Almost nothing is hidden. The husbands of the women Platonov has taken as lovers are all aware of the facts. The criminal Ossip is presented to us without reservations too: “Known to anyone and everyone as Ossip, horse thief, parasite and murderer and assailant.” Platonov’s perception of Russia and the Russians is pretty priceless too: “To be a pig and not want to acknowledge such a thing is an awful peculiarity of the Russian crook,” he maintains.
Lazkano gets up to make some coffee. Afterward he irons a couple of shirts and leaves the translation for the following day. Typical, that morose postponement of work for the following day. This is what Platonov declared to the young Sofia Egorovna, the lover who at the end of the play shoots him with a revolver and ends up killing him.
PLATONOV: Don’t you recognize me, Sofia Egorovna? I’m not surprised. Four and a half years have passed, almost five, and not even rats would have been able to gnaw at a human figure more thoroughly than the past five years of my life have gnawed at me…
SOFIA EGOROVNA: It’s too old and too banal a story for us to waste any time talking about it so much, or award it an importance it doesn’t deserve…Besides, it’s not about that…But when you speak of the past, sir…you speak as if you were asking for something, as if before, in the past, you hadn’t received what you deserved and you wanted to receive it now…
Lazkano thinks of the women in his life: Idoia, Ana, Lena, Gloria herself…How passion drove them to embrace. How tiredness drove them to embrace each other’s tiredness in order to be able to remain standing.
Those kinds of books exist. Books that arrive at the perfect time, grab us by the scruff of the neck and shake us hard. We go waist deep into their lines, they swallow us. That was exactly what happened to Lazkano with Platonov. He felt that all those characters spoke about his life, something that hadn’t happened to him in years.
TRILETZKI: If only you could see the article I whipped up for the Russian Messenger, gentlemen! Have you read it? Did you read it, Abram Abramich?
VENGEROVICH: Yes, I read it. Only, you didn’t write that article yourself, Doctor, but Porfiri Seminovich.
GLAGOLIEV: How do you know that?
VENGEROVICH: I know it.
GLAGOLIEV: How curious. I did write it, it’s true. But how did you know?
VENGEROVICH: Everything can be known, it’s a matter of finding out things.
“It is sometimes the case, my friend, that one feels the need to hate somebody, to bury one’s teeth in somebody, that one seeks someone to take revenge on for some bastardly thing that’s happened…”
It was all there, the turbid issue of his plagiarism, his middle-age crisis, the evidence that such crises offer no other consolation but the option to become contemplative beings.
PLATONOV: Is it possible that it’s time for me to be content to just contemplate memories? Memories are good but…is it possible that this is the end for me? My God! My God! It’d be better to die…We must live…We must keep living…I’m still young…
As Lazkano translated Platonov’s tragic monologues, he couldn’t help putting Chekhov’s face on the schoolmaster’s character, only to, given that it was all about getting under the skin of another fellow human, replace Chekhov’s face with his own as he advanced in the translation. When did narrators manifest with their own voice, and when with the voice of the author? Authors were at their best when they managed to get under the Devil’s skin, to be abducted by Him – or, even better, to abduct Him themselves. Lazkano knew this well, but interferences were inevitable, and as the days passed and he travailed over the translated paragraphs, the sensation that he’d been magnetized by Platonov settled in him, the feeling that he’d totally fallen under the spell of his influence, also because he kept hearing Gloria’s own voice in his head every time he translated Anna Petrovna’s speeches.
PLATONOV: Because I feel a deep appreciation for you. And I appreciate that appreciation for you in me, to the point that I would rather be under the earth than deprive myself of it. My dear friend, I am a free man, I have nothing against an agreeable pastime, I am not an enemy of relationships, not even an enemy of noble beds, but…to have a little adventure with you, to transform you into the object of my idle digressions, you, such a marvelous, intelligent, free woman. No! That’s too much. I’d rather you’d vanquish me to the antipodes. To be together for a month or two and then…depart, ashamed? Let’s forget this conversation…Let’s be friends, but let’s not play with one another: we’re worth a lot more than that!
Those words that Platonov said to Anna Petrovna, those half-truths, cheap excuses disguised as principles, but also as cowardice and lack of courage, how often had such words been repeated on the face of the earth, before and after Chekhov’s death, in the past hundred years?
Lazkano spent weeks absorbed by Platonov, without the strength or the disposition for anything other than that theater play, disheveled, unshaven, sleep-deprived, lacking the impetus to even change the sheets. When the acrid smell of sweat that had taken over his bed became unbearable, he started to rest on the sofa. It wasn’t only Platonov, all the characters in that play had entered his home, including the villain Ossip and his evil deeds; such irony, the living room of the man who never set foot in a theater was now filled with undesirable guests; Diego had become some sort of Pirandello; perhaps it wasn’t the stench of sweat that made his bed unbearable, but the fact that it was Platonov who slept there.
PLATONOV: When people remind us even a little of our impure past, how disgusting those people seem!
ANNA PETROVNA: I want to have my life already, and not in the future…
PLATONOV: How beautiful you are! But I wouldn’t bring you happiness. I would do with you what I’ve done with every woman who throws herself at my feet…make you miserable!
ANNA PETROVNA: You have an exaggerated sense of yourself. Are you really so terrible, Don Juan?
PLATONOV: I know myself. The novels in which I appear never end well…
ANNA PETROVNA: What else do you want? Smoke me like a cigarette, squeeze me like a lemon, break me into bits…Be a man! Something about you is so off!
The Bug Outer. The Bug Offer. Sir Insect. Mr. Infect.
And later on, through Ossip’s mouth: “I’ll strangle him…don’t be afraid.”
For a time in his life, in Lille, Diego Lazkano sank into drinking. He wanted to forget Soto and Zeberio, forget his confession, the torture he suffered, the folder he contemplated from the corner of his eye like a “souvenir without nostalgia,” feeling its elastic bands and caressing them without daring to open it, like a man afraid to get his lover naked. He wanted to banish his dreams and ambitions from his mind, he lived like a zombie. In secondhand bookshops, he’d sell the books he’d lovingly collected over the years in exchange for a pittance, and then he drank his own books, each day he drank one, some days as many as two. I’m drinking The Odyssey, the small change they gave me for it is disappearing down my throat, he’d tell himself, look how little I got for the paperback edition of Martin Amis’s Money. He exchanged literature for alcohol, Robinson Crusoe became a bottle of Baileys, The Brothers Karamazov a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, the three gin and tonics he’d just ingested were The Life and Adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes. He got his hands on an expensive bottle of Lagavulin whisky in exchange for the leather-bound copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses that Ana had given him as a gift; if, on a given day, he sold Montaigne’s essays for next to nothing, he would buy himself a Bordeaux red, trying to be coherent with what he drank; if he got rid of Madame Bovary, he had to try to find a potion similar to something Flaubert might have ingested, to be able to emulate him; in exchange for Italo Calvino’s Our Ancestors he’d get a Chianti or a bottle of pelaverga from Saluzzo, maybe. Who ever said that literature doesn’t feed us, that it doesn’t comfort our spirit or our soul? Diego Lazkano hardly ate around that time. His companion, Lena, the girl from Kursk, got frightened when she saw him on the verge of delirium tremens, and Diego had to c
onfess to her that he saw news bulletins inside his head incessantly, news bulletins that had beginnings but no endings; he saw wars among guerrillas, Kennedy and Nixon, Margaret Thatcher and Mitterrand, not necessarily in their corresponding roles. He might see Mitterrand with a kamikaze bandanna wrapped around his forehead, holding an AK-47 in the middle of the jungle, and then more news; he couldn’t hold back that flow, switch off that news bulletin, it was like being alone and defenseless in a gigantic cinema, in the middle of an atrocious scene, an item of news linked to the next one uninterruptedly and, suddenly, the flow would end and Diego Lazkano would find himself, at dawn, in an industrial area on the outskirts of Lille he’d never been to before, without his wallet, with his shirt ripped to shreds, incapable of recalling where he’d lost his jacket, feeling horribly nauseous.
Back then alcohol used to stimulate his desire to have sex. The shy pupil Lazkano, the dedicated student and occasional translator from Russian, met many girls who liked him, to his surprise. And he took advantage: he would have sex, phone them, stop phoning them, make excuses or not, hurt them in ways they didn’t deserve and be hurt in turn, and fool himself into thinking that he enjoyed the pain.
One day, not having the remotest idea where he was, he puked everything he had inside in an empty gas station, next to the air-compressor pump, he poured it all out, completely, and felt himself touch rock bottom, the deepest bottom, when he surprised himself scrutinizing his own vomit attentively, reading it, trying to hopelessly find some clue about where he might have eaten dinner the previous night, judging by the bits of food he’d just expelled. But he couldn’t remember a thing, he had forgotten everything, there was a big black hole in the place where his whereabouts of the past twenty-four hours should have registered.
He stopped selling his books then and started going to the cinema compulsively, almost every day, in an attempt to substitute the fast-flowing stream of terrifying news from his conscience with fictional stories.
He poured all the bottles down the sink (Gulliver’s Travels, The Belly of Paris, Wide Sargasso Sea) and promised Lena to become a new man. But it was too late: the girl from Kursk decided that she’d already had enough.
Diego Lazkano kept only one bottle of Irish whisky, as a trophy. A bottle he never opened, and which survived every move since Lille, quite a few of them. He kept it intact, seal and all, that bottle he’d bought with the peanuts they’d given him in return for James Joyce’s Dubliners. He’d decided to become a social drinker a long time ago, not to drink unless he was in company. But this time he’s going to make a little exception. The occasion deserves it.
If there is a knife in the house, that knife will be used sooner or later. The same goes for a bottle of whisky. “I’ll strangle him…don’t be afraid.”
By the time he realized, he was already halfway through the bottle. He was dying to speak with Gloria. He dialed her number, going against the old order of things, which determined that it was always her who called him in the middle of the night.
“The chapter I sent you the other day…I’m not completely sure I’d inserted the last revisions. Would you mind going through the passage in which Platonov and Anna get drunk together?”
“Of course, Diego. Hang on a sec, I’ll switch on the computer.”
“PLATONOV: I’m never drinking again…”
“That’s good, let’s start there.”
“We might meet again in a few decades, and then we will both be old and senile and able to laugh and cry about these days we lived through, but for now…Sshh! Silence!”
“It’s the same up to that, keep going a bit further, from the point where it reads: “I am an immoral woman.”
“I am an immoral woman, Platonov…am I not? And I love you perhaps because I am immoral…I am headed for perdition…Women like me always end up there. Do they match?”
“Yes, Gloria. They match. To the letter.”
“We’ve already started dramatized readings with the material you sent us. And if I asked you to come to the rehearsal tomorrow…?”
“In your dreams, Gloria.”
“Okay, I had to at least try…”
As soon as he’s hung up the phone, Ossip appears before Lazkano, performing acrobatic leaps like a jester: “And the general’s wife, why did she come after the other? And where is his woman? Which one of the three is the real one? And aren’t you a villain after this?”
Diego tries to knock Ossip down with a punch, as if he were really there. He doesn’t land the punch. It is he who ends up falling, and he rolls the carpet up then to try to asphyxiate Ossip. Afterward, when he’s convinced there’s no one there but him, he lies under it and goes to sleep.
A thermos filled with a liter of coffee to his right, a liter-and-a-half bottle of water to his left, and the computer in front of him. Next to the mouse, a cup.
Lazkano was determined to finish the job that very night. He would start by translating every passage he’d put aside because he couldn’t be bothered or because his talent didn’t stretch that far. After that, he would fix his clumsy sentences and correct all the fragments that were underlined in red, the parts he wasn’t completely convinced by. He wanted to put a full stop to his long night. That translation, that appropriation he’d initially undertaken with such gusto, had become a torment. He wanted to stop looking at the world with Platonov’s perspective and through Chekhov’s eyes.
Toward the end of the play, Platonov’s wife, Sasha, attempts suicide by ingesting matches. But the doctor finds her in time, she doesn’t die. Will Platonov use the opportunity to redeem himself?
He places the butt of the revolver on his temple.
“Finita la commedia! One intelligent animal less!”
But Platonov is not capable of killing himself.
The girl Grekova is still tangled in his web. She stops him from doing it.
PLATONOV: Thank you, clever girl…A cigarette, water, and a bed! Is it raining outside?
GREKOVA: Yes, it’s raining.
PLATONOV: Sophie, Zizi, Mimi, Masha…You are legion…I love you all…
Lazkano remembers Oteiza’s eighty grandmothers.
GREKOVA: What ails you?
PLATONOV: Platonov ails me! You love me, don’t you? To be frank…I don’t expect anything…Just tell me that you love me…
GREKOVA: Yes…
PLATONOV: They all love me. When I am healed, I’ll corrupt you…Before, I used to redeem, and now I corrupt…
GREKOVA: I don’t care…I don’t expect anything…Only you are…a human being.
Finally, it’s Sofia Egorovna who fires the revolver. Platonov lies on the ground, gravely wounded.
Lazkano reads Triletzki’s reaction to his friend’s death for the umpteenth time, and is moved once again: “If you are the deceased…who will I drink with at the funeral?”
Dawn breaks. The bottle of water is empty. Just a finger of coffee in the thermos. He closes the lid of the laptop. It’s finished. It’s all over. He stands up to open all the windows in the house, unmake the bed, and throw the sheets in the washing machine.
Ossip watches him, sitting on the washing machine, dangling his legs playfully. “A dog deserves a dog’s death.”
“Go,” Diego commands. “Get out, don’t ever come back. Leave me alone.”
Ossip leaves. Head hanging low, tail between his legs.
The house is silent, all he can hear is the sound of the washing machine’s spinning cycle.
Lazkano should shave and he does so.
“If you’re the deceased…who will I drink with at the funeral?”
Diego had constructed a coherent narrative to answer the question of why he hated the theater so much, one of those narratives that skirt around the truth, a comfortable narrative that you end up believing from saying it so much: he dislikes the modulated whispers and resonant screams actors are forced to deliver to make themselves heard, and even more so the social ritual going to the theater involves, entering corridors
and passageways, going through balconies and stalls, shaking hands or dispensing – yes, dispensing is the right word – a couple of kisses every time he bumps into an acquaintance that requires a courteous stop; fake courtesy, always. There is no way to reach your seat without coming across some acquaintance along the way, because the city is small, and because there’s always a chance you’ll bump into some neighbor, a friend from school, an ex-colleague, some undesirable from the same association or union you revoked your membership from years ago, or any other scattered member of the populace of lowlifes you yourself used to belong to. The better the ticket, the better and more central the location of your row and seat, the greater the chances that you’d bump into the pseudolordsandladies of the manor and other members of the glove-wearing bourgeoisie. And let’s not forget that in that city practically everyone belonged by default in this category of gloved bourgeoisie; even if they didn’t actually wear them anymore, they still gave themselves the same airs. He hated the whole process of reaching his seat from the bottom of his soul. But if there was one thing that he hated above everything else about the theater, it was premieres. On such days, as if the discomfort of the crowds and unwanted encounters weren’t enough, actors were in greater need of adulation than ever after the final ovation, and not happy with returning to the stage two, three, four, and even five times after the last curtain drop, they forced the extension of the applause from behind the scenes, demanding the audience’s continued clapping from the wings, coming out again and again, loitering around and crisscrossing the stage as soon as they detected – what sharp ears they have, it must be said – the slightest sign that the applause might be about to cease, giving the impression that it wasn’t the audience’s gratefulness or opinion that they wanted to receive, but lavish and never-enough attention for their swollen, ravenous egos.
Twist Page 32