The Candidate

by Zareh Vorpouni

  Minas also understood the secret of the other face, which gave her the look of a schoolgirl as she stood in the doorway of the kitchen, leaning against it with her shoulders slightly hunched, staring at him as he worked. Her sharp stare and pursed lips made her face look like a mouse’s snout.

  “He has his hat on.” Of course he didn’t own more than one hat. How could he? He was homeless. “He doesn’t even have a bag.”

  His monologue ended when he heard Vahakn’s voice: “Hey, Minas!” His eyes were drawn to the hat. He saw only the hat. Such a strange thing. Vahakn was entirely a hat. The confidence that came to him was drawn from the hat, not from his voice. His voice was the hat and perhaps simply a wish, born of a wish, so that he would be able to say to himself, “He’s got his hat back. His pockets must be full,” and be happy about it. Minas didn’t even have time to be surprised, but he was surprised that he hadn’t needed words for all of this. He hadn’t seen the need to move words into a sentence. His conviction had been immediate and spontaneous. It was at that moment that his ears caught his name and he saw another mouth opening and taking the shape of his name. The important thing was not his voice or the shape of his mouth. It was the hat that dictated the rest, because a belief in the hat already existed. His ears were able to immediately assume their role, while his thoughts slowly made their way through the dense forest of inference and speculation. With his sense of hearing near the door to his soul and his ears sliding the bolt to it closed, Minas managed to redirect his attention to the outside world.

  “Bravo, Minas,” Vahakn said with satisfaction as Minas came to sit on the chair next to him. “How did you know that I left my hat behind because of that? Didn’t they give you any trouble? Oh, this hat. It’s a treasure—a treasure. You drop it wherever you have a drink and leave. This isn’t a hat. It’s an insurance policy.”

  He was sitting in the chair next to him, mute, and it might be said, motionless. They had found each other. This was enough for the time being and he needed, first and foremost, to take a deep breath and settle into himself. Vahakn was satisfied, too. He enjoyed where he was sitting and didn’t even see Minas sitting on the chair next to him. Perhaps he was sleeping. His eyes were closed, but they might just have been closed to help him collect himself. He was gathering the fragments of a self that had been scattered during the day. The fear of being alone had broken him. He had gone to Rue Saint-Jacques again, but they told him that his friend had moved without leaving an address. It was then that, as he walked down the street and reached the banks of the Seine, he stopped in front of Notre Dame. The fear of being alone, the fear of having been abandoned, had surfaced and suddenly broke him. It was in that tattered state that he had arrived at the Billard in the evening, drawn by a hopeless glimmer of hope, like a moth dancing around a fire before throwing itself into the flame. Fortunately, it wasn’t a flame he had thrown himself into, but a bistro chair. Despite being so close to Vahakn and so far from him at the same time, he couldn’t stop talking. He spoke endlessly and his words, beating down Vahakn’s wall of indifference, took on the appearance of a monologue. “Ah, par exemple,” the monologue began. “It was the only way to meet you. That’s for sure. Do you understand? The hat, the hat.”

  During the day, when everything is in motion, it’s impossible for thought to pause for a moment and concentrate on the details in which it’s often possible to find a quintessential moment of life. It cannot be found in the jumble of ever-moving images on the surface of life, especially when they are—willingly or unconsciously—engaged in the business of disguising themselves like actors.

  Minas was confused. Despite every effort he made to emerge from it at any cost, the confusion had yet to relent. His mind flowed freely like a river and the more he tried to cling to something, the more he was plunged into the water and pulled away by the tide. The river was a torrent of mental images that didn’t stop. The powerlessness of his will to stop them was what tormented him. More than the weakness of his will, there was in him a kind of complacence toward the images. With their descent, he sunk further into their inner depths, where he hoped to finally find peace of mind. But, as always, the deeper someone goes. . . . Like a drowning man whose anxiety swells as he’s pulled toward the ocean floor, Minas fluttered and rose to the surface of his own mind, where everything suddenly stood still. A frozen image appeared to him on the surface, as if a film projector had stopped. It was an image of Hortense. The stillness had made the twitch in her right nostril disappear. Her will had been incapable of eliminating it; it had, rather, at most succeeded in hiding it, though the effort had distorted her face even more. Hortense had finally been able to make something pleasant out of the ridiculous, which was the very charm of her personality. Minas registered the surprising transformation that took place on that still, trapped image and his heart filled with inexplicable compassion for Hortense. The spontaneous, heartwarming charm of her mouse’s snout engulfed him.

  And yet he didn’t see Minas in the chair next to him. Minas himself didn’t hear what he was saying once he sensed him in the other chair. That was enough. The words had no meaning. His presence was what gave meaning to the words and also what gave him the right to relax into his chair. Now his bones, spine, and muscles no longer saw the need to remain alert, to keep watch, or to hold themselves upright. Sitting in the bistro chair, Minas was a defeated army whose soldiers—exhausted and wounded—took refuge in the shadows of the bushes at the side of a long road to forget in a deep sleep the horror of the day’s events. Even though the back of the chair kept his torso upright, Minas was immersed in horizontal sensations. Like the soldiers at the side of the road who had evaded danger, his line of sight was overcome with images of a house, a room, and a bed, when he suddenly stopped in front of a run-down hotel near Rue Danton. Like a fish tossed onto dry land, he sprung out of his thoughts and his throat released a hoarse sound: “I found it!”

  Vahakn immediately understood. He had a strange capacity for discerning the unspoken. He even understood that Minas was not paying any attention to him. It was as if he wasn’t there. He looked at his half-open eyes—impenetrable, dull, and hazy—in which lethargy lingered idly out of hunger or sleeplessness or both. “What did you say?” he asked, but the question didn’t quite come through. It didn’t come out of his mouth because a slight shift happened in his brain and imprinted barely noticeable movements onto his lips. Minas didn’t interfere in the battle that his will was waging against sleep. It appeared that sleep was in fact the master of his will, which failed to restore his features to their original position. They roamed around his face, abandoned like him, while his forehead—smooth and polished—invited Vahakn’s attention. His forehead assumed surprising proportions under Vahakn’s gaze. Sitting in that chair in that café on Boulevard Saint-Michel, his mind was lulled to sleep beneath distant purple horizons. His eyes were entranced by his friend’s forehead, which had gradually grown brighter and more luminous, because with sleep, a childlike innocence had come to visit him and stir a sense of fatherly affection in Vahakn’s heart.

  Sooner or later, the regret of failure will manifest itself in everyone. The wrenching, scorching regret of a father who sees his child as a kind of rose, an ornament worthy of his pride, until the moment he finds himself before a new reality. In the child is an autonomous, distinct, and independent being. With this realization, the father decides to make a person out of the child, a person who will be the embodiment of his dreams, the one who he had not been able to become, since every life is a failure when it stands before death. Every father sees himself in his child. And through the child, he gives life to his consuming fantasies. This is how the sacrifice of a father begins. But fathers will never understand why one day their children will suddenly flee their dedication and turn into wanderers in search of their own fantasies. Every rejection is an act of construction.

  And he still kept looking, his gaze having merged with the forehead of the other, while his heart was fille
d with feelings of supplication. He had forgotten about the procession of feet on the sidewalk. He turned his head toward the street out of habit, but no sooner than he turned did his gaze return to hang on Minas’s forehead once again. The man sitting next to him was a trembling creature. He was a shipwreck flowing with the water of the river within him, carrying along with it treasures that remained unknown to him.

  Vahakn extended his hand, almost warmly, and gently shook Minas’s shoulder.

  “Hey, get up. We haven’t come here to sleep.”

  Minas was startled.

  “What? Am I sleeping? Of course I am. It’s been two days since my eyelashes have touched. Last night I was so hounded by sleep that I dragged my feet from street to street looking for the hotel. You know what? I found it, I found it. I finally found it, but . . .”

  “You found it?” Vahakn screamed joyfully as a brilliant idea came to him.

  “On Rue Danton,” Minas continued. “I mean, on that narrow little street opening onto Rue Danton. But if you only knew how I found it . . .”

  “So you can go now.”

  And with clown-like gestures and words coated in honey, he tried to convince Minas.

  “Look at me and listen very closely. You’ll go now, but not in the state you’re in. Collect yourself a bit, get a room there and have a nice nap. Then you’ll tell them you have to leave to take care of something urgent. They know you, so they won’t make you pay right away, especially since you have the right to two months. Don’t tell them anything about that, though. And don’t be scared, I’ve done this kind of thing many times before. Early in the morning, you’ll pack up and go.”

  Minas contorted his face, as if he had figured out the extent of the deed.

  “No!” he screamed. “No, I can’t do this kind of thing.”

  There was terror in his cry. Vahakn knew that Minas needed some serious rest. If he spent one more night on the street under the open sky, his strength would abandon him entirely.

  Vahakn stood up. “Wait here, I’ll be right back,” he said calmly.

  He had barely taken a step before turning around. “Don’t run away,” he added. “I’ll be back in a half an hour, at the most.”

  Minas couldn’t have run away if he’d wanted to. He slouched in his chair. Now he was sinking, powerless, and surrendering himself to the dense haze around him. Only a voice reached his ear. It was his own voice coming from within. All of his body’s doors to the outside were shut. It cannot be said for sure, just assumed, that his disconnection to the outside world can be attributed either to somber resignation or despair, but when once again he heard the voice say “He’s gone,” he made an imperceptible motion like someone pulling a bed sheet over his head to fall asleep.

  But since it was impossible to sleep outside the café, on the sidewalk, he closed one eye to trick himself and kept the other open to trick the waiter, who was working just as much as he was watching him. Sometimes both eyes would suddenly close, encouraged by some inviting mental images formed by memories of home and bed. His chin—as heavy as lead—fell to his chest, despite his struggle to ward off sleep.

  Vahakn was not gone for long. But to Minas it felt as though he had awakened from hours of sleep, when he noticed Vahakn’s footsteps out of the corner of his hazy eye. Yes, Vahakn’s footsteps drew closer on the sidewalk and he was carrying a bag.

  “Come on,” Vahakn said.

  There was a joyfulness in his voice. This was why Minas could jump out of his thick inner turmoil, as if he were pushing away an obstacle with his shoulders.

  Vahakn paid for the coffee in that particular way of the rich that reeks of arrogance, but he did it explicitly to inspire confidence in Minas. They crossed the street and passed a bakery on the corner of Rue Racine, where they bought small loaves of bread made with milk. Then Vahakn stopped in front of a hotel across from the Sorbonne. He squinted, pretending to read the name of the hotel and, like someone who had found exactly what he was looking for, said, “Right, this is it,” in a way that immediately dispelled the suspicion that had already begun to grow in Minas.

  The hotel reception desk took care of the formalities—Identity papers? Where are you from? Where are you going?—and Vahakn, refusing to hand the bag over to the concierge, accompanied Minas to his room, walking behind him and giving the bag and its owner more authenticity. The room had every amenity—confort moderne: hot and cold water; a clean, large, imposing bed; an armoire with a mirror; and a table and armchair. The floor was covered with coarse, bluish carpet, and above the headboard was a lamp that could be turned on or off without even getting out of bed. After he finished reading, he could just press the pear-shaped button. Minas felt like a phoenix rising from the ashes. He couldn’t stay in one place. He walked back and forth across the room; put his hand under the cold water, under the hot water; turned the faucets on and off; and then stopped in front of the mirror on the armoire, still silent, stirred and restless. In a moment, he transformed into a new man and filled with happiness. At times, he was almost choking on his emotion. He didn’t know how to express his feelings, which had gathered in his throat to form a hard lump. He moved to the left and right to hide the tears welling up in his eyes.

  “Well,” Vahakn said, moved. “Go to bed now and get some rest. Tomorrow morning, you’ll come to the Billard. I’ll pay the bill downstairs.”

  Vahakn was almost out the door when Minas ran after him, finally able to open his mouth.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Vahakn said. “Paris is big.”

  “Haven’t you had enough of this life, Vahakn? Let’s find work tomorrow and we’ll have a room like this every day.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I’m waiting. It’ll happen someday.”

  He walked down the carpeted corridor with his head bowed, while Minas, deep in his sad thoughts, followed Vahakn’s steps with his eyes. When Vahakn reached the stairs, he lifted his head and started walking down them proudly like an actor coming out onto the stage.

  Minas was alone now. His back against the door, he looked at the room without moving; he feared that any movement would suddenly displace everything and make everything vanish. What did all of this have to do with reality? Reality was a combination of happiness and fear. But what if it’s all an illusion? He was careful not to let his hand graze the bed. He didn’t touch anything. And yet there he was in the mirror. His hand accidentally touched the cold surface and suddenly all the objects in the room surrendered to him. Then he could touch the rest of the objects, too. He could put his head under the hot water that flowed from the glittering faucet, pull open the covers on the bed—that miracle—and stretch out underneath the fresh, white sheets—which he did. Everything was real. Quick, quick, enjoy it while it lasts! It could soon turn into a dream again. And it was already a dream. “Don’t concern yourself with us. I wrote that your uncle is keeping his promise until the boys get older. Take care, son. What are you up to? You never say anything about yourself. Don’t let my health worry you. The doctor said it’s only heart trouble. Soon you’ll feel fine, he said.” How rich a life of security can be! Rich with both sadness and happiness. And all of this, all of it crashing into each other, turns his mind upside down. Instead of closing his eyes and falling into the sweetness of sleep, look how a rose meditating in a vase awakens emotion in him. Whistling ships head toward wide horizons, while in the circle of their masts, his sister’s grieved face smiles at something invisible beyond the rose. Across from the “horned” church, the girl selling perfume in front of the barbershop suddenly turns her head away, seeing lust in his sharp gaze.15 Why so sharp and lustful? Why did he scare the girl, the one with a fake black beauty mark on her left cheek? Only now did he see that she had a beauty mark. How had it been that he hadn’t seen it before? How naïve he had been. But he got his punishment. My God, how did he get here? Leave the barber’s daughter in peace
. The ship leaving the harbor whistled. Ghevont must be done with his work over there. What is Ghevont doing? The ship whistled once more and he felt like he was about to fall. He was at the edge of the bed. Quick! He stretched his hand out to reach the button above his head to turn off the light, pressed it with his thumb, and all of a sudden darkness invaded the room.

  He won’t look for the towering Hortense walking down the narrow strip of carpet on the staircase anymore. He had made this decision the day before. He would love this slim, petite woman who two nights before had known how to make herself small in his arms. So much so that she dissolved in them as he held her tight, kissing her ears, eyes, and lips. Now he smiled at her in a way he had never smiled before, especially at a woman who was the object of his affection—Hortense—she who was always compelled to become small, to become childlike out of love, whose chest beat surprisingly fast and swelled under the moons of his kisses, and in whose gaze lived a gloomy light. The scent of her breasts was still on his palms. Sometimes he couldn’t help staring as he cupped them in his hands and felt them tremble as he released them onto her slim body, which would have taken flight like a bird if his tense fingers had allowed it. The grip of his fingers, under which her body stiffened in obedience, brought a new, unfamiliar shudder.