“What do you mean?”
“The probability of the emergence of life is about the same as hitting the jackpot on a slot machine with hundreds of reels. We’re here because once upon a time the only combination that could work came up. Don’t you think that’s amazing? And who dropped in the coin to make the reels spin? That’s the big mystery. The Big Bang is totally irrelevant because the main thing is not what happened, but who or what clicked a lighter to light the wick.”
“Does that mean there’s an invisible hand behind everything that happens to us?”
“That would be a gross oversimplification.” Titus was smiling for the first time. “I believe it was Jung who said that all beings are joined by invisible threads. You pull one, and the whole set moves. This is why every small act affects everything and everyone. You don’t need a God for that.”
“But knowing this doesn’t help me to understand why Gabriela was there—and still less what I’m supposed to do now.”
“Remember the cosmic slot machine. The fact that we’re here is already a mystery. A great mystery. That’s all there is to it.”
The Opposite Is Best
My conversation with an out-of-sorts Titus had hardly clarified matters. In some way he was urging me to do something, but he didn’t specify what or how. Perhaps the best thing would be to stop wasting time with romantic fantasies and forget about the whole thing once and for all.
Before saying good-bye, I told him how reluctant I was to go to my sister’s.
“Well, I can offer you a magic formula for that,” he said.
When I asked what it was, he said, “The opposite is best. Whenever you’re angry with someone, apply this maxim. It means doing the exact opposite of what your body’s telling you to do. Believe me, it works miracles.”
—
While waiting in line at the bakery to buy the Epiphany cake, the tortell de Reis, I decided I’d try to follow Titus’s advice.
Rita and Andreu—my sister and her husband—form a duo that is as perfect as it is destructive. He has taken on the role of chief mourner and complains nonstop, while her job is to point at the guilty parties.
In the fifteen years they’ve been together, I don’t remember ever seeing a happy moment in that house. I always put it down to their not having had children as they’d wished. Now Rita is well over forty, and I suppose she’s come to terms with the fact that nothing’s going to change. Including her disagreeable character.
As I went up in the elevator to their apartment in Avinguda Diagonal, a cold sweat broke out on the nape of my neck. It always happens when I visit them. Knowing I was going to be there for a couple of hours made me feel queasy even before arriving. It’s a psychosomatic thing.
The opposite is best. I repeated this mantra as I rang the bell.
Andreu opened the door, and the mere sight of his wounded-bull expression made me regret that I hadn’t prolonged my flu for one more day and stayed home.
“How are you?”
I knew he didn’t care how I was, but I applied Titus’s maxim and said: “I’ve been ill for the past three days. But you look great.”
“Really?” He was taken aback.
“I can’t believe you had a hernia operation only two months ago. You look ten years younger, as if you’ve been to a spa.”
I went into the dining room, leaving a deflated Andreu at the door. This could be fun.
“What did you say? Are you drunk?” were my sister’s words of welcome. “Or are you messing with him as usual?”
I hugged my sister and planted a kiss on her forehead.
“So good to see you,” I said. “Sorry I didn’t bring gifts this year.”
“Since when do we exchange gifts?” Rita said, showing me into the living room.
“Since today.” I laughed. “I was thinking . . . perhaps we could go out to a seafood restaurant one Sunday? My treat.”
My sister’s face relaxed, giving way to a cautious smile.
“That’s very nice of you, but Andreu’s on a diet and I turned vegetarian last month.”
“Good for you,” I said, humoring her. “Meat’s full of hormones and all sorts of nasties.”
“Well, at least you’re not arguing with me for once,” she said, and went into the kitchen to see to the food.
I sat down next to Andreu, who, with a glass of water in his hand, was spellbound by the news on TV. He kept casting sideways glances at me as if afraid that I really was drunk and would end up doing something silly.
“What a state the world’s in! Terrible,” he ventured. “Where will we all end up?”
“Something’s got to be done—and soon.”
I caught him unawares.
“You think something can be done about it?” he said.
“Of course. For a start, they should fire the news editor and put in another one who gives us more pleasant news.”
Rita came in with a dish of vegetarian lasagna and put it on the table. “What’s going on with you? From the moment you arrived, you’ve been talking nonsense.”
Normally we would have sat down at the table and eaten in silence, watching the news. Titus’s maxim prompted me to try to do the opposite. I praised every dish my sister served, took an interest in what was going on in their lives, and told them a couple of anecdotes to liven up the atmosphere.
“A cat got into my apartment,” I informed them between mouthfuls. “At first I thought it belonged to Titus, but it looks like it doesn’t have an owner.”
“Who’s Titus?” Andreu asked, turning off the television with the remote control.
“I think it’s great that you’ve got a cat,” Rita said, before I could answer. “It’ll give you good vibes. They absorb negative energy, you know.”
The old Samuel would have said, “That’s why I was thinking of giving it to you,” but instead I took the conversation into uncharted territory, reminding her of what we used to do on Saturday afternoons thirty years earlier. I also asked if she’d heard any news of Gabriela.
“Who is she? I don’t remember that name,” she said. “There are lots of kids from the Gothic Quarter. We only knew a few of them.”
“She hid under the stairs with me. I think you were the one who found us.”
“How can I remember that? Anyway, if she was under the stairs, she must have been a devil.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in that stuff.”
“Why do you think people keep away from places like that? I think it’s written in the Bible: the devil hides there.”
The conversation then moved on to aromatherapy, a discipline my sister had recently taken up. I realized it was time to go. I downed my coffee and put an end to my visit.
“Get some sleep,” Rita said with a sardonic expression as she waved good-bye. “I think the flu’s gotten to your brain.”
How to Become Enlightened in One Weekend
That afternoon, my Epiphany gift to myself was correcting the laggards’ essays. Some couldn’t even spell Werther’s name. I gave some of them a pass out of compassion. Others were given a reprieve so that I wouldn’t have to read their stuff again in September. I’d become pragmatic.
I bundled up the essays in my folder ready for the next morning. My first class was with that group.
The light was fading. I switched on my reading lamp so that I could read a few more entries in Rheingold’s dictionary before dinner. I was struck by his definition of a German word that is no longer used much these days.
Weltschmerz: literally, “world-weariness.”
The word seemed to have been created for Goethe’s hero. At the end of his entry, Rheingold points out that Weltschmerz sufferers are often the sons or (less frequently) daughters of rich parents who don’t have to worry about their next meal or having a roof over their heads and are therefore free to in
dulge in a feeling of existential malaise.
This definition made me think of my sister. Although she didn’t have a Romantic bone in her body, Rita had made it very clear as an adolescent that the world was piling its pain upon her. And how!
Maybe it’s because our mother died when we were very young, and we were left in the care of a man who neglected us because of his other priorities. Rita had inherited my mother’s apartment, where she now lives with her husband, and I got some shares that I never touched, plus a feeling of bitterness that still lingers on.
Rita and I were quite close until she turned twenty. Even though she had become despotic and nasty by then, as an adolescent she still thought she could change. I called her the “course kid,” because she was always trying something new: Tai Chi, Reiki, Biodanza, and so on.
She was trying to feel good about herself, a sheer egotistical impulse that didn’t bear any fruit. Then again, I found her amusing. She always had something new to talk about, and I listened with curiosity, even though I didn’t think any of that stuff could make a person happy.
—
I remember that one weekend—I was a university student then—I agreed to go along with her to a course of what in those days was called “transcendental meditation.” The guru was a tanned fiftysomething. He had rented a farmhouse in the Empordà region, where—the leaflet informed us—we would share the miraculous experience of enlightenment after just one weekend.
I found myself in an attic with about twenty other young people who were avid to learn what existence was all about.
After breakfast on the Saturday morning, the guru summoned us to the garden for a chat. He began by dismissing the “false gurus”—that is to say, his competitors—and assured us that enlightenment was within the reach of all those who dared open their eyes.
“And you’re already enlightened,” he told us. “But the thing is, you don’t know it yet.”
Everything was pretty normal until then. After that, we went into a hall, where each one was given a thick mat and a hard pillow. The guru told us everything about the lotus position and the half-lotus position, warning us that it might take us some time to master them. For the time being, he would let us sit with our backs straight and eyes half closed.
“Every second in which you manage to keep your mind clear,” he proclaimed in a deep voice, “is a crack in your armor through which tenderness and clarity may enter.”
The guru turned out to be full of love, especially for the women with the best bodies. He kept helping them to correct their posture. He was particularly concerned that, when they breathed in, they had to lift their chest, and he checked this from behind with his hands on their breasts. The women weren’t allowed to wear a bra during meditation because he said it “restricted the breath of life.” I think I must have been very skilled at breathing and meditating as he never had to help me.
That Saturday night there was a great commotion when he chose a young girl for Tantric Initiation. He’d lavished attention on her during the meditation exercise, and now she was refusing the privilege, saying she wasn’t ready. The guru was furious and ridiculed her in front of the group. “Until you get rid of your petit bourgeois hang-ups, there is no hope of liberation for you.”
What was clear to me was that the guru was very far from penetrating the deep folds of reality. One could generously say that the light of his enlightenment was forty watts at most.
Franz and Milena
After a boring essay-writing class, I gave a lesson on contemporary literature to my fourth-year students. There were eight of them, quite a nice group, and they were fluent in German, even though it was a struggle to get them to read a whole book.
Since this was an introductory course, we spent two weeks on each author. I gave a short presentation with some biographical information and a few details about the works we were studying. I gave the students a subject to prepare and asked them to talk about it in class.
This is the way they teach humanities in Germany. In Spain, however, it’s hard to get students to take any initiative. Most of them prefer the traditional method, in which the lecturer dictates the same notes year after year and the students scribble away, never once raising their heads.
That day, the paper was on Franz Kafka. Many students feel intimidated by him because of the common prejudice that his books are difficult, but I argued that nothing could be further from the truth. In order to demonstrate this, I wrote on the blackboard the first sentences from two of his key works, The Metamorphosis and The Trial.
One morning, as Gregor Samsa woke from a fitful, dream-filled sleep, he found that he had changed into a monstrous insect.
Someone must have been slandering Josef K., because one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.
Before giving my students their assignment, I talked briefly about Kafka’s life, skipping the obvious facts, such as his problems with his father. Instead, I focused on some of the more insignificant details—for example, the fact that he had an uncle in Madrid who got to be director-general of a railway company. I also told them that Kafka used to sleep every afternoon for four and a half hours, and that at the end of his life he dreamed of opening a restaurant in Tel Aviv and working there as a waiter.
I guess this is gossip culture infiltrating the classroom, but if you want to interest students you have to put yourself on their level.
I devoted the last twenty minutes of my lesson to Kafka’s correspondence. Apart from his unfinished novels, he sent the women who loved him hundreds of wonderful letters. Probably the best among them were those he wrote to Milena Jesenská, who had translated some of his works into Czech.
Unlike Kafka, she wasn’t Jewish, but after the German army occupied Czechoslovakia she was deported and imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died in 1944. One could almost say that Franz Kafka was lucky to have died of tuberculosis twenty years earlier.
Their love was doomed because, among other things, she was married. However, this didn’t prevent them from meeting a couple of times or stop Kafka from writing her the following words:
Dear Frau Milena, the day is so short, what with the time spent with you and a few trivial things it is almost over and done with. There’s hardly any time left to write to the real Milena, since the even more real one was here the whole day, in the room, on the balcony, in the clouds.
Lunatic
Kafka’s love letters must have put me in a romantic mood, because when I left the class I decided to return to the crime scene.
It was 1:00 p.m., the same time as when we had met. The intersection where it happened was only a few minutes’ walk from the university. This time I felt no emotion. The street looked like any other street, with its never-ending traffic of buses, cars, and motorbikes.
This street is much worse when Gabriela’s not crossing it. I laughed at my own observation.
On the other side of the street there was a small bar with a terrace, at the beginning of Carrer Bergara. I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to sit there for a while to see if the miracle might happen again. While I was heading for the only free table, I remembered the joke about the drunk man who, on his way home at night, looks for his keys next to a lamppost, not because he lost them there, but because there’s more light. I was doing much the same, but only to prolong a dream.
Although it was sunny, I was surprised to see that two out of the three tables on the terrace were occupied in the middle of winter. An elderly couple was sitting at one of them—Scandinavians, by the look of it. I guess a temperature of five degrees and icy gusts of wind must have been like summer for them. A bearded man of about forty in a gray overcoat, wide-brimmed black hat, and white scarf sat at the other table, holding a thick, spiral-bound manuscript.
I took my seat at the free table in the middle and asked for a vermouth. From there I had an excellent view of
the intersection, although there was no guarantee I’d be able to catch Gabriela if she turned up.
What a coincidence, Gabriela!—I’d say—The other day I was devastated I didn’t have a chance to say hello.
Me too. Isn’t it a miracle that we’ve met up again after so many years?
It’s chance that brought us back together again. But sometimes one has to help it along, like God.
Well, that doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that we’re together now, isn’t it?
Yes, nothing will separate us now.
As I imagined this conversation and began to feel emotional, I noticed that the bearded man was openly staring at me. I tried to stare him down, but he didn’t flinch. He seemed to be mesmerized by my presence.
I conceded defeat and looked down at the manuscript on his table. It was a thick book of more than three hundred pages with the following title, written in large letters:
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
Must be a nutcase. I paid and stood up to leave my observation post. The man in the hat kept studying me, and even as I walked away I could feel his lunatic’s gaze boring into my back.
Message in a Bottle
I had a sandwich on the run for lunch, as I didn’t want to waste too much time: back home I had an ambitious domestic program that included two loads of laundry, vacuuming the living-room rug, and cooking dinner for the whole week.
I was also keen to work on my Kafka notes. I wanted to be on the ball when my students started their oral presentations.
After three Metro stops I was in Gràcia, the only neighborhood in Barcelona where there is more space for pedestrians than for cars. When I passed the Verdi movie complex on my way home, I stopped to see what was showing. Then I bought a newspaper and a bottle of sparkling water.
Love in Lowercase Page 4