Читать книгу Ziggurat - Bob Mazzei - Страница 8

I found myself thinking I was in some magic time or space.

It was the end of August, when end of summer evenings are shorter and the air smells of autumn rains that will be coming soon.

Those images, like slow motion, ran flowing before my eyes. People walking past water, running on the sidewalks and shrugging the cold, as everybody thinks how to get their daily deeds done. That picture raised a certain sense of tenderness in me. We’re frail in our bodies, in our reasoning, in our manners always too hastened.

Summer time ending had always been the most fruitful moment for my wandering imagination; it would take me with its wings, and fly me where my emotions are strong and wild.

Since I was a boy, I began experiencing the great limit of that wonderful conquest we call language, as some feelings become too immense to make it useless, and even profane.

And it has always been into that limit that we build up our existence, sometimes with too many explanations for simple things, sometimes pretending simplicity just to get superficiality. Too often used by the erudite to entrap the uneducated.

Then, I started to remember all things past. I saw my mother rummaging through her needlework bag, as my father was reading the newspaper, and he’d laugh and then look concerned, he approved and then frowned. Yes, my past gone.

I lifted up the book I chose to read from the sofa where I had laid it, The Goddess and the Child, than I stared at my glass. The wine was burgundy red, and it looked like it was softly swinging, rocking like a light sea inside the glass that laps over the rocks on the shore. I grasped it with my hands, and soon the perfume of deep summer nights came over me, like when the aroma from the vines is drawn to the coast. I took a sip, and my mind floated away again, into those charming spring evenings, when the days are getting longer, and my father would tell me about the way the world was changing as I got home. I would often try to avoid listening to him. Yes, my past gone.

I thought and then remembered a funny adage from Aristophanes, “Quickly bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may whet my mind and say something clever”, and I start tittering.

Yet again, my past gone.

All the wisdom of my grandmother who would caution me to calm my temper, yet to be brave and intense in my principles. With all the insight of my mother who urged me to read the Classics, and taught me to love Shakespeare. “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none, remember the countess”, she used to think that, “And you will see that All’s Well That Ends Well, son. Make it be enough, because it will be hard when you enter the bedlam”, she would conclude, and then smile with all the kindness she was able to.

I picked up the book once again; the cover pictured a work of Hyppolite Delaroche, La Jeune Martyre, a young martyr woman, her dead body drifted upon the Tiber. I began to read.

—Scatter, scatter around my love… Spread yourself about at the height of you

Highest wish of my lengthy years, free stay of my many days

Hadn’t life caught me as a drifter and fugitive, I wouldn’t have grabbed in my hands, in my breath, on my rough skin, the grace and the kindness of your skin, engraved like unending and immortal marks.

Hadn’t my pilgrim presence trodden my homeland again, like a homage of thought to heart, of heart to vision, of vision to the gentle sound of your lips, I would’ve missed the scent of scorched earth and berries, that I chase to glow and burn…

Who came to wake my torpor of drowsy child, bent in the haze of a prosaic night, numb in the cold, covered with down, and diverted by the fury of gloomy and wicked men, if not the daring judgment of my return, facing the glimmering age of wraiths, that I would miss and be away?

Ay, I would have found you waiting for one more try and roses, stretching out your arms with warm affection as the sweetest brides, though the time had passed to meet more intelligence and love, the way my childish reason would by then see and comfort the heart—

The night was dark, and a pale shimmering light lighted up the room. I rose up; I switched on the lamp whose metallic gleam grew little by little. I poured some more wine; I plunged into its magic flavor, and lunged back to my reading again.

— […] Ah, Yolène, mysterious and infinite woman, if your shapes are the sign of heaven’s beauty, I live exiled to hell. What could ever be pleasing me but you? […]

—A justicialist society is a hopeless society; it makes human kind dismal and bare. If murderers, thieves and rapists had no right to a just trial, the entire society could not claim any good. Justicialism, which is often political manipulation of the justice system, steals from people the opportunity to make progress, to driving out evil once and for all, because it bases upon blind punishment the emotion that the mass absorbs after the brutality of a crime takes place. It educates to revenge, not for justice… Huh, Monsieur Herschmann, where have you lost yourself today? What, more than Homer, rouses your interest?

Ahem. Sir, I apologize. My head… [“I don’t think this is enough…”]

Yes, your head Monsieur Herschmann. Your head is always where it is not supposed to be. Now, tell us Monsieur Herschmann, how was it that we passed from Homer to Justicialism?

That Greek hero, that sense for justice…

Monsieur Herschmann, do not deny us and take this opportunity to be a bit more cultured. I want a detailed account on the Homeric man, tomorrow! How is the Homeric man, Monsieur Herschmann?

Ahem… Particularistic… […“Men, Women, I have been seeking you… Where are you?”…] —

Well, I broke off over that “particularistic”. The sum of different parts. Yeah, σῶμα—sòma—the body, ψυχή—psuché—the vital breath, θυμός—thymòs—the affective center, φρήν—frèn—the rational center, νοῦς—nùs—the intelligence.

I thought what was left of these parts, and to whom they belonged. The entire person was reduced to sections, each one with its needs assured and suited by consumerist merchandising. The vital breath had been long extinguished to give room to a far more ephemeral commercial existence, the affective center had been replaced by the visibility to which there are no affections if they do not concur by all means to reach for the cult of fame. As for the rational center and intelligence, they had gone missing into smoky notions and empty intentions. If I had to find them before they had gone lost, I would have traveled millennia back into history. Would I have found the Man, like Monsieur Herschmann in the novel wanted to do?

I started reading again.

— […] The Sichelschnitt, was at the door, many lives were about to change forever.

At Liceo Condorcet, 8 rue du Havre, in the IX arrondissement on the rive droit, two young kids attended school, they were Yolène and Bertrand. She, Yolène, lived in rue du Faubourg Montmatre, with her good catholic bourgeois family, her father a moderate wealthy merchant. He, Bertrand, lived in boulevard Haussmann, with his good Jewish family, his father was a lawyer and his mother a teacher of literature.

France, beacon of Europe, was about to know its darkest time after the Reign of Terror—le Terreur in the 18th century—and with that eclipse of reason an unprecedented violence dimmed the light the world over […] —

“Violence”, its thinking made me startle. Violence, the same root of Vis, force. Force, coercion, obligation, it was a series of words that loose spontaneously within my mind. Vir, male man, contained the same root. The notion of virility made me sick. Virile, man, male, force, violence, force once again. Still no Man in there. All relationships based upon force. Man as force, the strongest wins. Like celestial bodies, which are attracted to one another according to gravity force, like wild beasts, like animals in the food chain. I was disgusted about the inane chattering of the declaimers of merit, to do so that a prize may come, a portion, a lucre, that is the meaning. A world that, from a time long since gone, had forgotten and buried our consciousness. Merx, goods, and merces / praemium, reward. Complete fools, idiots, punks! Claiming merit is nothing but crying for mediocrity: Merís.

I went back to reading…

— […] Beautiful Yolène, I follow you with my eyes and I fall enchanted. I try not to be caught with my hanging look, a fleeting glance just does, and I soon deflect my mind. I will take your hands, Yolène, I’ll lay ‘em down on my skin, let them warm my nerves. I’ll kiss your lips, and I shall be born once more. […] —

My mind whirling like a storm and then, I started to remember Clive, and all his genius.

London was whipped by an impetuous wind; the streets looked spectral, as the air was being pushed ahead and drew arcs and parabolas that could be touched.

With our stiff arms, our fists pressing into our jeans’ pockets, our leather jackets squashed against our chest, and ashen faced, Clive and I walked…

“What’s more bourgeois than a treasure hunt?” I asked Clive, “To take part in a prize competition” Clive replied, as his words were swept away by the wind, sounding more like a howl.

Clive’s paintings portrayed profane landscapes, and they were so full of color, like those of the best impressionists, but they were able to rise from the soul to the outer limits, meet reality, and then rebel against the matter. I had never seen something that could put expressionism and impressionism so finely together like Clive’s pictures. Yet, Clive refused the yoke of the bourgeois state, and at the end he gave in, “I decided to leave the game”, I knew what he meant. I watched him; my neck was so frozen and sore that I could barely keep looking to my right. He maintained, “I am left and six hundred pounds, I think it’s enough!”

Clive was found next to the Olympia Theater, squatted down in a corner and rigid. He drank his life away. The religion of profit wasn’t unable to possess him, yet he couldn’t find the desired road to Utopia. In those years London was burning through the flames of decadence. However, apart those who died in that stake, nobody else saw the fire, nobody realized that soon it would have wrapped around the entire world.

I went back to reading once again…

— […] The war ended, as the memory of the dead climbed up in the sky, leaving the empty that everything can fill. Yet, the dead don’t speak, they’re gone, and belong to the ages. The conflict had burned everything it had to, so the Rule could restart itself, to accomplish its destiny and expand all over the world. Bertrand had become a physician, and in the caducity of the flesh he made out with all the weight of power, without ever letting himself be carried away by emotion, even when life flows like a rushing stream and takes children and fathers.

-But if this society is violent, and it rests on violence, and it allows the dominant to dominate with excess, how can you tell me not to be violent if I want this cruel game to be over?

-Because you have to overcome it, if you want to reach your human condition.

-What is my human condition? And where can I find it?

-I would start thinking where you can’t find it! […] —

I thought of Clive again, in a few days it would be the anniversary of his death. He used to say that the Nazi dictator might as well been called Mayer, and that was not a superficial remark. And he added, “We’re all pushing to the same direction, right or wrong, we will make the same mountain taller”.

Those who believed Clive as a miserable and desperate young man, could read his tombstone, life teaches that an envious man is a sad man, on that cold slab his image opened in a smile that could have contained the sky above.

Those were the words he wrote on the back of his last painting, Hiems, winter. It was an exceptional picture. The snow going up from the ground, the starry sky of the twilight, the trees with orange and yellow hues, houses turquoise and violet, and people of all ages being busy, yet amusing themselves, playing and dancing, jumping and smiling.

I kept reading becoming more involved, for me it was unexpected, an enthralling novel

— […] You are as beautiful as the dawn. I still remember the first time I met the dawn, and all my bones still quiver.

It was before my teens. I was traveling with my father on a boat; he woke me up at an hour I didn’t even know existed. I used to closing my eyes early at night, and opened them in the morning when the sun already bathed the earth leaving no shadow.

That day my father called me, it was five a.m. of a summer morning, “Bertrand, wake up Bertrand. Look at the sunrise”. I went out with him on the deck, the air smelled with salt, wet and crisp enough to make me rattle and shrug. The sun was a circle rising up from the sea, orange and yellow. The horizon appeared veiled with cyan and speckled in white. I was gazing at a slice of water before me, which mirrored all those colors at once, as all around the darkness was melting away. […] —

Abe had been Clive’s girlfriend, and she inherited all his pictures. She kept them in a room empty of other things; she looked after them as if they were children. Seven paintings that nobody could tell which one was the most beautiful.

When telling accounts, Abe had the gift of involving and catching her listener, yet making them laugh at once. We were acquainted with Clive’s melissophobia, his atavist fear for bee stings. She told us that once she wore a t-shirt with a hive swarming with bees, and he was about to fall down on his knees, and he went in such a twitter that she had to soon go home and change her top. When she got back, he asked her what she did with the t-shirt, and she answered that she had thrown it in the wash, but he replied that it would have been more reassuring to burn it, “You never know, with all those bees, darling!”

We burst out laughing, indeed, and we thought we heard Clive’s roaring laughter as well.

Overcome with all my memories, I carried on reading that weird novel.

— […] And came the day where Dieudonné appeared, martial and fierce on his horse, with his impeccable uniform, his stiff posture, he was like a knife piercing Yolène’s heart.

They married in 1947, and it wouldn’t take too long before she found out all his hidden qualities.

Dieudonné was a man of sward, ready to defend the law at any cost. He was blindly obtuse and servile, he hadn’t ideas, he had no doubt, no questions, and he would never take part in stirring the sea of life. He enjoyed many favors from among the powerful, the curias, and religious leaders, because his knee was always ready to bend, his head prepared to submit. No matter his nefariousness and his contempt for the last, authority was never questioned. His certainties were innate, among which “the soul of woman is created below”, was right on top of his convictions. […] —

Except for classical Greek and Latin literature, and Shakespeare’s inestimable masterworks, I had never read contemporary novels narrating love stories.

— […] She was prohibited to talk what she liked. Each word she mouthed had to be annoyingly prepared, as befitted an officer’s wife and honor. She had to be austere, quiet, and rigorously detached. She was his baby doll, one can see yet never touch, she can never be questioned […] —

I turned, and then headed toward the window that looked south, I flexed my eyes framing my sight on the crescent that covered the side of the street on my left. There were three girls who seemed to dance slicing the night. Perhaps I was just dreaming. I heard the sound of a guitar coming from my right side, the rhythm grew, the melody was turning tough, and then a melancholic choir sang of a world running into its own end. I was probably dreaming.

The book was lying on the sofa, cut by the light of the lamp; it looked like a weird acuminated weapon. It didn’t upset me; I felt instead a strange tension infusing a push on my nerves. I looked over again in the direction of the street, the lights were purple and everything under them were so still. Sit down, I thought, and read some more…

— […] Now and then along the years, she happened to remember that music, that piano kindly playing so light like, the wings of an angel. Like the Spring when Nature awakes up again to cover the landscape with colors and sweet gentle touches, and a sound that lays down and renovates everything. Yet, she didn’t dare to find out who dwelled behind that window in Boulevard Haussmann, so she kept fancying about a bohémien musician who perhaps left to war and never got back […] —

And those words kissed me goodnight.