The Absolute, page 9
Of course, his discretion wasn’t enough to mislead Athenea. She could see that Frantisek was under the impression he was living out a few nights of light passion. And this terrified her. “What is he really thinking about? Where do I fit into it?” For all that she regretted the little she had gained up to that point, love, with its promise of future bliss, sustained her enough to let her endure the humiliating certainty that Frantisek was taking her like a female animal, one worth as much as an object; at the same time, her love prevented her from recognizing that when he clutched her in his arms, he was dominating all that throbbed within her as a possibility, reducing her to the eternal and palpable terror that dwells within every woman of being unloved—that is, to the condition of nightmare.
With the passing of the days, Athenea gradually adjusted to this situation, and fit herself to his being with the precision of a mask. But before she transformed into this sinister mirror of another’s morbidity, she struggled and resisted; she did so with the purity, clumsiness and naïveté (half sentimental delirium, half erroneous calculation) that characterizes everyone in love. To approach my great-great-grandfather’s heart, still affected by Jenka’s death, maybe it would have suited her to adopt a strategy crafted out of kind actions, understanding, service and patience, which after a period of time, would have received at least some form of response: if not love, at least tenderness and gratitude. But Athenea was too proud, or too anxious, and when she surrendered herself to Frantisek she did so in the hope of achieving with one blow the totality that had been denied her until that moment. Since this didn’t happen, finding herself in the trembling emptiness that opened before her dashed expectations, she didn’t know how to do anything but double her stakes, trying to give events consistency and make them “real” by the simple means of reminding him of them whenever she could.
Frantisek took this gesture as an imposition or, at least, as a complaint made from a place of strength. He interpreted Athenea’s comments to be a request for compensation, the necessary requirement to free him from their exhausting bond of passion, and so, in a shy and ambiguous way, as with people who consider it to be in poor taste to speak of money, he mentioned a figure. He waited for an enthusiastic response and the quick naming of a price. It disconcerted him to meet with an attack of sobbing. Where had he gone wrong? Was the money offered too much or too little? And what if Athenea’s reaction didn’t have to do with financial matters? But if it wasn’t about that, then what was it?
After a few days of doubt, he judged that it was better not to ask for clarifications. Out of prudence, and so long as he couldn’t find a way to understand what Athenea intended from him, he decided to cast upon their relationship the shadow of an imaginary shrug: when he crossed paths with her in the hallways, he gave her a vague smile and kept moving. It wouldn’t have escaped any objective spectator that this flight had a component of bewilderment to it, and that in his exits from the scene, Frantisek displayed a sort of absorbed haste, like that of a paralytic falling down a staircase. But the worst thing was his vulnerable and shabby appearance: his bowed head, his hunched back, his weak legs, his shirt untucked from trousers and hanging over his belly, his gaze lost in the surrounding darkness.
In the meantime Athenea, although she felt herself ridiculed by an objectively insulting proposition, noticed that her reaction had unexpectedly touched a weak point in Frantisek. This—she deduced—meant she had to keep insisting. And with greater emphasis than ever, she applied herself to talking about the links between them, refreshing for him even the smallest details of every one of their meetings—from her initial appearance up to what had been said and done seconds before—charging even the most minimal conversations with significance. For Frantisek, these emotional deluges were overwhelming, and their flow prevented him from noticing that he could have put a brake on the loquacity by just saying: “My dear, why don’t you shut your trap and leave me in peace once and for all?”
But he didn’t say that, or anything like it. Such silence seems inexplicable in someone who believed that, save for a few brushes in the night, nothing joined him to this woman. Yet the mixture of regret and spleen that Athenea produced in him, the tortuous way in which she had chosen to impose herself on him, provided a certain density to his existence. Although he wasn’t aware of it, although he figuratively continued to light candles at the dead woman’s altar, the truth is that his memory of Jenka and her easy ability to make him happy was fading away.
Was it a kind of egoism or inconsistency that my great-great- grandfather, who saw Athenea as an obstacle, ultimately ended up accepting her? She wasn’t the woman he loved; she was the one he had by his side. Naturally, these facts don’t explain everything. I believe that by keeping her in his home, and progressively submitting to her demands, constant complaints and inconvenient behavior, Frantisek had found a remarkable excuse for not facing his responsibilities to music. The hours of real life and his periods of mental exhaustion consumed him and left him a wreck. Or so he imagined. For him, in some sense Athenea’s flow of babble constituted the main obstacle to his musical creation, and she’d become his punishment for what he did not create.
And so, although he couldn’t stand her, Frantisek was completely dedicated to her.
Even so, before giving in completely, he made his final attempt, one that was so simplistic it can be thought of only as a spasm of resistance destined to serve as a prelude to surrender. If Athenea—he told himself—had clung to him when he’d revealed he was prepared to compensate her and see her fade away on the horizon, wouldn’t the situation be inverted if he now began to woo her, to pretend he couldn’t live without her? In practice, his hypothesis fell apart. Since he didn’t consider (because he didn’t know them) the feelings of the person to whom he was trying to apply his ideas, his effort produced results the opposite of those expected: Athenea interpreted Frantisek’s superficial maneuvers in a literal way and, thinking she’d finally pierced the rock-hard soul of the man she loved, surrendered to the sweetness of the new treatment: days of ecstasy, nights of ardor, lyrical formulations of a thicket of shared projects.
Frantisek realized he’d fallen into his own trap the day Athenea said to him:
“I think we should send a letter to your father.”
“A letter? Saying what?”
“There’s no need to dictate,” she said. “I’ve already written it.”
And she recited:
Dear father:
I know it might seem rushed to you that such a short time after becoming a widower, I’m writing to inform you of my next . . .
Et cetera.
The day of the wedding, Athenea flaunted an unusual hairstyle that suited her terribly, the tall headdress of a crazy woman adorned with orange blossoms and a green silk gown embroidered in gold. The anonymous reporter from Izvestia who covered the ceremony—clearly Propolski—wrote that “undoubtedly thanks to a scrupulous adherence to the advice of his doctor, a local eminence, our notable composer Frantisek Deliuskin shows himself to have recovered from the series of illnesses that afflicted him in the recent past,” while the bride, “slender, very beautiful, with expressive eyes,” still couldn’t quite seem to believe what was happening. Thanks to a mix-up by the choir director, which only my great-great-grandfather noticed, the voices intoned a Gregorian chant.
Celestial forces rise and fall
And the golden pitchers surrender
As always, Frantisek admired the characteristics of this tradition: its constant circling around a primary note without this creating the sensation of an emerging center, as it would in the posterior tonic, the avoidance of large intervals, and a freely oscillating rhythm that emphasizes not meaning but the suggestive tendencies of language. “An old but solid style,” he thought, as he glanced to the right from the corner of his eye. There were his composer friends, making picaresque faces at him. Gregorian. At one time he’d thought of using the severity of this model, wrenching it away from the necessities of the mass for more intimate poetic purposes. A Gregorian chant written for Jenka? In that case . . .
“Fran . . .” Athenea elbowed him.
. . . in that case, taking such a liberty would make it a new form. And if he were to advance outside the framework of the liturgy, and introduce love as an axis . . .
“Frantisek . . .”
“What?” said my great-great-grandfather.
“You may kiss,” said the priest.
“Ionic mode,” he murmured, leaning toward his bride.
7
Andrei remained in the care of Marina Tsvetskaia, the wet nurse, and the newlyweds set off on vacation; Athenea wanted to get to know all of Europe. The first stop was Saint Petersburg. It was summer. In the deserted city there wasn’t a single theater open. They didn’t go to Pavlovsk either, or to any concerts, or to any of the forty-two islands. Frantisek encouraged his wife to go out alone; he remained shut away in the hotel bedroom with the shutters closed. He tried to get used to the night, or perhaps make out a glimmer of minimal hope, day filtering through darkness. But it was irreparable; he was going blind.
From Saint Petersburg to Narva. From Narva to Tallinn and Tartu. From Tartu to Riga, Klaipeda, Kaliningrad. They arrived in Poland and stayed for several days in Elblag. From there on to Olsztyn, Warsaw, Wroclaw, Krakow . . . In Czechoslovakia, just Prague. Within the Austro-Hungarian empire, Athenea wanted to visit Vienna and Budapest. Berne, in Switzerland. In Italy, Milan (for the fashion), Venice (for the canals), Florence (for the Duomo) and Rome (for the pope). Spain didn’t interest her, France did. They crossed the English Channel so she could see London. Taking advantage of the mild climate, they went to the spa town of Brighton. There, on the advice of a hydrotherapist recommended to Athenea by a Polish countess, who had visited the hotel where they were staying by mistake while in search of her lover (an underage olive-colored Tunisian who two hours before had fled to Sfax with all the jewels of the Potocki family via the service entrance of the hotel across the street), Frantisek underwent a series of curative procedures. The first was an inverted crucifixion: replacing the nails with ropes and stretching his arms wide to expand the capacity of his thorax, they hung him upside down, with the theory that the upper part of his lungs would expel the illnesses troubling him. Then a renowned masseuse submitted his body to a series of elongations, twistings of different muscle groups, adjustments of bone structure.
After having endured these cures for some time, Frantisek permitted himself to express certain doubts to Athenea regarding their efficacy. But she paid him no heed: “You must have faith. We’re happy. Stop grumbling.” At moments like this, my great-great-grandfather became aware of the dimension of his error. His final hope, almost the desire for a miracle, had been that in the way things often happen, the marriage itself would weaken the link by means of routine, mutual boredom and annoyance with the tastes and manias of the other . . . Thus he had imagined that although Athenea’s presence would forever remind him of the initial error, the passage of time would soothe the most agonizing areas, leaving behind only a bit of discoloration after the terrible rash. But it hadn’t occurred to him to think that against all expectations, his new wife would show greater enthusiasm each day for their life in common. “Happy?” he wondered. “Where, my God, does she find this happiness?” He couldn’t tolerate being alone with her. She was a stranger to him, a presence that had imposed itself through the fault of a peculiar weakness in his character. The only thing that brought him relief was to confirm that Athenea didn’t notice his anguish. On the contrary, she showed herself to be more passionate than ever. “I’m so content to be the wife of the famous Deliuskin,” she said. “Famous?” “You are or will be.” “Me?” “Yes. Soon the fellowships, prizes, sales of musical scores and million-dollar concerts will come your way.” She had a stunning confidence about all aspects of life. At some point she decided to eliminate the last hints of prudishness, and while he was sitting on the toilet, she’d enter the bathroom for noisy drawn-out gargles, whose contents she’d spit in a gob out the window; she tried to fix their hours of sleep and wakefulness in accordance with the dictates of astrological charts; she was able to spend a whole hour explaining in what way, how much, where and why each vegetable, animal or mineral on the planet ate, digested, defecated. What Frantisek couldn’t help but wonder was why she considered this ability to be interesting. A provisional answer was that she was completely fascinated by herself, or at least by the possibility of being heard without interruption. Another was that the marriage (perhaps the fulfillment of an old longing) turned her into a happy chatterbox. This same new condition also rendered impractical the fantasy in which Frantisek had begun to indulge: that of losing her to the brawny embrace of any male specimen in better condition than he was—that is, almost any other male of the human race. He was convinced that he couldn’t take any more, yet his list of sufferings had only just begun.
He’d received a card inviting him to l’obligation of the summer season, a masquerade ball given by a Chinese tycoon, no doubt an agent of the Peking government. Athenea spent the week going around fashionable shops in search of a suitable outfit and didn’t want to delay their arrival by even a minute. In the middle of the winter season, she chose a tilbury carriage without a hood, and forced the coachman to set the horses racing at full gallop. This mad dash, along with the rest of the events that night, would aggravate my great-great-grandfather’s state of health.
The Chinese mogul’s apartment was located in the residential area. It was a shadowy, clean, spacious place stuffed with little curios. Velvet tassels hung from the night tables, and there were extra covers on the sofa. The butler explained that Song Li was held up due to an inconvenience but that he’d be there at any moment. In any case, some guests had already arrived. In the living room, with supreme concentration, a Philippine wound a crank to make the images of a magic lantern do turns, projecting phantasmagorias onto the walls. Most of them looked like copulating frogs. “Just lovely,” said Athenea. She settled Frantisek on the edge of a sofa, pushed up the glasses that were sliding down his nose, gave him a cup of a sweet yellow drink to hold and dubiously balanced a plate of sandwiches on his lap. “I’ll be back in a second,” she said and took two steps before her figure vanished. Frantisek had arrived determined not to eat, drink or speak with anyone, but his wife’s disappearance made him regret the lack of a companion. Since he didn’t know what was around him and didn’t want to grope at the emptiness like a blind man, he preferred to avoid the risk of getting his clothes dirty while clutching the food; thus he applied himself to draining the cup and mopping up the plate, before setting them down on a providential table or letting them fall to the floor. The decline in his sense of vision had favored the development of other senses, so as he ate and drank he kept himself entertained listening to fragments of a conversation taking place meters away. One woman was saying there was a colonel in love with her, that her mother was a widow, that she’d inherited a little forest near Stafford-on-Raven and that if everything went to the blazes and the colonel didn’t shell out a few pence, they’d see themselves forced to sell every last pine and eucalyptus. Her female interlocutor asked: “But do you love him?” And the first said: “I’m faithful, calm, undemanding and very capable of making any man happy. I don’t give a damn about love.”
Rustle of feet on the carpet near my great-great-grandfather, puff of air from a nearby couch deflating under the weight of a pair of buttocks:
“We’re having a good time, aren’t we? I’ve known you for quite a while now, I think, or at least I’ve seen you before.”
“Impossible,” said my great-great-grandfather. “I hardly ever go out.”
“Just because you don’t see anyone doesn’t mean they don’t see you. What’s your profession?”
Already tired of this conversation, Frantisek preferred to lie:
“I’m a machinist . . .”
“Pianist,” corrected Athenea, coming back from somewhere.
“Artist? What a coincidence! You’re a cellist and I’m an extortionist. Rhyme is proof of affinity,” the stranger let out a chuckle. Athenea accompanied it with a sharper smile than usual, which broke into a laughter that evoked the happy clucking of a laying hen at the moment of its annunciation.
“How amusing!” she praised him, when her convulsions had reached an end.
Frantisek felt growing within him the strain of a situation composed of at least two intolerable elements. The first was his anger at this man’s ability to cling to him and involve him in a banal conversation, forcing him to continue in the same line or else retreat into silence, an attitude that at a social event could be taken for a display of rudeness. The second was his even greater irritation that without anyone asking it of her, Athenea had decided to reveal to this parasitic plant an item of information he’d prefer to have kept to himself; by doing so, she’d unnecessarily put him in the position of a liar. Why had she opened her mouth? Her mistake of saying “pianist” instead of “composer” didn’t matter, and served only to prove once again that she didn’t know anything about him. In a gesture of supreme neglect toward the man she claimed to love, Athenea had scattered the decisions about her husband’s privacy like so many crumbs, to feed the conversational zeal of this unknown hanger-on . . . And for Frantisek, this was the worst of the worst, because it ushered a third element into an already tremendously complex scene: jealousy. Athenea—he thought he understood—would do anything necessary, even throw him bound by hands and feet to a pack of starving dogs, were it to pique this character’s interest.
