The Candidate

by Zareh Vorpouni

  There was something strange in him now, outside of him, which he still couldn’t grasp. The people, the streets, and the city offered him intimacy and approached him, whereas before he had only seen hostility. Everyone seemed to recognize him and might as well have greeted him, but he didn’t recognize himself, what he had become, the new Minas whom he would meet outside the Billard. Indeed, that was where he felt the transformation. Ever since he found himself “beyond the body,” sobbing in Hortense’s lap, encountering the girl on the street and longing to go “beyond the body” with her too, he had completely changed, matured, and dropped the pursuit of his inner images. He looked around with new eyes. Only yesterday, sitting in the same spot, did the passersby represent a forest where Vahakn went to hunt every night. That was what had changed. The forest had disappeared and was freed of people roaming along its paths. Yesterday he still saw them through Vahakn’s eyes. Now Vahakn had disappeared from the horizon in his mind and had suddenly become a distant memory. Memories are what became of those days of hallucination, which Vahakn had used to weave a spider’s web that trapped him with the startling threads of his life. He was like a spider that weaves a fateful web around its prey with the threads of its own body. He looked over at the chair next to him, where Vahakn had sat only yesterday. Today it was empty, but he didn’t feel emptiness inside, because he lived in the presence that he found during his excursion into the world “beyond the body.” He chuckled. In a single moment, his laughter purged the entire past. He had been so stupid. And he had a violent desire to get on a train or go to the barbershop, but this time the barber’s daughter wouldn’t be afraid of him. She would smile at him. He wouldn’t stupidly say to the girl selling fish, “Your cheeks are the color of trout.” He yearned to set off, to revisit the places where he had known so much heartache. Once again, his gaze wandered around the street and the café. Everything was familiar. There was nothing foreign to him. The foreigner had left him. Resisting, obliging, no longer faltering or retreating. On the way to his room, he remembered Vanadour, who had left him on the sidewalk. He was embarrassed by the fragility of his emotions. He walked with certainty. He began whistling—never mind that Hortense had called him “my child.” Her voice was in his ears, her gaze in his soul, and the length of her body, now taller after his sobbing, had emerged mature with the presence of her “beyond the body.”

  Vahakn’s letter was still on the desk. He picked it up and read it over again all the way through. It felt as though Vahakn were there. Minas also saw a change in Vahakn, which reminded him of his own transformation. In the letter, Vahakn attributes his emotional insensitivity to being dead, which would have only inspired a laugh had it not been for his tragic end. But now, a closer, more composed look revealed a certain truth to those words. Here death should not be understood in its physical sense. The man who died a month before his death, from the moment he decided to kill himself until the day of his suicide—the time during which he wrote that letter—was not dead himself, of course, but rather he was a man defined by his psychological state—the source of his words and actions. The change—the old psychological state, in his words, dead, vanished, making out of him a seeker of a lost thing, like we all have been at one time, endlessly in search of something lost—had not happened during that month alone. Similarly, if we were to rely on the individual words in the letter, we must also be convinced, as he says, that with his symbolic death, the general givens of the psychological state that made Vahakn seem like Vahakn to us no longer applied, and from that moment on, Vahakn was no longer Vahakn and a new Vahakn emerged. That moment, however, had not begun the first time Vahakn had stared at the ash on Ziya’s tie, finally putting his finger on it and saying, “It’s nothing. Just some cigarette ash.” Death, following Vahakn’s logic, had occurred the moment he had put his finger on the tie: the moment he touched, not the moment he looked. The observation is so indisputable that now, when Minas visualizes Vahakn, the first instance of surprise lies in the latter’s change of facial expression. First and foremost, his face. One day, while they were walking along the banks of the Seine—on one of the days after the scene with the tie—Vahakn was in a cheerful mood, chattering away, when he stopped and looked at him straight in the face. Vahakn kept talking. First, his usual distractedness was nowhere to be found in his voice. And then there was a seriousness, a seriousness about his own words, a sense of respect. He seemed entirely focused. But what surprised Minas was Vahakn’s chin. His weak, ever-drooping chin had gone to join the healthy parts of his face, forming with them a previously nonexistent harmony that made him look like the buffoon he already was and turned him into a slimy, deceptive creature. It must be said that Minas had not particularly grasped this idea at the time. Now it dawned on him as he replayed the scene with the letter in his hand, sitting in front of the table in the room where they had lived together. In the floodlights of his consciousness, Minas saw so clearly that Vahakn had appeared to him with two faces: one distant, extending further into the distance and giving way to the new one, which, on the contrary, drew closer and came into Minas’s field of vision, compressing his features and fashioning a new face, which—born of the other, out of the other’s death—came through as that of a handsome, loving, amiable new man—a brand new man. With a quick leap of his mind, Minas made a connection, confirming a similar change in Hortense—on Hortense’s face. A short while ago, just a short while ago, Hortense—supine on the couch—stared at him without that twitch that gave her a contorted, tormented expression, which often suggested her effort to conceal an evil thought. That face had calmed, illuminated by an inner sun, which in reality came from the space “beyond the body” that they had both reached the day before.

  Indeed, just as the sweetness in Hortense’s voice and gestures had cleaned the stains of past desire, Minas saw in Vahakn a nobility, a confidence of feeling when he spoke and acted. For instance, he partly gave up or ignored the feet game beckoning him from the sidewalk, until one day when he cheerfully referred to the girl whom Minas now knew to be Arshalouys. It seemed as though Vahakn had, piece by piece, begun to think about organizing his life. He came to consider his work at Les Halles to be real work. Vahakn’s reckoning with life—starting with that simple touch on the street, through which the long wait for the unthinkable would seem to reach its end—made the loss of a friend all the more poignant. When he thought he was safe, Vahakn climbed another floor away from the mysterious sense of anticipation within the haze of his soul by bringing his fingers to Ziya’s tie, which revealed to Minas the prototype of the man Vahakn would become after Ziya’s murder. And who knows? Maybe Vahakn was right when he said he was dead, because he had instinctually murdered Ziya not on the night in the Square du Vert-Galant, but on the other night when, sitting outside at the Billard, a finger resting on his tie, his touch was like the blade of a knife on the vulnerable hollow behind the silk.

  The main problem was not having a plan. For eight days, I’ve been trying to make my pen dance across the page. I shouldn’t rush, but how can I not? From the day I conceived of the idea, I’ve had no rest. Putting it like this isn’t quite sincere, either. It is inexcusable to accept the first word that comes out. The issue of word choice is the most important and the most difficult, at least that’s how it seems to me. I haven’t even started yet and I’m already using words improperly. The words “idea” and “conceive” don’t sound quite right to me. Often people are driven to create new words, or just new sounds. It’s possible to agree that here the word written as a note might be of no importance. We must be vigilant, so that imprecise words don’t enter real work in the future. But this point of view is wrong, too. If I allow myself to be easily pleased now, everything will become difficult later. Absorb the difficulties now, so that the work will be easier later. Otherwise, a bad habit will take root. We must be demanding from the very start. Herein lies the seriousness of the work, because above all else, seriousness is what is needed. How can we convey the identity
or authenticity of a thought or a feeling if the words cannot find their place? Inspiration is not enough, especially for someone like me, who is just taking his first steps in prose.

  Now, conception supposes consistent mental effort. By excavating the object of its pursuit, the mind at last brings it into the world. From within the plowed field, the seed grows to see light. Who knows? Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t imagine that my words and I were born together, but when suddenly the thought captures its object and traps it, an expanse comes into being, a stockpile of words at my disposal, outside itself, and here the words help hold the vision. For a long time, I didn’t know what a mouse was. No, this isn’t true. I knew. They said it was a rodent that gnaws on everything. This much I knew. But I had never seen it gnaw on anything. Gnawing is an abstract image, like the mouse itself—the mysterious animal that fled like a shadow as soon as it saw me. The mouse was also something of an abstraction to me until the day I saw a cat pounce on one before my very eyes. Only then did I know it to be a mouse—a poor, pitiful, tragic thing that lay motionless in front of the cat. It was the unfamiliar that stirred my fear—the gnawing was all I had heard. When it knows the words, the thought extends its hand in an invitation to dance and takes hold of whatever it likes, whenever it likes, like a cat with a mouse devoid of mystery, yet still terrified by its loss.

  It never crossed my mind that I could one day express myself in prose, although now I realize that I’ve used it in life every day, without feeling as amazed as Monsieur Jourdain.18 But I’m not altogether convinced of what I’m saying as I recall the sentences I’ve used with people that have surprised them. For example, the girl selling fish opened her eyes wide in amazement after I told her, “Your cheeks are the color of trout.” Rather, what I realize more now is that what I took to be fiction was something else, since it prompted amazement in others and set me apart from them, keeping my life disconnected from theirs. Hence my desperation.

  Was it nine or eight? Yes, exactly eight days ago, I was sitting outside at the Billard, where I can be found far less frequently since Vahakn left us. I sat there and thought of the time we spent together. I felt so good, as if Vahakn had been sitting in the chair next to me. Sometimes I even tried to turn and talk to him, but my movement consumed and digested itself, while I remained confused and disappointed, my heart racing.

  It was at a moment like that when he was forced on me. Just like that, with no warning. From outside, he was thrown inside and stayed there, expanding, imposing himself, and my will became his will. He said, “Write!” Now tell me, please, which is more agonizing? To be a slave to an inner obsession? Or to be handcuffed and taken to jail through the streets, flanked by two policemen?

  Whatever it may be, I’m like a prisoner who has been plotting his escape for eight days.

  Here, however, the problem becomes more complicated. I ask myself how a personal issue could possibly interest others—readers, I mean—since ultimately writing supposes a readership. The written word is a medium for exchange and communication, so why not also for borrowing things that must be returned? Thinking is more individual. It’s possible to think without borrowing. We think to steer our own lives. In this there’s no connection with another person. There is no give or take. It’s thinking about what to do, then either doing it or not doing it—walking, for instance. Who cares? But when you write or walk, thought also takes on a peculiar quality, multiplying in the exploration of the self. It doesn’t know how to end. Nor how to exhaust itself. The meteoric rise of thought in solitude is exactly how people give themselves over to madness. But I don’t have any intention of going mad. This is why I want to write. Not because it was Vahakn’s wish, but because when I turn to him sitting outside at the Billard and look at his demanding eyes, they tell me, “Write!”

  In this case, one must reflect on the law of exchange, which brings us face to face with those like us. In other words, as the aesthetes say, change the subjective into the objective. Leave yourself behind. Slip into someone else’s skin and hide there. Become universal, so that they will listen to you. Appeal to your listeners. Make them listen. Enchant with a story that will capture the reader’s attention. This way you will accord a function—not to mention a message—to writing. But not Vahakn’s message—no.

  Here is Vahakn’s letter. It will be the axis of the piece, around which the characters in the story must be gathered, because what is being told is, after all, a story. There’s only one issue. Usually authors have already jotted down the events that took place, when the fate of each instance is decided, accounted for, and concluded with all of its effects. Writing is bringing the past into the present. In this case, only Vahakn and his victim, Ziya, belong in the past. Apkar, Arshalouys, Hortense, Nicole, and I still continue to remain in the present. We cannot be part of history, and in the end, it wouldn’t be possible or fair to relegate us, with the stroke of a knife, to the past, just to pull us back into the present. We have no right to leave readers desperate to know everything and make them wonder, “What then?” Yes, what then? We need to wait, although if we were to look closely, it would be easy to predict the future through the chain of events, so that it becomes easy to roll the future up in the past with your thumb and hunt it down from there. There is still the matter of deciding how accurately the reactions to each event can be predicted. This is still an object of contention. Events will take unexpected courses sometimes. For instance, a moment ago, I saw no point in recording how my heart skipped a beat when I mentioned Nicole’s name. Who knows how simply recalling that unremarkable, insignificant feeling could have an effect on the future? It might one day change the course of a whole life, destroy it, or give it wings, the way Hortense, as we already know, brought stability and guided it toward a satisfying conclusion. It’s possible to write in the future tense, and not because it falls into the realm of prediction or fiction, since even novelists write about the future in the past perfect, transporting themselves to a distant future where everything has already happened. It would be smarter to wait and be satisfied with writing down the events of the day. At the same time, it’s possible to be truthful and write, “a novel based on a true story,” on the cover. Zareh’s mistake shouldn’t be made. Those arbitrary, contrived notations must be avoided. I had an argument with him about it back then. He knows just as well as I do that he did it deliberately. The incident under the bridge was made up. Nothing like that ever happened, since he was the one who paid my travel expenses and the only one who knew about my escape. How could it be that after having naïvely squandered the money I got from selling my books on prostitutes I didn’t even sleep with, I shamelessly used that beggar to satisfy my lust and then steal her modest savings? His explanation didn’t convince me. By attributing the act to me, he was seemingly raising a cry of protest against humanity. See how far your injustices can take a man? Shameless! Whatever his intention, I was the one humiliated. People looked at me with disgust and I was ashamed to be around them. According to him, the novel is not about what happened, but what could have happened.

  In a way, maybe Zareh is right. I think I need to wait for the events to take on a certain sense of completion or an outline, at the very least. How long will it take? Is it possible to wait a whole lifetime with this heavy weight on my shoulders? If honesty is required when addressing the reader, just as much as honesty is required of the writer, whose soul is perpetually gripped by the imperative to be rid of inner obsessions, how do we reconcile these two conflicting stances, dear reader—my friend and enemy?

  If we were to take a closer look, it would also become clear that the fate of the dead is still uncertain. I understand the utility of taking notes. It drives thoughts to think. Thought dives deep into itself, then rises like bubbles. It amasses wealth like travelers who keep collecting treasures on their trips.

  I shouldn’t have said before that Vahakn and Ziya were dead—because they aren’t. They have just gone somewhere else or entered a new realm. Perhaps to die is to c
hange realms. Some people will laugh at what I am writing. Why doesn’t anyone laugh when someone talks about changing an old, stained shirt? Everything changes. The body is the soul’s shirt. People are not merely bodies; they are paired with souls in one room, like Vahakn and I used to live in this room. I haven’t forgotten the first time we opened the window; Vahakn shut it, saying, “It smells like shit,” and afterward we never opened it again, to spare our souls from suffering in the room in which we lived together. But the soul doesn’t suffer after it’s buried in the ground. The soul is very cunning; it flees and always finds a body in which to dwell. Only the body rots and decomposes in the earth, abandoned by a deceitful soul. So if this is how it is, Vahakn’s life couldn’t have ended on the day he died. Now what do we see? We see from the notes here that he is present in our acts and thoughts. To be more honest, I will even say that he expresses his thoughts through us, while we naïvely believe them to be our own. Often our acts amaze us because we never think that they are, in fact, the realization of thoughts that Vahakn is controlling within us. They feed on us like the parasite he was when he could still be found in our universe. The same goes for Arshalouys and Apkar. And for Hortense, too, as a corpse. Yes, Hortense, too. Her gaze has been transformed by the vision that Vahakn’s death has ignited in us. If acting out our thoughts is not living, then what is life?

  We’re leaving. Wouldn’t it have been better if we had sat and had some milky coffee? I could barely control myself when he paid for just his coffee. Maybe my happiness rubbed him the wrong way. Am I to blame? He was the one who brought me. Of course I slept wonderfully. Why wouldn’t I have? “You just got a week’s worth of sleep,” he said. “Twelve hours, to be exact.” What was I supposed to do? Not sleep in that soft bed? My bones even rested. I always need them to stay on my feet—to walk. What does he have against me? Sure, I understand. It lasted a bit too long. I still have my hopes pinned on Apkar. I’ll have a word with him in private when I see him. He got up as soon as I sat down. The waiter stood there, expecting an order. “No,” he said. “We’re leaving.” Where are we going? I was so surprised that my gaze probed his eyes inquisitively. “For thine is the power,” he said, opening his arms and trying to laugh. It was the laugh of a buffoon, his face hideous and his teeth almost rusted. I’m certainly not saying that he should feed me. But what I find criminal—yes, criminal—is that first he gives you hope, fills your heart with joy, and then suddenly it’s like he’s screaming “Die!” in your face.* Ok? I don’t need anything from him. He has bound his luck to my bad luck on his own free will. He taught me incompetence, as though I hadn’t been incompetent enough. If he regrets it, well, then, let him be sincere and say it openly. It’s obvious that I won’t be spending tonight at the hotel. I’ll let him know that he’s finally free. He can leave. I could go to Les Halles and unload the carts, too. He thinks I don’t know. Why does he hide it from me? Arakel told me the story, but I haven’t said anything. It’s none of my business. I want a job—a decent job—like everybody else. My mother was right when she said, “I hate poverty. I hate it. I don’t like the poor.” She didn’t say it, but she hated the rich even more since becoming poor. His miserable mother. If she knew . . . what, am I crying? Yes, I must be crying, since here I am wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. We’re in front of the park. It looks like he wants to go in. I don’t know. I’m walking behind him, following his steps like a loyal dog. I don’t need to think. He is thinking for me. I’ll go crazy if I start thinking. Yes, we’re already in the park. Let’s see what he’s going to do. Oh, the sun has filled the park. I like April a lot. I mean the month of April, because I’m not sure that I like the other one too much.19 They didn’t give me enough time to like it. Life is beautiful. I have to admit it. The sun, my God, look at the sun. Look how the trees, which have already begun to cover their bare branches with blooming flowers, are smiling. I could never understand this. Why do the trees strip bare in the cold of winter and put their clothes back on only beginning in spring?