Adios, Cowboy, page 6
“Masochists,” said my sister. “They didn’t even know him. Perverse.”
Once, as children, we’d been at a funeral in the hills, where a professional mourner had been brought in, paid to wail and so inspire other people to cry. I think she was exceptionally successful as I too began to cry, from pure horror. Then my sister said: “They’ve terrified the kid, masochists.”
That was the first time I heard that word.
The years—from the day when the police rang the bell and Ma opened the door—passed in a flash, but I remember that unknown lady in black under the hair dryer better than any of the three of us.
Between my brother’s death and my sister’s almost incidental phone call that brought me back home, nothing worthy of mention happened, at least not to me.
I returned to the Old Settlement, for the answer to my question, for the words that my brother had sent to some fourth person, not to my mother, nor my sister, nor me. That’s what drives me to keep walking, turning over every stone. And, if truth be told, all I’ve discovered in my roaming and turning over is that the world contains more stones than snakes and bugs under them.
“Yawn and stretch as much as you can,” ginger Jill told me in an ancient dream. And I obey her, because every cat that speaks, even in a dream, deserves attention. I am waiting on a bench in the deep shade of a carob tree for my host to appear, I yawn and stretch in the scorching, endless, hypnotic Settlement afternoon. Lethargy, they call it, when a place hypnotizes you.
In the silence, from the other side of the garden, over the wall, purple figs can be heard thudding onto the ground, their tree, abandoned to itself, having gone wild like the beanstalk up which that idiot wanted to climb to the sky.
Through the brightly colored strips of plastic of the curtain in the doorway, Herr Professor appears and places a tray of cold tea and cakes on the garden table.
“Petits-fours,” he says.
He stretches out his fleshy legs with their strong white calves and from time to time rubs one pink heel against the other. On the other side of the courtyard, beside the broken greenhouse, with two stunted lemon trees, their branches pruned, a pair of tortoises are mating. “They’re a bit late this year,” says the Professor. The female doesn’t stir, while the male has opened his little mouth wide. There are a few stiff, dirty rags on the washing line, with flies and flying ants landing on them, and from the garden, tap water drips persistently into the yellowing stone basin.
I bend toward the iced cakes, but the Professor stops me with a movement of his hand. Something is noiselessly rolling toward us.
“Listen!”
Cymbals clang and stop the air.
“It’s St. Fjoko’s Day,” Ma had concluded this morning at breakfast.
“St Fjoko,” I say out loud, reaching for a cake.
“Aha, the town saint’s day!” The Professor slaps his thighs.
“Vrdovđek just bought it. The brass band.”
“Vrdovđek, oh yes. The one with all the shops?”
“Shops, and everything in the Settlement. He’s the big shot now,” I say.
I watch the Professor: his face, his blinking eyes, large hands, so white they’re almost blue. Over the years, his physical resemblance to a drowned man has become more obvious. And with those whiskers and that mustache—like a catfish, really. Whales and dolphins returned to the sea, disappointed with life on land, but the Professor’s type of sea creature had remained forever in between, wedged. He had once kept salamanders in formalin in glass jars in his living room, the way people in the Old Settlement keep pictures of their closest relatives. He also had two salamanders (“two fiery dragons,” he said), but I think all those jars were shattered in the incident.
With a rolled newspaper, he attempts to drive away the flies attracted by the cakes. As he swats them, scampering round the table, he is no less formal and pompous than he was a little earlier with the tray, I observe.
“He’s got manners, that man,” Ma once said. She always overrated politeness.
“His whole family, especially his late mother, was very refined. Crème de la crème,” said Mother’s relative Mariana Mateljan. And added: “God knows who this waster takes after.”
He kills several horseflies and smaller flies and sits down right beside me. He smiles like a pile of gelatin, slightly triumphantly, and “in that name” opens a special cut-glass bottle. The liquid in the bottom of the glass looks like the fluid in which the amphibians on the vet’s sideboard had once swum. I can’t avoid that image, although I recognize the smell of rose liqueur, honey-sweet and sharp.
“Rose liqueur,” the insatiable one used to say. “Oops-a-daisy! That’ll warm those fine ladies up. Give ’em a couple of glasses, they all start cooling themselves with their skirts. They haul their dresses up over their knees and air themselves. The whole street’ll stink of cunt…”
“The larger the cymbal, the deeper the sound and the longer it lasts, it behaves like spilled mercury,” says Herr Professor, handing me a silver teaspoon.
The light here is very soft and perhaps that, combined with the brass band and the liqueur, is why I am feeling lethargic.
Now that I was finally within reach of him, I had kept putting off the meeting like an exam or a visit to the doctor, but in the neglected garden belonging to that gelatin gentleman whom I do not wish to touch with even a millimeter of skin or clothing and of whose breathing beside me I am all too conscious, I feel that, after so many years of dragging my heels, I have sat down beside water, to rest. I have arrived somewhere. If nothing else, I am no longer being tormented by the need to get up and walk.
The timpani announce summer; the brass band declares the beginning of a cheerful holiday, even if it lasts only a few moments.
“Even a bear can play the cymbals,” my sister said on one occasion.
But I like cymbals. Without them a marching band would be less exciting.
“Cymbals and trumpet, that is, dear Dada, true theater! In the street! In our Long Street!” Herr Professor beams, like a returned exile.
He had polished the brass plate on his flaking front door, I observed: SMALL ANIMAL VETERINARY CLINIC. K. ŠAIN.
“Karlo Šain, good name for an opera conductor or someone’s uncle,” said my sister, long ago.
“Your buddy’s a faggot, you clown,” she said, slapping Daniel’s bum when he began visiting the vet frequently, as though he had bird flu.
“Fag, fag,” she taunted, making that shameful gesture with her hand and fist. Daniel would respond with another gesture, careless, twisting his finger against his temple, I recall.
Although she was never what you might call a beauty, my sister could, even then, have had a lot of men—for her sake one had already dived off the Big Pier onto the rocks, but he didn’t make it to the sea, or her attention. Tenderness in her had solidified like sugar on which you break your teeth. My sister always expresses caution as far as love is concerned, I observed. That stiffness doesn’t fit with her lips, like a wound, or her smooth dark skin. “Camouflaged,” Daniel called her if she wasn’t in the room with us.
Whoever met my brother wanted to take him home, to have him nearby laughing or speaking, to be Daniel, to touch him on the shoulder, to pinch his cheek (which he hated). He had the gentleness and ferocity of a serious little man. Well, tenderness attracts people in different ways, it tempts some to crush it, I recall, people often wanted to thrash him; it gets on some people’s nerves. Being just a little bit different was always an excellent reason for something to be destroyed.
I see them: my older sister and my younger brother sitting arguing, their heads close together so that Ma wouldn’t hear them: side by side like that, they looked like a cactus and its flower.
Keeping company with the vet developed into friendship the autumn my brother started secondary school. That year Daniel made a terrarium in the Prof’s garden: over dry sand that he had carried from the Little Lagoon glided lizards, transparent little tarantulas, and a blasé gecko, a big greenhorn, a real dandy; he had fireflies and scarab beetles and two tortoises, you could tell the female by her cracked shell, I recall. They survived and are still here in the garden, beside the clouded glass of the greenhouse, which “bore witness to the fact that this house had seen better days,” said my sister once. The Professor’s yard, enclosed by a stone wall with little sparkling pieces of mother-of-pearl in it, the bodies of shellfish, and its crawling, rattling, grunting animal kingdom, attracted us, all of us children, I recall. We used to go there almost stealthily, because of those stories. Apart from Daniel, who, by all accounts, had no problems of that kind.
Later I observed behavior similar to ours in people who privately, to themselves, admire things that they will gladly vilify in public, equally sincerely and fervently. That must be painful, I thought. Depends on the person, I think now.
It seemed that everything was simpler for Daniel. He came here every day for as long as he felt like coming. Perhaps that’s why my younger brother is more present in this yard than in our house.
It’s still strange, I find myself thinking, that Daniel won’t now appear through the colorful plastic strips in the Prof’s doorway. This is all that remains of his games, those two debauched tortoises, the already brittle posters for cowboy films that I had moved to my own room, and this Herr Professor here.
The only other possession of my brother’s that I regretted was the Colt our father had given him, which we never found, along with his school case.
In my pocket I have a letter that has been folded and unfolded countless times. On a dirty piece of paper, typed on an old typewriter, it says:
Dear Daniel,
I’m sorry I haven’t written before now. The circumstances are such that I rarely open my electronic post, and I don’t have access to a computer here. In fact, it’s a lucky chance that I did read your messages at all. As you see (postmark), my work has taken me to the other side of the world. You’re clever and you probably know that I’ll need more time than has now passed to accept some of the things that happened, but I blame myself for this more than I do you. This stamp, of course, is not random, it’s for you, as is the picture of the spotted salamander I’m sending you. I hope you’ll like it. These are things I can’t send by email, so I’m sending them by good old postal coach! There, let them be signs of reconciliation and good will. You write about the difficulties that have befallen you—I hope that you’ll be able to solve those problems and that they aren’t a consequence of that unpleasant event. I’d like to be able to help you. However, at present I can barely help myself, I sleep in some rather strange and miserable places, I eat when I manage it, that’s how things are. It seems as though I’ve acquired pneumonia as well. For the moment I’m still not in a position to send you an address where you could write to me, or to promise that I’ll be able to read your emails for the foreseeable future, but I hope it won’t be long before I can. I’ll let you know. Keep well.
Greetings,
Your Friend
In the upper right corner there is a date, several days after Daniel’s death.
I wasn’t impatient, and I wasn’t rushing anywhere.
I had left several messages on his answering machine—I knew he was just a few meters away, the man who had the answer, behind the walls that divided his garden from the rest of the Settlement; and I believed that he would look for me. I turned several times into the short side street where his house was, but at the last minute my will failed me or I would be overcome by a comical and terrible shame or unease.
Today the telephone rang as Ma was making coffee for herself and her relative Mariana Mateljan. Cigarette smoke swirled down the corridor from the kitchen, water gurgled in the pot on the hot plate. They were both staring at a soap.
Šain Karlo here, please, I would like… to speak to Dada… So, at last, dear Dada!
“Mariana’s my oldest friend,” Ma would mention from time to time. “And my close relative,” she’d add.
Mariana had been coming from the city center in an orange Lada for decades—on Sundays, sometimes also on Wednesdays. Then one of the two of them would say something they shouldn’t have and Mariana Mateljan would vanish without trace for a week, a month, and once even for two years. A black fart of smoke would puff out of the Lada’s exhaust and she would drive off furiously like an orange out of hell. The last time that happened, we wrote her off forever, but then she did appear again just after Daniel’s death.
I did not wish to disturb your dear mother… Otherwise, I would have got in touch myself, had I known that you… Had I known that you had come. Yes, yes, I did, I got your messages, but—I was away. Out of town on business. But, of course! It would be important for me, I would be glad if you came. Of cooourse… To remember the old days. Besides, besides…
“Hell, I thought we’d got rid of her, like the others,” said my sister when Mariana appeared among us again, with swollen eyes.
My sister polished her hatred of her to a high shine, I recall.
But still, Mariana finally found an appropriate role in our house and played it briskly and steadfastly. She was devoted to our ebbing Ma; Ma’s misfortune brought Mariana freedom in their relationship. We knew—had it not been for Daniel’s death, our relative would never have crossed the threshold of this house again.
Pride is such a bizarre attribute, and self-destructive; I’m not really clear why we count it a virtue.
For the first two weeks after Daniel’s funeral, there would be up to thirty people in our house every day, they drank brandy, smoked and talked, and then suddenly, no one remembers the transition, they disappeared. Bit by bit, after some time, they stopped phoning as well. They probably didn’t know what to talk about, it “discom-mod-ed them all,” said my sister.
Mother sat and nodded the wax mask on her face up and down, like people on antipsychotic drugs when they come out of the madhouse, looking like robots or disinterred totems. My sister washed glasses ceaselessly, emptied ashtrays, and sent piercing glances toward her soft, now former, husband. Tragedy swayed in the room, hanging from the ceiling light between the visitors and us.
“Someone else’s tragedy, that requires commitment,” said my sister.
Come as soon as you can, come whenever you like. We’re not far, we’re neighbors, after all! Yes, yes, of course. Knock hard… my bell still doesn’t work… on the door… Bye. Bye, my dear.
I put the receiver down.
Mariana was sitting in a preparing-to-concentrate attitude in front of the television, cracking walnuts.
“It’s our St. Fjoko’s Day today,” she said.
“He saved us from the plague,” she added, scratching her belly.
“And died of syphilis,” she said emphatically.
I guessed that this was the beginning of one of Mariana’s bravura tirades, and they shouldn’t be missed. I’ll go this afternoon, besides, besides.
I’ve no clue what our Fjoko died of or why. His holy bone was carried up and down in a silver box behind the high cross along the one decent road in the Settlement. The Long Road leading from the port to the way out onto the highway.
On St. Fjoko’s Day, a band of male and female blowers, sweaty in their blue uniforms, blares away all day, morning and afternoon. Toward evening the men from the brotherhood squeeze into cowls and set off in a procession with flaming torches, while behind them the nuns and women from the church choir of St. Lisa sing monotonously.
Around the tail of the centipede that is twice as long as Long Road, the emotional populace mills with dignity. They mill, because Long Road is not particularly long and sometimes the procession’s head catches up with its own tail.
“Dunque,” continues Mariana, licking honey from the piece of bread on which she has laid the walnuts, “the future saint’s embarrassing illness never stops him carrying on with his lovers. In fact, his body’s falling apart, his bones is decaying, but his spirit’s still lively. That’s why merciful and almighty God left our martyr, for all he was syphilitic, untouched in the part that was for his devotees, as indeed for the whole town today, a holy relic—here, like this!”
She stretched out her fat middle finger with two gold rings and a long, polished nail.
“He never did!” I bleated. She sometimes imagined things, like every born storyteller who sacrifices truth on the altar of the story.
Everyone knows that Fjoko had a blessed finger whose touch cured lepers. So what was so fantastic about this, I asked her.
Mariana’s body, covered in tinkling jewellery, in its wide tunic of dazzling brightness, had settled into the couch, but only in order to spread its crest.
“All depends,” she answered. “You can lie to tell the truth. When all’s said and done, in all the hullabaloo over St. Fjoko there’s a little bone from his middle finger, so you just have a think.”
She smacked her lips and lightly stroked her gold and silver rings over sleepy Jill, who had snuggled in between the cushions.
Mariana has a long head, good-looking in a horsey way, and you can’t say that horses aren’t beautiful, but her body is enormous, it seethes even when it’s still, creating ebbing and flowing tides around it as it moves.
Ma was smiling absently as she put out her cigarette. The ashtray was brimming with flat cigarette butts and walnut shells. Then she immediately rolled and lit a new one and turned up the volume.
Aaron clasped Minerva in a passionate embrace.
Mariana wiped away an invisible tear with her thumb.
Beside her, Ma looked like a wax candle beside a lighted Chinese lantern, I observed.
Our relative waved her hands, pressing the heat and stench out of the room. She sank still more deeply into the couch, occupying all the comfort available. I thought about the way Mariana sucked in through her pores the comfort of whatever room she found herself in. Along with the comfort, all the kitchen smells and household dust and odor of Tiger Balm from Mother’s skin entered into her as well. Created from all those particles, which she absorbed like a brightly colored hole in space, her laughter swelled and bubbled out of the windows, while her imperial flesh gushed under her wide clothes.
