by jordi Nopca
I explained to Stamm that during the months prior to a trip, Estrella and I would read literature from the country we were planning on visiting. I made an effort to recall the reading schedule. I wanted to leave him for last, and I first mentioned a few novels by Hermann Hesse, Max Frisch’s Homo Faber—I forgot Montauk—and the enigmatic name of Ágota Kristóf.
“Our first contact with Swiss literature was through your books. My wife read your most recent novel; I read your first book of stories, the one that starts with a night of teenage love that ends with a leap to the death.”
After listening to Estrella’s translation, Stamm nodded again.
“The same night I read Jakob von Gunten, my wife came home late. She told me she’d just come from a meeting.” After a pause to take in a breath, I added, “Estrella works at a law firm. She has a good job, and it pays quite well.”
I let her describe her work duties herself, in English, a language she often employed to exercise them. We were getting closer to the final plot twist. I still wanted to put it off a little longer, and I recalled the trip taken by Wertheimer—Thomas Bernhard’s frustrated pianist—to commit suicide on his sister’s estate in Zizers.
“Have you ever been to Zizers?” I asked Stamm, who, after a few seconds of weighing which answer was in his best interest, shook his head. “I found Wertheimer’s suicide awful. But my wife said she thought the story was fascinating. It’s a matter of taste, I guess. Do you like Bernhard, Mr. Stamm?”
The writer nodded his head once more.
“I don’t think I’ll ever read him. Not because of his literary qualities—I don’t even know anything about them. It’s because of what happened to me the next day.”
From that point on, I told the story of Estrella’s thwarted meeting with her lover in as much detail as I could. The text message I got by mistake. My early arrival at the hotel. The wardrobe, where I hid and watched my wife in lingerie she’d never worn for me. The brownish nipple that slipped out of one of the cups of her bra. The angry call Estrella made to her lover before going home in a bad mood. And the intense scent of the wardrobe’s doors.
While her translation of my words into English had been fluent up until then, once I mentioned the text message, Estrella started to falter and look at the floor, ashamed. When I began to describe the lingerie in detail, I even saw a tear.
Stamm was watching us with an annoyed expression. The bags under his eyes had taken on a dramatic, sickly color. Blood was still dripping shyly from his nose, down his chin, and onto his shirt. The writer was lucky: Not a drop had splattered onto his expensive brown corduroy pants.
“A story of adultery doesn’t seem like much, not these days, right? You dealt with the subject in your last novel. The main character, an architect from Munich, gets involved with a mediocre, ugly young Polish woman.” After shooting an admonishing look at my wife, I ordered her to continue. “Translate, Estrella.”
She did.
“Until just now, my wife didn’t know I knew about her other relationship. That night, I acted the same as ever: We ate in front of the TV and then we separated to read. The only difference was that when she turned off the light, I didn’t beg for even the slightest sexual contact. Translate, Estrella.”
She again obeyed me.
“It’s been months since we’ve had intercourse. The last time we did anything, she gave me a hasty hand job after dinner; it was my reward for having that meeting with my boss, the son of a bitch who still has yet to pronounce my last name correctly even once. Translate, Estrella.”
Before she could start speaking, Peter Stamm had a coughing fit that forced me to take the duct tape from his mouth. I took the opportunity to clean off the dried blood that had collected beneath the author’s nose. Then I taped his mouth up again.
“Translate, Estrella.”
She did as I said, once again. The moment had come to explain the exemplary punishment I had been brooding over ever since the night I had found out she was cheating on me.
“We’ve come here because I want her wedding ring back,” I said. “I think it’s only fair. Don’t you, Mr. Stamm?”
After listening to the translation, the writer nodded.
“I want the ring back, but with the finger,” I told them both.
Then I pulled out the Swiss Army knife and, after choosing the correct implement, I pointed it at Estrella as she translated my last sentence in a trembling, weepy voice.
“And now, after all I’ve told you, Mr. Stamm, I want you to tell me how the story ends.”
I pulled the duct tape off his mouth, slightly ceremoniously, awaiting his response. Stamm cleared his throat and spoke a few sentences without the slightest emotion—or that was how it seemed to me. All I could make out were two words: ring and knife.
“He says that, if he were you, Octavi, he’d take the ring and leave the finger and try to forget all about this grisly story,” Estrella explained.
“And what did he say after that?”
Estrella’s eyes glimmered like a cheap bracelet.
“That if you have to cut off my finger, you should use a meat cleaver, not that damn Swiss Army knife.”
WE HAVE EACH OTHER
He bade me out into the gloom,
And my breast lies upon his breast.
—William Butler Yeats,
“The Heart of the Woman”
Carhartt and Fornarina weren’t in a good place. He had just lost his job at the appliance store where he’d worked since earning his degree in Germanic languages. She, secretary at a company that wasn’t doing very well, had to take off constantly to accompany her father to the doctor—he’d been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.
Since he’d stopped working at the store, Carhartt was drinking more than he should have been. Fornarina abused antide-pressants to mitigate the double pessimism that pursued her night and day: She suffered over her father’s countdown, but she was also worried about her boyfriend’s liquid self-destruction. Thank goodness she still had a job, she often told herself as she prepared a salad with a lot of carrots or as she watched one of those Sunday-afternoon movies in which emotions navigate rough seas in a leaky lifeboat.
Fornarina made an important decision after saying good-bye to her last family member at the cemetery. She was an only child and had lost her mother shortly after turning eighteen. When her dad died, she was left practically alone in the world. She needed to get her relationship back on track, feel that Carhartt was still hers. Her attempts to strengthen ties between them led her to a not at all encouraging realization: Her boyfriend was carrying on with the neighbor in the penthouse, a woman who’d arrived from the Czech Republic a few months ago. She’d discovered that shortly before reading an article in a free newspaper that explained how a former hairdresser—Ludovico Arelli—had expanded his business practically overnight after managing to find the way to fix difficult lives. Thanks to his method, anxieties, malaise, insomnia, and many other disorders, detailed on a list longer than any catalog of beauty treatments, became a thing of the past. All the clients had to do was submit to a tiny intervention, done right there in the salon, that lasted as long as “a simple tap on the head.” The author insisted that as soon as her work obligations allowed, she would rush to Arelli’s salon and let him fix the various disorders that had made her lose all desire to get out of bed in the morning. The end of the article was a bit confusing, but Fornarina never got that far. Spurred on by the simplicity of the solution and, above all, by its affordable price, she got Carhartt drunk in the early morning and took him to Arelli’s salon/clinic.
At the entrance, a woman asked them, “Are you here to get your hair cut or to try the method?”
Fornarina replied, while Carhartt blinked compulsively, disoriented. She was the one who filled out a form where she had to put an X beside each of the dissatisfactions that had brought her there. She took care of both her form and Carhartt’s.
They were sent into a small room pai
nted a scandalous hot pink. Fifteen minutes later, a young woman appeared and asked them to accompany her to Mr. Arelli’s office. He was a tiny man with his hair combed back. He was somehow reminiscent of singers of Italian melodic songs. His language, however, was so precise that with a dozen well-linked phrases he managed to get Fornarina to pay for the intervention in advance. Carhartt didn’t resist, either: He stretched out docilely on a not particularly modern cot that Arelli’s assistant had covered with a yellowish sheet.
The young woman who had brought them to the office asked Fornarina to leave the room for five minutes. When she went back in, Carhartt was slowly opening his eyes, as if waking from a very deep sleep. Arelli demanded he not get up yet and he ran his hand over Carhartt’s bandaged head to remind him he had just had a small intervention. All of a sudden, another woman appeared. She was dragging a wheelchair that was meant to be used to take Carhartt into another room.
“Don’t worry, ma’am,” the young woman said to Fornarina. “You’ll both be out of here in an hour, and without those horrible bandages. I give you my word.”
###
And that’s exactly how it went. An hour later, the couple was heading home with their heads uncovered. Fornarina tried to reconstruct what had happened since she’d lain down on the cot. They had covered her body with another yellowish sheet, she recalled—the first one had been removed, slightly splattered with blood. She’d seen Arelli’s well-groomed hair. He’d said something to her and showed her an object he gripped in one hand. Fornarina hadn’t managed to focus on it. What could it be? she’d wondered. Some sort of hammer? Why couldn’t she see precisely what was most intriguing her? Fornarina started to sweat and asked Carhartt in a monotonous voice, “Do you remember what they did to us in there?”
Carhartt, who was walking with his gaze fixed on the ground, replied in a mutter, just like when she asked him something while he was watching a game show on TV: “Haven’t the slightest.”
And he hiccupped, a symptom of his starting to digest the alcohol he’d imbibed before the visit to the salon.
They were distracted from their unease by the first bus covered in advertisements that passed by. They were unable to explain the method the hairdresser had applied to their bodies, and they could barely remember what it was called.
They continued walking home in silence.
###
One Tuesday afternoon, Fornarina prepared bacon cheeseburgers—Carhartt’s favorite meal—and while Barça played an uninspiring Champions League game, she asked him if he felt happier.
“No doubt about it,” he replied in a monotonous voice.
“Me, too,” she added. “When we go to bed, I’m no longer tortured by my problems. I close my eyes and forget about everything.”
“Problems aren’t important anymore.”
“They’re not important because they’ve vanished.”
Then Barça scored a goal and the couple hugged each other. It wasn’t enthusiastic, but it was heartfelt, because a thick tear slid down Fornarina’s cheek, and she said, “It’s as if my parents aren’t dead anymore.”
“It’s as if I never lost my job.”
“It’s as if you hadn’t taken a lover.”
“I like it.”
“I like it, too.”
The couple hugged again before continuing with their meal of bacon cheeseburgers. Later, at bedtime, Carhartt felt the almost physiological necessity of having sexual relations with Fornarina. She agreed with so little desire that she didn’t object when Carhartt wanted to take her without a condom. The sex act wasn’t long or intense. Three minutes of almost fake panting. And then their respective visits to the bathroom to erase the presence and scent of the fluids.
###
Fornarina didn’t get pregnant, but almost exactly a month after they’d had Arelli’s intervention, she was let go from her job. She came home crying, and her agitation grew when she didn’t find Carhartt there. He hadn’t left a note.
Desperate, she went up to the penthouse and knocked on the Czech neighbor’s door. If no one answered, she told herself, that meant that Carhartt had resumed his adultery, and that he was putting it into practice right then and there.
But the Czech woman did open the door. The innocence of her sky blue eyes and blond mane of hair made Fornarina turn around and walk slowly down the stairs in a daze, as if she’d seen a ghost. She waited, wrapped in a blanket on the sofa, for her boyfriend to come back from wherever he’d gone. Carhartt arrived at eight-thirty.
“Did you forget I had a dentist appointment?” he asked her.
She couldn’t stifle a disconsolate howl, prelude to the confession of the day: She had lost her job. “We have problems again, my love. …”
“We have each other; that’s the most important thing. Besides, tomorrow I have an interview with the manager of an appliance store.”
“Really? That’s wonderful.” Fornarina’s words were expelled without any sort of emphasis. More than an exclamation, they seemed part of a prayer repeated in a liturgy.
Carhartt holed up in the kitchen to make dinner. He had it ready in less than a half hour. They ate chicken nuggets with barbecue sauce, sitting at the small table in front of the television. They watched a show that Fornarina never missed, and Carhartt waited until the episode was over to hug her and repeat that he had a job interview the next day.
“I’m sure you’ll get lucky soon, too,” he said as he pushed her hair off her forehead. It was a little greasy. “The most important thing is that we have each other.”
###
The next day, Carhartt didn’t meet with the manager of any appliance store. He got together with two former coworkers, Roc and Dac, who were inseparable. They fit together like two pieces of the same cog. The three guys got drunk and reminisced about the old days. Carhartt got home in the early evening, totally blotto. He smelled of dark beer and salty snacks. Fornarina had fallen asleep in front of the television, but when she sensed her boyfriend’s presence, she opened her eyes and asked him—in the same monotonous tone of the previous night—if the interview had gone well.
“I think I have a good shot,” responded Carhartt, holding in a burp. “I’m sure of it.”
“That’s good news.”
“Sooner or later, our luck has to change.”
“I love you, Car.”
“Love you, too, Forn.”
Carhartt locked himself in the bathroom and vomited up the dark beer and salty snacks he’d had with Roc and Dac. Then he took a shower, because he still felt bad. When he got out of the bathtub, he slipped and cut his head open against the bidet. He was able to call out to Fornarina to take him to the emergency room as a red cloud overcame his field of vision. Then he lost consciousness and didn’t regain it until hours later as a nurse was celebrating that he’d awakened.
“You were very lucky, I’ll tell you that much. You could have really gotten hurt.”
Fornarina, who was sitting in a black chair and wringing her hands, let out a cry of joy, got up, and wrapped her arms around her boyfriend’s head. She looked like a little boy hugging his first ball.
###
Carhartt let two weeks pass before telling Fornarina, late one Friday afternoon, that the position he’d applied for had gone to someone else.
“They took a long time to make up their minds,” she said.
Since Carhartt didn’t add anything to her comment (perhaps because he was thinking that they were having problems again, and they never said that anymore, or if they did, they denied it straight away), Fornarina decided to change the subject. “What would you like for dinner?”
Carthartt got up from the sofa, went to find his jacket, put it on, and said, “I’ll be back soon. I’m going for a walk.”
He went up to the penthouse and knocked on Milena’s door. She opened the door quickly and warned him about his wife’s visit a few weeks ago.
“I think she knows it,” she said in English, opening her blue eyes to
painful extremes.
“I don’t care,” he replied. He felt as if he really had been told that he didn’t get the job at the appliance store.
Milena prepared tea while he tried to explain to her in English that he felt sad about an invented failure, but he couldn’t pull it off, and his lack of linguistic skill made him even more depressed. His relationship with Milena had always been purely sex and postcoital conversations, when everything is simple and warm and soft. That visit was a challenge he couldn’t meet. So he opted for taking off his pants and underwear, right there in the living room, wanting to swap grammatical constructions for excessive, monstrous moans.
“I not want to do it,” said Milena, whose English syntax and accent were no great shakes, either. “I am not your prostitute.”
Carhartt felt so ashamed of his behavior that he got dressed and left Milena’s apartment as fast as he could. He ignored her pleading with him to stay. “It’s okay having sex now,” she even said, and the comment humiliated him even further. He ran to the bar at the train station, which was five minutes from the house and an almost secret space, the place he’d chosen to start getting drunk when he had really lost his job.
The waiter, who was named Pere, was drying glasses and cups with a towel.
“Haven’t see you around for a while,” he commented, fishing to see if Carhartt had found a better bar to drink at. He wouldn’t have minded if Carhartt had spent that time at home, immersed in the warm spirit of family.
Carhartt sat down on a stool and gave his regular signal: He wanted a gin with Coke. Then he spoke: “I’ve been out of town. Work trip.”
Pere sensed that Carhartt was lying, but he played along, urging him to explain the virtues of life in Stockholm, which Carhartt had been privy to, thanks to two conference participants he’d befriended, Rolf and Dag, the Nordic version of his two former coworkers.
“Up there, people are civilized,” he said before bringing the glass to his lips.
When he tasted the gin, he started to feel disgusted. He got up from the stool and went to the toilet. The anguish grew when he lifted the lid, but he didn’t vomit. He didn’t wash his face, either. He went back to the bar and Pere continued his questioning.