cracks in the earth, ready to swallow me up. He threateningly flared his nostrils, from where a gleaming trail of saliva trickled. His sharp little teeth chewed the grass I’d just walked on, and he kept his eyes on me. I was sure we were thinking about the same thing: he about how to eat me, and me about my flesh disappearing into his mouth, his teeth sinking into my body and tearing off piece after piece.
‘You all right, mate?’ I heard the man say behind me. I turned back and saw my neighbour, whom I’d completely forgotten. For the first time in my life I was glad to see him. For the first time I found comfort in another human being, despite his gap-toothed smile and half-witted gaze set beneath a low brow and red lopears. Away, away from the animals! I thought as I rushed up the stairs. My neighbour ran after me in surprise.
‘Whoa, easy does it, mate. You look a bit pale,’ I heard him say.
I led him into the house and cast one more glance at the he-goat. He was still standing in the same place and staring at me. It was as if he wanted to make it clear to me that I’d opened the gate of my house for him, that he’d entered and that he’d never leave. He’d stand there and wait for me until the end, whenever my end would be.
‘I don’t have any rakija. Do you drink whisky?’
‘I drink everything,’ he said.
I poured myself a full glass and just two fingers for him because I wanted him to leave as soon as possible. We sat in the armchairs in the living room, opposite each other. I put the bottle down on the table between us, hoping it would obstruct my view of him, but it was in vain: the table was too low and the bottle too small.
Through the balcony door, I could see the tips of the flames. They must have been frazzling what was left of the hill. Yet I found comfort in the flames. They were the perfect excuse for me not to look at the fellow in front of me. He’d think I was fretting because of the fire or that I felt sorry for my father. He tried to start a conversation but soon gave up and decided to leave me to my sorrow.
‘I’ll pour myself, mate, don’t you mind. You just go ahead and think,’ he reassured me.
After that we sat in silence. When he’d quaffed all my whisky and my neck was stiff from looking out through the balcony door, he left. As he was going, he said: ‘You’re a good man.’ I nodded, refusing to look at him. When he closed the door behind him, I burst into tears.
That’s how she cried, too, as if she was imploring someone. And that someone was me, I sometimes thought, and yet it was as if she was beseeching someone who wouldn’t hear. The only purpose of crying is self-pity, which brings us the greatest satisfaction – a wet orgasm after emotional masturbation. We pity ourselves because there’s no-one else who would. Self-pity is held in great stead. Only someone who cries and weeps convulsively over themselves can hope to gain the sympathy of others. But it only lasts an instant. Everyone turns back to themselves in a flash because people are only capable of ongoing agony in relation to themselves. And who can blame them: being alive is an unquestionably tragic fact which can induce nothing but tears.
When she finally stopped sobbing, she left me. All at once she wiped away her tears, and instead of a tearful glance she sent me one full of hate.
‘You’ve destroyed me. I curse every day of our life together,’ she snarled.
I saw clearly where this was heading. Two or three sentences more and she’d say I’d made her want to die, I thought. But she didn’t.
‘Life with you was hell,’ she said instead, ‘a hell I’m now leaving. I’m going to start life again. On second thought, I should be grateful to you because you’ve aroused the desire for life in me again: a life after you. Now I know there’s a life after death.’ She laughed hysterically. ‘Life after you. Thank you for everything,’ she shouted as she threw her things into her suitcase.
She left before I could say anything in return. I simply stood in the hall, staring at the door she’d slammed behind her, left alone in the house which until just a moment ago had been our home. What did I expect? That the door would open again, that she would come in, laugh her golden laugh and once more grace this damned house with her smile; with the smile which made me fall in love with her in the first place; the smile I married? It was only this morning that she left me, yet I can no longer remember the reason why. What happened between us? What was it that became so unbearable? I thought about her but couldn’t come up with a single reason why she found me so abhorrent, nor of how I’d become estranged from her, incapable of living close together. I knew now that I loved her. I thought about her smile and loved it like the very first day I met her, and it seemed as if nothing untoward had happened at all, nothing had changed. I realised that her leaving had brought everything full circle: she had gone and everything returned to nothing.
I remembered watching her singing in the kitchen in the immaculate light which came in through the open window, like the illumination in baroque paintings. She stood there like an angel with wings outspread, too tender for this world. It seemed only a moment before her mangled, fragile form would float heavenward and her wings would fall into the mire in which I reside. But then she started singing, and the terrible dissonance destroyed the picture.
‘Darling, you look like an angel but sing like a toad,’ I told her.
As a matter of fact, everyone becomes unbearable once we get to know them a little better. That’s why the most beautiful women are those on painters’ canvases, where they’re limited to their appearance. Beautiful they are, and that’s all we need to know about them. Because any other detail about their biographies, habits and thoughts would repulse us and turn delight into disgust. I can just imagine how the girl with the pearl earring must have stunk. Europe at that time didn’t have bathrooms, so it’s hard to think of European women of that era as anything other than carriers of the plague bacillus. This woman, as we know, was a maidservant. Before she sat for the painter determined to immortalise her beauty, in other words the lie about her, she must already have cooked the main meal, scrubbed the floors and done all the shopping. She’s sure to have worked up a sweat at least three times, and being in the same room as her must have been awful. But there’s not a man alive who doesn’t desire to kiss her when he sees her on a museum wall.
Art always lies, as a matter of fact. It seduces us with its lies like a killer seduces a girl standing in the rain in front of the school and waiting for her mother, who’s running late because her lover needed several minutes longer to reach orgasm that day. It takes us by the hand just as that girl is, blinded by lies, and leads us away from the truth, away from life. Art creates the impression that things have meaning and always happen for a reason, but the truth is different, of course: we never find out why, nor do we perceive the meaning of what happens to us. Things are neither beautiful nor justifiable. They simply stink like the sweaty body of Jesus did up on the cross, or the masses who tried to stone him and the disciples who bewailed him; they stink like the saints and sinners, the convicted and the executioners, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and especially van Gogh’s shoes, which Heidegger, amid the stench of beer and sausages, claimed to be those of a peasant. We, the living, stink too; we wash in vain because filth, not cleanliness, is our natural state. We clean ourselves but always get dirty again. And we stink hideously: from the day we’re born until our dying day, and even after we’re dead. We stink in both life and death.
Only now that she’s gone can she be beautiful again, and only now am I able to love her again. Because now I’m forgetting all I had learnt about her, and can allow only her beauty to remain. Her smiling face. I will cherish that image just as precious paintings are stored in high-security museums.
Apropos women…I heaved myself out of the armchair
