The Symmetry Teacher (2 page)

Vanoski, an obscure author from the 1930s, enjoyed a veritable boom at the end of the sixties. This was due solely to the efforts of the permanent chairman of the foundation, V. Van-Boek. I would be banished in disgrace from the close-knit ranks of my colleagues if I so much as raised an eyebrow about the veracity of the myth he has so carefully constructed. No one would believe me. I would be refuted categorically, and accused of fabrication. And then where would I take my annual vacation?

Incidentally, Urbino Vanoski was not a churchwarden. He was an elevator operator, and died (or perhaps he is not dead at all?) fully aware of his sudden fame and his Grand Prize. Fully aware. For it was I who found him before his death (or not before, whatever the case may be). I was the last one to see him, to pass on the happy news to him. And I was the last one to interview him. It was not even so much an interview as a confession. I do not know why he chose me for this task—perhaps because he disliked me the moment he laid eyes on me. One is well advised not to believe everything that was revealed in the course of this confession. I have grounds to suspect that his mind was no longer absolutely sound. When I asked him how he felt about receiving such a high prize, he answered that he expected a higher one. “Which might that be?” I asked him. “Death,” he said. He became particularly irate when I asked about what he was working on just then. “Thank God I have never been a worker!” he spluttered. I tried to rectify matters by asking what he was writing. “I’m not. I’m painting! Landscapes. Why do you bother to ask me what I’m writing, anyway, if you haven’t read what has already been written?” I took this to mean that there was an unpublished book in the works. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he broke in. “I know, of course, that every decent writer is supposed to leave a respectable posthumous work in his wake.” I couldn’t resist the temptation to swoop down on this morsel. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact there is,” he said reluctantly. “There is an unfinished novel. It’s called
Life Without Us
 … or
Buried Alive
? I don’t remember the name myself! Besides, it’s unlikely I’ll finish it … Life will.”

“Is it about life in the beyond?” I said, pondering.

“About life here and now,” he said, angered. “How can one possibly know which side is beyond, and which is here?”

It is likely that I looked somewhat deflated. He regarded me as though I were a child, and again his eyes blazed.

“There is one novel, perhaps nearly finished, but I can’t find it. I’m not surprised, however, for it is called
Disappearing Objects
. It’s about—well, no. I won’t try to retell it. That would be ‘tasteless impropriety.’

“Have you ever clean forgotten a word? You know the word, but your tongue is incapable of catching hold of it … You say that happens to everyone? But then you remember the word eventually. What if you forget it for all time, and can never recover it? I was once in the possession of such a word—a key word. I recalled it on one occasion, but at that very moment I was caught in a storm and forgot it once and for all. To this very day. It is, of course, significant that it was that particular word, and that I was the one who forgot it. Have you ever observed how sunflowers remember the sun, so they won’t forget it before morning?” The old man’s eyes glittered. “Perhaps you would like me to paint you a landscape? Very well, then. I will. It will be a landscape that no one apart from the ancient Greeks has ever seen.”

*   *   *

“Such sunflower fields must surely have existed in ancient Greece. Dika and I saw them when we were together in Italy. No, not the ancient one,” he said, pointing to his calf. “Right there, in Umbria. There was an enormous sunflower field. We passed it on our way up into the mountains to watch the sunrise and sunset. Everyone knows that sunflowers always turn toward the sun. They drink in every little ray. They’ve even copied it onto their faces, like children. We walked past them, smiling, and they smiled back at us. At sunset, however, they looked more organized, more preoccupied, like a regiment of soldiers waiting for orders. It seemed they wanted to catch the very last drop of sunlight. Then, suddenly, the whole regiment would turn away from the sun, showing us the backs of their cleanly shaven heads. Uncanny. Did they feel insulted by the sun, as though it had done them some injury?

“I was only able to explain it to myself in this way: They were preparing to greet the first ray, and not to see off the last. They use the energy of the setting sun to turn and face the rising sun. They must derive more benefit from the light of the sun as it is coming up. Dika rejected my theory. Unlike me, she knew a thing or two about biology. But she was always more drawn to fauna, whereas I was attracted by flora. I spoke to her of sunflowers, she spoke to me of goats. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘do they always go up a slope in a single direction? It must be awkward, always the same way. They never turn around.’ I explained to her that she was referring to a special breed, a mountain goat. The right legs are shorter than the left ones. ‘But what happens when they come back down?’ Dika fretted about them. ‘They’ll topple over!’ ‘They just go round in a circle their whole lives’ was the solution I offered her. And she believed me. She was so very gullible.”

The old man suddenly grew stern. He continued.

“You see, life is a piece of writing that the living never read to the end. But writing is alive, too! Every line contains the secret of the line that follows. So it is in life—the next moment is always To Be Announced, always in abeyance. We’re not sunflowers, we’re mountain goats. In America she wondered about how the Americans found enough turkey legs to go around on Thanksgiving Day. I told her that the Americans had bred a special four-legged turkey to prevent a shortfall, and this satisfied her.” He blew his nose and mopped his teary eyes.

I have reason to suspect that he was no longer in his right mind. Could I later publish all this nonsense? I could. It would cause a sensation, at the very least. I was young, I dreamed of fame. Fortunately, one seasoned reporter dissuaded me, warning me that I would lose my job if I did. And, really, who was I? My sensational article was sure to founder on the cliff of the myth that had grown up around Vanoski. Sometimes it seems to me that the myth had shattered the poor elevator operator himself. As if his own elevator had snapped off its cables. It could so easily have crushed him. But, then again, who would have wanted to take his life?

Perhaps the other story would be better after all—in the church, selling votive candles, cherishing no thoughts of grandeur? An easy, light-filled death.

*   *   *

“So it’s nothing out of the ordinary when some stranger—fat, bald, sweaty—sits down next to you in the Garden Park. In fact, he doesn’t so much sit down as flop down beside you, with a ‘Phew! Made it, for once.’ He composes himself, airing himself out, his sweat drying in the April sun, and says, still panting a bit, ‘Now then, Urbino. There isn’t a whole lot I know how to do, but I
can
show you a photograph of yourself…’ If something like that ever happens to you, as it did to me, don’t register surprise, and don’t give it a moment’s thought. Simply send the gentleman packing. Sending someone packing is always a sound philosophy. It’s the wisdom of dignity. This is something I came to understand only much later. Though despite understanding it, it’s a kind of prowess I have never been able to muster to this day.”

Here, old Urbino Vanoski heaved a deep sigh, raising his beautiful eyes to mine. Never had I seen a gaze of such directness and such meekness rolled into one. Still, he averted his eyes in consternation the very next moment, lest I think that his philosophy held true for me, as well. Though how could it not? As a correspondent for the
Thursday Evening Post
and
Yesterday’s News
, I was interviewing him. We sat in his tiny lair, which was so clean and empty that it felt spacious. The only real piece of furniture was a dilapidated plywood wardrobe.

It would have been a bona fide prison cell, had it not been for the subservience of the surroundings: he was not the prisoner of the room, but rather the tiny room was the prisoner of his gaze. The room was the frame of its dweller’s face, and his face framed his own eyes. Their relationship to one another was somehow reversed—a face in a gaze, a room in a face. His little shoebox of a room nestled right under the roof, and through the slanted window neither the courtyard nor the roofs beyond were visible, just a scrap of sky with a cloudlet floating in the frame. I sat on a solitary bentwood chair, quite rickety. Vanoski sat on a narrow folding cot. His long, perfectly clean-shaven face was as spare as his room. He had a youthful expression that for some reason accentuated his age, lending depth to it. Ah, how empty, how pristine, how well-considered it all was, so that he could part with every moment of existence, leaving no outstanding debts to the world at large. This room accommodated nothing else but me—but my body, despite its robust plumpness and the impropriety of my health and desire to exist, felt a sensation like heat from a kitchen hearth, or maybe it was the coolness of a crypt. Either I had arrived here from another dimension, or my body was itself another dimension …

Something in my perception had shifted. I kept confusing the external and internal planes of objects and phenomena—quite an unpleasant feeling. I stared with hostility at this maniac, who, nevertheless, had written
The Last Case of Letters
, a book so remarkable that only I could have written it, if I could have … With what enthusiasm I had thrown myself into this unenviable task—to seek out the grave of the mysterious Vanoski. And what do you know, I found it! Not the grave but the man himself. And alive, to boot. Or was he? I found him—only to freeze in the proximity of this minus-man, to marvel at the irony of the foresight that offered me the ability—or, rather, the opportunity—or even the hint of a possibility to create such a book … such power—in the dead loins of a moribund man … with hot, pulsing envy to stumble upon the futility of that envy, and to experience a painful awkwardness besides, because you are pestering someone who has consciously removed himself from life, as if this were your role—to cause him his last, living pain. Any movement of mine would rend his fragile, ashen-gray cocoon, like a child crushing an empty wasp’s nest.

It now seemed to me that from the first glance, after I had stepped inside the elevator with him, the old man saw his executioner in me—his expression was so mournful, within the bounds of propriety and good breeding, yet nearly bursting these bounds. He couldn’t possibly have looked at every passenger in that way. In other words, he was expecting me. At the same time (I was aware of this), he couldn’t have been waiting for
me
, because he no longer expected anything to come from his books, no consequences thereof. He was anticipating someone who could have been me but turned out not to be—this much I understood by how quickly his fear left him when I explained to him why I had come. When it left him, however, I sensed that he felt not simply relief but disappointment, in the same breath. He seemed bored, agitated, and bereft, to a degree that I could only guess at but never quite grasp. I had no notion of that abyss of absence that swallows an author who has evoked things so intimate and familiar to us all.

Vanoski said that he couldn’t spare any time for me until the end of his shift, so I decided to arrange for it to end immediately. Timid and frightened, he tried to stop me. I announced that it would not trouble me in the least. With the self-assurance of a young fool, I assumed that this impoverished, unsung genius of an old man would be pleased with the flurry of courtesy and servility his superiors would show upon learning of my mandate and credentials from
Yesterday’s News
. And, indeed, everything was as I had predicted: the supervisor began rushing around—Certainly, by all means!—and let the old man take the whole day off, finding a replacement for him without further ado. But the pangs of torment in the old man’s face from all this fuss and bother, from the fawning curiosity of others, from the cannibalistic lip-smacking at the gratuitousness of fame—the very anguish of his gaze—was something I didn’t expect. It was the gaze that meets visitors to the zoo from inside the cages. I had destroyed the old man’s balance of energy. The damage was done, and he knew it.

He was poised for a predetermined spectacle: the sensation of a new star—launched from the penury of nonexistence into the august ranks of great artists—overshadowed both the artist and his poverty. The hoopla was the content. Thus, the poor old man could not become himself in any sense of the word but had to remain that Vanoski whose legend had been born without him. The legend had to develop and grow while there was still time, but only according to the simplest rules of a fixed plot. The masterpiece created in poverty presupposes the poverty that creates a masterpiece—and positivism triumphs. I asked him how he had been able to write
The Last Case
, and he answered, “I don’t know.” I asked him what he would do with twenty thousand dollars and he answered, “I don’t remember.”

I might have called it quits then and there, because the old man couldn’t be of any use to me. He had no needs himself, so he wouldn’t appease me for our mutual advantage; and the newspaper wasn’t interested in anything close to the truth. The truth might have intrigued me personally, but truth was far to seek, and time was short. There wasn’t even anything to hold the gaze, not a thing for it to rest upon, in this clean-swept grave. There was only one object that ornamented the room, and a rather strange one at that, if one paid proper attention. It was a large-format photograph behind glass in a thin metal frame. For all intents and purposes, the photograph depicted nothing. It was empty, save for something that resembled a small cloud in one corner. The picture hung above the bed over the old man’s head on the wall opposite the little window—like a second little window I could look out of, at the same time that the old man, sitting across from me, looked through the real one. This photograph could also have served as evidence of the oddity of genius: placing above the bed a view of one’s own window, from which, in its turn, nothing is visible except a scrap of sky. Under the picture frame was a bronze nameplate with a florid engraved inscription. Would some vainglorious photographer really want to take credit for such a paltry work, I found myself wondering. Another object that would not have interested me in the least, had it not been for the behavior of the old man toward it, was something resembling a doorbell, also located above the bed, but slightly lower than the “picture.” The doorbell was set flush into the wall so that only a button protruded from it—round, smooth, white, and fairly large for a doorbell. Apparently, the device had been installed just recently, because the patch of plaster encircling it was still slightly moist. Now and then the old man glanced at the button with something like trepidation, at the same time trying to conceal this from me by awkwardly pretending it was only by chance that his eyes had strayed to that place. I easily satisfied myself with the explanation that the doorbell was actually some sort of intercom, a means of summoning the old man to the elevator that required him to answer back. I interpreted his sidelong glances at it as the sign of a downtrodden wretch with a self-abasing nature.