The Box Man (18 page)

“You’re all sweaty… .”

(But there’s no need to apologize. Writings left behind by the dead can’t always be taken at face value as inevitably relating the truth. Those who are going to die have jealousies and envies that are incomprehensible to those who remain. Among them are those perverse ones whose hatred for the empty promises of “truth” cuts to the bone and who at best nail the coffin lid on with lies. One can’t very well swallow the bait whole by just claiming it is the writing of the dead.)

In His Dream the Box Man Takes

His Box Off Is This the Dream

He Had Before He Began Living

in a Box or Is It the Dream of His

Life After He Left It . . ?

My destination was the house located at the top of a slope at the exit from the city. After having traveled far and wide in a horse drawn carriage I have finally just arrived before the city gate. Judging from the length of my voyage, the house is probably at the entrance rather than at the exit of the town.

Furthermore, the horse drawn carriage is only a manner of speaking, for the vehicle was drawn not by a horse but in fact by a man wearing a cardboard box over his head. More precisely it was my father. Father was already over sixty. Naturally he had certain conservative aspects, and since he wholeheartedly refused to break the custom handed down from ancient times in the village that at a wedding the bride must be met with a horse drawn carriage, he himself had gone out to do so, taking the place of the horse. However, so as not to cause me embarrassment he had hidden himself in a cardboard box. It was also out of consideration for the bride lest he shock her.

Of course, if I had just had the money to hire a horse drawn carriage, my father would never had had to go to such extremes, nor would I ever have asked him. However, it would be simply too bad to give up the wedding because I

could not pay the fee for the carriage. Indeed, I could only depend on my father’s good offices.

But my already sixty year old father was not after all a horse. Since he was panting up a rough, sloping road, his progress was not one tenth that of a real horse. Nor could I very well get down and push from behind; the carriage crept slowly along. Time alone went wildly by. Furthermore, with the merciless jolting there was no reason for me to be blamed if the demands of nature finally reached their limit.

The carriage stopped. Father undid from the box something that looked like a leather belt (I don’t know its name) that attached to the horse’s belly and, looking up at me from the open observation window in the front of the box, smiled weakly a wan, exhausted smile. I smiled back at him stiffly, and slowly crawled down from the baggage cart. I said a carriage, but actually it was a baggage cart. There was no agreement that it shouldn’t be a baggage cart, and after I got married I could do with it what I wanted. Breathing hard, I ran shufflingly to the side of the road, at the same time opening my fly. As the pressure drained from my belly I experienced in a profound feeling of liberation as if I were flying away over some distant range of mountains.

“Chopin! What a thing to do!”

From behind me came Father’s perplexed cry. I had been too careless. Between the bride’s house and the road stood a great thicket of palms, and I was sure that I was completely screened off by them. But my bride had tired of waiting. Apparently she had caught the sound of the carriage from a distance and had come out right to the roadside to welcome me. Out of timidity and constraint she had concealed herself, ironically, right behind the palms that served as a shield for me. Our gazes crossed. It was certain that she saw my penis. Her white garment fluttered between the branches, and I could hear her light, running steps and the sound of a door being slammed as with a wooden mallet. Everything was lost. As I crossed over the wavering rope stretched between hope and despair, my breast aflame, and as I was about to reach the opposite side in just one more step, the ax had fallen. I was profoundly disappointed.

“You’re her guardian, Father. Do something, I beg you.”

Tears of resentment came welling up. As I sobbed compulsively, my urine still kept flowing. It dug a hole in the ground and formed a light yellow pond that gave off steam as it spread out.

“Listen, Chopin, it’s best you give the whole thing up,” reasoned my father sympathetically as he tapped in a staccato on the belly of the box with a hand that he had stuck out through the hole. “You had better stop this useless struggling. A man who’s got a mania for indecent exposure is not suited to marriage … it’s common sense … to young girls today.”

“But I don’t have any mania for indecent exposure!” “It probably seems so to her. You were seen, you know.” “But we’re going to be married anyway, so what difference . .”

“Out of consideration for your father who has gone as far as to take the place of a horse, couldn’t you how out like a man? I beg of you. Fortunately there were no other eyewitnesses. No matter how many hundreds of volumes of Chopin’s biography may be written, I won’t want anyone to know of this scandal. A fate governed by urinating is not at all suitable for a biography. Really not at all. Of course, I don’t say you’re at fault. Responsibility should be placed on the prejudice about indecent exposure and on the municipal administration that neglects the construction of public toilets. Well, let’s get going. You don’t have any attachment to this town. Let’s go to a big city where there are a lot of public johns. If only we could find a public toilet, we could urinate and defecate to our heart’s content.”

The wound to my heart would not be cured by going to a city. But why did my father refer to me as Chopin? Thinking that I was not the only one who was hurt, I decided not to persist. Hold on … I quite agreed with Father when he said that this town was no longer any place to stay. My defenselessness as I stood urinating made me feel keenly uneasy.

We abandoned the carriage. But my father flatly refused to take off the box. As the responsibility for the present situation was half his, he insisted that it was his duty as my father to go on playing the role of the horse for the time being. Thereupon I got astride my father’s box and turned my back on the town I had lived in for so long.

When we arrived in the city we at once took a garret room with a piano and decided to put our time to good use. I had the impression that we had simply turned and entered her house from the back, but that point was not clear. Handwork is best for diverting attention from grief. Father got hold of some art paper and pens somewhere or other. Using the piano as my desk, I devoted myself to drawing her from memory. Needless to say, as I became more practiced, the portraits turned into those of a nude woman.

“Chopin, your talent’s not bad. I admit that, and I think you realize it, but then our financial situation is not so terribly brilliant. So how about it? Try to go easy on the paper and paint smaller pictures.”

Father was right. But whether the paper was large or small was not the point. It was easier to draw smaller pen sketches. I continued working, gradually decreasing the size of the paper. Since I was proportionately more rapid finishing a drawing when I reduced the dimensions, I used

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more and more paper. At length, using a magnifying glass and attaching pieces of paper the size of the flat of my thumb with pins to my board, I accustomed myself to drawing lines so fine that they were indistinguishable to the naked eye. Only during the time I concentrated on this work could I be with her.

At one point I noticed something strange. The garret room, which should have been perfectly quiet, was filled with people. Why had I not noticed until now? From the door to the front of the piano a queue had formed and apparently stretched out into the corridor. The person at the head put money into the box (my father, of course) beside the piano and received with great deference the picture I had just finished painting. I was not all that taken aback. I also sensed that this situation had been going on for quite some time. That is, the food had got much better lately, and the old piano that served as a desk had at one point transformed into a new grand. Father’s box as well had made great progress; from cardboard it had turned into one of genuine red leather with buckles. All unbeknownst to me we were apparently beginning to be widely accepted by the world. No sooner did I make a picture than it was sold, and no matter how many I went on sketching, the line of buyers showed absolutely no signs of slackening.

But at this point such a state of affairs was without importance. Apparently with the money we earned we had bought a real horse, but that had nothing to do with me. Actually, since the breakup of the marriage I had never seen my father once leave the box, and so I was in fact suspicious whether he was my real father or not. My dejection came from the fact that although the girl in my pictures was always the same, the real girl had grown older with the passage of time, and I should never be able to get her back. Every time I thought about it, the pain of our parting was vividly revived, and from my slackened tear ducts tears began to overflow for no reason at all. Instantly, my father stretched his hand from the box, shook out a new silk handkerchief, and applied it to my eyes. Anyway since the picture I was drawing was small, it would smudge at once with a single teardrop and be useless.

Since I have been painting these pictures there is no person who does not know my name now. You won’t see an encyclopedia that doesn’t have an article on Chopin as the producer as well as the inventor of the first stamp in the world. But mail operations have progressed, and along with their gradual nationalization my name has become known as that of a counterfeiter of stamps. This is apparently the most convincing reason why my portrait cannot be exhibited in any post office. Only the red of the red box that my father regularly used at the end of his life is even now, in part, used on postboxes.

Five Minutes to Curtain Time

-A sultry wind is blowing between you and me now. A sensual, burning wind is blowing around us. I do not know precisely when it began. In the force of the wind and in the heat I seem to have lost my sense of time.

But in any case I realize too that the direction of the wind will probably change. Suddenly it will turn into a cool westerly wind. And then this hot wind will be stripped away from my skin like a mirage, and I shall not even be able to

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recollect it. Yes, the hot wind is too violent. Within itself is concealed the premonition of its end.

Why, I wonder? If I search for the explanation it will not be impossible to find. Yet the important thing is whether or not you intend to listen to it. Anyway I realize that I’m putting on a one man show, but I don’t want to bore you. What about it… shall I go on, or . . ?

-Yes, yes, if you make it short… .

-Short? About five minutes … ?

-Five minutes will be just about right, I think.

-Of course, we’re in love, you know. It’s a different love from one that gradually grows, turning into a soaring tower of mist, solidifying, and reaching completion. It’s a paradoxical love, beginning at the end… a love that commences from the realization that it is lost. A poet said it well. It is beautiful to love, but ugly to be loved. In love that begins with lost love, therefore, there are no shadows at all. I do not know whether it is beautiful or not, but in any case there is no grief in the pain of this kind of love.

-Why is that?

-Why is what?

-What’s the purpose of going on talking about what’s over and done?

-It’s not over. Our affair begins with love lost. Actually the fiery wind is blowing harder.

-It’s because it’s summer that it’s hot.

-Apparently you’re incapable of understanding. This is a tale, of course. This story is in the act of taking place. Since you hear it you have the obligation of being one of the cast of characters. Now you’re told someone’s in love with you. What a quandary I’ll be in if you don’t play the part you’re assigned, no matter how uncomfortable or ridiculous.

-Why, I wonder?

-The important thing is not the end. The thing to consider is the reality of your feeling the fiery wind on your skin, The denouement is not the problem. Now the fiery wind itself is important. In this fiery wind words and sensations that have been asleep give out a blue light as if they possess high voltage electricity. This is a rare time when a man can see with his eyes the soul as substance.

-Amazing. If you woo one like that you’ll manage never to be hurt. But your intentions are too obvious.

-I suppose … about half is true, But if you can’t accept the other half at all, we might as well stop.

-You do want to go on don’t you?

-Of course.

You have the right to two minutes more.

-You’re forcing yourself.

-You had better not waste any time.

-All right, I’ll be careful of the time. I don’t expect to get time back. Compared to the you in my heart, the I in yours is insignificant. But when I try to escape from that pain time melts slowly away. If I seriously command the techniques of wooing, then there is hope of coming into possession of a little peace and happiness. So I want to cherish that fiery wind that is so difficult to come by, that begins with love lost. Marvelous forests of words and seas of desire… time stops just by touching your skin lightly with my fingers, and eternity draws near, In the pain of this fiery wind a physical transformation that will not disappear until I die is effected on me.

Whereupon the Play

Came to an End

Without Even the Bell

Ringing for the Curtain

Now I can speak out clearly with confidence. I was not wrong. Perhaps I failed, but I was not wrong. My failure is no cause for regret. Because I have not particularly gone on living for the conclusion.

I hear the sound of the front door shutting.

She has gone. At this point I am neither angry nor bitter. The sound of the door closing was filled with deep sympathy and compassion. There was no enmity or strife between us. I imagine that even she, if it were possible, would have wished to disappear without using the front door. Thus she was hesitant about slamming it. After waiting ten minutes I shall nail up the door. I don’t really expect her back. I shall simply wait until she gets far enough away so that she will not hear the sound of hammering.