by Levi, Mario
It seems that the tailor Joseph Rothman had appeared on life’s stage right at this moment. Joseph was reported to have taken Aunt Tilda to the Lebon pastry shop the very day of their encounter. She had experienced her first disappointment there. You may call it disappointment or a sense of indifference if you like . . . That young girl who had had a marginal life had apparently expected to be taken to a music hall or a pub by the man who was to be her prospective husband, to a nightclub where they could dance till the early hours of the morning. Thus, the photograph would find its way into the album, among the other heroes of fiction. Could it be that she had dreamt of starring in a film, having as her co-star Robert Taylor, resting on a deck chair in the lounge while crossing the Atlantic?
Beyond the boundary Line
This preamble and the probabilities that I have reproduced based partly on hearsay and partly through my own logic have inevitably brought me to the verge of a conventional world of sentimentalism, emptied of its contents. On this threshold, I find myself faced with an apprehension of defeat which I find difficult to relate to others. After getting so close to this woman—who I always found to be different, and believed to be different—I cannot help but asking: “It’s all very well, but what was it that held this difference that was exposed to our view?” What had engendered that difference; what had caused Aunt Tilda to break loose from her circle among a multitude of words that were consumed and soiled? There are photographs sent to you by individuals, ones lost and ones desired to be lost, at unexpected moments in places unknown to you so that you can never trace the sender. This will remind you once more of the ‘road story.’ You will see in that particular frame of film millions of living people suggesting to you the idea that millions of people live on millions of fantasies, each unlike the other, connecting endless stories. Then you will venture to find places to fit in them the aspects of those individuals and relationships that had always been left in the shade . . . a new moment of disappearance, silence, and counterstatement . . . I wonder whether all that has been lived would assist in converging in you a few similarities with them, contrary to your expectations. Now, I am trying to see through such factors that make me uneasy, through probabilities that keep gnawing at my mind. Who possessed the said difference, where was it exactly, in which particular glance was it contained? Something—whose exact location, color, sound, and odor were not necessarily known—that led to Aunt Tilda or that originated in her, was quite probably hidden somewhere in this story. I don’t think I’ll ever find this something in my story or be able to trace it. Well, I don’t care. I feel safe in the knowledge that at least I know how to march ahead and disappear, despite all the defeats I have suffered . . . As for the boundaries of that world of sentiments soiled and denuded of its contents, I may take a few steps forward now. Aunt Tilda had lived naturally and idiosyncratically with what lay beyond that boundary. She had to move forward silently to the place where she wanted to live. Truths, your own truths, might well return to you when you considered the meaning of this forward march. You might like to have a new insight into the place where you had come face-to-face with your own realities, with the people you confronted, and the time that this had taken place in reference to your acquisitions from that solitude. This was a small but original legacy; a legacy that one should like to preserve secretly somewhere in one’s life. The extension of this legacy within me enables me to understand better the impression that Joseph Rothman had left on her despite the disappointments at the pastry shop. He had explained to Aunt Tilda that the profession of tailoring had been passed on to him by his father and that he had been trying to carry it on, that what made this profession particularly enticing was his observation that the bits and pieces of learning he had acquired could be gradually transformed into tangible things through the clothes he was making. The meaning inherent in it, which had to be unfolded and disclosed, was being gradually composed in this way, but what was being built up in that workshop no longer gave him satisfaction. He had taken a fancy to set off on a polar expedition about which he had resolutely made up his mind to carry out some day having already made all the preparations necessary for it in his mind, based on what he had studied in the books he had skimmed through. He even drew the tracks he was to follow, hoping he would eventually be able to set foot on that cold, vast, and deserted white realm even though the venture might be beset by disastrous incidences and marred by untoward events. Nevertheless, disenchanted as he was with his current lifestyle, this was the journey he had been patiently yearning for ever since he was a boy. He couldn’t tolerate those who could not realize the full seriousness of his dream. Among them, his father was in the lead, the figure whose confidence he had been trying to gain. His father and master who had instructed him in the trade was no longer what he used to be. He had lost his sight a couple of years ago; the light, which he had been endowed with and to which he had been accustomed throughout his life had failed him. He did, however, endeavor to go on working as he had nothing else to cling to in life. He came to the workshop with great difficulty for the mere sake of smelling its odor . . . of inhaling that odor and experiencing those touches . . . a habit he had developed over many years . . . He saw the workshop as a place of refuge rather than a prison . . . The touching of things restored to him the necessary energy he needed. Joesph had established an original connection between himself and the clothes he used in his room—an empathy difficult to explain. He had developed the habit of conversing with them for long periods of time when left alone. What he uttered was mostly devoid of sense; it was meaningless, things that left some people alienated; those clothes were his own conglomeration of people, his ultimate coterie . . . One must acknowledge the fact, however, that he still designed impeccable clothing. Nevertheless, he hardly spoke with his acquaintances unless he was compelled to by circumstance. Nor did he communicate with himself anymore. If ever he could . . . This had adversely affected Aunt Tilda. This lapse must have come as something of a surprise to her, coming from a man who had fought his way to her through other people’s steps. A fall quite different from the one he had experienced when he had taken cognizance of the importance of that fantasy that gripped his imagination of that cold, vast, and deserted white realm. That pastry shop, remote from the illuminated nightclubs, housed a hope beyond all nostalgic yearnings, deprivations, and extraneousness . . . a hope that made abandonment easier to face. There was a joy in it that sorrow enriched; a joy that originated from conveying a part of oneself to a fellow human being, or from finding that part of oneself in someone else. In that moment, in which certain feelings were observed from a different angle, one was faced to look inward. What he had grasped at such a terminal point would, I believe, shed light on a quite different path. Regrets experienced due to his delayed actions would be gnawing at him, at the man he tried to hold onto in the midst of the mass of people who would deprive him from the streets he walked, the lights, the colors he saw, and the odors he smelled . . . To root one’s fantasies in a vast, white, and deserted imaginary realm . . . That was the sole fantasy that Joseph had indulged in throughout his life, the one he had been seeking to justify. The traveler she had seen, the man that fate had presented to her, reminded her of the travelers she had seen in films. On the other hand, what Joseph had found in Tilda was a woman, who, for probably the first time in his life, lent an ear to him. The moment they met was one that gave credence to those who had an unshakable belief in first encounters. What they had both seen, what each of them saw in the other, was what he or she had wanted to see.