Читать книгу Bottom of the Sky - Rodrigo Fresán - Страница 21

I’m not at home when they come looking for my father and find him and take him away.

When I get home from school, they tell me that Solomon Goldman climbed up on the roof of the synagogue, that he was naked or dressed (there didn’t seem to be an agreement on this particular point) in a strange silver uniform or with his body covered in gold paint.

And that my father howled alchemical formulas and cabalistic prescriptions and desperate curses at the heavens.

And that he waved his arms, over his head, repeating again and again the gesture of someone drawing the blinds or opening the curtains.

Months later, a letter informed me that my father had died when he jumped from a terrace at the Bellevue Hospital Center.

The specialists’ final verdict was of sudden, unpremeditated suicide: they explained that my father was a “model patient,” whatever that means.

Years later, during a book signing at Andromeda Books—a specialty bookstore on Bleecker Street where one of my novels was being launched—a stranger with shrunken pupils approached me. Pupils the size of pills. He told me he’d been institutionalized with my father, but now was “completely cured and probably saner than you.” And he told me—presenting a copy of Remote Universe for me to sign—that my father hadn’t committed suicide, that that was a sham.

He told me that my father “had finally comprehended the secret language of the clouds . . . Clouds, immense and complex like ice cream sundaes in the summer, clouds as powerful as castle armies.”

He told me too that my father had attempted to fly and that, for few meters, he’d succeeded. He told me that he saw it, that he witnessed the deed, but that “the nurses’ cries made him lose focus and the poor and saintly Solomon ended up falling into the void.”

And he concluded: “Believe me: your father, Solomon Goldman, died happy—knowing he was right.”

And he handed me a notebook.

All the pages were blank except the last one. There, in Solomon Goldman’s familiar handwriting—but shrunk to microscopic size; I needed the help of a magnifying glass to read it—I made out words that I was quick to memorize because, despite their complexity and scope, I understood them to be my father’s last words. The final destination of his last voyage and, consequently, something worth preserving. In a way, I thought, these words were my inheritance, a legacy that had finally come to me:

“The only true essence of magic resides in the ability to exist in a state of consciousness where the past and the future long to trade places. Classical Hebrew, without going any further, has two verbal tenses: the present and another barely discernible time between the past and the future. Thus, to denote something that already happened, it’s enough to say I went. To refer to the future, however, one only need add the participle already as in I already went, which is understood as an I will go in a perpetual motion of coming and going. Thus, it suggests a kind of primitive understanding of existence. An understanding that would transgress our mode of separating, in actuality, the real from the imaginary. But in that ancient grammar, facts are not seen as facts that have already occurred, but as instructions from tomorrow. That is to say, as premonitions that visit us in dreams and nightmares. In the primitive world, yesterday’s facts mingled with the wonders and adventures of last night’s dreams. So saying that you have done something that you didn’t do is the initial and essential step to take in shaping what will be the future. Facts arise from premonitions. It’s as if the future couldn’t exist without the existence of its a priori delineation. A pencil sketch of what someday will become an oil landscape. The childish exercise that grows into the wise and mature symphony. God (or whatever you want to call Him; I know His true name, but I’m not allowed to put it in writing or say it or even think it) conceives of the world first and only then creates it. Thus, the cabalistic perception of this kind of miracle passes not through the magnitude of the enterprise, but through the fact that, in the act of imagining how the world will be, God has already created it before making it.”

Yes: my father had been and had already been and would already be.

Something like that.

But years before all of this (and just after they took Solomon Goldman away, tightly wrapped in a straight jacket) a man and a woman belonging to one of those organizations charged with the protection of minors told me to pack up what few belongings I had in my small suitcase.

My magazines, my notebooks, my books, some clothes, two or three photographs. I didn’t have any toys, I never did, they never interested me.

I made the short but transcendent journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan where I was taken to the house of an aunt and uncle—my mother’s brother—whom I’d never met before.

And there, in a house on 7^th Street, where I thought I’d be cured of my evil secrets, I met my cousin Ezra Leventhal.

I remember that moment perfectly.

I remember it as if it were happening again right now.

A thing that had been and had already been, but that would already be and will be again: Ezra shakes my hand, he shows me our room which until then was “just my room,” he explains to me, arching an eyebrow while—feigning a reflexive pose, hand on chin, thinking I won’t notice—squeezing a pimple. And, raising his voice to make himself heard over the relentless clamor of the sewing machines in the shop downstairs, Ezra tells me, in a serious tone of voice, suddenly broken by uncontrolled, high-pitched adolescent hormones, that my father “has probably been kidnapped by beings from a planet called Omikron.”

And with a conspiratorial gesture—almost nonexistent in its efficiency, as if it were a secret embodied in an object, in something palpable and true—Ezra hands me a notebook with a black oilcloth jacket and a cover where, on a white label, in precise caps, it reads: MANUAL OF A YOUNG SPACE TRAVELER/INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO OPERATE, INTERACT, AND PROSPER ON THIS AND OTHER PLANETS ACCORDING TO THE PRECEPTS OF EZRA LEVENTHAL (REX ARCANA OF THE MILKY WAY).

Then Ezra points dramatically upward, toward the room’s ceiling, toward something beyond the sky, toward the other side of everything and the end of everything on this side.

He looks at me, smiling.

And looks up again.

And I look exactly in the same direction that he’s looking and pointing.

And I see.