became so accustomed to it that I used to play it back to myself when they were gone. Always a Ruy Lopez opening.
“What are you doing with yourself?”
“Nothing.”
“Me? You’re crazy!”
“But what do you do all day?”
“Nothing.”
Followed the inevitable grubbing of a few cigarettes and a bit of loose change, then a dash for a cheese cake or a bag of doughnuts. Sometimes I’d propose a game of chess.
Soon the cigarettes would give out, then the candles, then the conversation.
Alone again I would be invaded by the most delicious, the most extraordinary recollections—of persons, places, conversations. Voices, grimaces, gestures, pillars, copings, cornices, meadows, brooks, mountains . . . they would sweep over me in waves, always desynchronized, disjected . . . like clots of blood dripping from a clear sky. There they were in extenso, my mad bedfellows: the most forlorn, whimsical, bizarre collection any man could gather. All displaced, all visitors from weird realms. Auslanders, each and all. Yet how tender and lovable! Like angels temporarily ostracized, their wings discreetly concealed beneath their tattered dominoes.
Often it was in the dark, while rounding a bend, the streets utterly deserted, the wind whistling like mad, that I would happen upon one of these nobodies. He may have hailed me to ask for a light or to bum a dime. How come that instantly we locked arms, instantly we fell into that jargon which only derelicts, angels and outcasts employ?
Often it was a simple, straightforward admission on the stranger’s part which set the wheels in motion. (Murder, theft, rape, desertion—they were dropped like calling cards.)
“You understand, I had to. . . .”
“Of course!”
“The ax was lying there, the war was on, the old man always drunk, my sister on the bum. . . . Besides, I always wanted to write. . . . You understand?”
“Of course!”
“And then the stars . . . Autumn stars. And strange, new horizons. A world so new and yet so old. Walking, hiding, foraging. Seeking, searching, playing . . . shedding one skin after another. Every day a new name, a new calling. Always fleeing from myself. Understand?”
“Of course!”
“Above the Equator, under the Equator . . . no rest, no surcease. Never nothing nowhere. Worlds so bright, so full, so rich, but linked with concrete and barbed wire. Always the next place, and the next. Always the hand stretched forth, begging, imploring, beseeching. Deaf, the world. Stone deaf. Rifles cracking, cannons booming, and men, women and children everywhere lying stiff in their own dark blood. Now and then a flower. A violet, perhaps, and a million rotting corpses to fertilize it. You follow me?”
“Of course!”
“I went mad, mad, mad.”
“Naturally!”
So he takes the ax, so sharp, so bright, and he takes to chopping . . . here a head, there an arm or leg, then fingers and toes. Chop, chop, chop. Like chopping spinach. And of course they’re looking for him. And when they find him they’ll run the juice through him. Justice will be served. For every million slaughtered like pigs one lone wretched monster is executed humanly.
Do I understand? Perfectly.
What is a writer but a fellow criminal, a judge, an executioner? Was I not versed in the art of deception since childhood? Am I not riddled with traumas and complexes? Have I not been stained with all the guilt and sin of the medieval monk?
What more natural, more understandable, more human and forgivable than these monstrous rampages of the isolated poet? As inexplicably as they entered my sphere they left, these nomads.
Wandering the streets on an empty belly puts one on the qui vive. One knows instinctively which way to turn, what to look for: one never fails to recognize a fellow traveler.
When all is lost the soul steps forth. . . .
I referred to them as angels in disguise. So they were, but I usually awoke to the fact only after they had departed. Seldom does the angel appear trailing clouds of glory. Now and then, however, the drooling simpleton one stops to gaze at suddenly fits the door like a key. And the door opens.
It was the door called Death which always swung open, and I saw that there was no death, nor were there any judges or executioners save in our imagining. How desperately I strove then to make restitution! And I did make restitution. Full and complete. The rajah stripping himself naked. Only an ego left, but an ego puffed and swollen like a hideous toad. And then the utter insanity of it would overwhelm me. Nothing can be given or taken away; nothing has been added or subtracted; nothing increased or diminished. We stand on the same shore before the same mighty ocean. The ocean of love. There it is —in perpetuum. As much in a broken blossom, the sound of a waterfall, the swoop of a carrion bird as in the thunderous artillery of the prophet. We move with eyes shut and ears stopped: we smash walls where doors are waiting to open to the touch; we grope for ladders, forgetting that we have wings; we pray as if God were deaf and blind, as if He were in a space. No wonder the angels in our midst are unrecognizable.
One day it will be pleasant to remember these things.
4
And so, moving about in the dark or standing for hours like a hat rack in a corner of the room, I fell deeper and deeper into the pit. Hysteria became the norm. The snow never melted.
While hatching the most diabolical schemes to drive Stasia really mad, and thus do away with her for good, I also dreamed up the most asinine plan of campaign for a second courtship. In every shop window I passed I saw gifts which I wanted to buy her. Women adore gifts, especially costly ones. They also love little nothings, dependent on their moods. Between a pair of antique earrings, very expensive, and a large black candle, I could spend the whole livelong day debating which to get her. Never would I admit to myself that the expensive object was out of reach. No, were I able to convince myself that the earrings would please her more, I could also convince myself that I could find the way to purchase them. I could convince myself of this, I say, because in the bottom of my heart I knew I would never decide on either. It was a pastime. True, I might better have passed the time debating higher issues, whether, for example, the soul was corruptible or incorruptible, but to the mind-machine one problem is as good as another. In this same spirit I could work up the urge to walk five or ten miles in order to borrow a dollar, and feel just as triumphant if I succeeded in scrounging a dime or even a nickel. What I might have hoped to do with a dollar was unimportant: it was the effort I was still capable of making which counted. It meant, in my deteriorated view of things, that I still had one foot in the world.
Yes, it was truly important to remind myself of such things occasionally and not carry on like the Akond of Swot. It was also good to give them a jolt once in a while, to say when they came home at three A.M. empty-handed: “Don’t let it bother you, I’ll go buy myself a sandwich.” Sometimes, to be sure, I ate only an imaginary sandwich. But it did me good to let them think that I was not altogether without resources. Once or twice I actually convinced them that I had eaten a steak. I did it to rile them, of course. (What business had I
