In the Country of Last Things

by Paul Auster

  On days when the weather was good, Ferdinand would position his chair in front of the open window, lay his pillow on the sill, and sit there for hours on end, crouched forward, his chin in his hands, looking out at the street below. It was impossible to know what he was thinking, since he never uttered a word, but every now and then, say an hour or two after one of these vigils had ended, he would begin babbling in a ferocious voice, spewing out streams of belligerent nonsense. “Grind ’em all up,” he would blurt out. “Grind ’em up and scatter the dust. Pigs, every last one of them! Wobble me down, my fine-feathered foe, you’ll never get me here. Huff and puff, I’m safe where I am.” One non sequitur after another, rushing out of him like some poison that had accumulated in his blood. He would rant and rave like this for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then, abruptly, without any warning at all, he would fall silent again, as though the storm inside him had suddenly been calmed.

  During the months I lived there, Ferdinand’s ships gradually became smaller and smaller. From whiskey bottles and beer bottles, he worked his way down to bottles of cough syrup and test tubes, then down to empty vials of perfume, until at last he was constructing ships of almost microscopic proportions. The labor was inconceivable to me, and yet Ferdinand never seemed to tire of it. And the smaller the ship, the more attached to it he became. Once or twice, waking up in the morning a little earlier than usual, I actually saw Ferdinand sitting by the window and holding a ship in the air, playing with it like a six-year-old, whooshing it around, steering it through an imaginary ocean, and muttering to himself in several voices, as though acting out the parts in a game he had invented. Poor, stupid Ferdinand. “The smaller the better,” he said to me one night, bragging about his accomplishments as an artist. “Some day I’ll make a ship so small that no one can see it. Then you’ll know who you’re dealing with, my smart-ass little tramp. A ship so small that no one can see it! They’ll write a book about me, I’ll be so famous. Then you’ll see what’s what, my vicious little slut. You’ll never know what hit you. Ha, ha! you won’t even have a clue!”

  We lived in one medium-sized room, about fifteen feet by twenty. There was a sink, a small camp stove, a table, two chairs—later a third—and a chamber pot in one corner, separated from the rest of the room by a flimsy sheet. Ferdinand and Isabel slept apart, each in a different corner, and I slept in a third. There were no beds, but with a blanket folded under me to cushion the floor, I was not uncomfortable. Compared to the months I had spent in the open, I was very comfortable.

  My presence made things easier for Isabel, and for a time she seemed to regain some of her strength. She had been doing all the work herself—object hunting in the streets, trips to the Resurrection Agents, buying food at the municipal market, cooking dinner at home, emptying the slops in the morning—and at least now there was someone to share the burden with her. For the first few weeks, we did everything together. Looking back on it now, I would say those were the best days we had: the two of us out in the street before the sun was up, roaming through the quiet dawns, the deserted alleyways, the broad boulevards all around. It was spring then, the latter part of April, I think, and the weather was deceptively good, so good that you felt it would never rain again, that the cold and the wind had vanished forever. We would take only one cart with us, leaving the other one back at the house, and I would push it along slowly, moving at Isabel’s pace, waiting for her to get her bearings, to size up the prospects around us. Everything she had said about herself was true. She had an extraordinary talent for this kind of work, and even in her weakened state she was as good as anyone I had ever watched. At times I felt she was a demon, an out and out witch who found things by magic. I kept asking her to explain how she did it, but she was never able to say much. She would pause, think seriously for several moments, and then make some general comment about sticking to it or not giving up hope—in terms so vague that they were of no help to me at all. Whatever I finally learned from her came from watching, not listening, and I absorbed it by a kind of osmosis, in the same way you learn a new language. We would take off blindly, wandering more or less at random until Isabel had an intuition about where we should look, and then I would go trotting off to the spot, leaving her behind to protect the cart. Considering the shortages in the streets at the time, our hauls were quite good, enough to keep us going in any case, and there was no question that we worked well together. We didn’t do much talking in the streets, however. That was a danger Isabel warned me against many times. Never think about anything, she said. Just melt into the street and pretend your body doesn’t exist. No musings; no sadness or happiness; no anything but the street, all empty inside, concentrating only on the next step you are about to take. Of all the advice she gave me, it was the one thing I ever understood.

  Even with my help, however, and the many fewer miles she had to walk every day, Isabel’s strength began to fail her. Bit by bit, it came harder for her to manage the outdoors, to negotiate the long hours spent on her feet, and one morning, inevitably, she just couldn’t get up anymore, the pains in her legs were so bad, and I went out alone. And from that day on, I did all the work myself.

  These are the facts, and one by one I am telling them to you. I took over the day-to-day affairs of the household. I was the one in charge, the one who did everything. I’m sure that will make you laugh. You remember how it used to be for me at home: the cook, the maid, the clean laundry folded and put in my bureau drawers every Friday. I never had to lift a finger. The whole world was given to me, and I never even questioned it: piano lessons, art lessons, summers by the lake in the country, trips abroad with my friends. Now I had become a drudge, the sole support of two people I would never even have met in my old life. Isabel, with her lunatic purity and goodness; Ferdinand, adrift in his coarse, demented angers. It was all so strange, so improbable. But the fact was that Isabel had saved my life just as surely as I had saved hers, and it never occurred to me not to do what I could. From being a little waif they dragged in off the street, I became the exact measure that stood between them and total ruin. Without me, they would not have lasted ten days. I don’t mean to boast about what I did, but for the first time in my life there were people who depended on me, and I did not let them down.

  In the beginning, Isabel kept insisting that she was all right, that nothing was wrong with her that a few days’ rest couldn’t cure. “I’ll be back on my feet before you know it,” she would say to me as I left in the morning. “It’s just a temporary problem.” But that illusion was soon toppled. Weeks went by, and her condition did not change. By mid-spring it became clear to both of us that she wasn’t going to get any better. The worst blow came when I had to sell her shopping cart and scavenger’s license to a black market dealer in the fourth census zone. That was the ultimate acknowledgment of her illness, but there was nothing else we could do. The cart was just sitting in the house day after day, of no use to anyone, and we badly needed the money at the time. True to form, it was Isabel herself who finally suggested that I go ahead and do it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t hard for her.

  After that, our relationship changed somewhat. We were no longer equal partners, and because she felt so guilty about saddling me with extra work, she became extremely protective of me, almost hysterical on the subject of my welfare. Not long after I began doing the scavenging by myself, she launched a campaign to change my appearance. I was too pretty for daily contact with the streets, she said, and something had to be done about it. “I just can’t bear to see you go off like that every morning,” she explained. “Terrible things are happening to young girls all the time, such terrible things I can’t even talk about them. Oh, Anna, my dear little child, if I lost you now, I’d never forgive myself, I’d die on the spot. There’s no place for vanity anymore, my angel—you have to give all that up.” Isabel spoke with such conviction that she started to cry, and I understood that it would be better to go along with her than put up an argument. To tell the truth, I was ve
ry upset. But I had already seen some of those things she couldn’t talk about, and there wasn’t much I could say to contradict her. The first thing to go was my hair—and that was an awful business. It was all I could do not to burst into tears, and with Isabel snipping away at me, telling me to be brave, and yet all the while trembling herself, on the verge of blubbering some dark maternal sadness, it only made things worse. Ferdinand was there, too, of course, sitting in his corner, arms folded across his chest, watching the scene with cruel detachment. He laughed as my hair fell to the ground, and as it continued to fall he said that I was beginning to look like a dyke, and wasn’t it funny that Isabel should be doing this to me, now that her cunt was all dried up like a piece of wood. “Don’t listen to him, my angel,” Isabel kept saying into my ear, “don’t pay any attention to what that ogre says.” But it was hard not to listen to him, hard not to be affected by that malicious laugh of his. When Isabel was finally done, she handed me a small mirror and told me to take a look. The first few moments were frightening. I looked so ugly that I didn’t recognize myself anymore. It was as though I had been turned into someone else. What’s happened to me? I thought. Where am I? Then, at just that moment, Ferdinand broke out laughing again, a real bellyful of spite, and that was too much for me. I flung the mirror across the room and nearly hit him in the face with it. It flew past his shoulder, smacked against the wall, and clattered to the floor in fragments. For a moment or two Ferdinand just gaped, not quite believing I had done it, and then he turned to Isabel, all shaking with anger, totally beside himself, and said, “Did you see that? She tried to kill me! The fucking bitch tried to kill me!” But Isabel was not about to sympathize with him, and a few minutes later he finally shut up. From then on, he never said another word about it, did not mention the subject of my hair again.

  Eventually, I learned to live with it. It was the idea of the thing that bothered me, but when you got right down to it, I don’t think I looked too bad. Isabel wasn’t intending to make me look like a boy, after all—no disguises, no false moustaches—but only to make the feminine things about me less apparent, my protruberances, as she called them. I was never much of a tomboy anyway, and pretending to be one now wouldn’t have worked. You remember my lipsticks and outrageous earrings, my tight skirts and skimpy hems. I always loved to dress up and play the vamp, even when we were kids. What Isabel wanted was for me to call as little attention to myself as possible, to make sure that heads did not turn when I walked by. So, after my hair was gone, she gave me a cap, a loose-fitting jacket, woolen trousers, and a pair of sensible shoes—which she had bought only recently for herself. The shoes were a size too big, but an extra pair of socks seemed to eliminate the problem of blisters. With my body now enveloped in this outfit, my breasts and hips were fairly well hidden, which left precious little for anyone to lust after. It would have taken a strong imagination to see what was really there, and if anything is in short supply in the city, it’s imagination.

  That was how I lived. Up early in the morning and out, the long days in the streets, and then home again at night. I was too busy to think about much of anything, too exhausted to step back from myself and look ahead, and each night after supper I only wanted to collapse in my corner and go to sleep. Unfortunately, the incident with the mirror had caused a change in Ferdinand, and a tension grew up between us that became nearly intolerable. Coupled with the fact that he now had to spend his days at home with Isabel—which deprived him of his freedom and solitude—I became the focus of his attention whenever I was around. I am not just talking about his grumbling, nor the constant little digs he would make about how much money I earned or the food I brought home for our meals. No, all that was to be expected from him. The problem was more pernicious than that, more devastating in the fury that lay behind it. I had suddenly become Ferdinand’s only relief, his only avenue of escape from Isabel, and because he despised me, because my very presence was a torment to him, he went out of his way to make things as difficult for me as possible. He literally sabotaged my life, pestering me at every opportunity, assailing me with a thousand tiny attacks I had no way of warding off. Early on, I had a sense of where it was all going to lead, but nothing had ever prepared me for this kind of thing, and I didn’t know how to defend myself.

  You know all about me. You know what my body needs and does not, what squalls and hungers lurk inside it. Those things do not disappear, even in a place like this. Granted, there are fewer opportunities to indulge your thoughts here, and when you walk through the streets you must gird yourself to the quick, purging your mind of all erotic digressions—but still, there are moments when you are alone, in bed at night for example, with the world all dark around you, and it becomes hard not to imagine yourself in various situations. I won’t deny how lonely I felt in my corner. Things like that can drive you crazy sometimes. There is an ache inside you, a horrendous, clamoring ache, and unless you do something about it, there will never be an end to it. God knows that I tried to control myself, but there were times when I couldn’t stand it anymore, times when I thought my heart would explode. I would shut my eyes and tell myself to go to sleep, but my brain would be in such turmoil, heaving up images of the day I had just spent, taunting me with a pandemonium of streets and bodies, and with Ferdinand’s insults still fresh in my mind to add to the chaos, sleep simply would not come. The only thing that seemed to have any effect was to masturbate. Forgive me for being so blunt, but I don’t see any point in mincing words. It’s a common enough solution for all of us, and under the circumstances, I didn’t have much choice. Almost without being aware of it, I would begin to touch my body, pretending that my hands belonged to someone else—rubbing my palms lightly over my stomach, stroking the insides of my thighs, sometimes even grabbing hold of my buttocks and working away at the flesh with my fingers, as if there were two of me and we were in each other’s arms. I understood that this was only a sad little game, but my body would nevertheless respond to these tricks, and eventually I would feel an ooze of wetness gathering below. The middle finger of my right hand would do the rest, and once it was over, a languor would crawl into my bones, weighing down my eyelids until I finally sank into sleep.

  All well and good, perhaps. The problem was that in such cramped quarters it was dangerous to make even the slightest sound, and on certain nights I must have slipped, must have allowed a sigh or whimper to escape from me at the crucial moment. I say this because I soon learned that Ferdinand had been listening to me, and with a sordid mind like his, it did not take long for him to figure out what I was up to. Little by little, his insults became more sexual in tone—a barrage of insinuations and ugly cracks. One minute he would call me a dirty-minded little whore, the next minute he would say that no man would ever want to touch a frigid beast like me—each statement contradicting the others, coming at me from all sides, never letting up. It was a squalid story from top to bottom, and I knew it would end badly for all of us. A seed had been lodged in Ferdinand’s brain, and there was no way to get it out. He was mustering his courage, gearing up to take action, and each day I could see him becoming bolder, more sure of himself, more committed to his plan. I had had that bad experience with the Tollist on Muldoon Boulevard, but that was out in the open, and I had been able to run away from him. This was a different story. The apartment was too small, and if anything happened there, I would be trapped. Short of never going to sleep again, I had no idea what to do.

  It was summer, which month I forget. I remember the heat, the long days boiling in the blood, the airless nights. The sun would go down, but the torrid air still hung over you, thick with its unbreathable smells. It was on one of those nights that Ferdinand finally made his move—inching across the room on all fours, coming toward my bed with dim-witted stealth. For reasons I still do not understand, all my panic subsided the moment he touched me. I had been lying there in the darkness, pretending to be asleep, not knowing whether I should try to fight him off or just scream as loudly as
I could. Now, it suddenly became clear to me that I should do neither one of those things. Ferdinand placed his hand on my breast and let out a snickering little laugh, one of those smug, abject noises that can only come from people who are in fact already dead, and at that moment I knew precisely what I was going to do. There was a depth of certainty to this knowledge that I had never felt before. I did not struggle, I did not cry out, I did not react with any part of myself that I could recognize as my own. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. I mean nothing at all. There was this certainty inside me, and it destroyed everything else. The moment Ferdinand touched me, I knew that I was going to kill him, and the certainty was so great, so overpowering, that I almost wanted to stop and tell him about it, just so he would be able to understand what I thought of him and why he deserved to be dead.

  He slid his body closer to mine, stretching out along the edge of the pallet, and began to nuzzle his rough face against my neck, muttering to me about how he had been right all along, and yes, he was going to fuck me, and yes, I was going to love every second of it. His breath smelled of the beef jerky and turnips we had eaten for dinner, and we were both sweating bullets, our bodies totally covered with sweat. The air was suffocating in that room, utterly without movement, and each time he touched me I could feel the salt water slide across my skin. I did nothing to stop him, just lay there limp and passionless without saying a word. After a while, he began to forget himself, I could feel it, could feel him foraging around my body, and then, when he started to climb on top of me, I put my fingers around his neck. I did it lightly at first, pretending to be playing with him, as though I had finally succumbed to his charms, his irresistible charms, and because of that he suspected nothing. Then I began to squeeze, and a sharp little gagging sound came out of his throat. In that first instant after I began to apply the pressure, I felt an immense happiness, a surging, uncontrollable sense of rapture. It was as though I had crossed some inner threshold, and all at once the world became different, a place of unimaginable simplicity. I shut my eyes, and then it began to feel as if I were flying through empty space, moving through an enormous night of blackness and stars. As long as I held on to Ferdinand’s throat, I was free. I was beyond the pull of the earth, beyond the night, beyond any thought of myself.