The Absolute, page 8
Propolski rushed to help the waiter, busying himself with laying out the plates, dishes, pitchers, glasses, cups, platters and vessels, full of solids and liquids that were charred, crude or chilled, before he then, sweating with pleasure, hurried to mix, taste, separate and recombine the different elements that trickled, stuck together, disintegrated or melted. Frantisek contemplated the pirouettes of his doctor as he tucked into the food, engaging in the seduction of inert worlds (raw and cooked), taking inspiration from the boundless gaze of the hypnotist and the tongue flicks of the lizard, and incorporating a complex series of advances and retreats, satisfied smacks and purrs upon swallowing. The whole series of calibrations, alignments and deflations that took place on Propolski’s face made one think of the gesticulations of a robot whose machinery has begun to function poorly, yet it didn’t stop him, at the same time as he swallowed each bite, from finding a way to compare it with the others he had sampled over the course of his existence at different restaurants, cafeterias, eateries, taverns, inns and hostelries all over Russia, which seemed to add their pleasures to those of the present, materializing themselves in the imagination as new and ineffable dimensions of quantity, volume, flavor. For my great-great-grandfather, in contrast, the mere sight of this overflow of food made him feel full in advance, while the verbal elaborations induced a kind of moral nausea. Yet again, he asked himself what he was doing there, in the company of this vulgar and contemptible being, a stranger who had dragged him along as a witness and who believed him to be an accomplice in this display of repulsive excess; no doubt a false physician to boot, someone who didn’t even have the courage to hurl the fatal diagnosis in his face. But if Propolski was the fleeting and tangible sum of all the misery it was possible to accrete in a day, then what was happening in the larger picture? Why was he consenting in silence to all of this?
“I adore the simple pleasures,” repeated Propolski, as he sucked out the white goo at the center of a knobbly, hollow bone, which he’d seized upon with his rubbery tentacles, “the,” slurp, “simple, ah, pleasures, are, mmm, the last refuge of complicated men . . . Don’t you fancy a little suck? It’s exquisite! What? I can’t hear you, man, I can’t hear you!”
“My incurable weakness, my incurable weakness,” whispered Frantisek.
Desserts: snowy blinis with thick cream and a deluge of sugar. Extremely rich khvorost, unpronounceable gurievskaya kasha. There were also khachapuri and pryanikis to throw in the air to a heaven of starving angels. Propolski ate, drummed on his belly and burped in several scales as he recited the names of the most distinguished figures from the current of rural-imaginist poetry that thrived in Odessa from 1660 to 1674 (a bunch of second-rate luminaries), which championed the elimination of rhyme in favor of the groupings of “casual cacophony”; he made noises to dissemble—a trace of modesty, at last—an episode of flatulence, then he stood up, intimating to his table companion that the small detail of the tab would fall to him. My great-great-grandfather paid, and they cleared out.
“To leave is to die a little, to die is to leave a little too much. Ciao, Sofia,” Propolski declared as an epitaph. Then, recomposing himself: “What a day, caro fratello! We ate, we fornicated (at least I did), we burped, at some point we fucked again . . . and we’re just getting started.”
“Wasn’t her name Ludmila?” said my great-great-grandfather.
“Who?”
“Ludmila. Wasn’t your friend named Ludmila Orlova?”
“Yes, and?”
“You said Sofia. ‘Ciao, Sofia.’”
“Ah, so I did. Her little ass did seem different, somehow . . . She was so young and so changed that, anyhow, I think there must have been a convenient confusion and I attended to the daughter. At bottom it’s the same, and all of it stays in the family! Do you know what we’re going to do now, with purely soothing and digestive ends?”
“Go back to Crasneborsk?” ventured my great-great-grandfather.
“Nein. We’re going to take a splendid little nap in a haystack that’s . . .” Propolski raised his hand and pointed forward with his short chubby index. At that very moment, a black bird crossed the ballistic trajectory of his finger: “An oschtropoi. Birds of ill omen. You don’t see them often in these parts.”
As if to make the word flesh, at that precise moment the oschtropoi gave a couple of spasmodic wingbeats, then plunged to earth, slamming against an invisible barrier and disappearing from the two walkers’ views. Seconds later, they heard the shot.
“To shoot down death: is this an unnecessary duplication, a dire omen or a sign of exceptional luck? Reality, my dear friend, dedicates to us incomprehensible marvels. Sometimes I think that everything—lights, shadows, sounds and colors—alludes in a delicate and infinite way to my distinguished person. I see a blade of grass floating in the air that at a certain moment shapes the first letter of my last name. What cosmic courtesy!” Propolski said.
“Or what an idiotic Universe . . .” muttered my great-great-grandfather.
Afternoon in the countryside. Every so often, Propolski helped along the process of pollination by leaning over to sniff a flower, in the process covering his nose with talc, the pompom of an inspired clown.
Frantisek was able to leave the doctor only near daybreak. On the road he surrendered to the pure happiness that fills a man when returning home after a long journey of obstacles. To the forgetting of small injuries and daily failures. To the feeling of plenitude. As night frayed at the edges, and he promised himself never to abandon his family again, Frantisek believed that he was going to witness the most beautiful of dawns.
He arrived at his property minutes before the sun came out. The solidity of the heavens had already begun to dissolve into iridescent particles. The first thing that drew his attention was the silence of the roosters. Then Andrei’s sobbing. It wasn’t the cry of the child who complains to his mother because he’s hungry, but the desperation of the one who’s called all night long, receiving no answer. Frantisek ran to the bedroom. Sitting on a chair next to the bed where Jenka lay unmoving, there was a black shadow, something that turned toward him. Frantisek recognized the gleam in those eyes.
“I wanted to nurse him, but it’s no good. My breasts have dried up,” said Athenea.
6
Frantisek understood how important Jenka had been to him only after he’d lost her. Her lightness, that ability of hers to make him happy, began to reveal itself in its totality after the wind scattered her ashes through the larch trees in the valley of Crasneborsk. At that moment he became painfully aware of his love. In his arms, Andrei stared into the embers of the pyre that had consumed his mother. A few steps behind them, Athenea murmured her psalms.
After the cremation, my great-great-grandfather hired Marina Tsvetskaia, a dairy matron, then buried himself in bed. A muffled and persistent pain drilled away at his bones. He chalked up this suffering as the reaction of his organism to Jenka’s absence; love was the silent immaterial fire that licked at him before it consumed him. With sheets drawn up to his neck, he noted the most visible signs of life—Marina’s laughter as she suckled Andrei, an orange-breasted bird pecking at the green worm of plague that devoured a cedar with blossoming branches on the other side of the window—and slowly he let himself go, surrendering to memories. His mind went back to the first musical experiments, those combinatorial exercises developed on female bodies. Now he could recognize the frivolity of his behavior, the cold deliberation with which he had handled those women, operating with the resentment of someone who knows beforehand he’ll never achieve the object of his quest. Frantisek closed his eyes to better evoke the waves of elusive ecstasy that had come over him suddenly in the midst of those covens . . . Such excesses hadn’t been useful for anything except perhaps to introduce him to the constant grief that would now forever afflict him, and which had been calmed, for an interval so brief it made the contrast terrible, only by the presence of Jenka. She’d been the great balm of his existence, the true cause and motor that had always driven his actions, and now she’d stayed in the past, leaving him defenseless. All that remained now was to accept the fleeting nature of his existence, which he assumed was reduced to his memory of her.
Slowly, as the days went by, the versions of Jenka that Frantisek remembered came flowing into his mind like an eloquent deluge. In the belief that he survived only to dwell upon her image, he transformed into the sentry who kept watch over the current, awaiting its end. Since this didn’t arrive, at least not immediately, my great-great-grandfather decided to accept the rigor of the paradox. Dead, Jenka seemed to become endless, or at least incessant, as if her peaceful appearance, rich with details, formed a prelude to the tribute he needed to make: a lasting goodbye in the form of music.
Clearly, to dedicate himself to the composition of a requiem or solemn mass, Frantisek would have needed a little more health, along with some solitude and concentration. But these last requirements had become tricky, seeing that after Jenka’s death, Athenea had decided to take special care of him. First out of courtesy, then out of respect, and finally out of fear, my great-great-grandfather didn’t voice any criticism of the new treatment by his housekeeper. Her interventions left his body exhausted and disturbed his spirit, but they were also the perfect excuse to delay the moment of seclusion and creation—that is, the moment of rendering homage to the deceased before he’d have to release her into the slipstream of dissolution.
For her part, even though Athenea’s determination was loyal to motives other than preserving fidelity to a life beyond this one, she herself was unaware of the secret impulse behind her actions and, with all her efforts, believed she was doing nothing more than helping a disconsolate widower tend to the garden of his memory. Yet even if she was unaware of her own reasons, she couldn’t help but notice the duplicity of her “patient,” who on the one hand surrendered to her manipulations, and on the other seemed to take refuge in his despair. This trait of my great-great-grandfather’s irritated her. Sometimes she’d gasp in annoyance, “Relax,” as she massaged his calves with her strong dry hands, which minutes before she’d sunk into a tub of ice water.
By acting in this way, Athenea was evidently going far beyond the call of duty; in a normal situation, a single word from her employer would have been enough to draw the line. But that word wasn’t pronounced, and its omission increased her boldness.
Carried away by a frenzy whose true meaning remained hidden, Athenea overstepped the bounds again and again. These attempts reinforced her perception that Frantisek and his oblique behavior were presenting her with new facets of the masculine universe, but exploring another and more intimate dimension also offered her a mirror of her own emotions, which she hadn’t suspected were going to appear. To put it briefly, Athenea didn’t know that she’d fallen in love with her master, that sad aloof widower. She was unaware that she loved him with a devotion that was yearning, demanding, anguished, far from tender; she loved him without hopes, without dreams, without feeling herself enveloped by the sweet hypnotic gossamer that casts itself from the gaze of the one in love and projects a ray of light into the beloved, who, in reflecting it, experiences the deceptive illusion of being not the mirror but the source. Instead of all this, she found herself pushed by a brutal and greedy desire, a sordid necessity not happy with anything. In consequence, she began to take on the appearance of a person submitted to a chain of disappointments; her smirk became more serious, her smile turned bitter.
Curiously, Frantisek attributed Athenea’s metamorphosis to what he thought was her fear of a decrease in domestic responsibilities: no longer thanks to any cutback by Jenka (she herself cut from life), but because of that sudden dryness that prevented her from feeding Andrei. Even in the midst of his own suffering, he thought of saying a few words to her about this, a comforting phrase or consoling refrain, something that served to cast away her fear. But then, as always, he let the moment slip, and finally forgot about it—or something in him, wiser and more deliberate, opted against it. Was this his small revenge? Maybe not; maybe he was simply dominated by the reign of his own somber meditations and the decisions of an even more somber mind, that of the divinity who presided over his end. To make things worse, his visual capacity was dwindling; instead of that zone of radiance experienced by those affected by a detachment of the retina, which bestows an aura of temporary holiness over objects and people, my great-great-grandfather could perceive only an opaque mist which started to blot out everything.
Frantisek hid this new renunciation by his organism; his situation was complicated enough without divulging a further weakness, which Athenea might use to force him into new extravagances. For this reason he preferred to keep silent, and with the urgency of a condemned man, he tried to memorize the pale remains of the day, leaning over Andrei’s cradle to burn those adored features into his retina. Each time seemed like the last, the perfection of the creature already beginning to grow hazy and dissipate (many years later, although for other reasons, my father would live through the same painful situation with me). In the spreading darkness, Andrei stretched out a little hand, clung to one of his fingers, smiled and murmured: “Daddy.”
In the spreading darkness. In the spreading darkness of his existence, only in sleep could he still trace the outlines of shapes with precision. That’s why he clung to these moments, and even tried to introduce dream to his waking life as a permanent method. He wanted to move in and out, from one state of being to another, as if these were joined by a revolving door. Could Propolski have been right, even though his opinions had seemed a condensation of stupidity in their moment, when he had said that time is made up of infinitely expandable units? Now he wondered whether it would be possible to recuperate the world (what had been lost, what was leaving) by the simple means of injecting into every dream the notion of eternity. To dream the world by parts, with fervor and lucidity, until it could be rebuilt whole. A world shaped to his liking, just as complete and lasting as the real one, and ending only when he wished it.
The way that events turned out, these attempts of Frantisek’s never went beyond the initial phase; they never completely transformed into a guided dream. But one night, after falling asleep and waking up several times, he was able to sense the figure of Jenka. She was by his side, in their home library. The novelty of the situation was rooted not so much in the visit by the deceased (who until that moment had been evasive, as the recently dead tend to be), as in the fact that Frantisek had managed to dream himself as an autonomous body within the dream, a being separate from his own consciousness as dreamer, unaware even that his own self was dreaming him. At one point, Jenka, who had been peacefully contemplating the flames in the hearth for some time, came back to her husband and said something like: “Marriage is the performance of just a few notes, but played clearly.” Frantisek nodded his head in agreement. With a leap, a fluffy white cat passed through the scene, and went to curl up on the rug less than a meter from the fireplace. “Jan,” murmured Jenka. Frantisek was struck by the suspicion that his wife had named a lover. “What?” he said. “Jan, our cat. I gave him that name in homage to Jan Sweelinck,” she said. “Who is Sweelinck?” asked Frantisek. Jenka looked at him with pity, moved by his amnesia: “He was an early contrapuntist, who composed music for the organ as if it were meant for a human voice. You always adored his style.” “Ah. Right. A precursor of Frescobaldi,” said Frantisek, and reclined in his chair. Jenka bent over her husband. “You adore cats,” she told him. “I didn’t know that,” he said. “There are so many things we don’t know about ourselves,” she commented in a strange tone. Then she added: “Your problem isn’t that you don’t know, but that you forget you know.” Frantisek laughed, uncomfortable, while he asked himself why Jenka had set out so late upon the path of reproaches, and why she was leaning over him in this way, as if collapsing. At such a short distance, he could make out the irregularities of her features and the impurities of her skin. Frantisek noticed that he was sinking into the interior of something that came from his wife’s gaze, or maybe from a deeper zone, from her hidden organs. The worst part was that he couldn’t escape from this force that took control of him like something inert, without his being able to move even a centimeter, because any backward movement of his body was opposed by the solidity of the chair. “What . . . ?” he trembled. “Shhh,” she said. And opening her lips, she stuck out her tongue and started to lick his face with moans of satisfaction. The smell of Jenka’s saliva, its density, was different from usual. It wasn’t necessarily unpleasant, but it was disconcerting. “You never even imagined what you were missing,” said Jenka’s new voice. Frantisek closed his eyes . . .
Nobody will be surprised at this point to learn that when he opened his eyes and woke up from his dream, Frantisek discovered he was with Athenea, who was naked and mounted on his member, rocking back and forth.
From then on, for Frantisek, every day was atrocious and every moon bitter. Obviously, with some relief. At the start, and even though it came from a manipulation that took shameless advantage of his sleeping unconsciousness and overall weakness, to the point it almost seemed rape, the sexual act with Athenea affected his entire existence; more than anything because, sure of the power that she held in this respect, Athenea decided to repeat her performance as a way of trapping him, staking all possible love letters against her wisdom in the erotic terrain. She believed that even with her stern yet tremulous look of a constipated noblewoman, her little virgin’s tits, man’s hips and nun’s thin lips, neither Jenka nor her memory could compete with her. But she did not surrender to this belief in the prior certainty of triumph. She didn’t trust Frantisek. In bed (or anywhere, beginning that night, where she happened to lead him), she kept an eye on even the tiniest of his gestures, resigning or deferring her own pleasure to acquire evidence of his; sleepless, she pursued him, lying in wait for him in silence or shouting. Frantisek was profoundly shaken by this turn of events. Athenea’s frenzy had moved him despite himself and captivated him with its spectacle, and now he had to recognize that he was aroused by a woman he didn’t even like. Nevertheless, he thought that his carnal euphoria was a mistaken sign, just like the promise of recovery that appears on the face of a dying person just before the end. And that is why, when all is said and done, despite being immersed in the mechanism of enthusiasms and orgasmic shouts, he gave little importance to these matters; they seemed to him lacking in gravity, save perhaps for the sensation of being unfaithful that sometimes bothered him in the middle of a penetration or that, as he let out the moans and groans usual in such circumstances, made him swallow unpronounced, like an incantation, the name of his deceased beloved.
