The next day, Danilo took off for who-knows-where. I went back home. But Marina and her husband still went over to Ljubljana to see Jaglika and those relatives. That was just the beginning. The remaining year that the four of us lived together in Svetosavska Street saw daily fights. Typically, Danilo would say something about Marina’s husband – something so insulting that the latter, following long-established habit – would disappear that same instant (second or third bedroom, the balcony, or the street), and then Marina and Danilo would exchange a few words before finally actually having it out. I behaved the same way Marina’s husband did, with one difference: I didn’t leave right off the bat, but I also didn’t get involved. Later, Marina claimed that everything was my fault. That summer, while on their visit at Jaglika’s, Marina managed to get several things done: everyone believed that my influence over Danilo was both obvious and sick, they knew very well where that came from, that is, from which side of the family and from which people within our family; furthermore, they all believed that my malice bordered on madness and that this was all connected with Marina’s bottomless unhappiness. When they departed for Milan a year later, Marina and her husband, Jaglika came back from Ljubljana as fast as she could. It was on account of Danilo, as she said later: ‘Don’t imagine that things were bad for me there. They took care of me like I was the apple of their eye…Everything revolved around me…with every one of them offering favours…But I came back because of Danilo…You’re a bullshit-nik just like he is…That much I know for sure.’
The ‘he’ here was my father; Jaglika would always talk like that. It was simpler: he, him. And by the way, those relatives in Ljubljana could hardly wait to have Jaglika off their backs.
For the first few months, Danilo spent a lot of time in Milan. I was also rarely at home; and Jaglika picked up a brand-new pursuit: she played cards day and night with this strange old man on the ground floor. Later on, the old guy died, and Jaglika was angry that I didn’t go to the funeral with her. She got to know his relatives (who turned up on account of that ground-floor apartment), lost her marbles and kept inviting them repeatedly for coffee, and for this, and for that. These folks (husband, wife, and niece) regularly accepted Jaglika’s invitations – in fact they didn’t ever leave the house, I ran into them all over the place and at every time of the day – in the morning, in the evening, in the middle of the day, in the bathroom, living room, dining room, kitchen, in front of the front door, next to the door …
One night when I kicked them out, and things got all theatrical: shouting, oaths, curses, raised arms, it turned out that they knew everything about me: both the seen, and the unseen, the fictitious and the real; and more of the fictitious: the whole building hummed with various little stories. In fact Jaglika slandered me to the old man’s relatives. This pure phantasmagoria: my hundred-year-old grandma, and those folks with their primitive physiognomy and needs to match, and me, their only connection, their reason for existing. Naturally, just this didn’t frighten off Jaglika. She simply moved to the ground floor; and my threats to send her to Milan to be with Marina, or to Ljubljana to ‘those super-duper relatives of yours’, came to naught. She didn’t stop chewing the cud with those ground floor dopes, for months, and even the building next door lived and breathed various little stories about morality and immorality. Then one day, these folks (the husband, wife, and niece), simply vanished, and I assume it was because they lost some court battle about the apartment. Jaglika came back depressed, and quarrelsome, and jumped all over me whenever I uttered a word; once again nothing was good enough, I was a bullshit-nik, a gypsy, a bum, and a ‘super-whore’ and ‘that girl’ and so on and so forth …
In the year 1970-something, everything was the same, or similar, which is the same thing when you’re watching from the side-lines. My isolation was supplemented by letters from an anonymous author, about whom nothing was known: sex, age, inclinations, desires, origin, occupation, and the rest, but especially the rest – as is the case with all unknown authors, despite which everything appears to be authentic, so the only thing that’s questionable is the fabrications of all kinds of (anonymous authors in all epochs; in all lands) in essence trivial people, although it is customary to think of these people (anonymous authors) as paranoid – which means danger, and to think of shutting them away, for example, in a prison or in a hospital or in both. Vespasian’s letters appeared like a bolt from the blue; I don’t know any other way to explain it; it’s not necessary to explain it any other way; after all, Vespasian was himself a heavenly figure, and as for what objects become intermediary (postal-postmanly) there’s no use racking one’s brains about that! Doubts and, generally speaking, various outbursts of rationality and scepticism in regard to divinity, the heavens, heavenly figures, and letters, are not advisable, even if a letter is unnecessary; even if Vespasian is a pure fabrication. In any case, my reading of his letters, (which always arrived bearing no signature, with crumbs, fingerprints, and stains on them), can’t be anything but superfluous to the same degree. No more or less so, exactly the same amount: identically so.
The Roman Vespasian was probably given his name by his mother; my Vespasian got his name according to some sloppy principle of association, occurring at the same instant, that is to say, when the letter arrived. It was so imbecilic and without imagination, like when someone unexpectedly gives you a Maltese terrier. What’s the point here, and where are we going with this obvious insufficiency of imagination? One night (around the same time that this first imperial letter came in, if it wasn’t that exact same night) I slept with a guy I’d picked up when I was wasted, in a café or on the street, I can’t remember anymore. For the most part guys like that weren’t so awful; however, when you take into account criteria of a more serious nature (which assumes that I rule out all sentimentality aimed at myself), he was incomprehensibly bad; but despite that, and some other things (sweat, stink, and stupidity) he was simpático, with his little pale red member, his large, protruding lower teeth, and his eyes that bulged just a touch; he was charming, despite being a dimwit, and after all what would intelligence mean to him in life – a big dick or at least a thick one, maybe, but brains? And that’s how this name came to be, not because I thought that night that I was sleeping (I imagined) with Vespasian of Rome, by means of mysterious powers, but simply like this: a cheerful bucktoothed pope (the newspapers were chock-a-block those days with news about the pope) and then all at once boom – Vespasian.
I had found a solution to my paranoia: at the bottom of every letter I placed the signature: Vespasian. Sometimes in Cyrillic, sometimes in Latin script; I was thinking that in that way anyone (but then again, who?) who might be searching with the pedantry of the police through my drawers, folders, and boxes, might get confused and thrown off the scent for at least a moment; he would have to wonder, at first, whether this ‘Vespasian’, sometimes Cyrillic and sometimes Latin, in both printed and cursive letters, now in red ink, now in blue or black, whether this wasn’t some code and a subcode of that same code, and, then, whether or not I myself had written these letters to myself, or whether I’d written them (me again) with the intention of sending them to someone, and so on and on …
Roman Vespasian had received, at the start of his imperial career, pulled out of a drum, like on a game show, Africa; later he fell on hard times and dealt in mules, but I’m willing to bet that at that point he knew an empire awaited him; he could tell everyone to fuck off. My Vespasian is an invalid; in his restricted province of life he has issues with his daughter, his wife, and himself, which is incomparably harder: the arc is smaller and, logically, the prospects are too. That other Vespasian had firm, short limbs, while this one of mine mentioned in several letters that as a young man he was tall, slender, smart, and handsome. Neither one of them should be believed.
Vespasian’s letter:
Dear Lidia,
How are you? What are you up to? What’s new? How is she, how are they, how are all your various theys? D
ear Lidia, you have to believe me when I say that I’m hideously bored. Boredom is going to drive me crazy. Everything bores me, save these letters, which look non-existent after I write them, and I do not know whether they reach you and I also do not know whether you read them or whether you toss them, if that’s the right word, into the furnace, for example; by and large this non-existence or more precisely the absence of the possibility of verification leaves me with some fantastic illusions, in addition, Lidia, which is not without importance in my immobile life, and, Lidia, then, or even because of that, I can imagine something. Do you understand, Lidia, that I actually imagine it all? And let me tell you something, Lidia, that I’m sure you don’t know: maggots are very good to use as bait for catching smaller fish, fishlets, especially; like for example: the red-eyed tetra and the common rudd. The procedure is as follows (if one’s intention is to catch both the red-eyed tetra and the common rudd, if that intention is a firm one, and unambiguous, as I said, with regard to both kinds of fish): you need to put a little piece of liver in a place where there are flies (that means anywhere, in other words, everywhere); so that the flies can place deep into the meat their discharge, which anglers call larva; those flies, then they slice the liver in question (meat) in several locations. Then you bury the little piece in the ground; Lidia, in just a few days the worms hatch; with them, or with horse leeches, or with a very young frog you can head to the river. You shouldn’t get too into this, that is to say that, pathologically into it, ambitiously, over there on the river one cannot catch the beautiful bream, or the even prettier and more supple hake, but what’s wrong with a common rudd, or, let’s say, that intriguing eel, which is delicious to boot! But let’s drop it. Now it’s time for the off-season. For me it’s always the off-season. As far as my wife is concerned, I’ve always been amazed at how she manages to find so much strength and stay so spry. It’s as if, in accordance with the old African custom, when she was a child, when she was a little girl, all over her back and above her elbows they carved symbols, and later, Lidia, they rubbed these symbols with charred meat – it was a real animal – that had solid muscles, exaggeratedly adroit and flat when looked at in profile – that distinction (for it is a distinction) belongs to the same marvel: by way of symbols and carbonized meat. I would not have been astonished if it one day seemed as though a Hottentot woman had strangled this child of ours. She concocts stories; Lidia, try, in addition to the other things that you do in life, try, just casually, to destroy the magic that is the warmth of the uterus and the vagina and above all of the clitoris that trembles from inside (pure metaphysics), and then go on and open your windows wide in the dead of winter. Put away your blankets, all the bedspreads, just let the biting cold into the room all around you, around your body; and you’ll see that everything, inside you, will stay warm, and only a penis, if one’s in the vicinity, will be frozen; blue, and timorous; my wife tried this anecdote out on me. I’ve never put it to the test. She, however, claims that the warmth of a clitoris or a vagina is staggering, and that there’s no magic involved; she says it’s simply the definite, straight truth: the temperature of the sun, and then she says that I as a man have to sense this even without the windows being opened. For ages I’ve been unable to recall this temperature about which my wife speaks; I ejaculate transparent fluid in the bathtub, below the surface of the warm water, and in the shower, and I move on from there not unburdened in the least; once I got an engorgement of some kind, you know, and then no orgasm ever came. If my wife is to be believed, the clitoris has a transcendental power – it communes with God Himself … What other nonsense is she not telling me, Lidia, such as, for example, her true dilemma: is the penis of a fifty-year-old (she’s thinking of me) a deus ex machina or a deus absconditus? At that point I told her that I had read, as you probably have also, Lidia, but she certainly has not (later this proved to be quite true), some essays with that same title, deus absconditus, in a newspaper – what this was about, I’m sure you remember, Lidia. And I said that I didn’t remember whether it was connected to that; but my wife told me that some things come from inside and that she could guarantee one hundred per cent that the author of those essays was some fifty-year-old man; it turned out to be quite true: the writer actually was a fifty-year-old man; but if the title deus absconditus was referring to a penis, which is completely within the realm of possibility, I still cannot see what the dilemma is with the other part: deus ex machina, and, what’s more, why is it only fifty-year-olds?
All of this is annoying, and boring, Lidia. I don’t know what I’m supposed to get out of it. I know even less about what any of it has to do with me.
Goodbye, sweet little Lidia.
VI
Put not one, but two sizeable rocks in your pocket and hit the first dog you come across in both eyes; and then, when the beast is high-tailing it away, squealing, well, don’t waste any time – get after him, d’you hear? A dog knows better than anybody where to flee to get out of shitholes on earth, in heaven, or in between.
This is the way I caught that more or less harmless STD: Tricho-monas vaginalis. One night I got in late from a trip to Ljubljana, from visiting God-only-knows which relatives of mine; it had been something about some things for Danilo, and some documents, from Marina. There were no more buses in from the airport; but a taxi was sitting not too far away from the exit of the building; I got in and a tiff started immediately with this guy who was already in there, about which route the guy should take (the guy being the taxi driver), that is to say, whom he should take first, since we were going different directions; we cursed at each other all the way to the bridge; several times I demanded of the driver that he stop so ‘this idiot’ could get out and ‘go on foot’ and ‘what kind of dirty trick is this’ and once more ‘so he can go to hell’. At a point only a hundred, or five hundred, meters from the bridge, however, he said: ‘Drive to the Hotel Balkan.’ At that same moment I said: ‘Drive to the Hotel Prague.’ It turned out to be the Balkan. What a shame about the Prague! My imagination was insufficient, and this whole combination was stupid: the airport, a fifty-year-old man, Hotel Balkan, and trichomoniasis. In contrast to Marina and her husband back then, way back then, in Poreč: Netochka Nezvanova and lunch and the two husbandly hands and Marina’s big butt, and I didn’t possess any imagination, not a bit, not as much as a child, not an ounce. That much is clear at least. Later I fell prey to the temptation (having been treated for trichomoniasis for months) to send to various people I knew a few vaginal secretions crumbled into an envelope, and smeared on paper – like on laboratory slides; with my signature under a microscopic bit of fungus: ‘with love from Lidia’. Anyway, so the guy in the Hotel Balkan takes off his shoes right away, as if he were in the Prague, and barefooted but in his politician’s suit he just plops into bed. Later it turned out that hiding beneath that politician’s suit were orange underwear, a hairy back, a scar below one of the globes of his butt – long, moon-shaped – and a big purple cock plus the abilities, let’s say… of a thirty-year-old. A month or so later, I saw him at the opening of an exhibition; he had some other folks I knew with him, and I waited till he was off by himself a little (ostensibly he was viewing the paintings) and then from behind his back and up close to his ear, right on his wrinkly, yellowish neck (this guy was shorter than me), I whispered: ‘You pig.’ He turned around, looked at me in surprise, and went on pretending to look at the pictures; he was wearing his politician’s suit, the same one as in Hotel Balkan. If only I’d been able to spit on him, but in a way that no one could see, or been able to rub trichomoniasis like an abstract daub, for instance, all over his angular, attractive, old man’s face, but in a way that no one would see. I wasn’t able to do anything. May I be forgiven for my cowardice; he simply ran away, slipped out abruptly, and he wasn’t to be found out in front of the gallery, nor on the second floor, nor out back in the restaurant, and not in the parking lot either; he disappeared. For the next couple of days I imagined that every grey head of
hair on the street, and every striped politician’s suit was him, and I’d shove my way through the crowd, really determined this time to fill his face with spit. I thought it would be obvious to everyone, on the outside (looking askance) that this whole confusion, and therefore this whole happening, had its origin in a few wrongly linked phenomena; the Hotel Balkan, and before it the airport, and after it the trichomoniasis. If it had been the Prague, everything would have been different, everything would have transpired differently, even if we’d taken a different route to get there.
Dogs and Others Page 4