The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (59 page)

“Tell me about your childhood … ” she said. She listened attentively, avid and already distant, somewhere in the green of the great trees. A fraction, enough to start you awake. And she’s back here. A burned look, her fingers touch the torrid center.

After a month Gora returned to the psychiatrist. A new office, four secretaries, elevators, bathrooms. The gray-haired Dr. Kelly inspires trust. Another pill. Small, preliminary doses. The normal dose has a positive effect. He increased the dosage by another quarter-pill. The patient seemed to have found his pill and his dosage. He slept well, didn’t feel tired. He took up his reading again, and his Obituary.

He accepted the status of a cardiac patient: a cocktail of six pills in the morning, two for dessert in the evening.

Thirsty for life, he considered its offers. Books and trees, faces and foods, the river, Lu’s gloves, the chair, the computer, the bathtub,
the wintry forest, the album
A Day in the Life of America,
the cat on the verandah, the telephone, the blue towel, the ridiculous shoes. He’d lost the energy for revolt, the absurd had become comic. The path had been short, short, silly blind groping through the property called biography. He was ready for the retrospective.

He pushed the yellow folder with his hand and pulled the gloves toward himself. He set them down in front of himself, separate, the left glove to the left, the right glove to the right. He placed his palms on each. His hands were shorter than Lu’s, but wider. Even if he could manage to slip them inside, he still wouldn’t have been able to feel the navel of her long, delicate fingers.

He pressed the palms of each of the two gloves, his left hand on the left glove, his right hand on the right glove. The skin vibrated. Magnetic field, copulation. He looked out at the forest through the window. His hands on the two instruments of reanimation.

Dr. Hostal had given him the chance to feel that magic touch again.

The lottery offered a deferment. Brought back from the other world and abandoned on the border between that place and life, Gora was learning calm, serenity, and an ashen indifference.

There were new games: the morning exercises, the evening walk. Controlling the blood pressure, medication, visits to Dr. Morse, who had replaced Bar-El. Elvira visited him twice a week to clean his apartment and to keep him away from restaurants, to which he went anyway on the weekends.

After the second angioplasty, a telephonic interlocutor reappeared.

“And how are you feeling? Any better?”

I insisted that he tell me about the whole intervention in great detail, about why he’d been hospitalized an additional night, about the erratic variations in his blood pressure.

He seemed overwhelmed by the shock he’d endured. I had to try to divert his attention away from his illness.

“Do you remember the revolution at the college?”

“Yes, of course,” Gora mumbled.

“I had just arrived then. To you it had seemed like an apt initiation. You explained to me the mechanics of these litigious epidemics. You said they were cyclical, that people need the illusion of morality. Speeches from the balconies, blocked access to the administration, picketing, impassioned slogans. For someone who had just escaped the paradise of Communism, it was a grotesque parody.”

I found out that Gora no longer saw anyone, outside of Elvira. He’d become very timid, he said; he wasn’t sure of his own body. I was trying something, to distract him; I was happy that he’d agreed to play my game.

“I kept all the clippings from the papers. The scandal of the rape that wasn’t a rape. The revolution. The trial. The settlement with the student.”

The salad days in the desert of liberty. We’d each discovered that we were looking for our own captive oases. Religion. Rhetoric. Charity. Ser vility to bosses and bank accounts. Frustration. You can understand the extraordinary experiment only gradually.

“And what about that tall, brown-haired student Tim? The one who’d come to talk to you on Tereza’s behalf. Tim and Tereza. And then, the buck … ”

“The buck? What buck?”

“Tim had hunted a buck. He had a rifle, and a license for it. It was hunting season. So it was all legal. The scandal came after the flaying. He’d brought the shot buck back to the college, and he’d flayed it in his room, together with other students. When he was called to the president’s office, Tim excused himself, but he also called for clear and severe measures against the person who might have, at some point, raped Tereza.”

“Tim is now the head of some organization that advocates the rights of immigrants in Santa Fe; Tereza is married with three children, and the assailant is a lawyer on Wall Street. You asked me to explain to you every aspect of the incident, so that you could understand your new home.”

“Yes, yes, and now I have a question for you. Could Palade have been an informant?”

I imagined that Gora raised his eyebrows to the sky.

“You should be able to find out if he was. Or if he could have been, since we’re hypothesizing. Many who could never have been actually were. So does that mean that they could have been, if they actually were? Even if no one, not even they, suspected? We can’t ignore the when, the why, and the how they became what they couldn’t have been.”

“Forgive me, maybe this isn’t the best time for this kind of conversation.”

“Oh, sure it is.”

“I think about it often, that’s all. It’s my fault that I haven’t let go of the old toxins. We should be talking about America.”

“Yes, it would be more interesting. Our stories seem interesting only because they are bizarre.”

“Okay. I promise I’ll call with happier occasions for conversation.”

“That would make me happy. No one calls me.” It wasn’t at all clear whether it would actually make him happy or not, but I no longer felt guilty for what I’d insinuated.

The old hag jerks him around, tightening her grip around his neck. Dressed in a thin, transparent blouse made of white satin. She strangles him scrupulously, with grave attention, with glee. A diaphanous, satin death. But just when you think you’ve escaped your earthly sins, she lets go, slowly, delicately, with infinite care. You shake out of your nightmare, you wake up in front of the Folder.

On the cover, the date of birth. In a different time, that was the age of the wise; now it’s the age of Viagra. The old von Aschenbach, who was embarrassed even by the makeup with which his barber rejuvenated him, could never have imagined what wonders would have been waiting for him in the next century. A time of infinite
possibility and infinite substitutions. Substitutions of kidneys and livers, of new noses and lips and new eyebrows, new eye color and gender, all at the client’s behest. Pills for your head and your feet, for narcolepsy and insomnia, for insanity, colds, and for cancer, for impotence and for envy, baldness and rheumatism, heart transplants and hair transplants and retina transplants, hearing and seeing and walking aids. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed and can be replaced. The dead have finally found their proper utility; last will and testaments foresee the transference not just of assets but also of organs, the spleen, the liver, the kidneys, and the soul, all ready to serve a new body and to become new themselves.

How did all this time go by?

The exile had accepted this new place and time; he’d assimilated to the fax and the Internet and the cellular telephone, the bank account and flying saucers, religious and erotic sects, education through the Bible and pornography; however, he’d remained in a past named Lu.

Why would Mynheer Pieter Peeperkorn have fascinated him so, when he was the total opposite of everything Peeperkorn was or could ever have been; why would he have reanimated Peter Ga
par? And why had he never forgotten that conversation with the pudgy Izy, thousands of years ago, in the dark and dank basement, when he divulged his admiration for Jesus’ chosen people, even though he himself would always remain religiously indifferent? What was he missing and what would explain his ever-unresolved need to become someone else? Someone less cautious, someone less remarkable. More rebellious, and not just in his thoughts, freer, and not just in his dreams, more versatile and hypocritical, more mysterious, more culpable and haunted by hostility. Someone more worthy of hate and compassion and the admiration of the masked people who surrounded him.

On top of the new earthy-gray folder on which destiny had written in large, red letters, gora, there was a blue sheet of paper with Dr. Hostal’s signature.

It seems that the coronary artery disease and the epigastric discomfort were unrelated. The angioplasty results show that there was a combination of a focalized and a diffused illness, which may have triggered a metabolic syndrome from the past, a state of hypercoagu-lation. Considering the risk factors of cardiovascular disease, the patient’s arterial hypertension is borderline; borderline hypercholesteremia (and low HDL) is at a normal level; and borderline blood sugar.

Borderline!
The Citizen of the Borderland Archipelago! The character might be read in the code of Borderland. On the line, on the borderline, nowhere!
Borderline!

The Citizen of the Borderline had pulled the curtains.
Go to the zoo!
He was talking to himself. In the zoo of the street, he would meet others like himself. Instead, he stays at home, like a vehicle forgotten in the garage.

The coffee, the cereal bowl, the pills. On the TV screen, the mischief of his species, chess players competing with destiny.

Exercises, shower. The day begins. He’d won another day, nothing could compare with that performance, his fellow citizens in the New World would have him believe. They were right. A new day. The farce of being, the wonder of existence.

He was watching the screen, the table where the ponderous Peter was playing chess, with the glass of Coca-Cola nearby. It was late.

It was late, but I’d defied the hour.

“Did you read the piece about the angioplasty?”

“Where would I have read it?”

“Today, in the
New York Times.
Front page news.”

“I don’t get the papers anymore. I would only read old newspapers, if I could, starting with the year of my birth. From seven decades ago.”

“That could be amusing. But you would miss all the new medical discoveries.”

“Such as?”

“Such as these, what do they call them … stents.”

“I’ve heard that word before.”

“They came up with a new model a few years ago, coated with some kind of substance that impedes further buildup in the arteries. But now they are saying the old ones were better.”

“They gave me the new ones, the ones impregnated by the saliva of Mephistopheles. I had insisted on whatever was newest, most efficient. Dr. Hostal agreed. He’s a trustworthy man.”

“Eh, don’t get melodramatic. In two months they’ll discover that the new ones are actually better.”

“The most important thing, however, is that, after you rot, those little amulets will still survive. The archeologists will be able to identify you.”

“How many did they give you?”

“Seven. A magic number.”

I was lucky. Gora was in a mood to talk.

“You know, Palade was your student. They refused his passport but gave it to him after a year, on the second try. In response to pressure from the Americans. They gave it to him begrudgingly. That seems strange.”

“What’s so strange about it? I know what you’re insinuating.”

“I’m not insinuating anything; I’m asking. I’m trying to cure myself of the illness with which we all left that place: suspicion.”

“That would have made me an informant, too, no? They gave me a passport, as well.”

“You were a different case. Ludmila’s relations could have intervened. Maybe they were the ones who made the deal.”

“And you … you came here with a passport, too.”

“They wanted to get rid of me. The secret police files have proof of that. I had uncovered informants among neighbors and friends and relations. I was naive; now I’m suspicious.”

“I remember when you first came. Palade had told me you’d arrived and that he gave you my phone number. But you didn’t call
for about six months. When I asked how you were, you said you were jet-lagged. I appreciated your humor, but you seemed disoriented and lost.”

“I was. I’d lost my ability to speak. When I was leaving, at the airport.”

“I remember, you were saying that when they stamped your passport with the exit visa, they also cut out your tongue. We all went through that.”

“Not all of us. Palade came here as a young man, and Professor Gora already knew the language.”

“I sent you to my friend Koch. Izy Koch.”

“You were right about him; he wouldn’t take my money. But I can see this conversation isn’t very interesting; you’re getting bored.”

“It’s interesting, but yes, it’s boring me. I’m happy for this country’s nonsense and goodwill. I suspect that you’re also satisfied with it.”

“I am. I thought I might amuse you with my question about Palade. I don’t know if I ever told you that we were high school classmates. We went on to different things.”