Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

  The article had been greeted with a certain suspicion and many of my colleagues had raised a number of objections about the reliability of the theory, the most common being that the temperature fluctuations of background cosmic radiation were too marginal. Oscar Liebowitz had gone one step further: he had written a decidedly astringent article in Science in which he knocked down both me and my theory. He claimed to be upset that a serious scientist like Yuko Atori should waste time on such nonsense, especially with someone who seemed for some time now to have wandered into Wonderland. To demolish my theory Liebowitz had claimed, ironically, that with a bit of intelligence and imagination—characteristics I obviously did not lack—you could see whatever you wanted in cosmic background radiation. The article was illustrated by an image of cosmic background radiation—a kind of planisphere dotted with blue and green thermal streaks, with just a few sporadic hints of yellow and red—and above it, surrounded by dark blue shadows, the words God Exists. Two days after the publication of his piece, going down into one of the bleak little classrooms in Pupin Hall in Columbia for one of my classes, I had found another map of cosmic background radiation attached to the blackboard, with the words We still love you, prof above it.

  “Very witty,” I admitted reluctantly, giving a little laugh.

  Two years earlier, Oscar Liebowitz had been offered the post of director of the Astrophysics Department of the new Kavli Institute in Dallas after I had already turned it down. One evening, over a beer, I’d heard from a mutual acquaintance that Liebowitz was embarrassed by the fact that he had been offered the job only after it had already been offered to a scientist ten years his junior, but obviously, on the few occasions we met, he behaved with the formality for which he was well known. One day however, after a lecture of mine at the University of Dallas which he had decided to attend, we found ourselves alone together in the elevator.

  “A bit lightweight, that talk of yours, Dr Ferri,” he said as soon as the elevator doors had closed, continuing, as if everything were normal, to stare at the numbers on the button panel as we descended to the ground floor. Usually, we used each other’s first names in public in a show of friendship.

  I turned and looked at him. He seemed smaller than usual, his skin cracked by some psychosomatic disorder. There was an almost imperceptible hint of a smile on his lips. So as not to go all the way down with him, I pressed the button for the second floor. When the doors opened I stepped out, then stopped the door with my hand, looked him straight in the eyes, and gave him an icy smile.

  “Professor Liebowitz,” I said, “having to chew the food someone else has spat out every day must have left a bitter taste.” Then I said, “Have a nice day,” and left with a big smile on my face. As I wasted a few minutes wandering through the second floor of the University of Dallas, I convinced myself that few things in the world were as satisfying as a well-placed barb. As a friend of mine would write one day in one of his books: “Never underestimate the terrible resentment of dwarves.”

  So I wasn’t too surprised by the smug sarcasm with which Liebowitz had slammed the article by me and Yuko. Unfortunately, half of me couldn’t help feeling dejected and sniffing the acid smell of failure everywhere. The other half just smiled and kept repeating, “I told you so.” Yes, in reality I had known that sooner or later this obsession of mine would bring me to a halt. I had known it ever since that spectre had insinuated itself into my thoughts. After a certain point, I had become obsessed by the idea of being able to find concrete and credible theories that would predict the fate of the universe. In reality, what little fame and authority I had rested on my lengthy study of the very subject of cosmic background radiation, more specifically its anisotropies, its irregularities. But what my obsession was actually about was the limits of the universe. I didn’t really want to accept it, but that was the way it was. However, because of the principle of indeterminacy, going all the way back to the real origin obviously wasn’t possible. So my interest had shifted to the future. All my studies, though, seemed to confirm the idea of what was commonly called the Big Chill, a kind of general cosmic death. The universe did not seem to have any intention, as I had hoped at first that I could demonstrate, of slowing down or actually stopping its own expansion—let alone starting to contract—and, however lacking in harmony it might seem to me, everything in fact appeared destined to move apart until it disintegrated and disappeared. The problem, though, lay precisely in the word harmony: I couldn’t accept that the extraordinary elegance I had grown accustomed to see in the universe was destined for something as cold and bleak as a general collapse. Emotion had, so to speak, penetrated the hitherto solid borders of my research. My subsequent study of cyclic cosmic waves was a way of gathering everything I had constructed and studied into a credible theory that could finally save the elegant idea of a cyclical universe in constant expansion and contraction, like the wrappers of an infinite and very tasty series of sweets. Moreover, it could quite easily be only one of the possible universes. In short, there could be as many sweets as you wanted, and the universe, that even larger one, the father of all universes, could go back to being a gentle, colourful place. That was why half of me, in writing the article with Yuko, had been convinced for months that I had finally found the project of my life, the one for which we would be remembered, a turning point in the history of modern astronomy. The other half of me—unfortunately the more serious and rigorous half—knew it was only a clumsy attempt to bend mathematics and physics and the WMAP data into a naïve sensation devoid of concrete and serious evidence. That was why my more lucid colleagues had taken it for what it in fact was: an interesting but basically weak theory.

  “So what?” Greg said, sitting there on his black leather couch with the glass in his hand. “Nobody knows more about the world than you people. It was you who told me that once, overcome by one of your ridiculous scientific ecstasies: ‘There’s no branch of science or philosophy that has ever investigated the universe so profoundly.’ That’s what you told me.”

  “And what do you think the point of it is?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, finishing his drink and putting down the glass. “You tell me.”

  “There is no point, no point at all.”

  “Stop it, you’re talking nonsense. Go home and look at yourself.”

  “No point to any of it. And do you want to know why?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Because advancing in the study of science only means advancing towards an awareness of our limitations.”

  Greg raised his eyebrows and continued to stare at me.

  “Precisely,” I continued. “At first it all seems beautiful: the laws of gravity, the curvature of space and time, neutrinos, gluons… it all seems to be there to give colour to a universe that never ceases to amaze you. Then, while you’re stooped over a desk solving equations with your eye fixed on that kaleidoscope, you realize the years are passing and the only thing you’ve really learnt is that a human being will never understand a fucking thing about what surrounds him, and above all that the whole human race and this whole planet that everyone worries so much about will vanish in what for the universe is no more than the infinitesimal fraction of a yawn. Everything becomes insignificant, Greg. Nothing matters any more. And the beauty of it is, you don’t even notice it. It’s a slow, unconscious process of erosion: moment by moment, every new revelation about the universe darkens another fragment of your days, until you’re not surprised by anything any more. What can still surprise us when we already have intergalactic collisions, black holes, fossil radiation and supernovas? Everything surrounding us becomes simply an accumulation of vibrating particles which will dissolve in the clicking of a finger or contract into the void it came from.”

  Greg was still sitting there motionless, staring at me and smiling. I stared back at him, biting the inside of my lip slightly. For a moment the music faded, and I almost thought I could hear both of us breathing.

  “Amanda wan
ts children.”

  Greg said nothing.

  “Do you think she’s wrong? We’ve been going out for three years and I’ve never even suggested living together, let alone having kids.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean ‘why’? How can I bring children into the world, make them work as hard as everyone has to work, most probably suffer, and then as soon as they’ve developed enough brains to ask me a few questions tell them, ‘You know, I was joking. There’s no point to any of this. Everything you construct, everything you strive for will be swept away like the contents of an ashtray in the wind’?”

  Greg continued looking at me for a few seconds. “And so your great new insight is that if you’d stayed in San Filippo everything might have been better?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe, yes. At least I didn’t know.”

  “Is that what you really wanted? A nice little wife to fuck in the missionary position, mass on Sunday, gathering blackberries in summer with your kids?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Did you want a life like your parents?”

  “My parents are satisfied with their lot.”

  “Sorry to tell you this, Skinny, but your parents are the dullest people I’ve ever met. Whenever I went to your house, even if it was only for ten minutes, it took me the next two days to shake off the boredom.”

  A smile escaped me. Then after a moment I became serious again and bowed my head. “I doubt everything, Greg.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said. For a while now there hasn’t been anything I haven’t doubted. Everything appears blurred and indistinct.”

  “Well, congratulations.”

  “On what?”

  “You doubt, you’re alive, you’re a man at last.”

  “What are you talking about? It’s all blurred and grey. Is that life?”

  “In your opinion, Skinny, why are we here?”

  “Oh, my God, how should I know why we’re here? I don’t even know if I still like coffee or not.”

  “Here in this city, I mean.”

  “In this city?”

  “Yes.”

  I stared at Greg for a few moments, feeling myself slipping into a terrifying and absurd whirlpool of incoherent arguments.

  “Original sin, Skinny.”

  “Original sin? What’s original sin got to do with it?”

  “Why do you think they call this city the Big Apple?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I, but it’s always amused me to think that it’s the greatest monument to the forbidden fruit, to man’s irrepressible tendency to rise above himself.”

  Again I couldn’t hold back a smile. “Are you preparing for another conversion?”

  “Stop it,” Greg said irritably. “And put it any way you like, but at a certain point in the history of this strange evolution of the ape something happened. And who cares about his discoveries? They all derive, every one of them, from the biological joke of opposable thumbs. We agreed on that once: nature couldn’t have found a more effective tool for training our brains than this damned crooked finger. But that’s not the real, the inexplicable miracle: it’s that after a while this animal started to ask himself questions. He removed himself from the world around him and found the freedom to doubt. That’s what we are: doubt.”

  I looked at him for a few moments. “Well, because of how we are, it might have been better not to ask ourselves all these questions.”

  Greg gave a forced laugh. “Oh, come on. Someone like you spends every day asking the most ambitious questions a human being has ever asked himself. Why do you think you get that thrill every time you come out of that damned 59th Street station?”

  I looked at him without saying anything.

  “Because you feel at home, Skinny. Because it’s music to your ears.”

  I lowered my eyes and gave a deep sigh. “I don’t know.”

  Greg looked hard at me for a few seconds. “What is it you want? Thanks to me you’ve seen the world, you’ve known the abyss of desire. You’ve learnt to suffer.”

  *

  Oh yes, the gods knew I’d learnt what desire was. Knives in the chest and organs that turned in on themselves. Red hot pincers had squeezed my soul and genitals until they bled, and all because of the unlikeliest of women.

  It all started on an ordinary late April evening. I was at dinner with Fausto, an acquaintance of mine, the New York correspondent for an Italian TV channel. The first word that comes to mind when I try to define him is: clichéd. His Italian shoes with their eye-catching stitching were clichéd, as were his mirror-filled Midtown apartment, his off-colour jokes and especially his passion for young girls. The way he’d laugh on the street and rub his hairy hands and point out a girl of barely twelve and say, “The things I’d do to her…” didn’t necessarily make him as odious as he perhaps hoped. More than anything else it made him not very original. For some reason, though, Fausto had taken a shine to me. I don’t know if it was the brilliant answers he told me I’d given during the interview that first brought us together, or the day he asked me to replace a friend of his in a soccer game in Central Park and discovered I was a decent midfielder. Whatever the reason, he’d convinced himself that I was a person worth spending time with. His insistence sometimes made it difficult for me to refuse, and as it was a time when I was reluctant to stay indoors anyway and Fausto was always full of plans, always had interesting places to suggest going, I always seemed to end up letting him drag me along.

  It was at the end of one of these strange evenings that I found myself in the back seat of a taxi, clinging to the body of a Latino girl. She said her name was Tara, and we had met only a few hours before at Novecento, the restaurant on West Broadway where she worked as a waitress. Fausto, with a lot of cunning and a number of lies—that despite my age I was in the running for a Nobel Prize, that he was interviewing me about it, that they were throwing a party in my honour in TriBeCa that evening, and then that the supposed party had been cancelled at the last moment because of an accident—had managed to lure Tara and another girl who worked with her to an ultra-exclusive club hidden in the basement of the Mercer Hotel, right there in SoHo. An endless supply of bottles of vodka and the girls’ excitement at spotting a couple of movie stars had done the rest.

  Some time later, standing on the sidewalk, Fausto suggested we all go to his place.

  I tried to regain a modicum of clearheadedness. I imagined us in Fausto’s living room, which looked like a pimp’s hangout, probably getting through another bottle of something, and the dawn coming all too soon.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “I think I’ll skip it.” Then I looked at Tara and asked her if she’d come with me.

  She burst out laughing. “Yes, sir, of course I’ll come with you.”

  By the time we were in the taxi we were finding it hard to keep our hands off each other and we started some serious groping. I felt as if I were going to explode. When we got to my building, I threw too much money on the plexiglass plate, told the driver to keep the change, and we jumped out of the cab. Tara stumbled and fell to her knees on the ground. Laughing, I picked her up and helped her up the few steps that separated us from the front door.

  “This is where my landlady lives,” I whispered once we were inside, putting a finger to my lips.

  “Oh yes?” Tara said. As I turned away to lock the front door behind us, she climbed a few steps of the staircase that led to the upper floor. She turned her head slightly, threw me a glazed smile, grabbed the hem of her skirt, pulled it up above her hips, pushed out her arse and wiggled it. The black thread of a G-string vanished between two buttocks as round and firm as nectarines.

  “Jesus,” I said. I approached her slowly, and as if my legs were giving way, collapsed on one of the steps and buried my face in her arse. She wiggled again, as if to let my face get further in. I put my hands on her buttocks and parted them and put my nose and tongue half i
n. Then I pulled back and, feeling all the oxygen abandon my lungs, lifted the G-string with my index finger and moved it aside. I again sank my mouth and tongue into the fold between the buttocks and between the moist lips, before I rose—with something appalling and unknown unleashed inside me—unbuttoned my trousers, climbed two steps and sank into her. Tara placed her hands on another step, emitted a little cry, and started panting. I grabbed the G-string with both hands and tore it. As I took her, I opened her buttocks as far as they would go and, clenching my teeth until they hurt, stared at that dark little star that seemed to be there, winking at me, inviting me. I started massaging it with my thumb, ever stronger, until I let a whole phalanx disappear inside. I felt something rising inside me that I’d never felt, something animal, fighting me inside and swelling my throat in the hint of a snarl. I spat between her buttocks and sank my thumb even further inside.

  “No atrás,” she said suddenly in Spanish, though still panting and moving.

  I didn’t listen to her and slipped the other thumb inside her too.

  “No,” she sighed again, still moaning.

  I felt that fierce animal continuing to swell my throat. It had nothing of the yearning I’d felt in the days of Trisha for her soft cunt and her skin, let alone the sublimated eroticism I thought I’d felt for Anna, the doctorate colleague in Baltimore I’d decided to become infatuated with and soon got bored with. It was something different, something shattering. Something older: older than me and older than man. It was as if I found myself torn in two: half of me had gone back to its most primitive urges, the other was in the most refined vanguard of evolution. And they were both struggling and snarling, trying to bring what they had started to a conclusion: I lifted myself from inside her, jumped up another step, again spat at her behind, took out my thumbs, opened her buttocks wide, and entered.

  “No,” she howled again, not very convincingly. I started to slip in and out of her, first slowly, then more violently, that constant muted snarl still vibrating in my throat. She was moaning ever more loudly, and the stairs were starting to creak. I felt the muscles of my legs and back hurting and when she was about to cry out, I tried to cover her mouth with one hand and she bit it, and when I was about to come and took away my hand and grabbed her hair and gave her a big slap on the arse, she turned her head aside and shrieked, “Ahi, corazón, qué rico!”