I did the mountain of washing up. I asked why Vera hadn’t come, the woman who occasionally did the cleaning. He’d forgotten to call her. It was the same with flushing the toilet, he forgets that too, and he forgets to change his underwear before it goes mouldy. He hadn’t forgotten to turn off the radiators. Every visit, I turn them on, but in vain: the next time I find the house as cold as a cave again. In the cold it’s easier for him to revel in how rotten he feels.
I changed the bedlinen. He’d managed to soil it too, with patches of different colours, and there were crumbs of food as well. Here he trains hard for the final, and that makes him famished. As soon as he forgets it, he loses his appetite and remembers to start groaning again. When his last moment comes, bringing ultimate relief and salvation, he’ll want to put it off for a minute so he can groan just a little more. Best of all to spectators, because otherwise it’s not worth it. I must admit I’m a poor audience–I neither clap nor cry. But talk about faithful! I’ve watched the same performance year in, year out without protest.
Then again, what medical or legal authority can certify the legitimacy of suffering and the line beyond which its reality ceases? What person can undo what they see as the only reality: that everything is dead, along with them? How naive it was of me to hope that he would at least occasionally look up and be different, that he could snap out of it for a moment just to satisfy me, out of possible love for his child.
I asked him how his eyes were. I could tell he was having trouble with them. The cataracts were advancing like a blitzkrieg. But he wouldn’t hear of an operation. How enthusiastic he’d once been about medicine–the human body had interested him as much as humans’ buildings. His vocation had been to plan the uprightness of concrete structures, but his amateur passion was now learning how to demolish the architecture of the body. He liked to demonstrate his knowledge of the diseases of every organ with the zeal of an unrealised lecturer. If you inform yourself well about the enemy, they’ll withdraw in fear. As far as the brain was concerned, he believed there were no areas inaccessible to another brain–that you could see it like a ground plan and redesign it with a skilful pencil.
I remember the photograph he procured for me of lungs eaten away by cancer: lifesize and in colour. That was after the educational episode with the fisticuff lesson in sexual medicine for under-age girls. The result was perhaps a little disappointing for him: I didn’t beg for absolution but lit up a cigarette in front of him the next day. Although that was a clear opportunity for him to teach me another lesson by the same method, instead he decided to get terribly offended at me razing his didactic edifice to the ground. He didn’t speak to me for three days, but then he found a way of converting me–with that photograph. Lovely! I had it framed and hung it over my bed. There’s nothing like certitude. How practical it is to know what you’re going to die of rather than to live in fear of everything that can endanger your life. Until then I’d only smoked a few cigarettes and had to force myself. But now smoking took on a higher purpose and I decided to overcome my aversion. Before the end of year eight I was on a packet a day, and soon I was fuming a lot more.
Father took my upbringing rather personally. He considered me one of his projects, just as important, in fact, as those which he submitted for national awards and sometimes won. He had his certificates framed and hung them by the glass showcase in the living room. When the educational moment arrived, he would sit me on his knee; later I sat beside him almost as his equal. He would clear his throat and proceed to lecture me, in a solemn voice, about making use of one’s life, not forgetting to cite himself as an example. The vocabulary evolved together with my ability to assimilate it, but was based on the same essential truths unchanged since my pre-school days: life passes tragically fast and you need to seize it by the reins, he told me. You have to be able to appreciate that gift and fill it with meaning through your own work. You have to give your utmost because only the diligent survive. You need to have a clear goal in front of you, go straight into its embrace, and you have to do this and have to do that. These guiding thoughts were supposed to settle and form firm foundations in me. He wanted them to continually fascinate me, so he periodically refreshed them, even in the days when my schoolfriends and I would air our heads with glue in plastic bags after class, or on the eve of the holidays.
That one time he replaced his lecture with a beating, the result was indeed enormous. I made a firm decision that it wouldn’t happen again. And more broadly, that I wasn’t going to take shit from anyone any more.
He never mentioned my sexual rights again. Of course, I kept seeing the boy I lost my virginity with. How quaint that sounds. I lost it, and in return I gained lifelong guilt, having betrayed paternal love with my genitals. Your virginity is gone and now for the rest of your life you bear the brand of that moral fall and the obligation to redeem yourself in the eyes of your father and all their surrogates. Every love takes you a step further away from your father’s. All your loves will be but a surrogate for the one you kill first, so they say. The only attainable ones are those painfully reminiscent of the unquenchable yearning for love, paler and ever paler copies of the original no one has ever seen. There’s no love comparable with what we owe our Creator. That debt is carried on from generation to generation, with interest. Since its original creation, the principal has grown at a bewildering rate. It’s immeasurable. Invisible to the simpleton’s eye! It can’t see the tree of love, on which it is only a bud, for the wood of vulgarity all around. It doesn’t perceive the vertical of the tree, which extends to the very heart of love, to the heavenly superfather who created us all in the image of His own narcissism so long ago that He’s long since forgotten it.
My first proper boyfriend and I saw each other for months before we first had sex, and who knows how long it would have been if I hadn’t insisted. He had some problem with it, as if the Inquisition was looming over him. As if he would maim and mutilate me by picking my flower. His considerateness was as noble as it was quixotic, incongruous with the rest of his personality, and I loved him all the more for it. But it disappeared once we’d crossed the Rubicon: we’d tear off our clothes as soon as we got to his place.
I was fourteen, he twenty-six. The day we met, I was dancing and he hung around the bar smiling ironically, his eyes glued to me. He seemed to have found something interesting enough for him in the desolation and now didn’t feel like looking at anything else, but without being intrusive, as if that sight was all he needed. If I’d left, he probably would have just stayed there smiling and observing the space I’d occupied. That’s what he was like. I went up to him and asked what exactly he wanted. An absolutely banal question, and he choked on the smoke and just said yeah, it’s great. All the words we exchanged were like that: fateful in their format, more dramatic than life, but devoid of sense from the very beginning. The world consisted exclusively of deep dilemmas and reasons for crying, but we scoffed at them all.
Ever since childhood he’d reaped the rewards of his parents’ divorce. His mother went abroad on the wings of her artistic career, while his father was tied down by managerial responsibilities and his new family. They atoned for this in the most sincere way possible–with money. They trounced their guilty conscience with combined forces when he finished school: he was given a flat and a comfortable student’s allowance. He enrolled at the Academy, majoring in graphics, and for the first few years he really did study. But over time he stayed away ever more assiduously. He didn’t have anything against the place, nor was he disappointed or embittered. He’d simply lost the reason to gain a degree, build a career and show his pictures. When I met him he’d stopped trying to uphold the illusion of studying in the eyes of his sponsors. He waited patiently for them to cap the resources, without the slightest concern for the consequences.
That doesn’t mean he gave up painting. On the contrary, he just shifted entirely to his inner reaches. He had a smile like a Cheshire cat for the outer world, as good-natured as it
was empty. Countless times, I had to repeat the words I addressed to him so they would sink in, and he needed a long time to build up an answer; you could see in his eyes that he was coming from afar. He could be very gentle and always spoke with a smile or a little laugh, but in his moments of silence he left me and disengaged completely. Several hours could pass and he would never be the first to speak. He would just sit next to me, clumsy and too big for his clothes: he was so tall that he jutted out of every garment he tried to fit into. And although I felt how much my presence meant to him, he was never able to focus on it for long.
I loved to watch him paint, especially his arms and hands. They were whiter than a sheet, his fingers long beyond measure and bent at the ends, and his veins stood out so much that they looked like they’d been stuck onto his skin from the outside. His hands belonged to the rest of the body only in theory. It remained numb, as if deflated, and he hardly seemed to breathe. But his agile hands, in the grip of their own fever, would raise a new world from the void, one uncharted, unpredictable to the very end, boundless and dizzyingly intricate. He most liked sitting on the floor with his splotchy legs, in just his underpants. Stuck in the corner of his mouth and immediately forgotten, his cigarettes burned away one after another and the ash fell in clumps onto the canvas. He would nonchalantly brush it to the floor with the back of his hand or just paint over it if he was working with oils.
There were always remnants of food on the floor: fruit, chocolate, cheese, things that didn’t require more than unwrapping. He kept almost all his belongings on the floor, too. The only furniture he owned were two foam-rubber cubes, which his piles of clothes prevented from functioning as chairs. He washed his clothes by hand, in the washbasin, and not particularly often. He always bought only the cheapest of clothes and sometimes threw them out when they got dirty. Fleecy balls of dust lay in every corner. He never cleaned the flat but from time to time did a big tidy-up, at intervals of a few weeks or months. All small objects then ended up in the rubbish container, including his current favourite cassettes which he played from morning till night while painting. And books, whether he’d read them or not: sometimes he browsed in bookshops, and if books made a positive impression he’d steal them, although usually he didn’t even touch them again afterwards. And his pictures too, whether he’d finished them or not. He painted very fast, without hesitation or correction, as if following the moves an invisible hand made to guide his, as if they were already traced on the canvas and he just needed to bring them to life. But sometimes he broke off in the middle of it–they weren’t going anywhere, he said. He put them aside with the others, standing stacked against the wall, and only took them out to the container when he decided they were taking up too much space.
Each painting evolved over several days. He kept going back and adding to it, even when it seemed not to need a single brush stroke more. Whatever technique he’d started with, he would always apply something different as if to attack it, flooding a drawing with watercolour or cutting sharp lines into an oil painting with a knife. Lines and colours built up crazily, fighting a struggle for superiority to the point of complete saturation and the worrying impression that the picture was about to explode. Everything pulsated, vibrated, trembled, rotated around its axis or reached into the distance. A devastating, centrifugal force gathered strength in that seething mass of details, capable of breaking through the frame and setting off an avalanche of destruction. But instead of that, an inexplicable equilibrium would arise–a symmetry woven by hidden threads. Through this incomprehensible reversal, the whole composition would suddenly evoke a feeling of stability which was precious because of being so hard-won and dependent on the enormous number of intricately interlocking components. This inner stability would emanate peace and happiness despite the intense heat of its genesis.
Each of the pictures, in its own way, showed living labyrinths: scenes of teeming action, dense and compact, full of interlaced movements, collisions, rifts and transformations. They were covered from edge to edge in intricate patterns, calligraphic tendrils and arabesques which intersected and merged, plunging into one another, vanishing into depths and forming bizarre figures here and there, amalgams of the recognisable and the incomprehensible, the earthly and the galactic: animals with monstrous extensions in the process of metamorphosing into another animal, a plant, an angel, or an anthropoid being, themselves half mutated into mysterious machines performing some function for other, larger mechanisms. Everything was being productive, but the end result couldn’t be seen, only a chaotic, spasmodic state of confusion; the whole always looked to be wavering between transmutation into a higher stage of existence and falling into degradation, degeneration and ruin. They included both morbid and pathos-ridden scenes, and naivety as much as cynicism. Their leitmotifs, in many variations, were the human staircase, the human fountain and the human whirlpool, and each of them at the same time rose up and ran back into itself. There were eyes shared by two beings, one good-natured and the other sanguinary. And window-eyes, through which you could peer into a house or an underwater seascape populated by sexual organs instead of seashells. And planets consisting of a confusion of disfigured limbs, with a hole in the middle, through which another such planet could be glimpsed, and so on. Trees grew atop canopies of human arms, winged balconies detached themselves from buildings, and broken skulls gave birth to little skulls. I remember a swan coming down to land in the nest with its prey in its beak, a dead cygnet, while snake hatchlings grabbed for it from the nest with greedy mouths.
Your eyes would search his nightmare visions for an island of stability, for something steady, but in vain: mirages and optical illusions sucked everything into a realm of dizzy disorientation where it spun off centripetally. Any yet, if you took a few steps back, especially with your eyes half-closed, you could feel a peace radiating from inside like warmth. It was reflected on his face as well, when the picture was finished, but not for long. Within a few hours, it would be extinguished.
All that he had left after covering the most basic necessities he would invest in his illicit mental superstructure. It didn’t develop into classic addiction: if the money ran out, he could wait for days. But when he had it, he pedantically maintained the level of narcotics in his body as if he was on antibiotics. He approached it just like a therapy, like his life’s project, curing himself of his worldly side with genuine conviction.
Of all that was available on the market, he most liked peyote, which his seaman friend periodically supplied him with. But a particular plant which mountaineers brought him from the Velebit range worked equally well. We would get into a tram and let ourselves be carted from one end of the city to the other for hours, and it was better than the cinema and more technicolour than the Amazon jungle. The streets teemed with clowns, caricatures and animals unconvincingly disguised as people. There were also ugly scenes when people we stared and laughed at took it personally. But most of the time we stayed isolated in ourselves, washed up on separate beaches, and when his eyes met mine they showed astonishment that I was there. Most of the time I felt out of place at his side, redundant, and I found myself less and less interested in the relationship. It had been makeshift from the very start, just a sum of moments wrested from coincidence. Any day could be the last.
And that’s how it ended, too. First he used up all the credit of his student status. When his investors, again in agreement, decided that the hour had come for him to tread an independent path, he didn’t twitch a whisker. Both sides dug into their positions and the crisis intensified. But he avoided dying of hunger through a compromise: he agreed to move temporarily into a down-to-earthing centre. This was conceived as a transitional phase of his full inclusion into the world of sanity and expediency. Weeks passed, and he didn’t show any signs of the intended improvement or any desire to leave his new residence. The chemicals were altered a little, but he said that people were kind to him there, the food was OK, and they brought him whatever material he needed for h
is painting. I visited him every day and he would always be glad to see me. In a very similar way, however, he was also happy when they announced it was time for dinner, and when I said I’d go he’d just say OK and didn’t ask if I’d be coming again. And one day I really didn’t go back. My heart was breaking, but I purged it of all that bound us. I never saw him or heard anything of him again.
I ironed Father’s singlets, a stupid thing he doesn’t even expect me to do, at least not explicitly, but I just got on with it. It’s enough for me to know what a tragedy he considers it to wear unironed singlets, although he’ll then keep them on until they’re crusty. I was at the door when the phone rang. It was his friend, with news of the death of another friend. I’ll pass that on, I’ll tell him. Thank you ever so much, I said.
His few former associates who still introduce themselves as his friends, although all these years he hasn’t had anything else to say to them than To be honest, etc., are departing at fairly regular intervals. As if they’re trying to maintain the temperature of death in him, everyone’s death in general, and drive him even deeper into his own. I returned to the room, sat on the couch where he’d already dropped anchor for the rest of the day, and slowly, circuitously, prepared him for the nasty news. But this time there was no folksy pathos when he found out, he just fell silent for a few moments, and then sighed, Oh well.
The ease with which he wrote off yet another companion was a positive shift, and in his case any shift was a big event. I didn’t disturb his circles any more on my way out. He remained on the couch as if petrified in that ease, with his arms crossed and his eyes fixed on the vase which had long forgotten why it stood on the living room table.
A Handful of Sand Page 13