Listen to My Voice (2 page)

Anyone who imputes the bankruptcy of his own existence to another person – or to an event – is like a dog attached to a long chain that slides along a cable. Before long, the grass the dog walks on stops growing and the trodden earth turns dusty, strewn with bits of food and piles of excrement. When, worn out by endless pacing to nowhere, the dog eventually dies and his chain finally hangs down inert, all that remains of his anxious life is a sad rut in the ground.

Events and people aren’t ballast, and they’re not alleyways that you don’t know the way out of; they’re more like mirrors: small, large, convex, concave, wavy, distorting, cracked, or clouded, yet still capable of giving back a reflection and introducing us to a part of ourselves we don’t yet know.

I must have awakened out of my sea cucumber’s life on the fourth or fifth night. My room was invaded by the cold light of a full moon. The coat stand threw its sinister shadow on to the floor. Why must there be a shadow in darkness? What’s the point of it, if not to evoke the existence of everything that can’t be seized and held?

Often, during the evenings of my childhood, you’d sit beside my bed and tell me a story. Out of all that welter of princesses, enchantments, monstrous animals, and amazing feats, only two images have remained fixed in my memory: the wolves’ yellow eyes, and the thudding, ungainly steps of the Golem. The wolves lay in ambush in the forest and along solitary roads, whereas the Golem could go anywhere; he knew how to open and close doors and climb stairs. He neither devoured children nor transformed them into monsters, but still he terrorised me more than any other creature. Whenever I recalled his name, the air I breathed turned to ice.

One early autumn night, damp but not cold, I felt
overwhelmed
by those threatening shadows and decided to get up and go outside.

The air wafted a perfume that evoked a flash of summer. Maybe the scent came from the apples, some of them still hanging from their branches, others already rotting on the ground, or maybe from the yellow, barely ripe plums. Since the temperature hadn’t yet gone below freezing, few leaves had fallen. The grass was still green, with a few wild cyclamens scattered here and there, as well as a couple of dandelions that had survived your resolute weeding.

By then, I figured all my entrails were gone. I went to the place where the walnut tree had stood and fell to my knees. The soil was damp and covered with little branches and twigs that had broken off when the tree came crashing down.

The air vibrated differently in the space where the tree used to be; for a moment, I had the impression that it was still there, its roots pumping sap up into the trunk and the dark fingers of the branches sending the sap back down. Not long before, nuts had dropped from that stream of energy anchored in the earth and outstretched toward the sky. The irregular symphony of their falling had accompanied every autumn of my young life; when I came home from school, I used to run to the tree and fill my pockets with them.

‘Don’t touch them, they’re dirty,’ you’d call from the
kitchen
window, but I wouldn’t obey you. I loved to open the walnuts delicately, taking care not to crush them. I wouldn’t eat them; instead, I’d hold them in the palm of my hand and look at them. For some mysterious reason, they were absolutely identical to the ones I’d seen in our textbooks. Our brains – the brains of all mammals and all birds – are made the same way: the skull, like a shell, is there to protect the more fragile parts, the dura mater, the pia mater, and, between the two hemispheres, the oddity of the hippocampus.

Why did two things in nature resemble each other so strikingly? Why did one thing refer to another? Was this a universal law, or was it just an extravagance due to a moment of distraction?

The ground around me was covered with walnuts. Heavy rains had transformed the green husks of June into a blackish mush; all you had to do was rub it with your thumb, and the shell would appear. Hard, but not hard enough to escape the squirrels’ pink paws and ivory teeth, or the beaks of the hooded crows, the ravens, the magpies, and the jays; hard, but not hard enough to avoid my questions.

Because that walnut tree – which was there one day and gone the next – had been my mirror, the first mirror of my life. Kneeling on the wounded earth, looking down into that chasm, immersed in the sinister moonlight with a seed in my hand and my heart seemingly empty, I
suddenly
understood that I would never, in all my time on earth, build mansions or amass a fortune or even have a family. As a cedar cone loudly struck the ground near me, I saw clearly that the path opening before me was the impassable and perpetually solitary path of the questioner.

2

WHEN I RECALL
our house, I see it suspended in the light of dawn. It’s still autumn, because the ground starts to smoke and fog rises in the warmth of the sun’s first rays. Like a bird in flight, I always look down at the house from above and far off; then I slowly draw nearer, observe the windows – how many are open, how many closed – and check the garden, the clothesline, the rust on the gate. I’m in no hurry to come down – it’s as if I want to make sure that the house is really my house and the story my story.

It seems that migratory birds behave in the same way; they cover thousands of kilometres purposefully, yielding to no distraction, and then, when they reach the area where they were hatched the previous year, they start to check it out. Is the horse chestnut tree with the white flowers still there? And the green car? And the
nice
lady who always steps outside and shakes the crumbs off her tablecloth? They observe everything meticulously, because for months, in the African deserts, the images of that lady and that car have stayed in their minds. But there are plenty of nice ladies and green cars in the world, so what’s the determining factor?

It’s not a sight, but a smell, the combination of the smells that filled the air in the vicinity of their nests: if the scents of the lilac and the linden overlap for an instant, there it is, that’s the house, we’ve come to the right place.

On the other hand, the odour that assailed me upon my return from the States was the smell of wet leaves that wouldn’t burn; by then it was mid-morning, and our neighbour had made a big pile of them and was trying in vain to set it alight, filling the air with heavy white smoke.

And then you emerged from the smoke, perhaps just a bit thinner than I remembered.

Convinced that I’d be able to free myself from you if I put an ocean between us, I’d travelled for months, seen many things, and met many people, but all that distance had produced exactly the opposite effect.

I still hated you as much as ever. I felt like a fox with a great bushy tail: I’d inadvertently brushed against the
fire
, and it followed me everywhere; wherever I was, rage was in my heart, and pain, and the desire to escape the flames, which were always burning behind me, always bigger and more destructive. When I put the key into the gate, my tail was ablaze, crackling and sparking like a sheaf of dry hay, its brisk burning punctuated by sinister flares.

You were in the driveway, with a broom in your hands.

‘It’s you!’ you exclaimed, dropping the broom. The wooden handle struck the paving stone with a hard, sharp sound.

‘Obviously,’ I replied, and without saying anything else, I went to my room, followed by Buck, who was yelping with joy.

In the course of the following weeks, our rituals of everyday ferocity went back into effect – I hated you, and you tried to avoid my hatred. On the days when you felt strong, you tried to blunt it, but your gestures were feeble, like an out-of-shape boxer’s, and they succeeded only in irritating me further. ‘What do you want?’ I’d scream at you. ‘Disappear!’ I called you ‘Old Woman’; I kicked doors while repeating, like a mantra, ‘Drop dead drop dead drop dead drop dead drop dead . . .’

It’s hard to understand how such hatred had taken shape in me. As with all complex emotions, it wasn’t possible
to
attribute it to a single cause; it was due instead to a sequence of events that combined unfavourably with some innate predispositions.

When the first flashes of adolescence appeared what had been a tranquil stream in my early girlhood started changing into a rain-swollen river; the water was no longer green, it was yellow, and it roared around every obstacle. All sorts of refuse washed up in its inlets – hunks of polystyrene, small plastic bags, punctured soccer balls, naked doll torsos, torn branches, dead cats with bloated bellies – and everything bobbed about and collided weakly with everything else, impotent, resentful, unable to free itself. Since childhood, so many things had accumulated under the surface that neither of us was capable of seeing them: as the years passed, a word said or unsaid, one glare too many, an omitted embrace – the normal misunderstandings that form a part of any mutual relationship – had turned into two stores of gunpowder, one inside each of us.

‘Us,’ I said, but actually I should have said ‘me’, because you tried with all your might to avoid any explosion whatsoever.

You kept quiet if you thought that might work, you tried talking if you decided talking would be more effective, but both your silences and your words were always out of place. ‘Why don’t you say something?’ I’d shout, irritated by some sign of inattention. ‘Why don’t you
keep
your mouth shut?’ I’d roar, certain that what you were saying was intended only to provoke me.

Every so often, I’d have a crisis. Electricity invaded my brain; aggressive termites scurried around inside my skull. They turned off the lights, their little jaws chewed through the cables, and everything slipped into darkness. And then out of darkness and into calm at last, calm regained. Suddenly, there was no longer a river inside of me, but a lake, a little mountain lake. Fat trout moved sinuously in its depths, and the dawning light turned the surrounding peaks pink.

Yes, everything could really begin again, just as every day emerges from the night. The windows opened, and fresh air invaded the house; light entered with the air, and it seemed there were no more dark corners. We baked a pie together. We went shopping together or visited the library to choose some new books.