The development of our relationship, slow but steady, led us to the verge of intimacy. Her virginity posed a threshold here, in a formal sense, although it wasn’t an emotional issue, nor did she contemplate the loss of her hymen in ethical terms. The problems fell into the domain of substantive family law: she worried what would happen if she got pregnant and she was only partly placated by my pledge that, in such a case, I would act in the most honourable of ways. It clearly would have meant more to her if we signed a pre-coital contract. Her father’s field of specialisation, Author’s Rights, would undoubtedly have been valuable here. But even if we reached an agreement that a particular act was to take place, there still remained the question of how. One of her parents and siblings (two brothers and a sister) was always at home; and we could forget about my place. So for two or three months, until the first experimental occasion, we merely theorised about sex.
In the meantime, I gained the right to be introduced to her parents. They received me cordially and inquired, smiling, about my family, and I smiled as I tweaked my replies. She said I left an impeccable impression of decency. Every visit, she played something for me on the piano, a Beethoven or Mozart sonata, pieces created so as to be reanimated by affable young ladies for as long as humanity endures, with tea served in art-déco porcelain brought in to us, sometimes with pastries and always with a kindly smile, by her exceptionally attractive mother with her barely perceptible limp.
Those were moments of unimaginable aesthetic bliss for me; occasions which the concealed connoisseur in me–my inner aesthete shackled in existential chains–had long awaited. She would place the stool at a precise distance, sit upright like a goddess, throw her hair back over her shoulders, exhale deeply as if freeing herself of everything which kept her earthbound, and inhale equally deeply, but no longer the air breathed by ordinary mortals. Wings would unfold above the keys, ready to carry her innocent soul heavenwards. Apart from the pleasing visual aspects of her throwing back her hair (her ear must have been crafted in a famous workshop because its like was not to be found in nature, and her alabaster neck was poorly chosen: how could one caress it without leaving greasy fingermarks?), it also brought fragrant waves of lavender, chamomile, mint and cinnamon. And then her two butterflies began a courting dance above the keys, fluttering and flirting around them, now bashfully, now full of the fervour of that magic dance, dizzyingly intricate and yet structured down to the very last movement.
Her mother always visited herself upon us at least once, but she never came in without knocking, so we were able to bridle our embraces on the couch. More than by inquisitorial motives, she was guided by boredom, wrapped in genuine sympathy for our relationship. There wasn’t a tad of housework for her to do because a cleaning lady came twice a week; her husband considered the flat nothing more than a bedroom; she’d completed her career as university lecturer, and after thirty years of theological research she’d clearly run out of undiscovered realms. She would come and sit with us and drift into evocations of her younger years, and a youthful glow would blossom on her already remarkably well-preserved face. Only when contemplating her face–that powerful defence argument of the most insidious of all mass murderers: time–did I recognise the full beauty of her daughter. She was one of those who don’t sparkle at first glance but reward your patience, and, what’s more, turn the years to their advantage. Before my eyes was revealed the resplendent beauty which maturity would sculpt and perfect in her features, and I sensed already that it would sweeten my old age. There were moments when that almost seemed possible–entirely possible.
I could see myself start up as a court interpreter for German in the annexe of her father’s law firm, and over time I would build up a translation agency for all fields and all major languages. Our wedding present would be a thirty-seven square-metre city apartment; we would exchange it for one twice the size and pay off the difference in sixty-eight monthly instalments. My tasks would be unpacking the dishwasher, picking up our daughters from kindergarten and doing the fortnightly household shopping at one of the malls. When our elder daughter enrolled in Design we would buy her a one-room flat from our savings, although a good part had been spent in vain on operations in Switzerland when the younger inexplicably lost her sight. We would enjoy inviting friends over for dinner; I would take over the cooking on those occasions, reproducing the creations of master chefs from the luxurious volumes assembled on a separate bookshelf. My dear wife would depart when I was seventy-four, but we would be reunited forever, three springs later, in a silent, ivy-clad vault at the Mirogoj Cemetery.
Realistically speaking, it was about as possible as Gregor Samsa truly turning into a giant beetle.
But it was all present back then, albeit embryonically. It seemed quaint and optional, a safe distance away; it felt like a film which, however moving, monumental and timeless, ultimately comes to the credits. And the scenario grew and developed, fitting itself to my body with terrifying speed and feeling ever more at home there, until it finally took over and merged with everything around; the scene became ever more exotic, bathed in a different light.
Once it reached full maturity it never left me again. It only changed faces, adding new countenances as variations of ones already seen, yet mainly just duplicating old ones with manic repetitiveness.
I imagined myself standing naked to the waist in front of the wardrobe where I’d already been hovering for fifteen minutes. I’d got my trousers on somehow but then just stood staring at all the other clothing, unable to make a decision, powerless to even move, let alone go out into the street. I was disgusted by my increasingly hideous and stubbly face, my socks which had started to stink on my feet and the snotty handkerchief lying on the floor for days, but changing any of those things demanded too much effort. I couldn’t focus on a single word when a colleague at work announced that his father had died, I camouflaged myself with a pained face and shocked silence and put my hand on his shoulder. And another one, this time over the phone, explained why his wife had needed a hysterectomy, while I leafed through the magazine which Peugeot Croatia used to send me as an owner of one of their products. I replaced the receiver and immersed myself in the editorial by Jean-Claude Fontas, the general director, who was happy to greet us again and glad that our numbers had swollen; he hoped the summer had been fruitful for us all. The article was headed by a photograph, and Jean-Claude Fontas evidently knew what happiness was: his cheeks were clean-shaven, his teeth very white and his watch of solid gold. I remembered feeling something like happiness or, to tone it down a bit, excitement, at the smell of the new car purchased on credit, when I opened the door and carefully sat on the plastic-wrapped seats. I’d never seriously thought about suicide because it presupposed a degree of bravery and, ultimately, initiative. But there I was, in the middle of the night on the top-floor balcony, begging that God existed so he could at least crush me to smithereens on the spot or whisk me away to another world. And now I am faced with yet another spring, another winter, another load of washing to be hung on the line. Which sight is less unbearable: crows on the winter skeletons of trees, or the vernal euphoria of budding? Why does blooming magnolia just remind me of vomiting?
And so you’re not 23 any more, but 28, and you can hardly tell the difference between the numbers; or maybe you’re thirty-eight, you can’t remember; there’s nothing worth remembering in those fifteen years, but at the same time they’re sadistically full, and you’re sinking and suffocating in those memories, all stale, dead and foreign; you shovel away at that muck day after day, digging to exhaustion, hoping in vain to catch sight of something new, something different, something of your own; you watch to see songbirds migrating from the south, but more and more crows arrive instead like morbid Christmas decorations which hang from the branches like faeces, like corpses thrown up by the sea after an eschatological earthquake in Southern Asia; ah, that would be the only relief–if everything was flattened, but there are no earthquakes here, only minor faults and br
eakdowns of the TV set, kettle or boiler; you don’t know how to fix those things and yet you don’t call the repair man but simply try to live with the situation; you don’t go out onto the balcony because a thrush decided to die there, with its little legs erect as if in prayer; you take this as a sign from heaven, a message addressed to you personally; you take everything personally as if everything has been arranged precisely so as to increase your suffering; your self-pity has walled you in with ramparts, beyond which nothing exists, and what’s really sickening is that you’ve become fond of them, you won’t do anything to breach those walls even though the whole world hurts wherever you touch it; you’re sick of your own egocentrism but you’ve learnt to live with it; your only fear is that people might see through the charade, so you look them in the eyes to see if they’ve noticed and if you can glimpse a message; you feel like going up to strangers in the street and asking them how they manage to get where they’re going and how they’re able to take another step; you even want to ask a tree how on earth it manages to stand tall for so many years; you’re afraid to open your mouth at the post office or the butcher’s in case something monstrous slips out, or you burst into tears because anything can make you cry or throw up: the massacre which time has inflicted on a face you haven’t seen since primary school, the smile a child in a passing stroller throws your way, the leaf which has dropped from a branch to lie silently beside its fallen brothers, the fatigue of thinking about all those leaves which grow on the branches only ultimately to fall, the dust relentlessly accumulating, the books perfidiously pressing down from their shelves in mute sarcasm; it’s too hard to even try and remember anything written in those books, and a colossal weariness weighs down on your shoulders; there’s more writing here on the desk, five hundred pages which need proof-reading so that the next five hundred can be done, and so that five hundred books later you can take over the editing desk and send hundreds of equally futile texts to the proof-reader; the author was born in 1963, or 1955, and you want to call him and congratulate him on his perseverance, on the fact that he still puts lines down on paper; you’d like to go and see him at that very moment and ask him how he manages to stay alive; and here we are now in a traffic jam, almost alive, squeezed from one set of traffic lights to the next in the pouring rain, autumn and spring; now we’re not moving at all but each sitting here to the swish-wish of our windscreen wipers, it feels good like this, and miracles do happen sometimes, so maybe the rain will decide never to stop and we’ll stay sitting in our cars until they rust and rot, and our bodies along with them.
Yet our relationship lasted almost two years. That is so phenomenal that I have to write it again: almost two years. That’s more than six hundred days and dozens of visits to the cinema. Her favourite genre was romantic comedy, with sweet music and a happy end, if possible with a peroxide-blonded Edward Norton (the very notion!) in the role of a priest who after perilous introspection only just manages to tear himself away from the temptation of infatuation. It also meant a hundred sittings in cafés and a hundred teas with her mother. However much she tried to look elsewhere, her gaze landed sooner or later on my dark complexion, hair and eyes, and her overall sympathy couldn’t conceal her anxiety at my possible marital intentions towards her daughter.
Moreover, there were flashes of a corresponding message, elaborate but articulated with the precision of a cut diamond and tuned to the frequency of my most intimate receptors: firstly, that the cosmetic allures with which I held her daughter spellbound in no way altered my untouchability, my belonging to those who are only likeable up to the doorstep; secondly, that I was only seeing her daughter thanks to her heroic maternal magnanimity; thirdly, that I should be under no illusion that my success at enchantment, coupled with her magnanimity, could be anything other than temporary; and fourthly, that I was expected to make amends for transgression and theft by making myself scarce pronto.
What a fitting word, temporary, so quintessential. Early on, I developed a sensitivity for that aspect of existence, temporariness, to such a degree that everything constituting it started to appear exclusively in the light of temporariness. I had ever greater difficulty seeing myself as anything imbued with power of duration. That doesn’t mean that I had apocalyptic visions or that I was at all worried about the future of humanity or the local community. It just became unlikely that it would also encompass me or that anything more long-term than tomorrow could affect me. I know how that sounds, but that’s how I felt.
And yet after every afternoon tea there was always another, and another. Sooner or later, as if by coincidence, the conversation intersected the ellipse of my father, and there it foundered; it was becoming ever harder to keep him indefinitely dead. So I had to come out with it.
‘Bone cancer has the nasty reputation of being one of the most painful ways to die. My father needed exceptionally long. He was penniless and had a strong will to live, so he refused morphine and fought to the last moment, with unimaginable screams. I’d just started school,’ I explained.
That certainly got rid of him as far as further questions were concerned, but at some stage I had to bring Mother into it too. Luckily, this was after Mother had given up smoking once and for all–so radically that she missed no occasion to rail against tobacco–and this certainly fell on grateful ears. Unfortunately, more or less simultaneously with the last cigarette, the Holy Ghost fizzled out for her, and in this respect, too, she swung to the opposite extreme.
I must say, my prospective mother-in-law held out well until the very end of afternoon tea, nibbling her lip when necessary. And as they were seeing me out, after she’d evoked God’s will and God’s help in health and life in general for the umpteenth time, my mother spoke through me in a gentle voice.
‘You know, God our Creator only helped himself by having himself crucified, and He’d admit it if he had a smidgen of self-criticism. But that was long, long ago,’ she said in absentia.
And with that my mother waxed lyrical, although no one had asked for it; the faces of the two listeners showed the damage inflicted by every word like a taximeter as Mother, through me as a medium, presented her vision of longevity together with her programmed bonus track:
‘Of course nothing comes after death, there’s no doubt about that. But perhaps at least the young will live to see fairer times–’ my virtual mother nodded to me and my girlfriend, and a ray of optimism lit up her face, ‘an age where the organisation of life will be taken over by science and everyone be given an equal allotment of years; fifty or a hundred, that can be laid down later. Everyone will know in advance how long they have and will be able to plan their life and arrange things nicely, and when their time comes they can go in peace, not like us who spend our lives in fear and trepidation of being taken away while still in our prime, or of lingering on as a burden to others when we’ve turned into a caricature of ourselves, an insult to what we once were.’
Undoubtedly there was noble-mindedness in that thought, but it was too ambitious for the audience. In that way the topic of Mother was ticked off.
And so, in spite of everything, it lasted two years. That also meant two summer holidays in the family’s beach house. Right by the sea, secluded, surrounded by luxuriant Mediterranean vegetation. Everything seemed to have been made and aesthetically maintained just for the two of us, down to the fireplace clad with ornamental stone and the intimate little beach by the house, triangular and fashioned with dry stone walls to the shape of a pubis. Here we were like the first people on Earth, or the only ones left after the justified annihilation of the species, and now responsible for begetting another.
Here we finally devoted ourselves to discovering physical love. Although we’d often spoken about the occasion, you couldn’t say we were all revved up and ready to go. My sole previous experience had not whetted my appetite, and she considered self-restraint a virtue. But that only brought us closer: we both saw sexuality as a part of us which doubtlessly existed but was located somewhere on the
periphery, in an indefinite dimension, like the overseas relatives with whom you maintain purely epistolary contact; the discovery was all the more delectable.
The first time, she got undressed and waited for me to grope her in the dark. She didn’t hold back her surprise at what my hands discovered in her body; an Oh, how lovely escaped from her when I penetrated her forest of sighs and the spurt of pent-up juices. Liberated, her body rushed to make up for all the years of inattention, giving itself blindly, faster than craving demanded. There were amazing smells in her: bottled up to ripeness and fermentation, they now gushed and flooded, lifting us up on a foaming tide and roaring past, too fast to be given a name. We collected ourselves and then started riding that wave once more, and then over and over again, tirelessly, diving ever deeper, exploring fibre after fibre of flesh.
We spent the rest of the time on the beach, each with their own book, reading each other significant passages and finding identical feelings in them, which in those three weeks of utmost devotion constantly revolved around our communicating vessels. Our mutual devotion didn’t abate, nor did it permit anything or anyone else in that environment. Once we were disturbed by a few foreigners, whose discretion didn’t mitigate the affront caused by their presence on the beach. I cast them a caustic glance to show what we thought, and it proved effective.
Our lovestruckness deepened by the day and was reflected all around: in the astral blue of her eyes, in the silvered sea, in the cricket chorus in the cypresses. We loved the same hues of dusk and dawn, the same shapes of pebbles, the same fruit, the same herbs and spices, the same sorts of fish, be they roasted or salted. We were equally insatiable of one another. We only gave in to sleep when we were completely exhausted, impatient to feast our eyes on each other again. My gaze constantly sought her and she rewarded it abundantly. Everything in us and around us was a joy for the senses, unimpaired by the slightest squabble–unless it be the rivalry of who would do the washing up or surprise the other with something tasty from the bakery. All was serenity and grace: her talent for marvelling at the moon, or a melon, Oh how marvellous, oh how cute; her voice, falsetto like a girl’s, and old classroom anecdotes and stories of school excursions, retold time after time, with comments equally rooted in her childhood; her passion for euphemisms and diminutives; her multiple extended phone calls to her mother every day to thoroughly discuss the weather, our food and her dreams, and all this in limitless mutual joy, full of My mouse and my darling, full of sympathy for others’ colds and gastric distress, Oh you poor dears, oh the poor thing, and with a complex farewell ritual at the end of each call, Cheerio then, speak to you again soon, I’ll tell you how it all goes, bye-bye, ciao ciao, kiss kiss, night-night darling, and take care, thanks, you too, I love you, and say hello to him for me, which after extending the conversation to two or three forgotten topics was usually all repeated.
A Handful of Sand Page 7