For two weeks a new order reigned in our house. Or at least that was how it seemed to me, deeply disturbed as I was by small details that perhaps I hadn't noticed before.
Claudia, who for the first few days tried to ignore the new situation, finally came to terms with reality too, and said that she was beginning to feel suffocated. On the morning of the second day he was with us, while Claudia was brushing her teeth, Ulises told her that he loved her. Claudia's answer was that she already knew. I came here because of you, Ulises said, I came because I love you. Claudia's answer was that he could have written her a letter. Ulises found that highly encouraging, and he wrote a poem that he read to Claudia at lunch. When I got up discreetly from the table, not wanting to hear it, Claudia asked me to stay and Daniel seconded the request. The poem was essentially a collection of fragments about a Mediterranean city, Tel Aviv, I guess, and a bum or a mendicant poet. I thought it was beautiful and I told him so. Daniel agreed. Claudia was quiet for a few minutes, with a thoughtful expression on her face, and then she said that we were right, she wished she could write such beautiful poems. For a minute I thought everything would work out, that we were all going to be able to get along, and I volunteered to go buy a bottle of wine. But Claudia said that the next day she had to be at the university first thing, and ten minutes later she had shut herself in our room. Ulises, Daniel, and I talked for a while and had another cup of tea, then each of us went to his room. Around three I got up to go to the bathroom and as I tiptoed through the living room I heard Ulises crying. I don't think he realized I was there. He was lying facedown, I guess. From where I was, he was just a shape on the sofa, a shape covered with a blanket and an old coat, a heap, a lump of flesh, a shadowy figure, heaving and pathetic.
I didn't tell Claudia. In fact, it was around then that I first began to hide things from her, keep parts of the story from her, lie to her. As far as our daily lives as students were concerned, things didn't change at all for her, or if they did she did her best not to let it show. When Ulises first came to Tel Aviv, Daniel was his constant companion, but after two or three weeks Daniel had to buckle down again too, or risk jeopardizing his exams. Little by little, I became the only one still available to Ulises. But I was busy with neo-Kantianism, the Marburg School, Solomon Maimon, and my head was a mess because each night, when I got up to pee, I'd find Ulises crying in the dark, and that wasn't the worst of it, the worst was that some nights I thought: today I'll see him cry-see his face, I mean, because until then I'd only heard him, and who could be sure that what I was hearing was crying, and not, for example, the heavy breathing of someone in the middle of jerking off? And when I thought about seeing his face, I imagined it raised in the dark, a face bathed in tears, a face touched by the light of the moon filtering through the living room windows. And that face was so desolate that from the very moment I sat up in bed in the dark, listening to Claudia's raspy breathing beside me, a weight like a rock settled on my heart and I felt like crying too. And sometimes I spent a long time sitting there in bed, repressing my urge to go to the bathroom, repressing my urge to cry, all for fear that it would happen that night, that he would lift his face in the dark and I would see it.
Not to mention sex, my sex life, which was shot from the day he came through the door of our apartment. I just couldn't do it. Or I mean I could, but I didn't want to. The first time we tried, on the third night, I think, Claudia asked what was wrong with me. Nothing's wrong, I said, why do you ask? Because you're as silent as the dead, she said. And that was how I felt, not like the dead but like a reluctant guest in the world of the dead. I had to stay quiet. Not moan, not cry out, not pant, come with extreme circumspection. And even Claudia's moans, which used to arouse me so much, became unbearable. They made me frantic (although I was always careful not to let her know), they grated in my ears, and I tried to muffle them by covering her mouth with my hand or my lips. In a word, making love became torture, something that by the third or fourth time I would do anything to avoid or postpone. I was always the last to go to bed. I would stay up with Ulises (who never seemed to get tired anyway) and we would talk about anything. I would ask him to read me what he'd written that day, not caring whether it was poems in which his love for Claudia was painfully obvious. I liked them anyway. Of course, I preferred the other ones, the ones in which he talked about the new things he saw each day when he was left alone and went out to wander Tel Aviv, Giv'at Rokach, Har Shalom, the alleyways of the old port city of Jaffa, the university campus, or Yarkon Park, or the ones in which he remembered Mexico, Mexico City, so far away, or the ones that were formal experiments, or seemed to me like formal experiments. Any of them, except the ones about Claudia. But not for my sake, not because they might hurt me, or her, but because I was trying to avoid the proximity of his pain, his mulish stubbornness, his profound stupidity. One night I told him. I said: Ulises, why are you doing this to yourself? He pretended not to hear me, giving me a sidelong look (which made me remember, as at least a hundred other thoughts flashed through my mind, the look of a dog I'd had when I was a boy in Colonia Polanco, the dog my parents put to sleep when suddenly it started to bite), and then he kept on talking as if I hadn't said a word.
That night, when I went to bed, I made love to Claudia as she slept, and when I was at last able to reach the proper state of arousal, which wasn't easy, I moaned or cried out.
Then there was the question of money. Claudia, Daniel, and I were in school and we each received a monthly allowance from our parents. In Daniel's case this allowance was barely enough to live on. In Claudia's case it was more generous. Mine fell somewhere in between. If we pooled our money, we could pay for the apartment, our classes, and our food and have enough for the movies or the theater or to buy books in Spanish at the Cervantes Bookstore, on Zamenhof. But having Ulises there upset everything, because after a week he had hardly any money left and all of a sudden we had another mouth to feed, as the sociologists say. Still, as far as I was concerned, it was no big deal. I was prepared to give up certain luxuries. Daniel didn't care either, although he continued to live his life exactly as he had before. It was Claudia-who would've thought?-who chafed at the new situation. At first she tackled the problem coolly and practically. One night she told Ulises that he needed to look for work or ask to have money sent from Mexico. I remember that Ulises sat there looking at her with a lopsided smile and then said he would look for work. The next night, during dinner, Claudia asked if he'd found work. Not yet, said Ulises. But did you go out and look? asked Claudia. Ulises was washing the dishes and he didn't turn around when he said yes, he'd gone out and looked but had no luck. I was sitting at the head of the table and I could see his face in profile, and it looked to me like he was smiling. Fuck, I thought, he's smiling, smiling out of sheer happiness. As if Claudia were his wife, a nagging wife, a wife who worried about her husband finding work, and he liked that. That night I told Claudia to leave him alone, that he was already having a hard enough time without her getting on his case about work. Anyway, I said, what kind of job do you expect him to find in Tel Aviv? as a construction worker? a porter at the market? a dishwasher? What do you know, Claudia said to me.
It was the same story the next night, of course, and the next, and each time Claudia was more tyrannical, hounding him, goading him, backing him into a corner, and Ulises always responded in the same way, calmly, resignedly, and, yes, happily. Whenever we were at the university he would go out and look for work, asking here or there but never finding anything, although the next day he would try again. And it got to the point that after dinner Claudia would spread the paper on the table and look for job listings, writing them down on a piece of paper and telling Ulises where he had to go, which bus to take or which was the shortest way to walk, because Ulises didn't always have money for the bus and Claudia said it wasn't necessary to give him money because he liked to walk, and when Daniel or I would say but how can he walk to Ha'Argazim, for example, or Yoreh Street, or Petah Tikva or R
osh Ha'ayin, where they needed construction workers, she would tell us (in front of him, as he watched her and smiled like a whipped husband, but a husband, still) about his wanderings around Mexico City, how he would walk from UNAM to Ciudad Satélite, and at night too, which was almost like from one end of Israel to the other. And things kept getting worse. Ulises had no money left now and no job either, and one night Claudia came home in a rage, saying that her friend Isabel Gorkin had seen Ulises sleeping in Tel Aviv North, the train station, or begging on Avenue Hamelech George or along the Gan Meir, then saying that this was unacceptable, emphasizing the word unacceptable in a particular way, as if begging in Mexico City were permissible, but not in Tel Aviv, and worst of all was that she said this to Daniel and me, but with Ulises right there, sitting in his place at the table, listening as if he were the invisible man, and then Claudia said that Ulises was lying to us, that he wasn't looking for work at all, and that we had to decide what we were going to do about it.
That night Daniel shut himself in his room earlier than usual and a few minutes later I followed his example, although I didn't go to my room (the room I shared with Claudia) but outside, where I could wander around and breathe freely, far from the harpy I was in love with. When I got back, around twelve, the first thing I heard when I opened the door was music, a song by Cat Stevens that Claudia especially liked, and then voices. Something about the voices made me keep quiet and not walk on into the living room. It was Claudia's voice and then Ulises's voice, but not their normal, everyday voices, or at least not Claudia's everyday voice. It didn't take me long to realize that they were reading poems. They were listening to Cat Stevens and reading short poems, deadpan and sad, luminous and ambiguous, slow and quick as lightning, poems about a cat rubbing itself up against Baudelaire's legs and a cat, maybe the same cat, rubbing itself up against the legs of an insane asylum! (Later I found out that they were poems by Richard Brautigan translated by Ulises.) When I came into the living room, Ulises raised his head and smiled at me. Without saying anything, I sat down next to them, rolled a cigarette, and told them to please continue. When we went to bed I asked Claudia what had happened. Sometimes Ulises makes me crazy, that's all, she said.
A week later, Ulises left Tel Aviv. When she said goodbye to him, Claudia shed a few tears and then she shut herself in the bathroom for a long time. One night, not even three days later, he called us from the Walter Scholem kibbutz. One of Daniel's cousins, Mexican like us, lived there, and the kibbutz members had taken Ulises in. He told us that he was working in an olive oil factory. How are you liking it? asked Claudia. Not much, said Ulises, it's boring work. A little while later Daniel's cousin called and said that Ulises had been kicked out. Why? Because he wouldn't work. We almost had a fire because of him, said Daniel's cousin. And where is he now? asked Daniel, but his cousin had no idea, in fact, that was why he was calling us, to find out where Ulises was so that he could make him pay the hundred-dollar tab he had run up at the kibbutz store. We spent a few nights waiting for him to show up, but Ulises didn't come. What did arrive was a letter from Jerusalem. I swear on my honor or whatever, it was completely unintelligible. The sole fact that it reached us is proof of the excellence of the Israeli postal service, no question about it. It was addressed to Claudia, but the apartment number wasn't right and the street name contained three misspellings, which was a kind of record. That was on the outside. Inside, it was worse. The letter, as I said, was impossible to read, although it was written in Spanish, or at least that was the conclusion Daniel and I came to. But it might just as well have been written in Aramaic. About that, about Aramaic, I remember something strange. That night, as Daniel and I tried to decipher the letter, Claudia, who after glancing at it showed not the slightest interest in knowing what it said, told us a story that Ulises had told her a long time ago, when both of them lived in Mexico City. According to Ulises, said Claudia, that famous parable about Jesus, the one about the rich man, the camel, and the eye of the needle, might have been the result of an error. In Greek, Claudia said that Ulises had said (but since when did Ulises know Greek?) there existed the word káundos, camel, in which the n (eta) read almost just like an i, and the word káuidos, cable, cord, heavy rope, in which the i (iota) is read i. Which led him to wonder, since Matthew and Luke were based on Mark, whether the possible error or misprint might not have had its origin in Mark or in the work of a scribe immediately posterior to Mark. The only objection to this theory, said Claudia, repeating what Ulises had said, was that Luke, who knew Greek well, would have corrected the error. And yet, Luke knew Greek but not the Jewish world, and he might have supposed that the "camel" passing through or failing to pass through the eye of the needle was a proverb of Hebrew or Aramaic origin. The funny thing, according to Ulises, is that there was another possible source for the error: according to Herr Professor Pinchas Lapide (what a name, said Claudia), of the University of Frankfurt, scholar of Hebrew and Aramaic, there were proverbs in Galilean Aramaic that used the noun gamta, ship's cable, and if one of the consonants were carelessly written, as is often the case in Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts, it would be easy to read gamal, or camel, especially considering that vowels weren't written in Aramaic and ancient Hebrew and had to be inferred. Which leaves us, Claudia said that Ulises had said, with a less poetic and more realistic parable. It's easier for a ship's cable or a thick rope to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And which parable did he like better? asked Daniel. The two of us knew the answer, but we waited for Claudia to tell us. The one with the error, of course.
A week later we got a postcard from Hebron. And then another from the shores of the Dead Sea. And then a third from Eilat, in which he told us that he had found work as a waiter at a hotel. After that, and for a long time, we didn't hear anything. Deep down, I knew the waiter job wouldn't last long and I knew that traveling indefinitely around Israel without a cent in your pocket could be dangerous, but I didn't say anything to the others, although I suppose Daniel and Claudia knew it too. Sometimes we would talk about him during dinner. How do you think he's doing in Eilat? Claudia would ask. He's so lucky to be in Eilat! Daniel would say. We could go visit him next weekend, I would say. And immediately we would tacitly change the subject. At the time I was reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and everything I saw or did only heightened my sense of vulnerability. I remember that I got sick and spent a few days in bed and Claudia, always so perceptive, took the Tractatus away and hid it in Daniel's room, giving me instead one of the novels that she liked to read, The Endless Rose, by a Frenchman called J.M.G. Arcimboldi.
One night, as we were having dinner, I started to think about Ulises, and almost without my realizing it a few tears slid down my cheeks. What's wrong? said Claudia. I answered that if Ulises got sick he wouldn't have anyone to take care of him, the way she and Daniel were taking care of me. Then I thanked them and broke down. Ulises is as strong as a… as a warthog, said Claudia, and Daniel laughed. Claudia's remark, her simile, hurt me, and I asked her whether she'd become insensitive to everything. Claudia didn't answer and started to make me tea with lemon. We've condemned Ulises to the Desert! I exclaimed. As Daniel was telling me not to exaggerate, I heard the spoon, which Claudia's fingers were holding, clicking and stirring in the glass, mixing the liquid and the layer of honey, and then I couldn't take it anymore and I asked her, I begged her to look at me when I was talking, because I was talking to her, not to Daniel, because I wanted her to be the one to give me an explanation or console me, not Daniel. And then Claudia turned around, put the tea in front of me, sat in her usual chair, and said what do you want me to say? I think this is crazy talk, all that philosophy is affecting your brain. And then Daniel said something like my God, yes, in the last two weeks you've been wallowing in Wittgenstein, Bergson, Key-serling (who frankly I don't know how you can stand), Pico della Mirandola, that Louis Claude guy (he meant Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, author of The Man of Aspiration), crazy rac
ist Otto Weininger, and I don't want to know how many others. And you haven't even touched my novel, added Claudia. At that moment I made a mistake and asked her how she could be so insensitive. When Claudia looked at me I realized that I had fucked up, but by then it was too late. The whole room shook when Claudia began to speak. She said that I should never say that again. She said that the next time I said it our relationship would be over. She said that it wasn't a sign of insensitivity not to worry excessively about Ulises Lima's escapades. She said her older brother had died in Argentina, possibly tortured by the police or the army, and that really was serious. She said that her older brother had fought in the ranks of the ERP and had believed in a continentwide American Revolution, and that was serious. She said that if she or her family had been in Argentina during the crackdown they might be dead now. She said all of that and then she started to cry. That's two of us now, I said. We didn't hug, as I would have liked, but we squeezed hands under the table and then Daniel suggested that we all go out and take a walk, but Claudia told him not to be silly, I was still sick, and that it would be best if we all had more tea and then went to bed.
A month later, Ulises Lima showed up. With him was a huge guy, almost six and a half feet tall, dressed in all kinds of rags, an Austrian Ulises had met in Beersheba. We put the two of them up in the living room for three days. The Austrian slept on the floor, Ulises on the sofa. The guy's name was Heimito. We never knew his last name, and he hardly ever said a word. He spoke English with Ulises, but only enough to get by. We had never met anyone with a name like that, although Claudia said there was a writer called Heimito von Doderer, Austrian too, although she wasn't sure. At first glance Ulises's Heimito seemed retarded, or borderline retarded. But they really did get along well.
The Savage Detectives Page 33