Winter of artifice; three novelettes (12 page)

moment one can repeat the process with the same dexterity which enables the garden to fill a hqueur glass exactly to the brim. One tear too much could bring about a catastrophe, but these only came uncontrolled in the case of a deep love.

She was smiling to herself at his naive lies. The truth probably was that he had wiped his own mouth after kissing the singer.

He was playing around now as before, but he hated to admit it to himself, and to her, because of the ideal image he carried in himself, the image of a man who could be so deeply disturbed and altered by the love of a long-lost daughter that his career as a Don Juan had come to an abrupt end.

This romantic gesture which he was unable to make attracted him so much that he had to pretend he was making it, just as she had often pretended to be taking a voyage by writing letters on the stationery of some famous ocean liner.

"I said to Laura: do you really think that if I wanted to deceive you I would do it in such an obvious and stupid way, right here in our own home where you might come in any moment?"

What her father was attempting was to create an ideal world for her in which Don Juan, for the sake of his daughter, renounced all women. But she could not be deceived by his inventions. She was too clairvoyant. That was the pity of it. She could not believe in that which she wanted others to believe in—in a world made as one wanted it, an ideal world. She no longer believed in an ideal world.

And her father, what did he want and need? The illusion, which she was fostering, of a daughter who had never loved any one but him? Or did he find it hard to believe her too? When she left him in the south, did he not doubt her reason for leaving him?

When she went about dreaming of satisfying the world's

hunger for illusion did she know it was the most painful, the most insatiable hunger? Did she not know too that she suffered from doubt, and that although she was able to work miracles for others she had no faith that the fairy tale would ever work out for herself? Even the gifts she received were difficult for her to love, because she knew that they would soon be taken away from her, jusr as her father had been taken away from her when she loved him so passionately, just as every home she had as a child had been disrupted, sold, lost, just as every country she became attached to was soon changed for another country, just as all her childhood had been loss, change, instability.

When she entered his house which was all in brown, brown wood on the walls, brown rugs, brown furniture, she thought of Spenglcr writing about brown as the color of philosophy. His windows were not open on the street, he had no use for the street, and so he had made the windows of stained glass. He lived within the heart of his own home as Orientals live within their citadel. Out of reach of passers-by. The house might have been anywhere—in England, Holland, Germany, America. There was no stamp of nationality upon it, no air from the outside. It was the house of the self, the house of his thoughts. The wall of the self-created without connection with tiie crowd, or country or race.

He was still taking his siesta. She sat near the long range of files, the long, beautiful, neat rows of files, with names which set her dreaming: China, Science, Photography, Ancient Instruments, Egypt, Morocco, Cancer, Radio, Inventions, The Guitar, Spain. It required hours of work every day: newspapers and magazines had to be read and clippings cut out, dated, glued. He wove a veritable spider web about himself. No man was ever more completely installed in the realm of possessions.

He spent hours inventing new ways of filling his cigarette

holder with an anti-nicotine filter. He bought drugs in wholesale quantities. His closets were filled with photographs, with supplies of writing paper and medicines sufficient to last for years. It was as if he feared to find himself suddenly empty handed. His house was a storehouse of supplies which revealed his way of living too far ahead of himself, a fight against the improvised, the unexpected. He had prepared a fortress against need, war and change.

In proportion to her father's capacity for becoming invisible, untouchable, unattainable, in proportion to his capacity' for metamorphosis, he had made the most solid house, the strongest walls, the heaviest furniture, the most heavily loaded bookcases, the most completely filled and catalogued universe. Everything to testify to his presence, his duration, his signature to a contract to remain on earth, visible at moments through his possessions.

In her mind she saw him asleep upstairs, with his elbow under his chin, in the most uncomfortable position which he had trained himself to hold so as not to sleep with his mouth open because that was ugly. She saw him asleep without a pillow, because a pillow under the head caused wrinkles. She pictured the bottle of alcohol which her mother had laughingly said that he bottled himself in at night in order to keep young forever....

He washed his hands continuously. He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself. The fear of microbes played a very important part in his life. The fruit had to be washed with filtered water. His mouth must be disinfected. The silverware must be passed over an alcohol lamp like the doctor's instruments. He never ate the part of the bread which his fingers had touched.

Her father had never imagined that he may have been try-

ing to cleanse and disinfect his soul of his Hes, his callousness, his deceptions. For him the only danger came from the microbes which attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which cats into the soul.

When she saw him washing his hands, while watching the soap foaming she could see him again arriving behind stage at a concert, with his fur-lined coat and white silk scarf, and being immediately surrounded by women. She was seven years old, dressed in a starched dress and white gloves, and sitting in the front row with her mother and brothers. She was trembling because her father had said severely: "And above all, don't make a cheap family show of your enthusiasm. Clap discreetly. Don't have people notice that the pianist's children are clapping away like noisy peasants." This enthusiasm which must be held in check was a great burden for a child's soul. She had never been able to curb a joy or sorrow: to restrain meant to kill, to bury. This cemetery of strangled emotions—was it this her father was trying to wash away? And the day she told him she was pregnant and he said: "Now you're worth less on the market as a woman". .. was this being washed away? No insight into the feelings of others. Passing from hardness to sentimentality. No intermediate human feeling, but extreme poles of indifference and weakness which never made the human equation. Too hot or too cold, blood cold and heart weak, blood hot and heart cold.

While he was washing his hands with that expression she had seen on the faces of people in India thrust into the Ganges, of Egyptians plunged into the Nile, of Negroes dipped into the Mississippi, she saw the fruit being washed and mineral water poured into his glass. Sterilized water to wash away the microbes, but his soul unwashed, unwashable, yearning to be

free of the microbe of conscience. . . . All the water running from the modern tap, running from this modern bathroom, all the rivers of Egypt, of India, of America . . . and he unwashed. . .washing his modern body, washing. . .washing... washing. ... A drop of holy water with which to exorcise the guilt. Hands washed over and over again in the hope of a miracle, and no miracle comes from the taps of modern wash-stands, no holy water flows through leaden pipes, no holy water flows under the bridges of Paris because the man standing at the tap has no faith and no awareness of his soul: he believes he is merely washing the stain of microbes from his

hands

* « * *

She told her father she must leave on a trip. He said: "You are deserting me!"

He talked rapidly, breathlessly, and left very hurriedly. She wanted to stop him and ask him to give her back her soul. She hated him for the way he descended the stairs as if he had been cast out, wounded by jealousy.

She hated him because she could not remain detached, nor remain standing at the top of the stairs watching him depart. She felt herself going down with him, within him, because his pain and flight were so familiar to her. She descended with him, and lost herself, passed into him, became one with him like his shadow. She felt herself empty, and dissolving into his pain. She knew that when he reached the street he would hail a taxi, and feel relief at escaping from the person who had inflicted the wound. There was always the power of escape, and rebellion.

The organ grinder would play and the pain would gnaw deeper, bitterer. He would curse the lead-colored day which intensified the sorrow because they both were born inextricably woven into the moods of natiure. 112

He would curse his pain which distorted faces and events into one long, continuous nightmare.

She wanted to beg her father to say that he had not felt all this, and assure her that she had stayed at the top of the stairs, with separate, distinct feelings. But she was not there. She was walking with him, and sharing his feelings. She was trying to reach out to him and reassure him. But everything about him was fluttering like a bird that had flown into a room by mistake, flying recklessly and blindly in utter terror. The pain he had eluded all his life had caught him between four walls. And he was bruising himself against walls and furniture while she stood there mute and compassionate. His terror so great that he did not sense her pity, and when she moved to open the window to allow him to escape he interpreted the gesture as a menace. To run away from his own terror he flew wildly against the window and crushed his feathers.

Don^t flutter so blindly, my father! • • • •

She grew suddenly tired of seeing her father always in profile, of seeing him always walking on the edge of circles, always elusive. The fluidity, the evasiveness, the deviations made his hfe a shadow picture. He never met life full-face. His eyes never rested on anything, they were always in flight. His face was in flight. His hands were in flight. She never saw them lying still, but always curving like autumn leaves over a fire, curling and uncurling. Thinking of him she could picture him only in motion, either about to leave, or about to arrive; she could see better than anything else, as he was leaving, his back and the way his hair came to a point on his neck.

She wanted to bring her father out in the open. She was tired of his ballet dancing. She would struggle to build up a new relationship.

But he refused to admit he had been lying. He was pale with anger. No one ever doubted him before—so he said. To be doubted blinded him with anger. He was not concerned with the truth or falsity of the situation. He was concerned with the injury and insult she was guilty of, by doubting him.

"You're demolishing everything," he said.

"What I'm demolishing was not solid," she answered. "Let's make a new beginning. We created nothing together except a sand pile into which both of us sink now and then with doubts. I am not a child. I cannot believe your stories."

He grew still more pale and angry. What shone out of his angry eyes was pride in his stories, pride in his ideal self, pride in his delusions. And he was offended. He did not stop to ask himself if she were right. She could not be right. She could see that, for a moment at any rate, he believed implicitly in the stories he had told her. If he had not believed in them so firmly he would have been humiliated to see himself as a poor comedian, a man who could not deceive even his own daughter.

"You shouldn't be offended," she said. "Not to be able to deceive your own daughter is no disgrace. It's precisely because I have told you so many lies myself that I can't be lied to."

"Now," he said, "you are accusing me of being a Don Juan."

"I accuse you of nothing. I am only asking for the truth."

"What truth?" he said, "I am a moral being, far more moral than you."

"That's too bad. I thought we were above questions of good and evil. I am not saying you are bad. That does not concern me. I am saying only that you are false with me. I have too much intuition."

"You have no intuition at aU concerning me." 114

"That might have affected me when I was a child. Today I don't mind what you think of me."

"Go on," he said. "Now tell me, tell me I have no talent, fell me I don't know how to love, tell me all that your mother used to tell me."

"I have never thought any of these things."

But suddenly she stopped. She knew her father was not seeing her any more, but always that judge, that past which made him so uneasy. She felt as if she were not herself any more, but her mother, her mother with a body tired with giving and serving, rebelling at his selfishness and irresponsibility. She felt her mother's anger and despair. For the first time her own image fell to the floor. She saw her mother's image. She saw the child in him who demanded all love and did not know how to love. She saw the child incapable of an act of protection, strength, or self-denial. She saw the child hiding behind her courage, the same child hiding now under Laura's protection. She was her mother telling him again that as a human being he was a failure. And perhaps she had told him too that as a musician he had not given enough to justify his limitations as a human being. All his life he had been playing with people, with love, playing at love, playing at being a pianist, playing at composing. Playing because to no one or nothing could he give his whole soul.

There were two regions, two tracts of land, with a bridge in between, a slight, fragile bridge like the Japanese bridges in the miniature Japanese gardens. Whoever ventured to cross the bridge fell into the abyss. So it was with her mother. She had fallen through and been drowned. Her mother thought he had a soul. She had fallen there in that space where his emotions reached their limit, where the land opened in two, where circles fell open and rings were unsoldered.

Was it her mother talking now? She was saying: "I am 115

only asking you to be honest with yourself. I admit when I lie, but you never admit it. I am not asking for anything except that you be real."