; I close my eyes and see it. One afternoon, just before giving another concert, my father lies down to rest on the bed of the last hotel room. The putrid blues of twilight can be seen through the window. With his clothes on, Sebastian Deliuskin looks as if he’s sleeping, as a trickle of blood slides from his ear and marks a red circle on the sheet. My father. The years pass and I think of him and feel so alone, but it consoles me to know I wasn’t so while writing. Until the very end, I have lived with my ancestors.
