The Abundance of the Infinite

by Christopher Canniff

  “St. Francis of Assisi,” she says, the half-completed statue wetting my fingers with paint. I hand it back to her, and wipe my fingers on the edge of my plate.

  “I like paint,” she says in English.

  “You like to paint,” I say.

  “I like to paint,” she repeats, smiling as she amends her words. “My daughters must to learn English. Your father taught me, but not them.”

  “I would also like to learn,” I say, uncomfortable, nervous somehow. “Not to paint sculptures, but canvases. To capture the essence of a moment so it won’t be forgotten. Much like telling yourself, before you fall asleep, that you will remember your dreams. I went to Madrid, and the art there inspired me to want to create my own unique impressions of what I see around me.” I can tell she is confused by my words, and I feel as though I am rambling. “Perhaps one day,” I add, “I will learn to paint.” She nods, seeming to understand this.

  She produces a small slip of paper, handing it to me for my perusal as she places the statue down on the table. The words are typewritten in Spanish. Before I can explain that I do not understand, she turns the paper over in my hand. The back side is written in English:

  He who works with his hands is a labourer.

  He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.

  He who works with his hands and his head and his heart

  is an artist.

  St. Francis of Assisi (b. 1181).

  “Bello,” I say.

  The Señora replaces the statue and the paper, and turns back toward me.

  “Your father, he will be buried tomorrow,” she says. “At noon. We are all sorry here, that he has died. He was a good man to us ... and so, where are you staying? How long are you in Manta?”

  “I was staying at a hosteleria nearby. Now, if you have an apartment available, perhaps I will stay here.”

  As I continue eating, I struggle through casual conversation. The Señora and her daughters speak in their native tongue quickly, much faster on the coast than in the Andes mountains. I cannot comprehend their words, or even hope to converse with them. I long to explain to the Señora, who would appreciate such sentiments, how much I learned from and was inspired by the art in Madrid, specifically at the Museo del Prado, where I saw the enduring art of the ages. I would tell her that I have found it is comprised, much like Tolstoy concluded in his book What is Art?, mostly of religious works.

  I would disregard the therapeutic benefits of painting, as touted by Richard, and would explain further, knowing that she has likely never been to Spain, that the works in the Museo del Prado are composed of primitive Italian art; a divine light represented in leafs of gold, with man in the background showing his smallness as per the medieval emphasis on God. A pregnant Virgin whose praying hands are perched atop her round belly is captured in the precise centre of one of the paintings, the tree of life on the bottom left, twenty-two pairs of hands with awed faces devoutly praying to the belly. The Christ Child is atop the throned Virgin Mary. His head is perfect in every aspect, His hands, the glow about His face, the soft curls of His hair represented in exacting detail. Saint John the Baptist is in the desert with falcons and lizards and many-eyed sheep. The snake of Genesis is there, as is Saint Francis protruding from a ring of flowers and fruit. Saint Michael stands frozen while battling the fallen angels. The archangel Gabriel in fitted armour is engulfed by spectators while kicking an angel with the heel of his foot and stabbing at Golgotha with a shining sword. Horrified people on boats are bound for the fiery lakes of eternal damnation. The martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, whose body, full of arrows, supports an anguished head, is depicted. Saint Helen sits atop a dark horse at the gates of Jerusalem, along with a gloomy entourage. The emperor Heracles is astride another dark horse, observed from above by a glowing angel as he carries a wooden cross. Santo Domingo of Silos and the Spanish King Ferdinand are meeting outside of castle walls. A repentant Saint Jerome stands before an incomplete cross as Mary Magdalene sits on an unadorned throne. Jacob and his brother Esau exchange birthrights for lentils beside the risen Christ, His haunting red eyes, red hair, red face and blood contrasting against the pallor of His face. The apostles are caught in a storm in the Sea of Galilee beside the prophet David and Lazarus, resurrected.

  I realize, of course, that my Spanish is insufficient to describe any of this.

  The Señora suddenly stops talking, and looks over at me. “You look for an apartment here in Manta, just like your father?” she says, adding, half-mockingly: “I don’t believe you.”

  “I would prefer to rent one in this building. You do have apartments for rent—”

  “I don’t understand. You have no wife? No children?”

  “I do.”

  The Señora looks around, as though they might be lurking around a corner or beneath a window, awaiting a signal to enter.

  “Then where are they?” she asks. “Why are you here, and they are in Canadá? Why did you leave them, just like your father left to you and your mother?”

  I am silent.

  “How you pay?” Yolanda asks abruptly in English. I reply that I have brought enough money for whatever payment was necessary.

  They converse amongst themselves, and minutes later, after I pay for a month’s rent and agree to teach the girls English in exchange for meals once or twice a day, I am thanking the Señora and her beautiful daughters and departing with a key.

  5

  There are two bedrooms in this dusty apartment, and a long windowed hallway that stretches out to provide an extended view of the beach. Three walls of the main living area are mostly comprised of windows.

  An elongated balcony overlooks the inlet with a view of several fishing boats lying on their sides at low tide, one boat standing upright on stilts in the dehydrated bay. At the end of the hallway there is a sizeable washroom with a standing shower, which I soon discover produces more of a trickle than a shower.

  My first dream in this new apartment is lucid and confused. I have been transformed into another person. I realize who I am, and I understand that I am dreaming, as happens in a lucid dream. There is the feeling, however, at least in my own mind, that I am someone else to those observing me. I have not been transformed into Kafka’s monstrous vermin—nothing like that—but instead, I am a man who is prideful in believing himself to have transcended his former life, and to be somehow more adept at dealing with pain than those around him. A man, whose shadowy figure does not allow me to discern his identity, asks if I believe that as a result of my travels, I have somehow moved past the anger and guilt I have over my daughter—as though she has died.

  “Yes,” I reply definitively and too quickly, “I have.”

  “Gauguin,” I continue a moment later, as though to further convince this stranger, who seems to doubt my words, “has done this, too. His pain was civilized society. Tahiti was his destination though, Paris his origin. Gauguin wanted a simpler life.”

  “Is that what you want, the abstraction of ostensible simplicity?” the stranger asks.

  When I do not reply, he continues. “Gauguin wanted to further his ambitions as a painter, but you are no painter.”

  “Perhaps I could be.”

  “No. You have forsaken your wife and daughter and your chosen profession. How dare you compare your artwork to Gauguin’s.”

  “I wasn’t. You’re misunderstanding. I could never—”

  “Why are you here?”

  “To see my father one last time.”

  “We both know that’s not true. How could you possibly care about a man you only saw a few times, decades ago and knew only perfunctorily? And why are you staying?”

  “I wanted to escape an existence where all that was pleasurable for me was found in the world of dreams, where waking thoughts were abhorrent and fear and panic would have con
sumed me. I wanted to embrace waking life instead of despising it—”

  “You are disgraceful, shameful, and egotistical; your phrases are vapid and recited far too often in your thoughts. Panic and guilt still consume you. You of all people should recognize this. You still focus too much on dreams, just as you do on booze, even though you profess a desire to escape from a need for them. You are a dreamer and a drinker. You lack morals. You have abandoned everything and everyone, not only your wife and daughter but everyone you have ever known and cared for. You have left them behind, and for what? All for this dusty old apartment and such taunting dreams as this? You must see yourself as you truly are by attempting to comprehend yourself as any other incompetent clinical psychologist might ... Indeed, you have disgraced art by your comparison, you have disgraced your profession by deeming yourself competent, and you have left your country, your family and friends, along with your former life that you claim to have transcended. You made the decision that killed your daughter....”

  “She’s not dead.”

  “Not yet.”

  There is silence. The face behind the voice produces itself with the sudden appearance of daylight, but when I awaken to a knock on the door, its identity is immediately forgotten.

  I am sweating beneath the thin sheet covering me. My eyes focus first on the fine mosquito netting around the bed. I jot down a few points, which I can later elucidate, in my dream journal. As my eyes adjust to the morning light, I look beyond the netting, out through the window and into the sea.

  There is another knock on the door. Startled, I stumble through the flaps of the netting and find myself standing abruptly upright.

  I walk to the door. The metal scrapes along the floor as I open it to reveal a young woman, slender and striking and wearing a worn flowered skirt and a faded brown top, her golden hair tied back to fully expose the chiseled features of her face. Her face, her fingers and her frame are gaunt, and she has a slight belly which protrudes from beneath her shirt. She has an attractive elegance about her, in spite of her somewhat tattered appearance. She is holding a large collection of paints and several brushes, along with my privacy sign.

  “Hola,” she says in a melodic tone, adding in English: “I came to invite you to a party.”

  She extends her hands toward me, offering me the paints and brushes, which I accept. “I found them on your doorstep.” Handing me the sign, she adds: “And I found this on your doorknob. Really, you needn’t bother with that. It’s often difficult to sleep around here, no matter what you do.”

  “These painting supplies must be from the Señora,” I say, aware that I am smiling now.

  “She does love to paint,” the woman says, also smiling. “So I’ve heard you’re Canadian. I’m from Winnipeg myself. And you’re from—”

  “Toronto.”

  “Oh. Are you a painter?” She looks behind me inquisitively, as if expecting to find a room full of sketches and paintings.

  “No,” I say, shaking my head.

  She looks disappointed. “So, you’ve come here for your father’s funeral,” she says. “I was sorry to hear that he died. He was sick for a long time.…” She sighs, pauses for a breath, and then adds: “And you’re staying here for a while, from what I understand, and under quite mysterious circumstances. No one seems to know why. You have no job, no ...” She stops. “But that’s okay. We’ll get to the bottom of that at my party. I’m Karen, incidentally. I live directly above you. The party is at my apartment this Friday, if you’re interested.”

  “I guess I won’t be able to sleep then,” I say, attempting to smile again, “so I’ll have no choice in the matter.”

  6

  I have often marveled at the richness of dreams and the poverty of life. In my dreams, lavish adornments of the mind can perceive conversations with those both living and deceased, and grant the capability to move through time to see either the initiation or the termination of the world. Those manifestations are unsullied except to be subjected to the unfortunate whims and illogic of your own subconscious mind, and are inescapably tainted by the mundane and sometimes tragic realities of human existence. While we are wonderfully able to recall Freud’s childhood “amnesia” in this dream world, to see the spinning of a cognitive web of our adult experiences and current knowledge suffused with these repressed childhood memories, we are invariably brought back into the cold light of practicality with each morning sun and with a few wretched pronouncements, such as the one made by my mother over the phone declaring that my father—with whom she would not let me live for a time as a child, saying that he cared for neither one of us—had died.

  As a clinical psychologist utilizing techniques of dream analysis, the concept of dreams as an escape from such realities, and eventually contending with these truths through dream interpretation, has always interested me. I have studied, in detail, Freud’s Austrian lectures—his relationship between manifest dreams (what is remembered) and latent (what is derived from the manifest dream after ‘free association’ analysis—what does this mean to you, quickly now, tell me, Freud might have said, using his understanding of substitution, allusion, imagery and symbolism to produce a dream meaning, the early Freud often interpreting a sexual one). I have learned the complicated theories of Jung, who was also interested in what the dream symbols mean to the dreamer in waking life. I understand Faraday’s three levels of dream analysis—looking outward for direct meaning, looking at the dreamer’s relation to symbols and settings, and looking inward by letting the symbols and settings speak for themselves. I also continuously study more contemporary viewpoints on the nature of dreams, but my attention always falls back to these three originators of dream analysis. And now, any attempt at escape from my reality through dreams is futile as I, along with the Señora, Inés and Yolanda, carry my father, who is wrapped in a shroud, and set him into the freshly-dug ground. We are all dressed in black, myself sweating in a black suede shirt and cotton pants, the Señora and her daughters in thin dresses that the Señora says she made herself. A few others, who are strangers to me, are lingering about.

  Looking down as flowers, then his bagpipes, and then dirt are cast over top of him, I find myself wanting to dig with my hands in the dirt to unravel the shroud so I can see his face for one final time, as if to confirm that it was indeed he who had died and that this event was not some heartless ruse initiated by my mother and perpetuated by the Señora and her daughters to keep me from thinking and talking about my father, who is, in fact, still alive and living in a different part of Ecuador—Salinas or Quito or Guayaquil—while another gringo with the same slim build and musculature and skin tone, barely visible through the shroud, is buried in his place. I regret my earlier foolishness in leaving him covered from head to toe as we all ate rice with chicken and ceviche around him.

  Despite the heartless and hypocritical ruse my father had perpetuated on me—promoting himself as a loving, caring father for the few times I was with him, and not the neglectful, abandoning, selfish man my mother and I knew him to be—I found that I could not help but love him. And seeing the dirt and the bagpipes and the flowers on top of him and the song of a chorus of birds in a nearby tree, the salt air and the cumulus clouds rolling over the ocean below us, I could also not help but feel a sense of awe and wonderment at what my father must have felt while standing here, over what would become his grave, in what the Señora pronounces as we walk away was his most beloved location in Manta, the place in which, with the view of the beach below, the prodigious backdrop of azure in the endless ocean and the infinite sky, he would play his bagpipes for hours with a few cervezas and a group of men who would gather here alongside him whenever they heard the air become laden with the heavy-set song of the sheepskin’s wailing, the song echoing and drowning out any and all birdsong and bequeathing the vastness of this space with what must have been, on the best of days, his closest earthly approximation to the
splendor of heaven.

  As we walk down the hill and past the marina and over to the apartments in silence, I cannot stop thinking that the abandonment he perpetuated on my mother and me was at least briefly eradicated from his memory in such moments when, just as when my father and I would spend countless hours at the parties on the beach, nothing else seemed to matter.…

  7

  There is a certain unmistakable beauty in this land. This is a land transfixed on family, close friendships, and living life as though tomorrow’s day might be the last. It is a land where it is easy to forget, where mothers kiss the bellies of babies they hold high above their heads, beside concrete homes with the glow of a single light bulb emanating from within; where, on this evening, the smooth melody of guitar and voice permeates the smooth hushing of the sea to the shore and the crackling of firewood. It is a land where an improvised dance floor has been created in the sand, where the shoes of young and old have been cast aside, where the smells of salt, lime, liquor, body sweat, and burning palm leaves infuse the air with an aura free from anxiety, free from tension and fear, and free from the worries of living.

  I awaken to see a crowd dissipating in the hallway outside Karen’s apartment, and I follow the party down to the beach. The flames of the fire seem to dance in rhythm with the music, just as the sea seems to. I sit down on the cold sand as Karen approaches me, her slim body outlined by her meagre dress and the light of the fire. In this light, she looks astonishingly like Yelena.

  “You are late,” she says. “You missed most of the party.”