Winning the Game and Other Stories (3 page)

Agnes stops in front of the bookcases that cover the walls of the living room and asks, without turning toward me, “Do you own this apartment?”

“It's rented.”

“What are the books mentioned in your note?”

“You'll find out in due time. It's a schedule without preset period of duration. You'll read a poem daily. The poets will never be repeated. You'll have the entire day to read the poem. At night you'll come here, we'll have dinner, and you'll talk to me about the chosen poem. Or about anything you wish, if you don't feel like talking about the poem. I have the best cook in the city. Would you like something to drink?”

Agnes, who has kept her back to me till then, suddenly turns, exclaiming, “I don't know what I'm doing here. I must be mad. Am I going to become a student? Is that it?”

“You're a pretty woman, but you feel an emptiness inside, don't you?”

“Ciao.”

Over twenty operations to correct a hump that never went away. Constant awareness of furtive expressions of contempt, blatant mockery—
Hey, little man, can I rub my hand on your hump for luck?
—daily and immutable reflections of repugnant nakedness in the mirror in which I contemplate myself, not to mention what I read in the gaze of women, before I learned to wait for the right moment to read women's gazes—if all of that didn't break me, what effect can an oblique ciao followed by a disdainful withdrawal have? None.

To select what Agnes should read, I decide, for the sake of convenience, to use the works I have in my bookcase. I think about beginning with a classical licentious poet, but it's too early to introduce poems that say
questo è pure un bel cazzo lungo e grosso
or
fottimi e fà de me ciò che tu vuoi, o in potta o in cul, ch'io me ne curo poco;
she might get scared. This obscene poet is to be used in the phase when the woman has already been conquered. I forgot to say that I choose poets who are already dead, despite the existence of living poets much better than certain renowned poets who've kicked the bucket, but my decision is dictated by convenience; the best of the dead had the opportunity to find their way to my shelves, and I can't say the same about the living ones.

I send Agnes a poem that says that the art of losing is not hard to learn. I know it will provoke a reaction. Lazy people are constantly losing things, not to mention missing flights.

It's raining on the first day of the program. As soon as she enters, Agnes asks, “How did you know that for me losing things is always a disaster, despite all the rationalizations I make?”

“The same way I knew that you have one foot larger than the other. Shall we talk more about the poem? We can have dinner afterward.”

“Tomorrow. Another thing, the foot of Botticelli's Venus is very ugly. Mine's prettier. Ciao.”

A hunchback knows how he sleeps. He goes to sleep on his side, but he wakes up in the middle of the night lying face up, with pains in the back. Sleeping face down demands that one leg be bent and the opposite arm stuck under the pillow. We hunchbacks wake up several times during the night, looking for a comfortable position, or at least a less uncomfortable one, tormented by nocturnal thoughts that haunt our sleep. A hunchback never forgets, he is always thinking about his misfortune. People are what they are because they once made a choice; if they had chosen otherwise, their fate would be different, but a born hunchback makes no choice; he didn't intervene in his lot, didn't roll the dice. This intermittent affirmation robs him of sleep, forces him to get out of bed. Besides which, we hunchbacks like being on our feet.

When Agnes arrives the next day, the cook is already preparing dinner. A guy with his vertebrae in place can take the woman he wants to seduce to get a hot dog on the street. I can't allow myself that luxury.

“The poet—Is it poet or poetess?”

“The dictionary says poetess. But you can call all of them poet, man or woman.”

“The poet says that when talking to the man she loved, she realized that he was hiding a tremor, the tremor of his mortal suffering. I sensed that when I spoke with you.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“Do you find it … bothersome to be a hunchback?”

“I've gotten used to it. Besides that, I've seen without anguish all the movie hunchbacks of Notre Dame, and I'm familiar with all the Richard IIIs—did you know that the real Richard III wasn't a hunchback, as can be deduced from his armor, which has been preserved to the present day? I also know by heart Dylan Thomas's poem about a hunchback in the park.”

Agnes imitates me.

“Interesting.”

I ask her to read me the new poem she's chosen. She leafs through the pages, reading poorly, her face buried in the book. You can't read decently with your face stuck in the book. And reading a poem is even more difficult; poets themselves don't know how to do it.

“Talk about the poem.”

“The woman laments the death of the man she loved … Her fate was to celebrate that man, his strength, the brilliance of his imagination, but the woman says she's lost everything, forgotten everything.”

“Did you feel anything?”

“A certain sadness. The poem bothered me a lot.”

“Talk some more,” I request.

Agnes speaks, I listen; she speaks, I listen. I intervene only to provoke her to speak more. As I know how to listen, it's very easy. Making them speak and listening to them is my tactic.

“I think that in Russian it must be even more tormenting,” she says.

“That's the problem of poetic translation,” I reply.

“The reader either knows all the languages in the world,” says Agnes, “or has to get used to it: poems being less sad or less happy or less pretty or less meaningful, or less et cetera when translated. Always less.”

“An American poet said that poetry is what's lost in translation.”

“Who was it?”

“You're going to have to discover that. How about our having dinner?”

I'm not going to describe the delicacies of the dinner, the wines of noble provenance that we drank, the specifications of the crystal glasses we used, but I can say that the table of the greatest gourmet in the city is no better than my own. My father was skilled in matters of business, and when he died—my mother died first, I think she couldn't bear my misfortune,
her
misfortune—he left me in a comfortable situation. I'm not rich, but I can move, when necessary, from one beautiful residence to another even better, and I have a good cook and free time to accomplish my plans.

I call a cab. I accompany her to her home, despite her protests that she could go by herself. I return very tired.

I get out of bed quite early, in doubt as to the next poet to recommend. Choosing the books makes me feel even more shameless, like one of those know-it-all scholars who make their living by creating canons, or rather, catalogs of important authors. Actually, as I've already said, I only want to use the authors I have on my shelves, and even the bookcases of a hunchback don't necessarily have the best authors.

I ask Agnes to read the poem in which the author describes allegorically an act of cunnilingus.

“Please read this poem to me.”

She reads. Her French is perfect.

“Talk about the poem.”

“The poet, after saying that his loved one is nude like a Moorish slave, contemplates the thighs, the woman's hips, her breasts, and her belly,
ces grappes de ma vigne,
observes, enthralled, the narrow waist that accentuates the feminine pelvis, but what leaves him in ecstasy and sighing is the haughty red of the woman's face.”

“Was that what you understood? The poet sees her pelvis and becomes ecstatic over the rouge on her face? Remember, he's staring at the lower part of the woman's trunk; the haughty red part that catches his attention can only be the vagina. Except he's not lecherous enough to dispense with metaphors.”

“It could be. What's on today's menu?”

“You're the one who said she wanted to
understand.”

“What's on today's menu?”

“Grenouille.”

“Love it.”

Several days have passed since our first encounter. I maintain control; patience is one of the greatest virtues, and that's true also for those who aren't hunchbacks. Today, for example, when Agnes, upon sitting down in front of me, shows her knees, I feel like kissing them, but I don't even look at them for long.

Agnes picks up the book.

“This here: ‘the lover becomes transformed into the thing loved, by virtue of so much imagining … what more does the body desire to achieve?' What the devil does the poet mean by that?”

“Agnes, you read the poem unwillingly. It was you who chose this poem. There were other easier ones.”

“Can we say it's a solipsistic sonnet?”

“Just for the pleasure of alliteration?”

“That too. Or should we call it an ascetic sonnet? Or a Neo-Platonic sonnet? See, I'm starting to sound like my own professor.”

“Can one have a philosophy without knowing the philosopher who conceived it?” I ask.

Her face remains immobile; she has the habit of being like that, without moving her eyes, much less her lips—those gestures of someone wanting to demonstrate that they're meditating. It's as if she has gone deaf. But she quickly resumes speaking, with enthusiasm. And I listen. Knowing how to listen is an art, and enjoying listening is part of it. Anyone who feigns liking to listen is soon unmasked.

I don't touch her, either that day or in the days that follow.

There are women with dull white skin, others with an almost verdigris whiteness, others faded like plaster or bread-crumb flour, but Agnes's white skin has a splendid radiance that makes me want to bite it, sink my teeth into her arms, her legs, her face; she has a face meant to be bitten, but I restrain myself.

I give her another erotic poem to read. I confess that I'm taking a calculated risk. How will she react when she reads
the tongue licks the red petals of the pluriopen rose, the tongue tills a certain hidden bud, and weaves swift variations of subtle rhythms, and licks, languorously, lingeringly, the liquory hirsute grotto?
Agnes had changed the subject when I tried to make an erotic exegesis (isn't that what she wants—to
understand?)
of the cunnilingus poem, read by her two days earlier. How would she act now, after reading another poem on the same topic and even more daring?

“I thought that poetry didn't show such things, that fellatio and cunnilingus were only clichés used in films,” Agnes says, after reading the poem. “I don't know if I liked it. ‘Licks, languorously, lingeringly' is an amusing alliteration. But ‘liquory hirsute grotto' is horrible. Is the next one going to be like that?”

I don't fathom the true implications of what she's telling me. Displeasure, disappointment? Mere curiosity? An opening? Better not to go into it too deeply.

We have been at the game for several days.

We read a poem about a guy who asks if he dares to eat a peach.

“Eating peaches?”

I play her game: “Let's say it's about old age.”

“And old men don't have the courage to eat peaches?”

“I think it's because old people wear dentures.”

“I thought that poems always spoke of beautiful or transcendental things.”

“Poetry creates transcendence.”

“I hate it when you show off.”

“I'm not showing off. Prostheses are not merely the thing they represent. But some are more meaningful than others. Penis implants more than false teeth.”

“Mechanical legs more than false fingernails?”

“Pacemakers more than hearing aids.”

“Silicone breasts more than wigs?”

“Right. But always transcending the thing and the subject, something outside it.”

“Is that implant much used? The one—”

“For the penis? Put yourself in the place of a man who has that implant. See the poetic simplicity of the metaphysical gesture of rebellion against the poison of time, against loneliness, anhedonia, sadness.”

“May I ask an indiscreet question?”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you use, or rather, would you use that prosthesis?”

“I'm a true hunchback. A hunchback doesn't need it.”

I could have told her that a hunchback from birth, like me, either sublimates his desires forever—in which case, why the implant?—or else, as an adult, like me who until twenty-eight never had a sexual relationship, comes to be dominated by a paroxysmic lubricity that makes his dick get hard at the slightest of stimuli. A hunchback either becomes impotent or burns in a fire of lasciviousness that never cools for a single instant, like the heat of hell. But she'll find that out for herself in due time.

“There are no dentures in the poem,” says Agnes, “or any kind of implant.”

“Poets never show everything clearly. But the dentures are there, for one who knows what to look for.”

“Old age is there, and the fear of death.”

“And what is old age in a man?” I ask.

“I agree: it's false teeth, baldness, the certainty that the sirens no longer sing to him. Yes, and also the fear of acting. ‘Do I dare?' the poet asks the whole time. He hates the horrendous symptoms of old age but doesn't dare commit suicide. ‘Do I dare to eat a peach?' means will I have the courage to put an end to this shit that is my life? The peach is a metaphor for death. But I accept that there's also a denture involved. Am I learning to understand poetry?”

“Yes. The poem can be understood any way you like, which in itself is a step forward, and other people may, or may not, understand it in the same fashion as you. But that's not important in the least. What matters is that the reader must feel the poem, and what one feels upon reading the poem is exclusive, it's unlike the feeling of any other reader. What needs to be understood is the short story, the novel, those lesser literary genres, full of obvious symbolism.”