Necropolis

by Santiago Gamboa

  When Momsen had finished, Gunard said, I’m sinking, Theodor, I can’t help sinking, farther and farther down, I don’t want to avoid it, I’m not the one who chose to be like this, it’s the situation and it’s Cécile and it’s what grew in me after being with her, something inside me that’s alien, like an illness we can only cure with waiting and silence, because there’s no substance or bacteria that needs to be cured, the organism is healthy, I don’t want to do anything to stop the fig tree growing and choking me, why should I? the idea of death through love is something we only understand when we’re on the verge of dying for love, Theodor, thank you for your advice and experience, they’ve been very useful to me today.

  After the talk with Mr. Momsen came the longed-for prize. There was a rap at the door, and when he opened it the world starting turning again, the planets resumed their orbits and their muffled noise, and night and day stopped being the two faces of a frozen sphere. Gunard’s heart swelled to the bursting point when he heard Cécile say, forgive me, my husband forced me to go with him on a ridiculous journey to Venice, but all I did was think about you, the surge of the canals brought me your voice, I demanded a separate room in the Hôtel des Bains to think about you in the middle of that vast ontological lagoon, I couldn’t stand being with him, I don’t want to be touched by anyone but you, touch me, kiss me, come inside me.

  They rolled on the floor and made love as they had the first time, until night fell and they phoned out for something to eat, and sat on the couch, eating pizza and drinking Burgundy.

  They stayed like this for three days until there was another knock at the door and Gunard heard Renate’s voice through the air vent, but he did not let her in. She wanted to know if he was planning to come back home, if he was planning to leave little Ebenezer, if he thought his marriage wasn’t worth the bother of an explanation, and added: I haven’t the slightest idea what you thought you saw that night in Edvard’s car, but it must have been a hallucination, the product of your obsession, don’t you think?

  Gunard opened wide the door of his study, pointed to Cécile lying naked on the cushions, and said, let me introduce the new woman in my life. Then, turning to Cécile, he said, this is my ex-wife, I hope you get along well. Renate looked at him with eyes full of hatred and said, how long have you been screwing this whore? Cécile got in ahead of Gunard–although he had not in fact planned to answer–and said, madam, I’ve been here for three days and we’ve made love twenty-two times. Before these three days, only once, last week. Don’t worry, this is new, believe me.

  Renate glared at her, turned to Gunard, and said, I don’t know how you’re going to justify this to your father, and then, much to everyone’s surprise, Gunard said, he already knows, my father already knows, and he fell silent again. Renate was terrified when she heard that and only managed to say: now I understand. Then she walked out, slamming the door, and Cécile and Gunard embraced.

  The next person to arrive was the banker Seymour W. Maeterlinck. He had learned Gunard’s address by bribing his wife’s chauffeur and now here he was, in front of the two of them, accompanied by his lawyer. Maeterlinck came straight to the point, and said, very well, I see you’ve decided to make a new life for yourself, I shan’t stand in your way, I will only ask you to sign a few papers, Mr. Heep? The lawyer, Uriah Heep, handed her a folder of documents and said, madam, please sign here, at the bottom, next to your name.

  Cécile looked through the documents, nodded in agreement, and signed them, until she came to one particular document, and said, don’t be cynical, Seymour, the house in Amalfi was chosen and decorated by me, to which the banker replied, indeed it was, my dear, but I paid for it, so sign, Mr. Heep thinks a monthly allowance of 25,000 euros will be sufficient, and she said, if Mr. Heep thinks that, then it must be right, although I would be inclined to go for double that figure myself. Then the lawyer Heep said, I understand, madam, but there is a problem, which is that if you don’t agree I’ll have to accuse you of adultery, there are many witnesses, not to mention the fact that you are here today, in front of us, half-naked. You’d also have to pay the legal fees, which seems rather pointless, so my advice to you is to stop arguing and accept the 25,000. Cécile thought it over for a moment or two and signed. Before he left, the lawyer Heep said, I wish you all the best in your new life, madam, and if at any time you have legal problems don’t hesitate to call me. Heep held out his hand to Gunard. It was damp and cold to the touch, like a reptile’s. That was the image he kept of the lawyer Uriah Heep.

  Three months later, Renate and Gunard agreed on a divorce and the young Swede was able to devote himself to Cécile. But Switzerland, and in particular Zurich, was hostile territory. There were unexploded bombs beneath those sidewalks and squares and they contained too many disturbing memories. Where to go? Gunard would go to the ends of the earth in order not to be separated for a single moment from the woman he loved. Cécile, whose family had emigrated to Switzerland during the Nazi era, had never seen it as her country, the fact that she had been born in Zurich was purely fortuitous. What she dreamed of was a thin strip of land in the Middle East, a fragile space of which she had heard thousands of stories and to whose defense she always sprang with passion: Israel, the land of the Jews. That was the place Cécile suggested, and Gunard, who was not himself Jewish, said, all right, we’ll go where you say, the best thing is to get away from this city, and the shadow of these clouds and these mountains, and that was what they did. They sent their belongings by sea and flew to Tel Aviv and then to Haifa, the city of the gardens of Bahaullah, and settled in an apartment with a view of the port and of Acre, and there they began a new life, she as a rich immigrant receiving visits from a multitude of relatives and friends, and he devoted to chess, sitting on the balcony, breathing in the air of the Mediterranean and bathed in the golden reflections of the sun, because it was still September.

  One afternoon when Cécile was out and he was contemplating the vague outline of Acre and the bay from his table, he felt something very deep, as if inside him a little goblin had opened a door and switched on the light of a grotto where antique objects and old masks lay, dusty and twisted but still there, intact. He went into the bedroom and opened Cécile’s closet. Twenty minutes later, he was wearing a purple dress and a pair of nylon stockings. He made up his eyes and lips and put a pin in his hair, which gave it a strangely volcanic effect, and sat down on the balcony in that costume to observe the swell of the sea, the slow movements of the boats and the clear air that appeared to shine on the water. He felt a disturbing happiness, a hurricane that was born in his chest and was struggling to come out, and so he gripped the iron bars of the balcony and cried out loudly, until the veins rose in his neck, and he cried not a word but a brazen lament, a song that was to split his life in two, this side, the side of the balcony in Haifa and Cécile and the view of Acre, being the part where he planned to stay for the rest of his life, leaving everything else behind. He was conscious that there were people he loved, like little Ebenezer, but that’s life, at times it can be cruel and incomprehensible.

  Imbued in these thoughts, he continued observing the landscape, and a moment later what he saw had stopped being the horizon of the Middle East or the profile of Acre or the gardens of Bahaullah. His imagination had taken him to Orplid, the distant city of stalactites, but as he walked along one of its avenues, there came a tremor, and the air filled with smoke and dust, and when he looked at the ground he discovered that it was covered in rubble and the remains of corpses, with mutilated arms and legs and faces frozen by death in a desperate attitude, the infinite solitude of a corpse, and then, as he walked up the main street, lined with demolished palaces, he realized that he was not alone, that behind him a group of shadows was beginning to climb. He was at the head of a silent retinue of people dressed in cloaks and hoods, carrying long sticks and advancing with difficulty, and he continued his march, seeing the highest hills in the middle of the city, where a dome still glittered in spite
of the fires. With great effort, he led the group and began the last ascent up a blackened staircase that crossed the remains of a garden of charred birches and a layer of ash where there should have been grass and flowers. As he reached the top and sighted the palace, and the group caught their breath before entering the temple to register its destruction, a deafening bust of gunfire coming from the darkest part of the night decimated them, and Gunard, faced with such sorrow, fell to his knees and raised his arms and looked down at his own body now torn to pieces, destroyed by shrapnel, and then heard a voice saying, what are you doing? why are you kneeling?

  Cécile covered her face with one hand, hiding an expression of surprise. Her eyes filled with tears, she let out a fierce laugh, and said, what the hell are you doing with my clothes? Gunard was still recovering from his terrible daydream and could only reply, I’m sorry, it’s the way I have of getting close to certain things, ideas or premonitions, it’s the only way I can unravel them, and she said, you look very pretty, come help me make dinner, my God, the wind is starting to get cooler, don’t you feel cold? Cécile did not make any kind of scene on learning of his clandestine enthusiasm. It seemed not to bother her, in fact she found it amusing, so they continued their life in Haifa, she devoted to her visits and he joining a local chess club, starting to play again and, much to his surprise, winning tournaments, because the general level was lower than his.

  He began to feel again that in order to enjoy life he did not need to go far, to be a Grand Master or gain prizes or anything like that. In the little chess club in the harbor area of Haifa he learned that, apart from Cécile, the one really important thing was to have time for his whims, a comfortable space in which to live quietly and privately, and a clean environment where he could breathe freely. Greatness, as it was traditionally understood, seemed to him a prison. So he devoted himself to simple things, which is another way of saying that he led a happy life.

  Four years later, he applied for Israeli nationality, in order to join his destiny to that of this strip of land and to be even closer to Cécile. One condition, though, was that he undergo military training, which he accepted immediately. A year and eight months later, he was another man, weathered by the sun, with well-toned muscles, a strong man always to be seen on the beaches of Haifa or in the restaurants of the harbor area. He started to play in tournaments in Tel Aviv as an Israeli, because it gave him pleasure to think that he was sharing the life of six million people who had come from the four corners of the earth with the idea of a country of their own, such as he had found in Cécile and they both had in Haifa.

  But happiness rarely lasts forever, as Gunard was to discover in the most brutal manner. In a fairly succinct e-mail, Renate informed him that little Ebenezer had died of meningitis. When she got home that evening, Cécile found him sitting in front of his Mac, as motionless as if a distant sniper had planted a bullet between his eyebrows. When she touched him she noted that he was freezing cold. In the emergency department of Beth Israel hospital, they said he had had a nervous shock, and when he recovered his first words were, my little Ebenezer is gone, I’ve been punished for leaving him alone.

  They flew to Zurich and attended the funeral. Renate was cordial enough, although she looked at him with accusing eyes. She had been living for some time now with the Norwegian Edvard, which was only logical, and was devoting herself to non-figurative art and artistic happenings, in the style of Paul Hayse and Miriam Cunningham. She announced that she was planning to operate on herself, in order to create a work of sculpture out of her own body, as a way of expressing her grief over Ebenezer’s death in a permanent form.

  They talked about this over a beer in the café attached to the funeral parlor, minutes before the cortege set off for the cemetery. Outside, it was raining. Gunard was surprised that Renate could use the death of their child for artistic purposes, however noble the idea; he found it hard to believe that her grief was not as strong as his and that she could only think about herself. But he said nothing, only listened to her and then stood up, paid for the beer, and went back to the room where the coffin lay.

  His father had come from Gothenburg for the occasion. They embarked, which gave Gunard back his strength. Then they went for a walk and his father said, the death of a child is the worst pain a human being can suffer, but you mustn’t look for reasons and you mustn’t try to assign blame, any more than you can deny that it’s a terrible injustice and demonstrates that this world is not ruled by a superior being but by a murderous, drunk little tyrant who gloats over his creatures. Above all, don’t try to understand, be strong and wait, the pain will pass, remember the Chinese proverb, we have to be like the bamboo, which bends when there’s a storm and then rises again, let the storm pass, the noise of it will thunder in your head, but don’t do anything. It’s like the rain. You can’t stop it falling, you can only wait until it’s over.

  He spent all night with his father and Cécile. The next day they buried Ebenezer in the Friedhof Fluntern in Zurich, in a grave on which Renate had had the following phrase carved: The rest of my life is written on the stones that lie at the bottom of the Limmat. Gunard made no objection, even though Renate’s need to transform the child’s death into something distinctive struck him as vain and ridiculous. The symbolism and metaphors concealed her imperious desire to play a leading role in the tragedy, to appropriate it for herself, thus demonstrating her extraordinary crassness and egotism. Gunard said nothing, and looked absent during the ceremony. Some of those present claimed they felt a great sense of cold when they gave him their condolences, as if something of that frozen North from which he came was in his eyes.

  Ebenezer’s death marked the final break with Renate, and that gave him a feeling of calm. On the flight back to Tel Aviv, he looked out the window at the glistening blue expanse of the sea and remembered the night with Renate in Capri. My God, he said to himself, what begins so romantically, between two human beings, has a tendency to become corrupted and end tragically, in contempt and insults and humiliation, is it always like that? The proof of the contrary was Cécile, but he also said to himself, it’s too soon to draw conclusions. We’ll have to wait a few more years.

  Some time later, when Gunard was on the point of abandoning chess, he was called into the army. His new country was getting ready to launch a military action outside its borders and needed all its reserves. Gunard joined a tank company whose mission was to transport the wounded as well as supplies. Cécile enlisted in a mobile hospital unit.

  The combat began and Gunard became accustomed to advancing amid dust and rubble, lifting bloodstained and mutilated bodies full of holes. He became accustomed to shrieks of pain and the sharp crack of ampoules of morphine opened with the teeth, and other things too: the smell of charred flesh and the smell of gangrene and the bulging eyes of young men who were dying and knew it and having to stop bleeding by plunging his hand into hot wounds, yes, Gunard’s fingers, accustomed to moving delicate pieces of wood or ivory, were now exploring the insides of shattered bodies, suturing broken veins, and occasionally, only occasionally, finding bodies that emerged from the rubble and started to run, propelled by the force of life, an image that made him cry and forced him to hide his face, because the simplest actions had turned into something precious.

  So it was that one afternoon, after a thunderous combat in a village, he saw a body emerge out of nowhere, and a man lifting his hands and saying, save me. Ferenck Oslovski.

  They met at the moment of salvation.

  Later, in the mobile hospital behind the lines, where they sewed Ferenck’s wounds and announced a slow recovery, Gunard said: I know how to spend the sleepless nights, and he took out a chess set. After a few games, they realized that they knew each other. They had both taken part in a tournament in Austria two decades earlier and although they had never played against each other, they remembered each other’s names.

  When the war ended, they continued to meet.

  Gunard would come to Te
l Aviv and they would play on the beach until the orange sphere of the sun descended below the surface of the sea, seeming to sink in the water. The two men would talk and move the pieces rapidly. The lives of both men had drifted to that coast like a school of fish moving to warmer waters. Oslovski would say to Gunard: look at the sand, it’s made of tiny stones and crystals. When one of these particles sinks it’s covered by another, by ten more, a hundred or a thousand, and the same thing happens to us, don’t you think? When we sink others will come, hundreds of thousands, and the Earth will always be populated by people who will feel alone, but a hundred years may pass before two men again play chess on this beach, do you think chess will still exist? Yes, said Gunard, chess is deeper and more mysterious than all of us put together; it’ll exist until somebody manages to master it completely, and that’ll never happen, Ferenck, it’s impossible for that to happen. Oslovski looked at him in surprise, and said, at the end of the day it’s a question of statistics: we’ll keep getting better, more intelligent, more gifted, we’ll keep going farther. Soon the great men of the 21st century will be born, or rather, they’ll turn into adults, because many may already have been born, and then we’ll know about them. The Freuds and Marxes and Einsteins and Nietzsches of the 21st century must be going to school right now, or still playing with toy cars, or watching the fall of a leaf in a park, who knows? And apart from them, there’ll also be a young Kafka suffering then turning to literature as therapy, and there’ll be an aristocratic Proust, who’ll portray the decadent bourgeoisie of the early 21st century from within, and of course the new Rimbaud must already be walking the streets, a young man with his fists clenched with hate, struggling against the social forms, and the Bukowski of the 21st century receiving a thrashing from his father and discovering that alcohol dulls the pain, and of course some boy of seven or eight must be on the verge of checkmating an adult on a chessboard, because in humanity’s infinite pack, the cards are equal only on one side; when we turn them over we find that there are many twos and threes and sixes of spades, but far fewer aces of diamonds, do you see what I mean?