But even so, this certainly did not prevent him from providing a generous dowry for the daughter of his sister. And he continued to help her in spite of the fact that the girl failed to realize that he did so more willingly when he did not see too often in his house “those sly eyes of hers that pretend they do not want anything…”
He especially disliked Mona’s husband. The first time he saw him, “I was afraid to touch him,” he admitted to her. “You think you are touching mucus…” She disagreed. Polys was polite and helpful. He was not the ideal son-in-law they could have found, but he was not the worst. He had a secure little position and the realization that he was marrying a girl who was socially superior to him; facts that ensured he would respect his marriage vows.
She liked Polys for another reason, too, which she could not admit to, of course. For the understanding he showed for her passion for horoscopes and palmistry. He supplied her with every publication which had even a single column about astrology. At first she had hidden them and read them when she was alone. Now, with the new situation, she could not occupy herself with her hobby, unfortunately, except during the hours that Criton was asleep.
“The other one didn’t phone?” The old man asked, interrupting her thoughts.
“No, dear.”
She saw his scrawny body emerge from the steam. She got up and gave him the bathrobe.
He could not forgive the indifference of his son and daughter-in-law. Recently their visits had become more infrequent.
“Their work, the children, their obligations,” Noni made excuses for them. “Satiation,” he said. “They got their hands on the old man’s money, why should they bother him any more?” This indifference of his son made him regard the frequent visits of his niece as provocation. He was convinced that she and her husband went to the trouble with just one aim: to show him who really loved him and who he ought to remember when the time came. They did not know, nor would they find out as long as he lived, the surprise he had in store for them.
Noni helped him put on his underwear and his blue pajamas. Then she combed his hair and threw a few drops of perfume in his hands.
“I hadn’t completely finished, but I can’t stand to feel you waiting for me.”
“But I…”
“I know you,” he interrupted her in the middle of her protest.
They went into the living room. He sat in the overstuffed armchair and stretched out his hand towards her. She helped him put on his watch.
“Exactly on time,” she told him.
He checked the watch against the two wall clocks, with the pendulum clock in the hall and the three table clocks, whose metallic voices refreshed the room. They were all perfectly synchronized.
He sank into his chair, half-closed his eyes and began following the hands of the clocks. It was his favorite occupation after having his bath. And his second serious habit which had developed into a biological need. In fact recently his life had become divided between these two needs, as he himself called them: to rid himself of dirt and to know the exact time at every moment. When the children had been in the habit of coming and seeing them he had had a third need, the telephone. He would call them every day and give them advice by the hour about this and that, from which investments were most secure to what was the best way of doing their shopping, or he would ask for information about business and about political developments. However, since the day that his daughter-in-law’s maid and his son’s secretary, as though by agreement, had begun to make excuses not to call them to the phone, it began to cause him migraine and he ordered it to be removed to the hall.
It was about that time that the water heater had broken down. As he was waiting for the water to heat up on the gas he suddenly found it difficult to breathe, he complained that the dirt was entering his pores, his eyes, his ears, descending his gullet. He began to grunt, to gesticulate like a man who was drowning. Noni was compelled to undress him and sit him in the bath. For four hours she poured over him warm water which she brought from the kitchen and to scrub him, because he himself was exhausted. She fell ill after that. On the first day he prepared her breakfast and was tender. So much so that she plucked up the courage to ask him for the first time what was the matter with him, why he thought he needed to take such a prolonged bath.
“You’ll be telling me I’m mad next,” he rebuked her. “Instead of taking care to clean the house a little, you complain about me. Wherever you touch in here you get dirty. How do you manage to bring so much dirt in? Is it you who brings it or is your protégé?”
And she did not see him again until the day she was better and emerged from her room.
If they had a child, someone to look after her… If she could have persuaded Mona to come and live with them. Now that she was married it was no longer possible. And she would have been even more afraid of her uncle. She had always been afraid of him. All the time she had lived with them, the unfortunate girl, she had tried to remain invisible. She went about on tiptoe, she made sure her uncle was asleep before going into the bathroom, that he was in his study at the other end of the hall before opening the refrigerator. At table she scraped her plate with lowered eyes and strove to anticipate his every wish. And when he gave her pocket money she would blush furiously, unable to find the words to thank him.
She was an orphan and they were her only relatives. If they had not taken her in after the death of her parents, God knows what would have become of her!
Yes, he was a good man, they should not complain. Who does not have eccentricities and whims? Especially at such an age, after such an Odyssey! From the Reformatory to the Summit!
The sound of conversation awoke him. He opened his eyes. He was in the armchair still, covered by a blue blanket. Between his legs, wrapped in a piece of worn yellow cloth, the hot water bottle rested.
Noni and his niece were sitting near the window, laughing softly. Before them were arrayed cups, the remains of a sweet, some savories. Noni’s face was flushed with the emotion that only dabbling in the mystery of her fate could arouse! Her eyes shone with an insatiable curiosity. The girl was paler and more transparent than she had been when she had lived with them. In other respects she did not seem to have changed. He just found her a little plumper. It was understandable. With all the deprivations which that colourless husband must have imposed on her…
He got up and silently went and stood behind them. He glanced at the newspaper. It was old. At least two months. He might have known it. The horoscope in that issue was favourable, it was one of the few cases in which it was favourable for both of them in the same edition.
He bent and seized the newspaper…
“Did you wake up?” exclaimed Noni, and she began to tidy up the tea service which she had knocked over when she was startled.
“Forgive us, Uncle. We woke you up.”
“Very late,” he said, and returned to his armchair with the newspaper.
He screwed it up and threw it in the fireplace, watching carefully the expression on Noni’s face. He was impressed by her composure. He saw her lower her gaze and laugh softly.
“It was an old one,” she told him.
However much he tried he could not detect any trace of irony in her voice. Just a certain playfulness.
“I brought your clock,” Mona said. “It was a small fault.”
“Put it there and give me the receipt.”
The girl replied that she did not get a receipt, “it was too small a sum to mention.”
“I asked how much it cost,” the old man insisted.
“Five shillings.”
“Noni, I have some change in the drawer of my desk.”
Noni got up obediently. He began to pace the room, leaning on his stick. He did not look at the girl. Now and then he stopped and listened to one of the clocks. Only the Swiss cuckoo clock needed winding up. He did it carefully.
In the detecting of every anomaly in his clocks he was infallible. His cold white fingers, when he rested them o
n one, became more sensitive than a cardiologist’s stethoscope. His ear registered the most insignificant peculiarity in its pulsation. And he could never accept failure, neither in the timely diagnosis of any small malfunction, nor in its cure. They had to work irreproachably, obediently, to be preserved and maintained, to fill the grandeur of every minute they conquered with their polyphonic rhythm. When the gold-inlaid Florentine clock, which now shone with health, had suddenly stopped, he had panicked. He collapsed in a chair and everything around him went dark. He felt a strong constriction of his heart, and neither the ether which Noni sprinkled on him, nor the massage by the soft, disgusting hand of Polys, brought him round. He was not even angered by that contact. And that worried him even more, he just asked to see his son. The young man went and telephoned. Unfortunately they were away on a trip. While he… Then, from within the haze he heard Mona’s husband say something original and witty:
“…impossible, I tell you! He’s suffered apparent death…”
That watery voice, those two broken, choked phrases, filled him with optimism. He gave in to the fatigue and slept. In vain they called the doctor. He had not died, of course he heard them in his sleep. And it did not matter that he could not interrupt them, to tell them that the words “apparent death” were the key, that although they had been spoken about him, they were absolutely correct for the Florentine clock. Two days later, when he came to, his first thought was to send it to be repaired.
He went to the table and began to caress it. He lifted it to his ear. On its surface was still a trace of perspiration from the girl’s hand, and a small spot of oil. The bronze gave off an intense foreign smell. He started to clean it insistently, while a fine gossamer stream of mud, vaporous as usual at first, began to flow from the nape of his neck down his backbone. The spot of oil, despite all his attempts to remove it from his hand, to which it had been transferred as soon as he touched it, stuck and spread all over his fingers, and millimeter by millimeter conquered his palm.
He turned and regarded the girl. She smiled at him.
“Why don’t you wash?” he asked her “Is that tramp of a husband of yours miserly with the water, too?”
She looked at him, offended.
“Why do you say that, Uncle?”
He took a step back, displeased by a smell given off by her body, which he could not identify. The stream of mud on his back branched into tributaries, some descending to his thighs, one climbing the hairs of his abdomen, one slowly entering the large intestine.
“You smell,” he told her, and sank into his chair. The movement caused the mud to spread to large areas on his body, sticking the material to his flesh.
“Uncle…”
“Stop calling me Uncle. I am not your uncle. Tell me, have you made love with that rabbit?”
“I don’t recognize you,” said the girl, and got up.
“Don’t answer me back, you fat animal. You are soiled by that person and you come here satisfied and foulsmelling to pass comments to me.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle, if you really feel like that about me,” Mona replied and ran outside.
In the corridor she met her aunt. The old man heard hurried, choked words and tears and angrily slammed the door. The impudent wretches who think they can ransom a will with five shillings. He had disinherited all of them, his son too, even Noni. For long enough they had benefited from his toil and sacrifices, the fruits of his life, which had sprouted in rubbish and poverty to ripen in omnipotence. “Of a life crowned with vindication!” the Minister had said at the gathering organized in honor of Criton by the Association of Pharmaceutical Suppliers. He, unfortunately, had been unable to attend, it was the time of his bath, but he had been informed of the proceedings by a colleague, who had visited him on the very same evening. They had called him a pioneer, who in three decades had succeeded in making the supply of pharmaceuticals an autocracy, in increasing prices a hundredfold, in so inspiring the enterprises that the local market followed hard on the heels of scientific developments, something that was only feasible in advanced countries! He was also informed of the sensation created by his suggestion, which was conveyed to the assembly by his son, that an end should be demanded in a dynamic way to the unlawful competition with the class of pharmaceutical suppliers by the State. Through the free provision of drugs to the poor, the Government was putting at risk a flourishing private enterprise. His suggestion was that such items should certainly be supplied by the Government pharmacies, but for payment, with a discount of twenty percent on current prices and only on presentation of a checked certification of poverty.
It was approved unanimously. Also unanimously the same gathering proclaimed him lifetime President of the Association, and the Minister, with commendable modesty, declared that “men of such many-sided and multifarious talents ought to occupy the highest Ministerial offices in the Government.”
The toast proposed by the Secretary of the Association was clever too: “Let us drink to the health of the eminent man who managed to earn such an income that he could easily have been taxed at twenty-one shillings to the pound if he had not had me as chief accountant!”
Something dripped on him from the chandelier. He ran his fingers through his hair and shook it off. It was a sticky substance. It smelled like wet camphor, no, like penicillin with orange essence. He tried to get rid of it with his other hand, but ended up dirtying that one too. He found it hard to unstick one hand from the other. He moved away from the chandelier. With the movement he felt the mud creep on his thighs. He lowered his blue pajama trousers and threw them in the corner. That revolting earthy smell! No, he did not regret his decision to leave his property to the firm in Leipzig, the famous firm of crematorium manufacturers. In return they would undertake to establish crematoria in all the towns of the island. Everyone who hated the damp and the micro-organisms of the earth would be taken care of free of charge in memory of the donor. As for himself, his will was explicit. They would embalm him and send him without escort, that was a condition, to Leipzig. “Per necessaria…”
He took off his dressing gown, his pyjama jacket and his vest. Then, with an effort, his underpants.
He looked at the clock. It was less than an hour since he had got out of the bath. The water would not yet have heated up. He ought to wait for a long time yet. He stood motionless in the middle of the room with his eyes fixed on the pendulum which continued to trace its perfect arcs. Every time the well-polished bronze cut the pale outline of his shadow it became flaccid, dark, and its metallic flesh was covered with blisters and bulges which resembled the craters of the moon.
The door opened. Noni came in. She was so confused that she certainly did not notice that he was naked, nor that as she approached him she dragged his underclothes and pajamas with her slippers.
“I’ll never forgive you for that,” she told him. “You are evil! You blame others and quarrel with those who love us, who have remained faithful to us. Have you forgotten what she has done for us, that unhappy girl? How many sleepless nights, what trouble, what care? Who else would have done it? Who else would have stayed here for so many years to look after you, to wash you, to change you, to touch you? The other one? Who never gave you more than the tip of her finger? You never dared quarrel with them, though, when you would have been justified. Because you know that they don’t need us. That they don’t care what happens to us. Do you know why the girl came here? She is expecting a child. She came to tell us first, before she tells her husband. Us! And you threw her out. You made her cry. I tell you, I’ve had enough. Enough. I can’t stay here any longer. Not another moment. I, who with calling you ‘my love’ for so many years used to forget your name and look secretly at your passport and our marriage certificate to remember it. Stay with your clocks and your fears, which you need more than you need me… Why did you do this to me? Because you know how much I love her?”
He could not hear her any more. He had set off with slow steps for the bathroom. He entered and quietl
y closed the door. He locked it. He heard her speaking, as though he was still before her, as though she had not noticed that he had left. Then her voice faded away in the depths of the house.
He took off his slippers and went to the bath. Under the slimy layer of mud and the smell of penicillin he felt his skin smart. He sat on the small stool. A chill pierced him. He turned the tap on. The water was icy. His members under the mud began to receive the cataract. He crouched, holding his knees, and let the water stab him.
Sometimes cold water warms more. Perhaps it cleans better too. He felt something hard under his chin. It was his watch. He removed it and placed it carefully on the hard sponge, which for the first time did not crawl, hungry for mud, over his body.
The seconds surrounded him mercilessly…
Gregory Page 4