by Mario Sabino
‘For the dead.’
‘Spiritual assistance for the dead. Didn’t anyone find this nonsense suspicious?’
‘It’s not nonsense. He prayed for the salvation of Augusto and his wife. It was quite touching.’
‘Kiki, can’t you see that Farfarello probably helped Hemistich kill them?’
‘They wouldn’t kill anyone, Antonym. The police conducted a thorough investigation. They took statements from everyone, examined the crime scene, and concluded that it was a homicide followed by a suicide.’
‘And was the crime scene the room behind that door?’
‘Everything seems to point to it.’
‘Did the police take a statement from Farfarello?’
‘No, because he wasn’t one of the guests. He wasn’t there when it all happened. I mean …’
‘You mean in spite of all their care, it was possible to trick the police.’
‘I didn’t trick anyone. The detective didn’t ask me anything about a priest.’
‘Did he ask you where you were at the time of the deaths?’
‘He did, and I told him I was in the wood next to the house with the guys who’d chased me — which they confirmed without me even asking. I didn’t want any hassles. Not with the police, or Hemistich.’
‘So you lied to the police.’
‘I lied a little, so what?’
‘So, just as you lied to the police, you might be lying to me.’
‘Where are you going with this?’
‘How do I know you didn’t take part in the crime?’
‘You’re crazy!’
‘How do I know you didn’t see the crime?’
‘I swear I didn’t see it, and I didn’t do anything. I’ve told you the whole truth. And now you have to swear again that you won’t tell anyone anything. Do you swear?’
‘I’ve already sworn.’
‘Swear again.’
XI
It was already dawn when Antonym parked his car near the beach he used to go to when he was first married. He walked a hundred metres along a narrow path down to the sand. Perfume from the flowers leaning over the walls of the houses was gradually replaced with the smell of the sea air that hinted at the infinite horizon. Gazing at the sea as it recovered its blue hues in the morning light, Antonym was hoping to recover something as well — something of his own essence. But it wasn’t long before this hope evaporated. For a few minutes he watched the birth and death of the waves, noticing those that interrupted their brief existence on the rocks, and scrutinised the hills framing the small bay. Nothing. Then a poem that Eugenio Montale had dedicated to the Mediterranean came into his head:
Antico, sono ubriacato dalla voce
che esce dalle tue bocche quando si schiudono
come verdi campane e si ributtano
indietro e si disciolgono.
La casa delle mie estati lontane
t’era accanto, lo sai,
là nel paese dove il sole cuoce
e annuvolano l’aria le zanzare.
Come allora oggi in tua presenza impietro,
mare, ma non più degno
mi credo del solenne ammonimento
del tuo respiro. Tu m’hai detto primo
che il piccino fermento
del mio cuore non era che un momento
del tuo; che mi era in fondo
la tua legge rischiosa: esser vasto e diverso
e insieme fisso:
e svuotarmi così d’ogni lordura
come tu fai che sbatti sulle sponde
tra sugheri alghe asterie
le inutili macerie del tuo abisso.*
[* I’m drunk with that voice, archaic sea / pouring from your mouths when they gape / like green bells and are shocked / back and dissolved. / The house of my distant summers, / as you know, belonged to you / there in that country of scorching suns / and low air fogged with midges. / Stunned now, as I once was, in your presence / I no longer believe myself worth / the solemn exhortation of your breath. / It was you who first taught me / my heart’s puny tumult / was only a moment of yours —/ that at bottom I kept your hazardous / law: to be vast and various / yet steady: / and so to purge myself of rubbish / as you do, hurling on the beaches / among starfish corks seaweed / the waste of your abyss. (‘Antico’, English translation by Sonia Raiziss and Alfredo de Palchi, Selected Poems, New Directions, 1975.)]
Antonym recited the poem to himself. Ten years before, it had moved him. Now, it was like repeating a shopping list. Montale was still grand, but he, Antonym, had lost his connection with poetry. Perhaps because poetry, deep down, is a highly personal experience, of which one can only grasp the surface at best. And this surface ended up losing its meaning, like a postcard landscape admired to exhaustion. Antonym stared at the sea, but didn’t see anything beyond the vulgar beauty that so charmed tourists. A wry smile spread across his face; attributing transcendence to it all seemed pathetically trite. Maybe Montale was just an idiot, trying to give meaning to that which had none. Maybe there was no depth whatsoever in poetry and it was just surface.
Now he was numb. ‘Il mare è di tutti quelli che lo stanno ad ascoltare,’ ‘Il mare è di …’ Who’d said that? The Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga, perhaps … Yes, it was Verga. Why he had once read Verga he could no longer fathom. Verga’s Aci Trezza, where Ulysses had visited, seemed so far away … Now Ulysses was a man with somewhere to return to. The world is less threatening when you have somewhere to return to, or was it the opposite? And this question … How many useless questions do we ask ourselves in the course of a lifetime? Was this a measure of our own utter insignificance? Maybe he should staple his fingers, as Hemistich had done, to at least feel pain — in the hope that waiting for the pain to cease would give meaning, even if only ephemeral, to some minuscule fleck of his existence. The meaning of life: how many jokes had been made about such nonsense? But was it really nonsense? Maybe he should have a child (Bernadette was having one, wasn’t she?) to resuscitate some kind of emotion. But what woman would want to bear his child? Antonym laughed again. A child … Not even with Bernadette. He’d been lying when he proposed they have one, and deep down Bernadette knew it. A child who was a failure or who outshone him — either outcome would be unbearable.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe he should kill himself, as Augusto had done. It wasn’t the first time he’d considered suicide, but the truth was that he’d never felt his existence was tragic enough to take this path of no return. Not even now, come to think of it. One had to take oneself really seriously, which he was incapable of doing — although, granted, he didn’t like the idea of being supplanted or disappointed by a child. Even in his moments of desperation, he often allowed himself to drift into banal thoughts. Was he less human because of it? Or more human? After all, wasn’t being human contenting oneself with surface? There was surface again. The problem was that he was unable to be entirely superficial or entirely profound. Augusto hadn’t struck him as terribly profound either, although he had left that poem. But if poetry is surface …
Augusto … He kept brooding over the story that Kiki had told him the night before, but it was impossible to know for sure in what way Hemistich and Farfarello had been involved in it. Might they have helped Augusto murder his wife, and then killed him? Had they been Augusto’s accomplices, and then watched him commit suicide? Did they simply witness the deaths, without interfering? Even in this last case, they wouldn’t be free of guilt; they’d be accessories. The only way to find out would be to ask Hemistich, but Antonym was less afraid of the answer than of the consequences of doing this. No matter what the answer, it would connect him to the fact and, by extension, to Hemistich.
Antonym gazed at a tree trunk, dirty with tar, that had been carried onto the sand by the sea. ‘Le inutili macerie del tuo abisso …’ He was seized by the idea that he himself was good for nothing
— just excrement in an ocean of other worthless existences. What had he done with his life to this point? Nothing. He hadn’t been able to love those who loved him (and there had been so few!), and he hadn’t produced anything of relevance in anything he’d turned his hand to (except in the opinion of Kiki and her backpacking ex-boyfriend — but Kiki and her crowd were a load of rubbish, too). What kind of epitaph would excrement like he have? Gazing at the seascape — which was, in itself, an invitation to live — he tried to come up with a phrase that, on his death, would sum up his idiotic existence. And at that moment he fancied he heard a voice, mingling with the sea breeze, whispering in his ear: Here lies he who died without ever having been.
Died without ever having been. But having been what? And then a light came on in Antonym’s mind. Without ever having been a man of spirit. Yes, that was what he wanted to be: a man who, through personal enterprise, would help change the fate of the world. This ambition was what was stopping him from being ‘a normal man’, as Bernadette liked to say. The fact that he hadn’t fulfilled it had often led him to feel dead or that he could be approaching death — perhaps even at the hand of Bernadette, who wanted him to be ‘normal’. Ever since he’d been a child, Antonym had felt different, special, but without ever lighting upon what it was that made him special. All those moments of anxiety that had punctuated his life, all those empty afternoons munching on biscuits, all those idiotic articles. They were symptoms not of his vacuity, as he had always thought, but of anticipation.
Antonym took a deep breath, his eyes closed. ‘Ubriacato dalla voce che esce dalle tue bocche quando si schiudono come verdi campane e si ributtano indietro e si disciolgono.’ No, poetry wasn’t just surface — not to one who decided to make his own life poetry. Yes, that was what he had to do: give his existence a poetic dimension. Brutally poetic. All great men had done this somehow — the good ones and the bad ones. But what is Good and what is Evil? If God couldn’t exist without Evil, if Evil was also a part of the divine plan, then … Then, that was it! One couldn’t judge men of spirit, because all of them were fulfilling God’s designs. What did it matter if, in the lines they composed, a few worthless little lives were lost along the way? It was the big picture that mattered. The big picture!
He could no longer condemn Hemistich and Farfarello. They were obviously partners in an undertaking with a higher objective. Yes, that was it: a new religion! A religion that celebrated the senses as the only way to understand the world … Life and Death … Augusto. Hemistich had said that Augusto had acted on his own impulse: ‘The purest expression of the senses.’ No, there was no flippancy in this remark. Hemistich and Farfarello had witnessed the deaths of Augusto and his wife. No one was that flippant. Perhaps they were true men of spirit, the founders of a new way. A way that contained a dash of Evil, certainly. But, since Evil was a part of the divine design, there always had to be someone to do the dirty work. And if this fate — doing the dirty work essential to the divine plan — was born of human free will, he who stepped forward to play the part had to be considered by God to be a special child. A child who loved Him so much he was willing to relinquish the advantages of Good; who was willing to face limbo, hell, or whatever else, so that God could bask in glory. Evil was thus a parallel highway to the highway of Good — and both met in infinity. The infinity that was God!
A religion of the senses that led to total knowledge. Was he, Antonym, prepared to be an apostle? Obviously, this was what Hemistich was going to propose to him. He and Farfarello had drawn him in because they had sensed the potential in him. They regarded him as a man of spirit, which in some ways he had always felt himself to be, though he had never admitted it to himself until then. No, he wouldn’t die without ever having been. No, he …
What nonsense to imagine he was any different to that tree trunk smeared with tar that the sea had deposited on the sand! How naive, how presumptuous!
Antonym watched a solitary seagull flying in imperfect circles over the ocean. He was also alone, also flying in imperfect circles. But soon his face lit up. Presumption and naivety: weren’t these also the attributes of a man of spirit? Many great men had been ridiculed early on in their careers for seeming overly ambitious and out of touch with reality. What if ‘realistic’ was just a euphemism for the weak, for those devoid of spirit?
Antonym realised, then, which God he had begun to believe in since his life had entered this jumble of events and thoughts. It was the God who had given him, Antonym, the capacity to stand out from the flock. It was the God who had taken him far beyond Good and Evil. It was the Entity who had created the Universe — the genesis of all presumption and all naivety — and had thus become God. ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will reject. Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar?’ Now he understood the real meaning of those words.
And this was how God appeared to Antonym, and Antonym appeared as God before God. Terrible events were to follow henceforth.
Part Two
–12–
I was hoping you’d say something immediately after the last reading session, but you left without saying a thing. I take it you didn’t like it … I can understand what you mean when you say it’s a disturbing book. I stopped writing it shortly before I killed my father, when I was swept up in the events that led me to commit patricide. What … ? That’s not true. I wasn’t emulating my characters when I eliminated my father … I’m sorry, but that kind of comment is uncalled for … No, I don’t want to hear it … What? What idiotic manual gave you the idea that using the word ‘eliminate’ is typical of those who premeditate murder in cold blood? I give you the most precious thing I have, and this is how you reward me. More than an attempt at writing literature, my unfinished book is a concrete representation of my interrupted life, and this is why it is of inestimable value to me. It’s confirmation that I’ve managed to become the protagonist of my own story. I decided to kill my father, I decided to stop writing my book, I decided …
No, it’s not true that it might have been my only option. I could have gone on living as if nothing had happened. But in choosing the path I did, I put a full stop to everything. Do you see? I imposed my will on everyone. Even you, who had nothing to do with this whole story, but who is now living and breathing it and will remember it until the day you die … Yes, I did kill my father, as one breathes — but that illustrates how resolute I was in my decision rather than the lack of an alternative. It was a conscious move — lucid, rational even; the adjective doesn’t matter. I couldn’t care less that people think I’m crazy, or that I’m here, in this place, because doctors and judges have declared me insane. I’m not crazy, do you hear me? I’m not crazy.
Isn’t it clear to you why I killed my father? Then I have no illumination to offer. Only darkness.
I had dearly hoped for an unbiased appreciation of my book, and now you come along with these … You’ve cheapened me, and what I wrote, by drawing easy, mechanical parallels. I didn’t expect such stupidity from you. Please, leave, and never come back.
–13–
It’s been ten days since we last saw each other — long enough for me to calm down and come to the conclusion that I owe you an apology. Can you forgive me?
You see, I was fantasising about seducing you with my book. After all, that’s what books are really for — to seduce. But you, it seems, were not seduced. You wanted to read meanings into it that … Come on, say it. Why do you think I emulated my characters? In other words, that the book anticipates my patricide? You think ‘anticipates’ is too strong a term? Then use another. ‘Is connected to’, perhaps.
The Brothers Karamazov is the story of a patricide. So what? The fact that I mention it doesn’t mean I intended to kill my father; it’s just that it deals with some of my philosophical and religious concerns — because it debates the existence of God … Coincidence? Yes. Can you allow me the right
to coincidences, or is that asking too much?
How curious … Did I tell you this at the beginning of our conversation? That after killing my father as one breathes, I leaned the piece of wood against the back of the couch, as if it were a ritualistic object? I’d forgotten that detail. It’s true … for Hemistich and Farfarello, Augusto’s death also had something ritualistic about it. Yes, Antonym would have turned out like them. Do you know what else? Contrary to what I first thought, I now believe that you were seduced by my book — even more than I’d hoped. I bet you haven’t thought about anything else this whole time. I, at least, have only thought about you.
I apologise again. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong — it’s just that you’ve become my only connection with … I don’t know what. I was going to say ‘the outside world’, but that’s not true. You don’t bring in anything from the outside. Our only topic is me, my history, what I did. But, in a way, you are the outside world — a piece of it. You’re another voice, at least. I haven’t heard another voice for days, not even my own. It’s my isolation. I don’t have anyone else — just you. And I’ll lose you when our conversation is over. You’ll never come back, I know … Don’t make a promise you can’t keep. I hate it when people feel sorry for me. I’m a murderer, a parricide. I don’t deserve pity, nor do I want it.
Reading the book — your reading of the book, that is — has unsettled me. You read it with so much interest. I’m no longer sure if I’m happy it’s not finished. Your vivid interest — I could tell from the way you read it — planted a seed of doubt in my mind. And I don’t need this uncertainty, do you hear, because not even a parricide deserves to be tortured like this … What uncertainty? That maybe I had no other option. No, I can’t think about it. I need to breathe a little, I need to breathe … The dizziness, oh dear, the dizziness is back …
–14–