I Am the Brother of XX

by Fleur Jaeggy

  Quietly, a candle gleams. The hand of Caspar draws up a will. He calls his brothers by their name, but it is his own odious name that proceeds from his mouth like an oration. His brothers have lost their exteriority. In China children were once named according to the sound of their voice. Voices are still. All is set before it happens. Caspar shoots the dogs, out of pity. And the gun emulates that gesture, pointing straight at Caspar. He was about to turn seventy-nine. His wish has come true. He had not been impatient. He had hoped that a child from the portrait would kill him. And that long before.

  They say in Rhäzüns that the last of a line is killed by his own dead, by his siblings. Caspar, when he looked at the portraits, had wondered which of them would be the assassin. And that was why he had started molesting their images. The chrysalises. The funeral was grand. The old people of Rhäzüns and the children, too, followed the carriage, dancing almost. The carriage, like a dead ship, slid over the snow, giddy and mute.

  The Gentleman and the Lizard

  She had asked herself why she lived in an ugly city. Because it went hand in hand with her life. Some things are quickly spoken, they don’t need to be thought. The teapot is on the table. “Hush, hush, Regula, that’s enough.” Regula conversed with her cup, a precious little cup, painted by hand. Her ancestors had drunk from it. They were her interlocutors. The small cutlery with ivory handles seemed to find some things funny, especially the little fork. They kept her company. Like teatime, the exquisite hour, when nothing could disturb her, nothing can disturb her life, a life some might define as empty. Incautious people who immediately pass judgment. They don’t know what the void might be. And believe that an empty life is contemptible. Not so. Regula appreciates the void, in all its nuances. The walls of the rooms are bare, white and harsh. Bald. A sort of baldness adorns her rooms. On the bedside table there is a little bell that hasn’t been used for years now. In a corner of the room a bouquet. Regula prefers “a bouquet” to “a bunch of flowers.” About certain words she has prejudices. They are variegated orchids, minuscule, tattooed, humid. Who were they once? What were their intentions when they grew hidden in ravines and shadow? Once there were pictures on the walls. Regula can no longer bear to see art hanging on the walls. Yet how much time she has spent in museums. In front of portraits. She was drawn to the faces. The young man turning the pages of a book, but not looking at them. His gaze was distant, toward the unknown that pulled him elsewhere. The lizard, poised on a pale blue cloth, turning its small head toward him, knew this. It is the unknown, it said. It is the abyss. It is the wing of the abyss. So high up. The young man, who was called a gentleman, wore dark clothes, a collarless white shirt, fastened by a thin ribbon with small tassels. Frivolous cuffs, of evanescent silk. Letters, bits of torn paper on his desk. Sheets folded and tied by a thread. A document, perhaps. His inert hands invite caresses, a kiss. Regula had drawn near and, as though they might be a relic, touched them. The lizard was intrigued by the possibility that a being could be endowed with such large stores of unhappiness. He didn’t know what it was, he would have liked to taste some. The young man listens without hearing him. Fickle, a thought slips away, featureless as he tries to grab hold of it. Missives, hidden numbers, tell of evil spells. All that they were exuding was against him. His eyes were leaving eyes. Why are they not looking out the window? Regula tries to write him a letter. Through the window, above a landscape the color of swamps, sky and clouds can be glimpsed. He turns his back. Soft clouds. Look, she tells him, they barely exist. They are quick to fade and quick to re-form, as though it made no difference at all. Near the horizon a carriage drawn by blind horses goes by. He’d like to climb into it. But it’s too late, it has gone away. It didn’t wait for him. And life, too, no longer feels like waiting for him. What will happen to him? Regula wonders. But the portrait does not answer. It is calm and desperate. Despair has a visual quality, it spreads calm, chill, levity, like an optical illusion. The gentleman in the portrait no longer sees anything that lets itself be said in words. He begs Regula to stop talking, not to look at him, to shut the door. He wants to go away, simply to go away, forever. Not in a violent manner as Stifter did, cutting his own throat. Darkness falls across his desk. The letters turn to leaves, vegetation. The words were ribs, a plantlike tongue. The night of the 27th to the 28th of January the gentleman in the portrait started wandering in the dark, more and more adrift. Even that gesture was an illusion. There was no place called the end.

  Agnes

  Agnes left me five years ago. Today is Good Friday. I went to the church and looked at the vestments. The one day of the year when I go to church. I stare at the vestments and hope that they’ll enter my eyes, covering them. On Good Friday, it’s as if I am possessed. I know that the vestments last more than a day. But as far as I’m concerned they last a day. I don’t know what they may be hiding, those magnificent, exhilarating purple vestments. I have no precise understanding of the Passion. I mean to say that I have no knowledge of the liturgy. The crucifixion is to me without a body. Without a soul. Without an image. I know what nails and a crown of thorns are. Ornaments, as if in a dowry. But all of that means nothing more to me. I’d just like to lie down next to it all and drink the blood. Yet on that day I become, by grace, by total ignorance, devout. Like the pagans. I collect myself. I am in union with what is hidden. If it’s a matter of love, I do not love. Other than that moment. When I stand, kneel, and if no one is watching, bow down to the ground, my forehead touching the marble.

  I live alone. I earn enough on my salary. There is shadow over the light, it’s fragile. From the dome another light, more pointed, descends, icy, trenchant. I stare at the gloom of the vestments, at the visionary truth of the little box, a golden casket with a tiny door, the tabernacle enshrining the eye. Which a key locks. On that day I am devout. I fast. I am in silence. I am moved and must cry. Sometimes in Greece I entered the small Orthodox churches to greet the iconostasis. I give an offering for the candles, drachmas old and filthy. For the honey-colored candles, the color of faded sun, of remembrance. Of fire and sand, almost human to the touch. Slender, pliable, spirits. Then a hand grabs them all — as though they were being grabbed by the hair — and tosses them into a bin filled with sand. They go back to where they came from. They don’t put them out. They let them burn to the last breath. They are still standing, lit. They taper, they head toward dissolution, bending. Whoever grabs the dying candles does not smother the fire. I wouldn’t like colored candles. I have a distaste for colored candles. Or red ones. Those imitating Christmas. Hands clap and everyone laughs when the candles are blown out at a birthday party in one breath. Light blue, pink.

  I met Agnes the day of her twelfth birthday. She had refused to blow out the candles. After that we became inseparable. Like an illness. At the age of eighteen it was convenient to live together. She leaves a mother in need of affection. I leave no one. We invite her mother now and then. “If only I’d done as you did.” She said. Then, behind my back, I heard her say to her daughter: “Marry a man.” The little sentence had become an insistent litany. I was cleaning the house, my girlfriend slept. I went to her in sleep. Agnes was becoming indifferent in bed. Our passionate coexistence began right away, by attraction. At twelve she, my little girl, Agnes, was a fury. She pounced on me everywhere. She took the initiative, I am only a few years older than she. The sexual initiative. At that time I was still using words. Small gifts. Flowers. I courted her. She threw away the flowers. Laughed at the words. Had no use for the gifts. Before me she had fallen in love with a school friend. She would pick her up after class. She left her after a few months. The school friend got sick. She had neither the strength nor the energy to accept amorous passion, or abandonment. I saw Agnes drag the girl across the lawn by her hair.

  The amorous passion that drew us together indissolubly (or so it seemed) is over. When Agnes was twenty-three her mother and I decked her out as a bride. The bridal gown advances slowly to bow before the a
ltar. Agnes looked at me. I caught an uneasy gleam. Agnes was mad about that man. Next to her, kneeling before the altar. I heard two yeses.

  Let me go or I’ll kill you, is what she told me shortly before getting married. That “let me go” offended me. The “I’ll kill you” part filled me with joy. When I was designing her dress it was like drawing a tattoo on her skin. The sheets of paper were her skin. And when she left I was relieved. The relief one might feel in having been abandoned. The house seemed to me airier and more desolate. Her presence faded. And returned stronger each day. Agnes’s mother and I play cards. Agnes’s mother, too, tries to jump me. She says that her daughter always slept with her. And why should I care? I beg her not to talk to me about Agnes.

  Then I take a leash and drag her to the door. She squats down, the old lady, in the hallway. Panting. We’ll only play cards, she promises. That’s all. That doesn’t make me unleash her. Hadn’t she instigated it all, her daughter getting married? Often, when I left the office, I’d go into some shops. I looked at everything meticulously. The small bottles of perfume, the jewelry. The cameras. I felt like stealing. For her. I’d make the gesture. Then I’d put back the gesture, the idea of the gesture. I bought little orchid plants. They came from Holland. From South America. I had seen them in the Mediterranean. Growing in the damp. White, with purple eyelets. Rosy, pale, an evil expression. Acidulous. Yellow. They last a long time. Not much earth. Not much nourishment. They reawaken in the dark, at night. Avid for company. When they wilt, they become small skulls in tuxedos. Tiny night birds. They look at me. I look at them.

  I just had a visit from Agnes’s husband. Agnes was in the garden. I was forgetting to tell you that Agnes’s husband has a delightful little house in the country. A small kingdom for a newlywed couple. The garden borders on other gardens. And more gardens, all the way to the garbage dump. He found her asleep on a deck chair. A book of poems on her lap. He didn’t tell me the author, he is ignorant. I think it’s Robert Frost. I gave it to her. He called her. “Agnes, Agnes.” He didn’t want to wake her. The vegetation reeked of an eerie maleficent calm, a brutal calm. I know the countryside. In winter when it’s cloaked in a delightful shroud. You know that kind of mist, tiresome. It seems inert — isn’t. Agnes. She cannot reply. Or read. The book has just slipped out of the hands. On the finger the ring I had given her. I alone.

  I imagine a man mad with grief in the lovely garden. He is beside himself. I can understand him. I can understand when a man is upset. I am slightly bored. I don’t let on. I am the only one who understands him. Didn’t I, too, love her? Before him. Two of us loved her. Really loved her. He says. It is superfluous for him to say “really.” But people always talk too much. He adds. Instead of subtracting. I am calm. A natural death, he says. Why? I ask, with scant curiosity. Lately she was uneasy. I stop listening to him. I relax. As the man speaks, my mind wanders. I am not in the least moved. I feel no sorrow. Once — sorrow. It won’t be back. It doesn’t visit any more. At home, in the room, sorrow returns. Like a grace received. In my house. As though the house alone were the place of loss. I listen to the man again. He uses the word happiness in his grimace of pain. He had apparently had moments of happiness. What is meant by a natural death? Isn’t it enough to say, “She died”? He’d been happy, he repeated in his grief. He tries to burden me with his happiness and grief. He gained satisfaction from me. He succeeded. She would have killed me if I hadn’t given satisfaction to the one who was to be her husband. It was like a duel. I offered the wedding dress, the ring. And something I can’t say. He said he would take the ring from her. I thought: he took her life. To mention just one thing. But the husband didn’t hear.

  Now he goes to the cemetery often. Not far from his garden. Not me. I don’t believe in these material things.

  The Aseptic Room

  Once with Ingeborg we talked about old age, she smiled at that word, but that word was accompanied neither by the heart nor by a real smile. I imagined a longevity without death, a house in the country, a wall, I described to her the external architecture and I bound her with a rope. And a garden within the walls and again I said to her the two of us. I was terribly convinced. A headstrong conviction about what doesn’t come true. I imagined visits, guests, and we discussed the names of the guests, drinking gin and tonics. As she sat on the blond wood Biedermeier couch, its striped upholstery, the round Biedermeier table and the vase of flowers seemed to be listening. Yet I wasn’t altogether convinced by her participation, she was kind and somewhat distracted. “Wouldn’t you like us to live together when we are old?” I’d insist. Then Ingeborg (I think to mollify me) would nod. But she did so as though she did not foresee a future. I did not speak of old age as a future, rather as a premonition, a fear . . .

  Old age, she said, is horrible. It’s all horrible, I’d tell her. With a kind of glee. I tried to convince her that it’s all truly horrible (at that time our lives weren’t bad at all) and I meant it. Then her eyes radiated happiness and years went by. Swift. Every day I went to Sant’Eugenio, the burn unit. Twice I entered a room that had to be kept aseptic.

  The Heir

  Hannelore, a girl without a fixed residence, is the only witness to a fire in the apartment of Fräulein von Oelix. A modest, gray afternoon. Vitreous. The fräulein is a kind woman, wilted and very lonely. And solitude had made her even kinder, she practically apologized. Lonely people are often afraid to let their solitude show. Some are ashamed. Families are so strong. They have all of advertising on their side. But a person alone is nothing but a shipwreck. First they cast it adrift, then they let it sink. Fraulein von Oelix lives in a lovely apartment. The fraulein eats little, is strictly vegetarian. Hannelore has just returned from shopping. She is ten years old. She follows the fraulein’s orders with precision and good cheer. She is happy to be of service. She is attached to her. That afternoon, the air was becoming stifling. “I am about to faint,” said Fraulein von Oelix. It was a lucky thing that the girl was there. So calm, tranquil, not gripped by panic. She would call the firefighters. Flames are swift. Around the fraulein the flames were spinning, as though playing. Hannelore put a wool turban on her head. Her hands are covered in rags, as though they were boxing gloves. She is playing, too. She ducked the flames nimbly, she was using a wool blanket as a shield. The adorable little warrior. The apartment is semidestroyed. The girl did not call the firefighters. The portraits fall. The fire, Hannelore thinks, shows its vocation to annihilate. The word vocation, she said to the flames in a knowing tone, regards you, fire, because everything has a primordial force that triggers our actions. Fire is not the criminal. It is God who sends the flames into the apartment with its Biedermeier furniture. There are images with a heart in the shape of a flame. It was He who started the fire. Souls are dangerous. Often inflamed. The girl felt like preaching, but breathing was labored. The flames excited her. She runs from room to room, drunk with danger. Who is she to impede a destructive destiny? Only God can. God ordered the total destruction of the house. She knows that. There is something larger above us all, in hidden places that command the flames to take possession of every life pulse. She is indigent, the daughter of unknown parents, without prospects. She cannot beseech. She has nothing. How can she pray for grace? Those who have nothing, nothing at all, don’t ask. She doesn’t even have a past. Or a birthday. She sprang from trash and to trash will return. She sprang from the swamps of the dead. And to the swamps she will return. That is why the fraulein took her in. Why then put out flames willed by supreme design? And then she was having fun. For the first time, in her miserable existence. For us, creatures of the streets, instinct is our dwelling. And a total disregard for the good. And often, when it feels like it, evil is the best form that the highest good can take.

  The dear Fraulein von Oelix treated the girl like a daughter. She hadn’t been able to adopt her because she was unmarried, but she had signed her estate over to her. And one day she had told the girl, who was already wea
ring a lot of makeup. Especially the eyelids, a coppery henna. She was attractive. Like many girls dressed and made up like women. Which the fraulein had noticed. She watched her while she dressed. And Hannelore did so slowly, almost like a professional. To please the fraulein. “Hanne, you will be my heir,” she had told her. The fraulein was sitting at her blond wood desk. A pale light, also Biedermeier, monotonous, on the pale blue sheet of paper and her initials in lower case. She’d wanted to imitate Djuna Barnes’s letter paper, which had actually been white. It seems that Djuna had a willfulness all her own in the way she hid, at a certain point in her life. When, in her room on Patchin Place, she was surrounded by innumerable prescription bottles and wore a light blue dressing gown. And she seemed taller than she was, an imperious air. Her name, then, was embossed white on white. And so, Fraulein von Oelix, with her small, orderly, and affected handwriting, wrote a few lines. Manifesting her wishes. Her state of mind was exhilaration. The exhilaration of being in a position to leave everything to that destitute girl. Not, as she had thought, to a random name in the telephone directory. Besides, that had already been done in a film. Or to the turtle. She had read about a gentleman who spent the entire day in his room on the first floor watching the turtle in the garden below from his window. And the turtle returned his gaze. For years they had kept each other company. The turtle became his heir. The sum was considerable. The fraulein did not meet the turtle, but the girl. Everything might have been going to a crook. Fraulein von Oelix was by no means foolish. She knew what she was up against. She knew what it meant to take in a presumed orphan, perhaps a criminal. And she knows that to act out of good intentions sometimes leads to misfortune. But the object of the alleged good intentions is a very graceful and amusing specimen of female adolescent. Hannelore was full of good will. She helped the fraulein, laughed and sang. And, when the fraulein called her Baby, she rubbed up against her, let herself be petted, and she purred. The girl had a will. Enormous will and determination. She wanted the destruction of that woman who was good to her. To destroy for the blasted glory of it. She doesn’t want money. But to destroy. Should she have to answer to a ridiculous why? Because everyone believes there is a why, in human gestures and impulses. A reason. But any pretext is inviting. Without reason. Fury, sanctity, boredom. The girl saw her thoughts on the window panes like insects swollen with blood on the walls of a room. Her thoughts distant, detached, as though someone else’s. To destroy the universe. Nothing matters. What does thinking matter? Thinking is iniquitous. It is not pleasing to God. Creation is a form of destruction. And she sang the Stabat Mater, that the fraulein had taught her. “Are you warm, Madam?” Hannelore asked. The gaze triumphant and mean. The flames were roasting the fraulein like a sacrificial animal. She was not unlike one on a spit. The fraulein felt no pain. While the flames enveloped her she felt a terrible longing. For what she didn’t have. For what she’d never had. She did not fear death. The longing — or perhaps the despair over all the nothing — was so acute as to make death seem mild to her. Her hands, like the claws of a crustacean, clutched a little mound of dust.