The Candidate

by Zareh Vorpouni

  No, he wouldn’t love the coquettish, conceited Hortense on the staircase, who was already prepared to shout orders with each step. He would love this tiny woman who looks at him so tenderly, with the glassy eyes of a fish, admiring and beseeching, while he prepares the breakfast orders and arranges them on trays, as though he were a war commander on the front, bringing thousands of captives to throw at her feet.

  Sometimes he laughs out loud; a smile wouldn’t be enough to express his joy and his triumph over this woman who knows how to behave like a child. For months, she worked quietly to teach him all the secrets of her body without a single word, carrying out her strategy in silence. It’s in the temple where love matures and is refined, where words kill mystery. When he looks at her, laughter rising, his heart—brimming with pride—fills with gratitude. Recalling the love games during the night, led by Hortense’s silent orders that threw them both into a supreme moment of union, he sees the road that brought him to victory, to the place where love is achieved by taking possession of something beyond even the body. Of course, Minas could not explain what “beyond the body” possibly meant. There are things that defy explanation, and if they are like that, it’s probably because they are of pure inner emotion that transcends the boundaries of language and remains out of reach for the mind. It may be said that what Minas felt was a profound sense of satisfaction and happiness, which came to him not through Hortense’s body, not from possessing it, but from the presence of that which is called Hortense. This was the novelty of what Minas called “beyond the body” and perhaps his curious mind had already begun to create a theory around it. He actually felt her presence just as powerfully, if not more powerfully, when she was gone, which was something he realized after Hortense had left the kitchen. It meant that the question came down to being there. Even if Hortense left, she was always there, invisible, because she was within him—“beyond the body.”

  “Long live the Revolution!” Apkar said all of a sudden.

  Minas looked toward the door at the speed of lightning. Hortense was gone. Apkar, on the other hand, did not need to look toward the door. He felt Hortense’s comings and goings on his back, as if setting down a heavy weight or picking one up. Besides, he wouldn’t have seen anything if he had looked. The door created depth between the wall and the room service elevator. Yes, a heavy weight fell off his back. He felt lighter whenever Hortense quietly opened the door, trembling, and then disappeared. Her presence silenced him. Holding his tongue, he turned back to work diligently, not because he was afraid of her, but because he wanted to make his disdain known.

  Apkar’s exclamation was followed by a burst of laughter mixed with bold derision, which he pulled along behind him at all times, like dragging a dead animal to the dump by the end of a rope.

  Minas pretended not to notice, not so much because of the laughter directed at Hortense, but rather because of the sorrow that roamed the caverns of Apkar’s hoarse voice, like rats roaming through the sewers of the city, not alone but in packs.

  Apkar hurriedly paced to the elevator and back and then arranged a few things on the stove. “The bitch left,” he growled.

  Without stopping his work, Minas turned his head mechanically toward the sink. Apkar was standing there, his back against the sink as he dried a plate with slow, well-oiled movements. A disdainful smirk softened the lines on his face.

  “She’s gone, but don’t worry. She’ll be back,” he said, drawing out his voice to convey hidden meaning.

  “Why?” Minas asked.

  “Come on, you’re really asking me? You know better than I do.”

  “I don’t get it, Apkar.”

  “Really? Do you take me for a fool? Did you learn that from Vahakn? Listen!” he said suddenly, raising his voice. “Before you started, that woman never set foot in here. She’d stay for five or ten minutes and then go. Now she’ll go on talking for an hour. She doesn’t even come up for air.”

  Minas preferred to keep quiet, especially since defending himself with lies didn’t sit well with him. But his heart ached. True, the pain wasn’t physical—it was some kind of sadness that gathered to form a lump that weighed painfully on his heart—but having turned to Apkar, almost face to face, he realized that his silence would be insulting. It already was insulting, because Apkar quickly turned his head away and Minas broke the silence:

  “So it’s my fault,” he said in a low, humble voice.

  “No, it’s mine!” Apkar shot back even more harshly. “But I know a way to keep her away. You’ll see.”

  The next day, when Hortense came in, Apkar started to make a terrible commotion, singing “Les bourgeois, on les pendra.” With that popular song of insatiable vengeance, he added his own lascivious laughter that made blood pour out of the walls. Hortense covered her ears with both hands, turned around, and left. When, with her hands over her ears, she looked at Minas to express her astonishment, he noticed something new on her face. Despite the snarl that appeared to show her displeasure, Minas saw a strange serenity that made the twitch in her right nostril disappear. This usually forced the corner of her mouth to twitch, which in turn made her constantly bite her upper lip.

  He strolled down the boulevard. He was already nearing the bridge. The boulevard was filled with people and cars. Elbows pushed through the crowd. Sharp, hateful glances were exchanged. Near the bridge at the top of the stairs leading to the riverbank, the clock on the iron railing read eleven o’clock. Entirely numb to feeling, he didn’t notice anything going on around him. As he walked, he cursed the day he met Minas and that game they played. Suddenly he felt something. It was fatigue. He looked like he was coming back from a funeral. He had buried his old carefree attitude along with the dead. No, this wasn’t why Minas was sleeping peacefully in a soft bed at that hour, while he was going to unload carts. The job was a guard against his old carefree attitude. Perhaps it was its absence that now made his thoughts, as sharp as the blade of a knife, stand in front of him and threaten to cut through space? The more he walked, the deeper the image became in his mind and the more he was pushed to the edge of the crowd, alone and isolated. There he was, standing at the base of a well, throwing a stone and watching its effect on the water’s mirrored surface. It should have shattered, but instead he only saw himself, sinking into his own wound. He was tired. He was exhausted and he hadn’t even reached Pont Saint-Michel yet. Leaning against the stone edge, he watched the flowing river below. Across from him was the black mass of Notre Dame, standing tall in the darkness. The noise of the cars and passersby didn’t reach him. He was alone in the night, in endless desolation, which rejected him and pushed him back so far that even the desolation wouldn’t have him as a friend. There was nothing, nothing that told him, “Come here.” The city had closed its eyes to him. The city was getting ready for bed. Everybody rushed home, while he was forced to keep walking. He was forced to keep walking to forget the passage of time. His waiting strained to suspend time to prepare him to accept the unknown object of his anticipation, which could have been a person or an event. This is why he was always alone and unable to look anyone in the eye in a sincere, friendly way. He thought about this when he began cursing Minas, who at the moment, was sleeping sweetly and innocently in his soft bed. If Minas had only been with him, he would have looked without blinking into his eyes beneath the streetlamp. Minas had a startling gaze. It exuded an elegant serenity that infected his smooth cheeks with an enchanting sheen—the sheen of innocence—that suddenly revealed trembling ghosts rising from his wounded heart, gripped by the fear of life. Now he tried to look, through his imagination, into the eyes of the absent Minas, but he only saw himself, as though he were standing in front of a mirror, but he couldn’t hold his gaze and, before he felt his eyelashes touch, he had erased his own image from that gaze.

  It was still early. He reached Les Halles and stopped in front of the Église Saint-Eustache. Its clock sounded the twelve strokes of midnight, careful and measured. The big trains arrived one
after the other and dumped the food they had been carrying, invading the surrounding streets with piles on Boulevard de Sébastopol, Rue Réaumur, and the Poste Centrale. The nightly stir of well-known restaurants released cheerful notes into a night filled with the commotion of work. The cafés looked like lanterns dangling over the edge of the night. The clock on Saint Eustache had just struck twelve, covering Vahakn with silence, as he suddenly saw himself transported to an unfamiliar place. A splendid place, which was his everyday environment, so ordinary, and yet that night it seemed so foreign to him, so otherworldly, as though an imaginary reality was being constructed behind a curtain and he was standing at the edge, ready to walk on stage as soon as it opened. There was still time before the panting, tumultuous arrival of the day’s hero. And when it did arrive, the curtain of the night would open and the gang of vagrants would storm the stage. Vahakn, quicker and nimbler than most, would shove them with his arms, elbows, and shoulders and push his way through to the front of the line to get his share. And in a frenzied atmosphere filled with curses, the carts would be unloaded as quickly as the vanishing of the proverbial piece of cheese thrown to the rats.

  But he was already under the lights on the large boulevards. And he was not at all surprised, because a secret thought would often pursue him from within and occupy the entire space of his mind, disrupting his schedule and daily reality. This is where the imaginary curtain game came from. Driven by that impatient idea, he couldn’t wait for the curtain to open and, gently pulling up one corner, he slipped out. He was on the verge of confessing to himself the reason for escaping to the other side of the curtain, but the spineless idea fused with his footsteps and kept pushing him onward. He escaped from himself, but he still had to break through the crowd and get to the opposite sidewalk, and at the exact spot where the two boulevards converged, people ran underground to catch the last metro. These rushed people were not the usual crowd. It was just as the theaters and cinemas were closing. Vahakn stopped to avoid colliding with them and once again found himself alone, entirely numb, and stranded in the corner of an alleyway, trembling. He had once again fallen into his whirlpool of inner images. There was his main idea, the main impetus for his walk that night, which like a solitary, dazed fish making its way among thousands of fish, appeared clearly before his eyes. Vahakn was running away from Minas. Leaving the neighborhoods on the left bank, he plunged deep into the ones on the right bank. He was on the corner of Boulevard Haussmann when the thought came to him. Before him stretched the wide, nearly deserted boulevard in magnificent serenity. The streetlights winked at him from behind thick foliage. But it was in front of Printemps, in the overpowering glow of the windows, that he stopped and confessed. Yes, he was running away from Minas. He said it to himself right then and there, the secret behind his nightly escape attempts, as though he were talking to someone else. The lie was no longer bearable. He needed to walk, to keep walking, to pull himself out of his own head, like pulling a cork out of a wine bottle with a pop. He was thinking about this as he came to stand in Place Saint-Augustin and beheld before him the mass of the church jutting into the dark canvas of the night, its large, round dome thrusting into the heart of the sky. Unusual activity was going on around him. He was in front of the enormous Cercle National des Armées. Military officers in full regalia and white gloves, along with men and women in civilian clothes, headed toward the building’s big, wide door. Naval officers shuffled across the sidewalk. Suddenly, as the crowd grew denser, a black car pulled up to the curb. One of the naval officers rushed to open the car door and let out a soft noise into the night that lodged itself in the gaps in Vahakn’s concentration. A woman extended one leg and then the other out of the car door. She stood and started to walk, stopping two steps later to cast a heavy look over her shoulder. For an instant, her eyes closed, as though she had grown tired of the weight of her gaze. Vahakn could see long, black eyelashes hovering above her rosy cheeks like tiny little fans. The woman was followed by an admiral in a ceremonial uniform adorned with medals. The woman was tall and slim—perhaps owing it to the dress that fell to her gold shoes and, with each step, made a silky rustle pass through the glimmer of her diamonds. The purplish strands of her hair and starry eyes reminded Vahakn of a sweet spring evening. Stately and erect, she held her skirt in one hand, more for the effect than out of necessity. The rustle of the silk was music to Vahakn’s ears. When she passed by, he followed her with his eyes, mesmerized, until she reached the entrance to the building, where she vanished at the admiral’s side like a dream disappearing as sunlight falls onto our beds just as the room is breaking free from the night’s clutches. Vahakn stood still, rubbing his eyes nervously, as if to anoint the lingering vision with gold dust. Then, suddenly, he started to run, run like a wounded animal looking for safety.

  He finally reached Les Halles, but the train was long gone. He was glad it had left, because it required such considerable effort to make his way through the pack of vagrants.

  What Minas has done since the moment he gained something “beyond the body” must finally be said. The following evening, as usual, he went upstairs through the service door and discovered something completely new. It was subconscious at first, but slowly became conscious little by little. For a moment, he stood halfway up the stairs, which he would never normally dare to do. He realized he wasn’t rushing. He was calm. Usually he climbed those same stairs secretly, his ears trained to detect the softest footsteps and ready to hide at a moment’s notice. He feared chatter, especially from the maids, who—always jealous, always gossipy—would waste no time spreading rumors, folding them into their whispers. He wasn’t holding a tray for the simple reason that it wasn’t time for coffee yet. It would come at around two o’clock, before he left for the day. But the tray was just the pretext. Reaching the second floor hallway, he sauntered the two meters to the end of the hallway, where he found Hortense’s room, half-covered by the thick, saber-shaped leaves of a giant cactus. The door seemed to be protected by a brigade of knights with their swords drawn. He opened the door without knocking. “It’s me,” he said, seeing a big, wide smile that seemed to embrace him on the face of the woman lying supine on the couch. He almost ran to the couch and jumped into the woman’s arms, which were open to welcome him. That woman—Hortense—pressed him to her and whispered, “My child, my child.” Minas fell to his knees, put his head in her lap, and started to cry. His crying lasted a while and was now and then interrupted by sobs that threatened to tear out his heart. But what happened was exactly the opposite. Once he stopped crying, his heart was stronger, bound more tightly to his body. He sensed the presence of his strength, which resembled a ripe piece of fruit. He was not at all upset that Hortense stayed silent as he cried, unable to relate to the source of the pain that remained obscure to her. But Hortense rested her hand on his head tenderly, and although there seemed to be indifference in her voice, she now and then repeated, “My child, my poor child.” If Hortense had known Armenian poetry, she would have adjusted her normal refrain to say, “Cry, my son. Cry so you may grow up,” which would have better suited Minas’s state of mind.16 But Hortense didn’t know Armenian poetry, and even if her own words meant the same thing, her indifference was anointed with mild scorn. Not only had Minas not been unsettled by Hortense’s detachment from his pain, on the contrary, it made him press his head into her with an unfettered soar of the heart and expel a flood of emotion through his sobs, like a child clutching his mother tighter and tighter to stifle his tears.

  Then he stood up. His heart was finally calm. At last, a callus had fallen off his heart and disappeared. He wiped his eyes and noticed Hortense half-naked beneath her long, gauzy nightgown. Hortense gave him a curiously languid stare. Minas moved closer, warmly and respectfully covered her naked breasts with her nightgown, and stretched out beside her on the couch. He dozed for quite a while.

  It was already dark when he found himself on the street. Someone bumped into him. He turned to the man and apolo
gized. The man, who knew he was at fault, looked at him with surprise and both of their smiles brightened. The man apologized in turn. Minas was happy. He felt like singing. How long had it been since he had last sung? Yes, he would sing. He would sing right now on the boulevard, where the streetlights made it look like a stage. He began mumbling “Pamp Vorodan.”17 He continued singing under his breath. It had been so long that he had forgotten the words, but they suddenly exploded like a bomb: “Down the fields of Ararat.” “Oh!” he called out. His heart was calm and the passersby didn’t make him feel the least bit shy. It was his right to sing. Now he would always sing. He made his decision and kept walking down the boulevard. Porte Saint-Denis was still far. He passed by Apkar’s street, where the girls waited for propositions or did the propositioning themselves with a “my darling” or an “are you coming?” So why not? Just like that, maybe to test his new strength or for no reason at all—none—he picked a girl and found a hotel. He tortured the girl with his tender games, against which she resisted on principle. But when she stood up to fix her hair and try to calm her racing heart, she said with playful anger, “You’re a pig—a pig!”