However, I did not understand the real gift my grandfather had given me until almost the end of my day, when, weary of so many idiotic reports, I closed my eyes to rest. All of a sudden, I found myself in a railway carriage, lulled by its rattling wheels and blinded by the stream of light flooding the compartment. Terrified, I opened my eyes once more, only to find myself back in my small office with the hum of the computer and embalmed by a chilly October’s leaden light. Had I been the victim of a hallucination? Taking a deep breath, I settled in my chair, holding on tightly to the arms, and tried again, this time closing my eyelids deliberately slowly. I found myself in the compartment once more, seated by the window. There was no doubt it was a carriage pulled by the Adler. The compartment was lit by oil lamps, and my nostrils were filled with the smell of burning coal. Outside the window, the castle at Elsinore rose like an apparition, wrapped in a shroud of fog, with its fairy-tale spires and high redbrick walls, where Hamlet was struggling with his phantoms. I opened my eyes again: I was back in the all-too-familiar setting of my office. Everything was the same all around me. There was no longer any smell of coal or oil. In the background, I could hear the clamor of telephones, the banging of fingers on keyboards. And yet all I had to do was close my eyes for all of this to disappear, and for another reality to take its place. I tried to relax. I mustn’t allow myself to be carried away either by panic or by the excitement of this discovery. I waited patiently for my workday to finish, and then, back at my apartment, after fortifying myself with a glass of wine, I sat on the sofa to continue with my experiments. I was in Berlin, Istanbul, the Alps. I discovered that all I had to do was lower my eyelids to be transported into my tiny wooden double, to see with his eyes and no longer with my own. With no more effort than that, I could pass from my insignificant reality to the one my grandfather had built; between the two there was no more than a momentary sense of vertigo, an instant when I swung in the air, too short to feel anything worse than the fleeting anxiety acrobats must experience as they fly toward the hands of their colleague.
I spent that evening, and many more thereafter, traveling the world from the threadbare sofa in my living room. The crosswords piled up on the table while I greeted the floating houses on the canals of Amsterdam, wished for love by tossing a coin into the Fontana di Trevi, or fell head over heels for a Malaysian girl playing with a turtle on a beach in China. At nightfall, I would go out onto the balcony and stare at the snowy peak of Mont Blanc, the national lottery building, the multicolored temple of Toshogu, the kiosk of the association for the blind, the man in the cobbler’s setting off a stampede of antelopes when he pulled the noisy shutter down. And as the colors drained from my neighborhood, I would prepare a pot of coffee that I would drink amid the aroma of lilies in a Japanese garden, followed by the elegant beauty of the Acropolis, and ending at Westminster Abbey. The bite of a hermit crab on a Greek beach still stung as I caressed the plumage of a toucan in the Amazon rain forest. I wore a Naga warrior’s bearskin-lined headdress decorated with wild boar’s teeth, and came across a precious gemstone as I sifted through mud in the mines of Ratnapura. At night, when my eyes were closed by the will of Morpheus, I also traveled ceaselessly: Berne, Montreal, Dublin, a kaleidoscope of cities covered in clouds of steam, a feast of monuments and architectures that swallowed one another up and procreated at the whim of the tracks, giving rise to delirious hybrids, aberrations of a bastardized history of which I retained only a vague awareness upon waking. When I took a shower, I could not help but be aware of the pleasant tiredness of someone who has been on a long journey, a slight aftertaste of alien experiences as the water soothed my muscles, a trace of unknown perfumes mixing with the smell of my shaving cream, the caress of a distant breeze as I did up my tie.
This extraordinary way of traveling soon became an addiction. Before long, it wasn’t enough for me to use it as an escape from my daily routine, to lessen the boredom of my evenings. I started to feel an irrepressible hunger to see the world, a desire for new places that forced me to set off even during office hours. Every morning, I worked without any breaks and completed my reports with unheard-of diligence, so that by midday I had nothing left to do. I would shut myself in one of the bathroom stalls and escape to the temple at Karnak, to Mount Rushmore, the beaches of Sri Lanka. Later, I would leave the office as stealthily as someone hiding a secret, feeling overwhelmingly transparent whenever a work colleague’s eyes rested on me. Despite everything, I also couldn’t help feeling an immense sense of pity toward them. After returning from New Guinea, where, daubed in mud and wearing a bird-of-prey mask, I had taken part in a ritual battle against the spirits, my colleagues seemed painfully ordinary, without depth or color, satisfied with a life that was as narrow as a coffin to me. A life that for many years had been mine, where there was nothing beyond what could be seen or touched.
I was enjoying myself so much, gorging myself on landscapes the way others binged on sweets, that I had barely paused to reflect on the causes and consequences of those astral journeys. But one evening, after returning from my enthralled contemplation of the grass roof of the church at Funningur, I saw myself reflected in the windowpane. My drowsy posture on the sofa seemed to me identical to the one my grandfather adopted for most of the day. This led me to wonder whether I was the only one who traveled this way, or whether my grandfather had known about it for years. That would explain a lot of things; it would solve the mystery of an entire life. I ran to his apartment and searched the model railway in the hope of also finding a diminutive replica of my grandfather. None of the tiny figures seemed to represent him. This inexplicable absence of his own double came as a huge disappointment. Did it mean my grandfather was immune to the magic of the model, that for him it was no more than a pointless amusement, that he was unaware of everything I was experiencing?
This was what I thought until one evening, as I was rummaging in a sideboard drawer for his cough mixture, my eyes caught one of the portraits standing on top of it. It showed my grandfather as a young man, a stocky, sinewy lad smiling shyly at the camera while adjusting a checkered cloth cap. I stared at it a long while without being able to grasp what was so familiar about it. As soon as I did, I ran to the model railway. There, on the side of a hill, I found what I was looking for: the figure of a robust young man wearing a checkered cap. The hill gave way to the extraordinary Saint Basil’s Cathedral, and I realized that, curled up on his armchair in the living room, my grandfather must be agreeing with Ivan the Terrible, who had ordered that the eyes of its architect should be gouged out so that he would never again create anything so beautiful.
I brought in a chair from the kitchen and sat in my usual spot opposite him, but I looked at him in a very different light. No longer was he a poor old man, unable to stay awake until his hour arrived. Now my grandfather seemed to me a compulsive hedonist, a devoted sybarite who all these years had the world at his feet. He had cut himself off from everything, had given himself over to pure pleasure, regardless of the price he paid. Possibly, he had his doubts before he sacrificed what might be called his corporal existence; perhaps he had them when he understood that this would also ruin most of his son’s as well. Or maybe he didn’t have a choice—once he had tried it, he couldn’t leave it alone—and maybe sharing this treasure with his son and the woman he loved was the only way he could find to resolve his weakness.
My grandfather had offered his son the most rewarding gift anyone could possibly give him, but my father had seen only two ridiculous small figures, and he had thrown them down the drain. That same night, I had dinner with my parents to confirm what I already knew, to glimpse once more, beneath their impeccable manners, their unsophisticated happiness as a well-off couple, that dark shadow that had troubled me since childhood and whose origin I finally understood. By pulling the toilet chain, my father had rejected heaven and embraced hell. Now I knew the reason for the clouded look in their eyes. I understood all the pointless visits to psychoanalysts, my father’s fr
equent bouts of insomnia, my mother’s desperate need to wrap herself in a cocoon of glittering luxury. I knew now that they were suffering a punishment they did not understand, sharing a sickness they found impossible to combat, and that they were unable to dream as they slept. They lived without understanding why when they closed their eyes all they could see was an ocean of turbulent, muddy waters; a horrific, putrid world, a sewer they were condemned to descend into every night.
Unlike my father, I had understood my grandfather’s gift. I accepted it as a blessing, with infinite thanks. Those journeys were a paradise to me. But there was something missing. And like Adam, I also begged the creator of all this for a female companion.
“I don’t want to go on traveling alone,” I dared confess to him one evening, kneeling beside him in a woolly silence disturbed only by the hypnotic thrum of the Adler locomotive on the tracks in the adjacent room. “Beauty is increased if it’s shared.”
My grandfather did not reply. He still had his eyes shut, which I preferred; I probably would never have revealed my feelings in this way if he had been looking at me. But I knew from experience that my grandfather would hear my voice floating over all the places he had imagined, and so I described as best I could the woman I desired, so that he would have no problem creating her in wood. I told him that she should be as delicate as a teardrop, with eyes like mint among weeds, and a slender body so light that the slightest puff of wind could steal her from me. I rounded off her portrait in a voice aching with desire and filled with melancholy. Then I fled from my grandfather’s apartment feeling slightly ashamed, as if he had discovered me masturbating. I spent all the next morning tortured by doubts, wondering if my grandfather’s fingers were at that very moment giving my wish a shape, or whether on the contrary my request had seemed to him an impertinence he had no wish to satisfy. The moment work was over, I walked to his apartment full of expectation. My grandfather was dozing in his armchair. I went into the adjoining room to look at the model railway, afraid that my plea had not been heeded. Tears filled my eyes when in the carriage of the Adler I came upon a female figure who would put an end to my solitude.
As soon as I closed my eyes that night, I could smell a woman’s perfume struggling to overpower the smell of oil in the compartment. She was sitting beside me, and I could admire her face while the green of her irises reflected a rushing kaleidoscope of the wonders of the world: the Parthenon rising above the walls of the Kremlin, Notre Dame Cathedral followed instantly by the Blue Mosque of Istanbul, then Prague, Helsinki, and Vienna crashing against the train window like machine-gun bullets. The entire world was ours: mankind’s achievements and the caprices of nature, jumbled together in a unique, demented geography, an itinerary devised according to my grandfather’s wishes.
That night, and many of those that followed, I became an improbable seducer, a dramatic Don Juan who could call on all the most beautiful backdrops in the world to win the heart of the woman he loved. I invited her to a crazy menu made up of cheese fondue with truffles, Hungarian goulash, and Peking-style duck, all of it washed down with a French sparkling wine laid down in a Rheims wine cellar. We smiled at each other from behind Venetian masks. We took each other in Oslo. And in Tierra del Fuego, like two silly lovers, we planted roses against the wind.
Every morning, when I walked through the lobby of my office building, she gazed at me in a way she never had before. Beautiful and dazed-looking, perched behind the receptionists’ desk, she watched me come in and go over to the elevators without taking her eyes off me. I had been in love with her for months. According to her badge, her name was Celia Riquelme, and she was not born of my rib (my bones didn’t have that much imagination) but from the last round of new hires. Although previously she had not paid me the slightest attention, for some days now, she registered my arrival as though spellbound. She was obviously wondering who this unremarkable guy was that she dreamed of every night with oneiric punctuality, the prophet of a wondrous world where a hunter seemed to have painstakingly shot all the tigers one by one, and torn up all the nettles. With my back to her, I could hear the telephone ring without her making any effort to pick it up. I could tell she was staring at me as if trying to solve a riddle, her mind still full of the tumultuous sensations of a crazy night that had never existed, in which the lips of the stranger now waiting for the elevator had slid like a slimy slug’s all over her dappled body, specially doused for the occasion in Armenian brandy. And occasionally, when I had to go out for some reason, I would find her leaning back in her chair, her eyes gently closed and a contented smile on her face. This was when I realized that, like me, she was no longer afraid and had learned to enjoy my grandfather’s gift without asking herself any questions. She gave in to it with all the blind trust of a little girl in her father’s arms, enjoying the twists and turns in midair without ever thinking those hands could let her fall. She loved me; she was loving me well ahead of reality. Every night, we gave ourselves to each other despite the fact that we had never actually touched, and I was in no hurry to transfer this joyous love to our insipid world, where it could crumble at the slightest obstacle.
It was then that I discovered, from so often pleasurably studying the model railway, the deceitful, miniature world where our romance could blossom, that the figures moved around in it. Every evening, I found them in different places in the landscape. I didn’t want to ask my grandfather if it was he who moved them, if he was the one who decided on a whim each morning what was to be the backdrop to our dreams. What did one more mystery matter if we lived in a gingerbread house in an enchanted wood?
Those were happy, beautiful days. But we soon discovered that their destiny was like that of the roses we were so desperate to grow in Patagonia, tributes to a vanished beauty always swept away by the cruel wind in the end. It happened on a weekday morning like any other, when the Adler was steaming happily through paddy fields of rice. Celia and I had transported ourselves while at work and were sitting inside the locomotive, holding hands, enjoying the green spectacle outside the window, when a sudden pestilence invaded our compartment. It was a nauseous, unpleasant smell that we had no time to identify. Suddenly, the locomotive seemed to be jolted forward, sending a shock wave through the whole train. Then we heard the sound of wild steps, as if of something powerful, huge, and unimaginable rushing toward us. I clutched Celia’s hand just as the roof of our carriage was smashed open with a monstrous crash. Among the splinters, I could make out a damp darkness bristling with fangs coming toward us.
I opened my eyes at once. And found myself in a bathroom stall, believing I was safe from whatever had burst into the kindly world of the model railway. A second later, I was proven wrong when an intense pain in the pit of my stomach made me fall to the floor, writhing like a heroin addict. I bit my lips to stop myself crying out, fighting to overcome the terrible pain even as I noticed blood running down my throat. The stabbing sensations came and went, like arbitrary, absentminded bites. Something was savaging my wooden double, and although I was feeling only a pallid reflection of the suffering, a kind of scaled-down martyrdom, I realized with a shudder of panic that this torture could easily end in the loss of a limb or even my head. How would that be reflected in the real world? How would it affect me? Best not to know. At all costs, I had to prevent that from happening. The only chance I had was to take advantage of the intervals between bites, when I could perhaps walk or crawl, to try to reach the model railway.
I staggered out of the bathroom, reeled down the corridor, trying not to attract attention, and collapsed inside the elevator the moment the doors opened. I pressed the buttons like a blind man. In the lobby, I was confronted with a dreadful surprise: surrounded by alarmed onlookers, Celia was writhing, convulsing on the floor like someone possessed. That painful sight gave me the sharpest bite of all. Feeling guilty, I rushed out of the building, knowing there was nothing I could do for her there. The only way I could help was by reaching my grandfather’s apartment as quickly
as possible.
I ran through the streets like a madman. Every so often, a searing pain hurled me to the ground, and I had to wait for it to cease in order to continue, even though I knew that the fact that I was freed for the moment from those phantom jaws only meant that they were toying with Celia instead. By the time I reached my grandfather’s building, I was panting, crumpled, and aching in a thousand different places. I more or less crawled up the stairs. With no time to search for the keys, I gave the rotten door a kick, and it burst open. I lurched down the gloomy hallway, and found my grandfather fast asleep on the sofa, oblivious to everything. My head spinning, I ran into the adjoining room. The sight of the model railway was heart-rending. Numerous little figures lay destroyed and smashed in a winding path to the center, where, in the midst of the train’s shattered remains, lurked an enormous rat. Its snorting muzzle was poking about in one of the upturned carriages. Hearing me enter the room, it left whatever it was doing and turned its head in my direction. We stared at each other for a few seconds, as if sizing each other up. Among the wreck of the carriage, I could make out our two replicas, covered in viscous saliva and teeth marks but still relatively intact. The rat’s tiny eyes gleamed like pinheads, full of that vivid intelligence that for some reason (perhaps because they don’t talk) we always attribute to animals. But it was enough for me to whirl my arms to reduce it to its condition as a rodent and send it running. The rat scurried frantically all over the railway, sweeping away everything in its path, searching for an escape route from that labyrinth raised too high above the floor. It eventually found one in the kitchen chair I used to sit on every evening to admire our miniature world, and which I had forgotten to replace the last time I had been there. But before it leaped off the table, the rat had time to snatch a final victim, a solitary figure it found on its way—the replica of a young globetrotter in a checkered cap. I gave an anguished shout and tried to block its path, but the rat scuttled between my legs and disappeared down the dark corridor.
The Heart and Other Viscera Page 2