Читать книгу Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality - UNIV PLYMOUTH - Страница 7

Clara

For my crises a physician was consulted, and he uttered an odd word: “paludism”; I was most amazed that my disquietudes, so intrinsic and so secret, could have a name, and a name so bizarre at that. The doctor prescribed me quinine: another subject of wonderment. It was impossible for me to understand how my sickly spaces might be cured, they with the quinine I was taking. But what disturbed me exceedingly was the physician himself. For a long time after the consultation, he continued to exist and to fidget in my memory with rapid automatic gestures whose inexhaustible mechanism I could not manage to stop.

He was a man small in stature, with an egg-shaped head. The pointed extremity of the egg extended into a black, continually quivering little beard. The small, velvety eyes, his clipped gestures and protruding mouth made him resemble a mouse. From the very first, this impression was so powerful that it seemed only natural to me that, on hearing him speak, he pronounced each “r” sonorously and trillingly, as if while talking he were always nibbling something on the sly.

The quinine he gave me also strengthened my conviction that the physician had something mousy about him. Verification of this conviction came about so queerly and is bound to such important events in my childhood that the occurrence is, I believe, worthy of being narrated separately.

Near our house there was a sewing machine shop where I used to go every day and stay for hours. The proprietor was a young man, Eugene, who had just finished his military service and had found himself an occupation in town by opening this shop. He had a sister a year younger than himself: Clara. They lived together somewhere in an outlying district, and by day they looked after the shop; they had neither acquaintances nor relatives.

The shop was merely a private room, newly let out for trade.

The walls still preserved their living-room paint, with violet garlands of lilac and the rectangular, fading traces of the places where the paintings had been hung. In the middle of the ceiling remained a bronze lamp with a dark-red majolica calotte, its edges covered with green acanthus leaves in faience relief. It was a highly ornamented object, old and outmoded, but imposing, something resembling a funerary monument or a veteran general wearing his old uniform on parade.

The sewing machines were lined up in three orderly rows, leaving between them two wide lanes as far as the back. Eugene took care to sprinkle the floor every morning, using an old tin can with a hole in the bottom. The thread of water that trickled out was very fine and Eugene dextrously manipulated it, tracing erudite spirals and figures-of-eight on the floor. Sometimes he would sign his name and write the day’s date. The painted walls evidently demanded such delicacies.

At the back of the shop, a screen of planks separated a kind of cabin from the rest of the room. A green curtain covered the entrance. It was there that Eugene and Clara always used to sit. They ate their lunch there, so as not to leave the shop during the day. They called it “the artistes’ cabin” and one day I heard Eugene saying: “It’s a genuine ‘artiste’s cabin’. When I go into the shop and speak for half an hour to sell a sewing machine, am I not acting out a comedy?”

And he added in a more learned tone: “Life, in general, is pure theatre”.

Behind the curtain, Eugene would play the violin. He kept the notes on the table and stood hunched over them, patiently deciphering the jumbled staves as though he were untangling a knotted clew of threads in order to extract from them one single fine strand, the strand of the musical piece. All afternoon, a small petroleum lamp used to burn on a chest, filling the room with a dead light and scattering the enormous shadow of the violinist over the wall.

I went there so often that in time I became a kind of additional piece of furniture, an extension of the old oil-cloth couch on which I sat immobile, a thing with which no one concerned himself and which hampered no one.

At the back of the cabin, Clara used to do her toilette in the afternoon. She kept her dresses in a cupboard, and she would peer into a broken mirror propped against the lamp on the chest. The mirror was so old that the silvering had rubbed away in places and through the transparent spots loomed the real objects behind the mirror, blending with the reflected images as though in a photograph with superimposed negatives.

Sometimes she would undress almost completely and rub her armpits with cologne, raising her arms without embarrassment, or her breasts, thrusting her hand between body and chemise. The chemise was short, and when she bent over I could see in their entirety her very beautiful legs, squeezed by well-smoothed stockings. She wholly resembled the half-naked woman I had once seen on a pornographic postcard that a pretzel vendor had shown me in the park.

She aroused in me the same hazy swoon as that obscene image, a kind of void that swelled in my chest at the same time as a terrifying sexual hunger clenched my pubis like a claw.

In the cabin, I always sat in the same place on the couch behind Eugene, and waited for Clara to finish her toilette. Then she would leave the shop, passing between her brother and me through a gap so narrow that she would have to rub her thighs against my knees.

Every day, I would wait for that moment with the same impatience and the same torment. It was dependent upon a host of petty circumstances, which I would weigh up and lie in wait for, with an exasperated and extraordinarily sharpened sensibility. It would be enough for Eugene to be thirsty, for him not to feel like playing, or for a customer to come into the shop to make him abandon the place by the table and then there would be enough free space for Clara to be able to pass at a distance from me.

When I used to go there in the afternoon, as I neared the door of the shop I would extrude long quivering antennae, which would explore the air to pick up the sound of the violin. If I heard Eugene playing, a great calm would come over me. I would enter as softly as possible and say my name aloud on the very threshold, so that he would not think it was a customer and interrupt his playing even for an instant. In that instant, it would have been possible for the inertia and the mirage of the melody abruptly to cease and for Eugene to lay aside his violin and play no more that afternoon. For all that, the possibility of unfavourable occurrences did not cease. There were so many things happening in the cabin… During all the time that Clara was doing her toilette, I would listen for the tiniest sounds and follow the tiniest movements in fear that from them the afternoon might develop into a disaster. It was possible, for example, for Eugene to cough lightly, to swallow a little saliva and suddenly say that he was thirsty or going to the confectioners to buy a cake. From infinitesimally small events, such as that cough, a lost afternoon would emerge monstrous, enormous. The entire day would then lose its importance and in bed at night, instead of thinking at leisure (and lingering for a few minutes on each detail in order to “see” and remember it the better) about the moment when my knees touched Clara’s stockings – let me carve, sculpt, caress this thought – I would toss feverishly between the sheets, unable to sleep and impatiently waiting for the next day.

One day, something wholly unusual happened. The occurrence commenced with the allure of a disaster and culminated with an unhoped-for surprise, but in such a sudden way and with a gesture so petty that my entire subsequent joy at it was like a stack of heteroclite objects that a conjurer holds in equilibrium at a single point.

Clara, with a single step, changed the content of my visits in its entirety, giving them a different meaning and new frissons, the same as in that chemistry experiment in which I saw how a single piece of crystal immersed in a test-tube of red liquid instantaneously transformed it into an astonishing green.

I was on the couch, in the same place, waiting with the same impatience as ever, when the door opened and someone entered the shop. Eugene immediately left the cabin. All seemed lost. Clara, indifferent, continued to do her toilette, while the conversation in the shop went on endlessly. Nonetheless, it was still possible for Eugene to return before his sister finished dressing.

I painfully followed the thread of the two events, Clara’s toilette and the conversation in the shop, thinking that they might unwind parallel to one another until Clara left the shop, or on the contrary they might meet at the fixed point of the cabin, as in those cinematographic films where two locomotives hurtle towards each other and either meet or pass alongside depending on whether a mysterious hand shifts the points at the last moment. In those moments of waiting I categorically felt that the conversation was taking its course and, on a parallel path, Clara was continuing to apply her powder…

I tried to rectify the inevitable by stretching my knees further towards the table. In order to encounter Clara’s legs, I would have had to sit right on the edge of the couch, in a posture if not bizarre then at least comical.

It seemed that through the mirror Clara was looking at me and smiling.

She soon finished rounding off the contour of her lips with carmine and powdering her cheek with the puff one last time. The perfume that diffused through the cabin had dizzied me with lust and desperation. At the moment when she passed by me, the thing I was least expecting occurred: she rubbed her thighs against my knees the same as every other day (or perhaps harder? but this was an illusion of course) with the indifferent air that nothing was going on between us.

There is a complicity of vice deeper and quicker than any verbal understanding. It instantaneously pierces the body like an inner melody and entirely transforms thoughts, flesh and blood.

In that fraction of a second, when Clara’s legs touched mine, immense new expectations and new hopes had come to birth in me.

*

With Clara, I understood everything from the very first day, from the very first moment; it was my first complete and normal sexual adventure. An adventure full of torments and expectations, full of disquietudes and gnashing of teeth, something that would have resembled love had it not been a mere continuation of aching impatience. To the same extent that I was impulsive and daring, Clara was calm and capricious; she had a violent way of arousing me and a bitchy joy in seeing me suffer – a joy that always preceded the sexual act and formed part of it.

The first time when the thing for which I had been waiting so long happened between us, her provocation was of such an elementary (and almost brutal) simplicity that that meagre phrase she then uttered and that anonymous verb she employed still preserve in me even today something of their former virulence. It is enough for me to think about them a while longer in order for my present indifference to be bitten away as though by an acid and for the phrase to become as violent as it was then.

*

Eugene had gone into town. We were both sitting silently in the shop. Clara in her afternoon dress, cross-legged behind the window, was absorbed in her knitting. A few weeks had passed since the occurrence in the cabin and between us a severe coldness had suddenly arisen, a secret tension that translated as extreme indifference on her part. We would sit in front of each other for whole hours without uttering a word, but nonetheless in that silence there floated a perfectly secret understanding like the threat of an explosion. I lacked merely the mysterious word that would puncture the membrane of conventionality; I would make dozens of plans each evening but the next day they would strike up against the most elementary obstacles: the knitting that could not be interrupted, the lack of a more favourable light, the silence in the shop, or the three rows of sewing machines, too neatly lined up to allow any significant exchange in the shop, be it even one of a sentimental order. All the while I would be clenching my jaws; it was a terrible silence, a silence that in me had the definiteness and the outline of a scream.

It was Clara who interrupted it. She spoke almost in a whisper, without raising her eyes from her knitting: “If you’d come earlier today, we could have done it. Eugene went into town straight after lunch”.

Up until then, not even the shadow of a sexual allusion had filtered into our silence, and lo and behold now, from these few words, a new reality gushes up between us, as miraculous and extraordinary as though a marble statue had risen in the midst of the sewing machines, sprouting from the floor.

In an instant I was beside Clara, I clasped her hand and violently caressed it. I kissed her hand. She snatched it away. “Hey, leave me be”, she said, annoyed. “Please come, Clara…” “It’s too late now, Eugene is coming back, leave me be, leave me be”. I was feverishly touching her shoulders, her breasts, her legs. “Leave me be”, protested Clara. “Come now, we still have time”, I implored. “Where?” “Into the cabin… come on… it’s good there”.

And when I said “good” my chest swelled with a warm hope. I kissed her hand once more and forcibly tugged her off the chair. She reluctantly allowed herself to be led, dragging her feet across the floor.

From that day on, the afternoons changed their “customs”: it was still a case of Eugene, still a case of Clara and of those same sonatas, but now the playing of the violin became intolerable to me and my impatience lay in wait for the moment when Eugene would have to leave. In the same cabin, my disquietudes became different, as though I was playing a new game on a board with lines traced for an already familiar game.

When Eugene left, the true wait would begin. It was a harder, more intolerable wait than hitherto; the silence of the shop would turn into a block of ice.

Clara would seat herself at the window and knit: every day this was the “beginning”, and without a beginning our adventure could not take place. Sometimes, Eugene would go out leaving Clara almost undressed in the cabin: I thought that this might hasten events, but I was wrong. Clara would accept no other beginning than that in the shop. I would have to wait pointlessly for her to dress and go into the shop in order to open the book of the afternoon at the first page, behind the window.

I would sit on a stool in front of her and begin to talk to her, to beg her, to implore her for a long time. I knew it was useless; Clara would accept only rarely and even then she would make use of a ruse, in order not to grant me perfect liberty:

“I’m going into the cabin to take a powder, I have a terrible headache, please don’t come after me”.

I would swear not to and then follow in an instant. In the cabin, a veritable battle would begin, in which, obviously, Clara’s forces were inclined to surrender. Then she would tumble all in one piece onto the couch, as though she had tripped up. She would put her hands under her head and close her eyes as though she were asleep. It was impossible to budge her from that position so much as an inch; just as she was, lying on her side, I would have to tear the dress from under her thighs and press myself to her. Clara put up no resistance to my gestures, but nor did she give me any assistance. She was as inert and as indifferent as a block of wood, and only her intimate and secret warmth revealed to me that she was mindful, that she “knew”.

*

It was during this period that the physician who prescribed me quinine was consulted. Confirmation of my impression that there was something mousy about him came in the cabin, and, as I have said, in a manner wholly absurd and surprising.

One day, as I was sitting pressed up against Clara and tearing off her dress with feverish hands, I felt something odd moving in the cabin and – more with the obscure but finely honed instinct of the extreme pleasure I was nearing, which admitted no alien presence, than with my real senses – I guessed that a living creature was watching us.

Frightened, I turned my head and on the chest, behind the box of powder, I glimpsed a mouse. It stopped right by the mirror at the edge of the chest and fixed me with its beady black eyes, in which the light of the lamp placed two gleaming golden pips, which pierced me deeply. For a few seconds, it looked into my eyes with such acuity that I felt the gaze of those two glassy points boring into the depths of my brain. It seemed as though it were meditating on a harsh rebuke to me or merely a reproach. But all of a sudden the fascination was shattered and the mouse fled, vanishing behind the chest. I was certain that the doctor had come to spy on me.

The same evening, when I took the quinine, my supposition was bolstered by a perfectly illogical albeit, for me, valid reasoning: the quinine was bitter; on the other hand, in the cabin the doctor had seen the pleasure Clara suddenly offered me; in consequence, and for the establishment of a just balance, he had prescribed me the most unpleasant medicament that could exist. I could hear him nibbling the judgement in his mind: “The grrreater the pleasurrre, the morrre bitterrr the pill!”

A few months after the consultation, the doctor was found dead on the floor of his house; he had fired a bullet into his brow.

My first question on hearing the sinister news was:

“Were there mice on that floor?”

I needed that certainty.

For the doctor truly to be dead, a pack of mice would necessarily have had to swarm over the body, to bore into it and extract the mousy matter lent to the physician during his life in order to exercise their illegitimate “human” existence.