28. The Princess
Six square millimeters for each foot and yet he would certainly need much more space to see it well so the dark color of the kimono would look right and the hair would shine when viewed from any direction. It would need a white cloth like the white silk background that pearls required, as the Japanese woman in the suite facing the garden had said; silk and satin for the distant, mute, and almost smiling little lady dressed in mauve and gold, hair held by little gold pins with pearly heads, a gold sash that tied in the back with a wide flat bow, and a yellowish fan that might have once been gold in her raised hand as if to hide her face, at least the mouth and nose although not those eyes that revealed a smile. The sweet suffering of those tiny motionless feet, traversed by two slivers, naughty the smile, savory the taste of discovery, acrid the dead air in the house where everything was being sold, furniture, fittings, lamps, utensils, and decorations, bitter the stale odor of age, of what had been closed up and unused for a long time, sitting in the cold and dark accumulating white spots from humidity seeping through the ceiling and the cracks of carelessly closed doors. He would put her between the dancer and the monkey, as if they had the duty to entertain her, as if she were only looking at him after having seen the pirouettes of the dancer and the bows of the monkey to let him know how much she had enjoyed the show. The lower shelf, not on the upper shelf where it might slip and fall and where the fish-man sat who saw everything, knew everything, and was jealous of everything. Wulda approached with the platter: instead of holding it over an open hand within reach and keeping the other hand on the far edge, she desperately held it with two hands, one on each of the longer sides, making it hard to serve himself comfortably. He looked at her angrily but she noticed nothing, only smiled at him briefly, almost a grimace, so different from Kati-Kati’s smile; which made him feel sorry for himself and for the effort he had put into erasing or at least muddling the memory by twining it around any other one and closing it tight and hoping it would not arise even disguised in dreams, that fleeting moment when he had lunged forward and the girl, startled or impatient, had fallen back abruptly no doubt pushed by the gaze of the fish-man who had presided over every act that afternoon. It had been an accident, that certainty supported him: an accident. He grasped at the serving utensils, passing one of his hands behind Wulda’s arm to bring them nearer but the spoon was too far away, and he sat there tense, frozen, and furious while Madame Helena Lundgren spoke about travel with Miss Esther and was not watching, did not see what was happening: Kati-Kati thought she was important and that was why she had fallen, not because he had attacked. If she had stood still, nothing would have happened, but the fish-man had been behind it all, a force of destiny behind her wavering body, useless hands, horrified eyes, and the fall, and then Wulda herself was running her fingers over the edge of the platter to give him more room to lift up the serving utensils and finally he could put some meat and vegetables on his plate. The fish-man staring through the water, an open door, the steps of Kati-Kati coming down the staircase: it had all pushed him to leave his room and once past the door to congratulate himself because only the two of them were in the corridor; the girl came down the last steps, he waited below, she jumped to get away, he reached for her, she moved fast, hesitating, and falling back, her head hitting the edge of the steps she had just come down without even enough time to cry out, he returned to his room and stared at the eyes of the fish-man for hours until it had grown so dark he had to turn on the lights and only then did he hear voices and hurried steps although the doctor had come much later, even after the evening meal, which had been the first meal disastrously served by Wulda. The girl would recover, how could she not, please, it had been such an insignificant fall, not a fatal accident like the one involving the boy from the house across the street months previous run over by a coach and trampled by horses; no, this was nothing, just a stumble, a fall, a contusion, nothing, she would of course heal, absolutely, but if she healed he would have to flee, to escape Kati-Kati’s eyes which would open and search him out and say: it was him. Unless she had forgotten everything, which according to what he had read somewhere might happen since sometimes people who suffer a blow to the head and lose consciousness later awake having lost their memory, not knowing who they are or where they are or what has happened to them; he would need to leave. He would take only the little Japanese princess wrapped in silk so she would not suffer, soft and warm in the hollow of his hand, no other treasure, just her, and by no means the fish-man with his fish-man eyes capable of slithering over rocks and walls. He would leave his treasures behind and he would not care because she would go with him, her porcelain soul, silken heart, pearls on the pins of her headdress, and secret eyes of black amber, to wherever the wind and sea would take them. He did not know exactly when Wulda had taken away his plate or exactly when she had poured more wine in his glass: when Kati-Kati returned to serve dinner, he would not be in the house, he would not eat creamy sauces or well-seasoned meat, he would not chew nuts like bits of butter nor would his tongue help wine slip past his palate and down his throat, he would not hear that Lundgren woman’s voice, or see daylight appear through the window of his rooms before everyone else. With all his strength he wanted to twist the day, unite the flavors, set aside time, forget all those people who again and again sat at that table to look for words in the folds of their more than imperfect memories and throw them at each other and smile, above all the women, even this poor-spirited girl who served them; to smile in the desert where there was no one and nothing, not even a wolf whose teeth shone as it tried to bite a mouthful it would never reach. A china and silk princess, with slivers in her feet, natural hair sold by some woman, threaded into her head lock by lock and arranged with a nest of pearl-headed gilt pins from a country of fans and domes and bells, he would take her and leave, and with that would suppress the footsteps on the stairs, the gaze of the fish-man from the upper shelf as if from the sea, the voice of Helena Lundgren giving an order that no one could dispute, and the Japanese woman entering as portent for this other woman, herald of the truer one of flesh, blood, and saliva, in the house on Scheller Street.
29. Forever
The word forever did not have a special meaning after it had been said and thought through, contemplated like an object or mechanism, like something concrete outside of herself; on the contrary, now it meant nothing, deprived of width, a mere line of meager letters, something secretive or medicinal you placed in your mouth, this word briefly chosen to avoid all betrayal, another to seek improbable consolation: she had resorted to that word like a refuge and closed a door behind herself after finally locating the room filled with distrust and every kind of suspicion and objection, windowless, airless, suffocating, and maternal, like the divan for an over-protected sick woman. She said: I am leaving forever, but she had not said that to anyone and even the excitement of saying it had become self-delusion, a string of letters that had lost their sound and meaning along with their noise and weight, and she did not hear them, they only seemed to be a hint of music, a brief upward trill of a flute when night had fallen, not in a concert but solo, improvised, coming from an upper floor from time to time; above all in the morning seeing someone pass the curtainless glass in the windows, the somber tones of an oboe, a string vibrating with some fickle note cut off as if the bow or hand had given up on it forever, forever and ever. It had been the last lunch forever and ever in the house and it had not been much different from earlier ones; she had conversed with Madame Helena, they had said a few things like oh but is it as far away as Japan, do you remember Madame Nashiru? and they had said the distances are unimaginable for those of us who are older although of course not in Japan where everything is so very small and close unlike the Americas that await you, and finally they had said do not fail to write us and remember us, won’t you? But after lunch, waiting or watching the minutes pass that at some point would become hours in this world that no longer existed for her and which she could no lo
nger touch or brighten, the two open suitcases on the bed, telling herself that all that remained was to put what she needed from her boudoir into her handbag. Time tried to overcome her and hurt her, talcum, comb, powder, to make her weep or lament the now naked walls in the room, tweezers, nail clipper, toothbrush, the drawers smelled of lavender and above all the tea shop that had been a fragment of her life, hand towel, bar of soap, nail file, a long waylay in the presence of noisy gentlemen and solid women who with a toss of their head said yes or no and accepted each other so easily, sensibly, over a cup of French chocolate in winter with their coats over the curved backs of chairs, rose water, lanolin, lipstick, as if it had been a fragment of floral life by Felix Ziem, “maître de la lumière et des couleurs vibrantes” which she could never cut out from her memories about the wall in the second-floor corridor of the house on Scheller Street which she was going to leave forever, forever and ever, or the flowers behind the green leather-topped desk in a corner of the salon in “Miraflora” where Mr. Celsus had suggested not going away alone and hidden like her name, so distant on the misty far side of the world, unknown and mute in a language she would not understand and where no one would understand hers, where great rivers, giant trees, and vast plains confounded the measure of all things, sizable letters taken like medicine and now meaning nothing or they do but they do not know what, only a broken string, the sound of the violin d’amore, the light of other stars all along the journey. The drop that never falls from the spigot, the flame that never dies on the wood, the bluish steam at the spout of the teapot, the grille on the window when the day breaks outside, the first step toward the gangway of the ship, they are also a fraction of an entire lifetime and little things done without thinking, details of a painting like the color of a vase in which autumn flowers wilt before a summer landscape that has already been left behind, a single instant of existence that smells like the black ink of the notes in a musical staff, the music of wisdom interrupting words and closing mouths, the black smell of wick wafting up on a candlelit night. She thought it was like death to leave “Miraflora” in other hands no matter how efficient they were, to shut the suitcases, to cross the gangway genuinely alone, to forget the other things that she now no longer remembered whether they belonged to her or not, if they were things she had carefully done to avoid dying or things like the rest of them that had filled the space of a second, the space where she had decided her life. She left behind all the time she had built, all the music in one note, all the feelings in all the words in a single word, a sleeping girl, a window opening onto the garden, another window she had never looked out of, an atrocious moment when she had closed her eyes as some horses bolted past. She had briefly bid farewell to Mr. Celsus and would not say farewell to anyone in the boarding house, to no one except for Madame Helena who in her role as lady of the house was going to be at the door to say good-bye: she would travel across the round belly of the world and this is what made her feel that she would return somewhere, that she was not leaving forever. Perhaps she would always return to the psalm-like sounds in the first song, the vibration in the ear like a drumhead beaten by clay-colored hands, she would return to the heart, the black smell of black ink impregnating the night and staining the fingers of the father she left behind, the inconclusive memories drawn on maps in her childhood room, other faces and other names, her own name hidden among the flowers garlanding the wall in the instant that it took to leave anyplace in the world for someplace else that would never again be the house on Scheller Street.
30. Exaltation
What more intense satisfaction could he expect than her absence when nothing had been said? White china felt smooth to the touch and sparkled for the eyes in the dining room lights during the moment when young Gangulf tried to convince himself that he had triumphed; eyes on the bright china, the white voice of the cups against saucers, the creamer next to the bottle of milk, the faint silver cry of the cutlery that burned his skin as if he had lain naked in the sun for the ages since the beginning of time under the gaze of visionaries, pushing him toward the clarity of bonfires, sparks, the reverberation of genius; everything left him blind, groping, trembling, becoming his own prophet in search of the conquerors’ pride. He took another step toward the stairway thinking he would manage to climb to the second floor and stalk to the door of the room at the end, a hidden and well-known door, his steps as light as a fox whose reddish color blends in with fallen leaves, light as someone walking suspiciously in a strange city, like the goshawk, like a sloop, light as the vole and the sun-dew, like venal sin, he who sought destiny in sacrifice; but in the end he paused at the foot of the stairway, turned, and entered the salon, crossed it, and came to the dining room whose doors were always open at that hour, dressed in metal and brilliant silvery lights that he almost never looked at. If nothing had been said, what did absence mean? He allowed himself to greet everyone, to sit at the table with its ivory tablecloth white china white flowers that he could not identify with yellow spots in their center, to ponder an apprenticeship that would raise him up to what he called exaltation even when that word very rarely appeared in his ruminations: it lived in truth rather than in hushed pronunciation, or no, like the sensation of acid fire, like illness or the inferno and possibly even the flight of angels to the foot of a throne of an indifferent god, cruel at times and incapable of meting out punishment in a show of deformed justice; a feeling of safety inside that became heavy and ignorant, too clumsy to know what was truly happening to him but alert to an urgent desire. Although he answered Mr. Pallud, he quickly looked at the General: here we have, he said to himself, a miserable man, and he knew unhappiness at that moment, avid for a pain that would authorize him to go up to the second floor, to knock on the door of Miss Esther’s room and enter smiling, to wish her a good trip, to surprise her, disturb her, finally to leave forgetting that absence can offer itself as the pretext of satisfaction, to go to his room where he would suffer this unnamed pain that was not his, as distant from him as a far-off land where he mistakenly went time and again. This woman, sharp and soft and smooth and keen as a dagger, dangerous to herself in her beautiful absolute determination, daughter of the Nibelheim Cave gods, would dream about him, speak to him, follow him, embark with him in the ship that would fight in all the rivers of the world for his fortune against the current flowing to the sea: he would make that happen without the disguise of terror, without a cry, without confession, without having said anything. Young, fatuous, miserly, far from his home and parents, the student thought that if treachery killed his determination he would wind up like that, like that pale watery-eyed old man who spent his time visiting second-hand shops in search of the dolls he adored and perhaps revered, worshiping ridiculously, naked or on his knees or flagellating himself or talking to them as if they were his children or dreaming that they grew and grew until they devoured him, always gray, quietly saying you have to see this treasure, just imagine, it is described there in the third volume of Heindesberg in a footnote in the chapter which studies national figurines what a find is it possible that these people did not know what they had this happens from a lack of information and most of all from a lack of interest. Under the spell of the growing fire that burned in the ashen man’s eyes, he told himself perhaps no or perhaps yes he would call it a destiny like the General’s and toward which little by little his mouth had been twisting the way the openings of his jacket pockets yawned at him and his gaze lowered until it was dragging on the floor unable to move his lids or pupils, his two eyes turned into hard agates left unpolished on the banks of a solitary and sluggish river. He finished his tea and said yes, of course he would be delighted to see the figurine and indeed it seemed very strange that Mr. Pallud had found it, so exquisite, exactly six months after Madame Nashiru had left the house on Scheller Street.
Prodigies Page 13