I waited for my presence at the event to officially become superfluous, which it was from the beginning anyway. Everything in that place screamed out its superfluity: neckties, the perfume sprayed on necks, my illustrations and the oxygen expended, although none of those present would admit it even under torture, but that didn’t distinguish them from the masses strewn across the planet in lesser or greater density, between walls no different to these.
Then you came up to me.
You neared me like the educated eye approaches a picture, trying to see something within but maintaining a necessary distance. It was new and slightly unsettling for someone to be contemplating me and seeking the picture inside. Through that same prism I thought I caught a glimpse of the place where my pictures come from. But it was only a flash, an intangible instant unable to be brought down to earth or turned into anything fluid.
All of a sudden you were here, just a step away, making no demands, nor offering anything, except for that softness emanating from you, mute and melancholic, which soon snuggled up to me.
Very soon, perhaps while we were still standing there, I knew I wasn’t imagining things; although that couldn’t yet be true because the truth still had to be woven, weft for weft and warp for warp. I’d been irritated and disheartened so many times by those standard expectations that I just fulfil the stereotype and nourish it with my flesh.
Words looked ridiculously small in the space between us: needless, even harmful, and of all things the most capable of spoiling whatever was on offer. Still, one had to speak, to make something of that moment which had cut us out of time. So there we were, at a table in a completely empty bar, if you exclude the barman, who was puttering around with his utensils in an attempt to conceal that he was eavesdropping; people have an insatiable hunger to hear what’s none of their business. Maybe he was intrigued by there being almost nothing to hear: two freaks come in and just stare at each other. Humpty and Dumpty in black! They found each other in a ditch where they were put to keep them at a safe distance from the healthy eggs, and there they fell in love with their own reflection. They consume it with amorous eyes, never blinking, and say over and over again: Oh, what a lovely egg you are! And: What am I to do with you, one so lovely? Where am I to put you when I can hardly carry myself, when it’s already so hard to keep myself together in this shell? Just see what it’s like to roam the world with an egg in your pocket! Or should we break each other straight away and do away with the borders between inside and out, all the hypocrisies of the human husk? You can dress up in black all you like: in essence your garb is transparent, yellow and slimy.
I’m sitting by the wall, as I always do when I get the chance. Another advantage of an empty public space, apart from the genial absence of the crowd, is that it’s easy to find a place by the wall. Of all my friends, I’ve always preferred to entrust my back to a wall. They say true love turns into friendship over time. Will we last long enough to build love a monument of friendship?
The main thing is to silence the doubt. Not to let it hamstring us before the starting pistol. To draw together all that is still unspent from within and open windows for it, to find space for a fresh breeze.
Both of us, without a doubt, would gladly push off into heights as yet unknown to humankind, into that which it has only caught an inkling of in fiction, far from the labyrinths where love is immured. We would like to be a weightless variation on the eternal hormonal theme. We would take our bodies up there with us, of course, because otherwise it wouldn’t be fun. We would burn, and from the ashes let a new, eternal flame arise. That way we could at least emerge from the heap of stone in us: the egg would exchange its smooth monolithicness and self-sufficiency for a grain of foreign salt.
We rummage around in ourselves for things worthy of saying. We try on things which have accumulated at the back of our cupboards–will they suit us?–without knowing what the newcomer has glimpsed inside. Who are you to think you can do that? Who am I when you think that’s inside me?
We’ve been brought together by Chinese wisdom and the sciences, both culinary and astrological. By Chinese animals painted on silk, eternalised on the bookshelves of domestic gourmets. And what did our first little quest for knowledge about each other reveal? That we have the same sign of the zodiac, and then bingo: born on the same day of the same year too! Congratulations to the winners of the remarkable twin halves competition! In a different situation I would have laughed, but this had an elemental streak of the tragic in it. Why did you have to latch on to life on that same, totally irrelevant date too: 29th December 1972? In the same city, perhaps even in the same hospital? You said there was no one left for you to ask. Did we fall in love with each other and the world back then, at first glance, and bawl at each other from neighbouring cribs about that lovestruckness, which would grow with us from year to year, like a tree with two trunks, like the shares of IT companies, like the passenger planes of rival airlines outvying each other in size until they attain the capacity to simultaneously transport entire populations enamoured in that rat race from one city to another? Was it a mix-up, malevolence or the work of a wicked fairy that we were sent off from the same crib on separate paths in life, splitting our common egg, condemning the Platonic halves to wander blindly, with the cruel possibility of passing each other by forever?
Horoscopes are one of those bullshit things you can’t avoid in life, however much you ignore them. Try and be born outside the signs. Try and forget your specialnesses and what distinguishes you from eleven twelfths of humanity. That’s much less than a billion! A solid foundation for the feeling of uniqueness and an insight into personal predestination! But what have the stars in store for the two of us, what victuals for the voyage to the stars? For our common astrological animal, people are a less lovable aspect of the planet. Of all company, the goat will choose rocky terrain–steep and stony–where lowland livestock break their legs. It won’t climb up to reach the edelweiss (but might piss on it in passing), preferring to laugh into its beard in peace. When it’s had enough of irony, it will diligently graze by the house (perseverance is its greatest virtue, along with the inability to see further than its own horns), and will diligently protect the house from guests with its stench. It’s a faithful animal, happy to be tied up by the house or any other dear domain: it wants to be yoked, to bear a burden on its back. A cross isn’t bad, but carrying a chapel is even more heroic. Yet it’s important for it to find out who to butt horns with. Someone to share the pain and misery with, but just sometimes; for at the end of the day, what’s mine is still mine. That’s how we were neatly prefabricated for happiness as a twosome.
What the rational mind knows is impossible and no one in their right mind would believe–the body still believes. Trembling hands give it away and seek anchorage in cigarette after cigarette. All their composure, to the last drop of sobriety, goes up in smoke. Drunken water gurgles in my ears. Splash goes the wine, running from an upset glass over the table and my legs. Wet pants: a chance for a time-out, to splash some water on myself in the bathroom, to look out from the mirror and check if everything on my face is still there or if there are disfigurements already.
That showed me a new myself, thrown off balance, well and truly shaken up, one who’d walk the streets in the following days as if they were bomb-cratered ruins, tripping over my own shadow, bashing into public phone booths, knocking over a blind man and saying Sorry, I didn’t see you. Marvelling at objects in my hands and their fragments on the floor. It demanded enormous effort for me not to lose the ground beneath my feet, not to let myself drop. I always found tightwires to balance on. I constantly had to check my overstretched seams. And now I consigned all that held me together into the hands of blind curiosity.
* * *
All that has been, when viewed in retrospect, never happened. All of human history, from the instant just spent and buried back to the dawn of consciousness, exists only in the nonexistent space of memory.
How much sub
sequent tragedy am I interpreting into our first moments? Would they now look so dramatic and passionate without it, so charged with emotions and symbolism? In brief: how much am I lying to myself? Quite a bit, no doubt, but that doesn’t matter, because what I still feel we felt together and what began between us is more real to me and more alive in my body than all the things the eye convinces me really exist; the whole universe is just one vast, painful lie compared to that.
In the downstairs area of the bar we’re the only guests of the jazzers whose portraits populate the walls, beset by their gazes and the full-bodied, ebony-ivory vibrations of a piano. Syncopated saxophone motifs blast between the tables, electrifying the air, which is hot and dry to the point of crackling, enough to make it rustle beneath the blades of the ceiling fans, and burn our cheeks like a blast of sand; I’m on tenterhooks, like sand jammed into an hourglass, and every single grain is torn from my body because time has suddenly become terribly precious–not one second is to be surrendered without a fight.
You are a mirage on the other side of the small round table and one mistaken movement would be enough to make you disappear; but at the same time I can already feel your smooth skin beneath my fingers, which glow with anticipation to find yours, interlock, and keep exploring.
Everything on you is smooth and rounded. And diminutive, like a child’s: your feet, touchingly curved inwards, joined at the front as if in conversation; your incredibly small hands; your shoulders so slight, as if they weren’t there; your doll-like face with berry cheeks, your mouth only sketched and your nose barely hinted at. Only your eyes are too old and too big, sweeping away and erasing whatever is within their reach, and with those wing-shaped eyebrows overarching everything on your face, and engulfing all they see.
A glass model at my fingertips, begging for me to take it in my hands, a Murano miniature with space inside for a cathedral, a family of dolphins and a snowstorm; and at the same time an ultimate astuteness, a slippery darkness bordered by derision; just one step inside and it possesses me: there’s no going back.
From the back room of this hospitality joint now emerges the proprietor, an international great of the vibraphone, a living legend, the main and only hero of the canto Wine, wine, wine, now of more girth than mirth. He trundles up to the table reserved for him on a kind of stage–the throne where he displays all one hundred and fifty kilos of his earthly manifestation to his myriad admirers and keeps an eye on all the events in the hall with the look of a sleepy toad. Since there are no other events apart from the two of us, and we’re totally static, he overcomes his horror vacui by gurgling to himself something evidently amusing, causing him to giggle and hiccup, and at the same time he seems about to cry. At any moment he could melt down completely into a torrent of tears, and whatever is crushing him inside he generously gives to us, heartily treating us to a performance of his soliloquy, which he endlessly tops up from an ice-filled silver bucket.
Whatever holds this man in submission inside is stronger than the outer glitter and can’t be rinsed away by his planetary glory. Perhaps that is precisely the message he’s been entrusted to spread all over the world: that we reach for the stars in vain because there’s no shine which won’t sink into the internal mud.
But we don’t hear him, at least for now. I don’t know what we’re saying, everything is absorbed in a mutual hypnosis, there’s no other name for it, we’ve discovered a hunger in ourselves and seized it with both hands, and we can’t take our eyes off each other. At least until the moment when the spilled wine reminds us that we have hands too, albeit unfit for handling objects, and warns us how brittle what we might build would be, and how readily the little liquid which distinguishes us from the angels brims over.
Your little red lake only lasts an instant before vanishing into the barman’s cloth, but it’s immediately replaced with two more glasses of wine, and several more serve as justification for the drunkenness in us which tears down the last remains of gravity, and everything accelerates and becomes more imaginable.
Even your We can’t go to my place at closing time opens up beautiful vistas of what we can do, right now, because it allows us, and even invites us, to go to my place.
Outside, once we’ve negotiated the spiral staircase, I discover that linear, unidirectional time has ceased to exist. But in a way it still endures, consisting now of a myriad of separate, simultaneous tempi ticking inside me. The street shudders from the heat of the day trapped in the asphalt and the movements of people which have stirred it up; I see straight through every pair of eyes into people’s soul, that’s what I feel; with all my being I understand what makes people the way they are and what it means to be that little piece of the universe. I instantly turn into what touches me: the title of the book in the shop window, the smell drifting over from the toasted-sandwich kiosk, a fragment of the sentence which brushes us in passing. I no longer cower in myself but am my own bright, luxuriant, sparkling explosion; I exist in an unlimited number of dimensions, and they keep extending and I’m present in each of them with all my being, and every segment of the world is open for me to read in deep perspective.
Now we’re in the car, beneath the horse chestnut in full bloom. It’s not a big car but could fit a whole flock of folk your size because you take up only part of the seat; at the same time, this is no longer the car I knew, its purpose and potential are as yet undefined, and a tension reigns like in a spacecraft before lift-off. But my hands and legs do their job; some force tells them what to press and pull, and the scenery glides past and the intersections roll by in a recognisable sequence. Every time I dare to look to the right I find–incomprehensibly–that you’re still there. With those eyes which hardly fit into the car, black fireflies glowing in the dark; for some reason they haven’t flitted away but tamely escort me home.
I unlock the door and push it open, and still on the doorstep, without turning on the light, we’re seized by a fever and reach for the other body, which immediately refuses to remain foreign, and in it we recognise the other half of ourselves; like a switch, this sets off a trembling in both of us, and our two halves inflame it further, stirring and fanning the fire in each other; our halves understand each other perfectly in their own language unearthed in regions of our being which have long languished in ignorance; we had no idea that we possessed them, and they us; our body takes us over completely, lifting us out of oblivion into its arms with a love swift and sudden, and we would instantly surrender it all we have, and that is now so much, more than can fit into the sum of our earthly existence minus this instant; it is one immense microcosm, it merits that we stay in it forever and ban other forms of existence, more of which arrive to vie with each other ever more frantically and destructively; which to choose, perhaps the one where it becomes certain, irreversible, that our lips will adhere; it already exceeds all my hopes, the horizon of my life’s combined expectations, to think that the closeness of someone’s lips would bloom in me into such splendour and riot, but they don’t stop at that, they really do touch me, all of me and all at once; I tremble from head to toe from one single touch of that tiny, downy body because it answers every tremble like a mirror with a trembling of its own, and that mirror shows how much I’ve missed what you are, what now bedews your lips; I press myself into them and they absorb me whole, all that remains of us is a common mouth–a source and an orifice at the same time; all else is swept away by the darkness revolving around us, we’re buffeted by a whirlpool and are at the same time its heated, delirious heart, freed of mental grime, and our fingers and mouths conquer centimetre after centimetre more of that naked throbbing, wherever I touch is terribly vibrant, it burns, renders, dissolves and draws me into itself, it can’t stand clothes a second longer and we cast them off like fetters, it’s inconceivable to ever wear them again, such an insult to the skin, it’s unimaginable to touch anything except your skin; yours and mine have been tailor-made to press up to each other, envelop each other and enter every recess, to grind eac
h other’s presence into the grooves; all the separation we’ve endured now gushes forth, rushes to recover what is ours, all of life has marathoned and moulded us for this moment, with Spartan austerity for this eruption, whatever we experienced before was only for comparison with this, for the sake of euphoria at discovering the original; bare skin takes on the role of lungs, inhaling the heavenly manna from the other skin, drinking it without breath, with elemental passion, as if possessed; pedantically I sample one morsel after another, only to return obsessively to the epicentres, tirelessly drawing from the chambers of relish, from your breasts and armpits and groin and all the folds, furrows, openings, cavities and dark spaces; I penetrate, press, plumb, probe, plough; you tremble beneath me and rise up, fit flush against me, squirming, moaning, gasping, striving to break through the membrane which hampers complete osmosis, the fusion of the sexes, of shorelines and skylines; we’ll stay uplifted in the stratosphere, the eddying elements, we’ll blindly seethe in every segment of ourselves and hide in the astral expanses from all that is perishable and one iota less than intense, integral, hypnotic and boundlessly arousing; that’s all we can do, it’s the only place, there’s no further than this.
* * *
I was one of those women who would readily claim, because you have your expectations but nothing more sensible to say, ‘Really, it’s pleasure enough for me when you come’. And that was almost the truth because I was never crazy about orgasms. I mean, the whole concept of ‘doing it’, like some assignment, with that one goal in mind–no thanks, I’d rather not even start. I don’t mean to say that, for me, orgasm was a planet in some virtual galaxy. It did visit me here and there, more like an exception to the rule, independent of the effort invested. Sex was an absolute must for me in every relationship; at the same time, sex was no good without a relationship. But I didn’t go asking Cosmo how many times a week I had to come; it’s a bit strange investing effort in a passion, honing that skill and counting the number of times ‘it’ happens.
A Handful of Sand Page 17