—But you’re alone all week long, I answered.
—Yes, but even on weekends, when you come, I still want a few hours to myself.
—I spend half of every weekend at your house writing, I answered. You have least fifteen hours to yourself.
—I get jealous when you write. You don’t belong to me anymore. I want you to read. And I’ll choose the book. A book that won’t excite you, that won’t make me jealous. How about The Three Musketeers?
—I’ve already read it.
—Read it again.
13.
Once while Alkis was stroking me and kissing my hips, there in the small hollow just below my waist, he said:
—You’re so handsome.
—Beautiful, you mean.
—No. Handsome. You have the hips of a little boy. I adore you.
That aroused me. We made love, and the whole time I felt like a woman in a boy’s body and with a boy’s soul. From then on we always made love that way, starting with a kiss on my hip.
14.
—Alkis, look how handsome that man is!
—Mmmm… not bad. Especially his stomach, with that narrow waist.
I became his accomplice. Afterward, alone in my apartment, I’d fall to the floor and howl like a dog. So as not to kill him. Because I liked it. I became his ally in this ritual of the gaze. I pointed out boys to him all the time. It became an obsession for me, like constantly checking my watch though I already knew the time. And I trembled under their stares. Alkiviadis was the one they wanted, through my gaze, and I offered him up to them every time. We were always seeking each other out with our eyes, always, everywhere, every moment of the day and night—especially at night. One of us watched another who watched yet another. These looks were sensuous, pleasureful, they had nothing to do with the deadly hatred of desire. An exquisite combination that plunged me deeper every day into an exquisite hell. These gazes concealed a sanctuary: the sanctuary of my own soul, which became more and more aroused by what it hated most. And so hate and pleasure became one. And I, nothing at all.
15.
Alkiviadis and I were nothing alike. We were opposites in everything. I spent money left and right, said whatever came into my head, would laugh or cry at the drop of a hat, and got up at five in the morning. Generally speaking, I was impossible, but in a sweet, harmless way.
—That’s why I married you, Alkiviadis used to say. Because you’re a lovely, impossible madwoman.
Our meetings seemed almost hieratic, since they were absolutely fixed in place and time: Alkis’s apartment, every Saturday. Once I lost track of what day it was and went a day early, on Friday. I realized my mistake just as the taxi was pulling up in front of his house, and it seemed like such a crime that I told the driver to take me back home. That was when I first began to love Alkiviadis less.
Another time I went on the right day, but an hour early, to surprise him. Alkiviadis was furious; we fought as we’d never fought before. He kept shouting over and over:
—I have to be completely psychologically prepared if I’m going to see you. Don’t ever do that again. Ever.
Me, I just cried. I looked out the window and cried, because I didn’t understand why what I had done was so wrong.
16.
—Alkis, I had a dream. Do you want to hear?
—Sure.
—My cousin Alexander is sleeping. He’s been awake for years, but today, all of a sudden, he decided to sleep. He lay down, crossed his hands on his chest, and curled himself into a ball so he could drop into the well of sleep: he had to take on a shape that could attain the necessary depth and speed—that’s what he told me, anyway.
He gathered his clothes into little mounds— sweaters, pants, shirts. He put them in suitcases and locked them up.
I’ll find them here when I wake up, he told me conspiratorially.
He lay down, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.
Now I’m watching from a hilltop as he falls peacefully into the well. Thousands of mirrors are watching him, and no matter how far he falls, the well keeps getting deeper, because the well is entirely his own—he explained it all to me.
There are strange shapes scrawled on the walls.
I remember them, he told me, from dreams I had when I was a baby, but I have to sleep very deeply if I want to have those dreams again. Jungles, animals with green wings, beautiful monsters—he pointed them out to me as he fell.
From the hilltop where I’m standing I watch him falling slowly, and the mouth of the well seems to be climbing into the sky. Then a cloud passes directly overhead and covers it up.
Alexander is falling slowly, now he’s almost at the center of the earth—I can see him clearly from the hilltop. I can see the other side of the earth, too, and I’m waiting. My cousin hovers there for a while, exactly in the center of the earth, and it’s as if the earth is widening at exactly that spot, like a smile. As he falls and comes out the other side I start to run, I circle the whole earth to catch up with him.
My cousin starts moving faster, until he’s falling like a meteorite. A million years passed in an instant, I saw the center of the earth close up again, a million years passed and I watch him from the hilltop, falling, drunken, happy, forever.
—Go to sleep, Alkiviadis said. Go to sleep. Don’t wake me up again. My sleep is sacred, you know that. I have to be at work early in the morning. Keep your dreams to yourself. They have nothing to do with me.
17.
Alkis and I went to see Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. In the movie there’s a horrible bishop who torments his wife and her children. As we left the theater I said to Alkiviadis:
—The bishop reminds me of you. I hereby baptize you the Bishop, that’s what I’m going to call you from now on. That’s just how you torment me, and if we had kids you’d torment them too.
So I stopped calling him Alkis. And how I longed to go back to my childhood home, like the woman in the movie! Each weekend I went to Glyfada with increasing unease. I didn’t want to see the Bishop anymore. At some point, on one of our weekends together, he was sure to do something terrible.
—Alkis, I don’t want to come to your place anymore.
—It seems to me… Alkis said.
He started every one of his sentences with that unbearable, pompous “it seems to me.”
—It seems to me that you didn’t understand the movie at all. The bishop torments the children for their own good. It’s a sort of initiation, to help them grow up. That’s why he torments his wife, too. And deep down, his wife adores him. If she hated him, Bergman wouldn’t have made the movie. It wouldn’t have been the least bit interesting. If his wife didn’t love him, why would she go and live with him?
—But she runs away.
—Yes, Alkiviadis replied, because she longs for her childhood, her house, and her mother, who’s the symbol of comfort and ease. The fact that she goes back home is a sign of failure. She couldn’t bear to grow up. The harshness, even the cruelty, it’s all part of becoming an adult. The bishop shows her life as it really is, and it isn’t the dream she’d prefer to go on living.
I was furious.
—Is that why you pulled out Caesar’s claws? To help him grow up? You’re the fool, Alkis, you’re the one who didn’t understand the movie. The wife is the real adult. The bishop is the immature one, since he needs to be inhuman in order to exist. And his wife doesn’t “go back,” as you say. She returns to where she belongs, to maturity.
—You didn’t understand at all, Alkiviadis insisted.
The battle raged all night. Never before had we spoken so heatedly, never before had he tried so passionately to convince me of anything. Because in talking about the movie, we were really talking about our marriage. Alkiviadis understood this. I, however, did not.
The next weekend I went out and rented some movies, stretched out with my dogs on my own bed in my own home, and whispered:
—I’ll never go to see the Bishop again.
Alkiviadis and I went to Paris. One afternoon when he had gone off on his own I went shopping with Christina, a childhood friend, and then went back to her place. We laughed at our purchases, all these things we’d never wear. Then we decided to watch Jaws. We’d seen it five times together and countless times apart. Christina liked to be scared, but only by movies. We tried on our new blouses again.
—I’ll never wear this, it’s too nice, Christina said.
—Why don’t you get highlights? I asked.
—What are you talking about? My hair is full of highlights, can’t you tell? she asked, upset.
—Oh, Christina, I wish this day would never end. Let’s stay like this forever, talking about highlights and clothes.
—Are you on a diet? she asked.
—A great one, I answered. You eat nothing but raisins soaked in brandy, so you’re always drunk and your appetite just disappears.
We laughed. Time passed. It was a quarter past eight. We were watching Jaws, squeezing our eyes shut during the scene when the shark bites the girl in half in the water. We always shut our eyes during that scene, so we’d still never seen it.
Now it was half past nine.
—What happened to Alkiviadis? Christina suddenly asked.
I was embarrassed.
—Let’s eat. Something must have come up.
Just then the doorbell rang. Alkiviadis came in, flushed. He barely even said hello.
—Come into the bathroom, he said to me.
—But we’re about to eat, I said.
—Come into the bathroom.
Alkiviadis, usually so formal and polite, was treating me incredibly rudely.
In the bathroom, Alkiviadis sat on the lid of the toilet. He took me in his arms and began to speak in a monotone, as if lulling me to sleep.
—The two of us share everything. Everything. Well, I went to a gay porn theater. I bought a ticket at the door. The room was dark, and there was hard-core porn on the screen. At first I couldn’t see anything, but after a while I began to make out the figures of boys walking around. The room was all aisles, and there were boys climbing up to the balcony and down to the restrooms, circling the seats, which were all empty: no one was watching the movie, everyone was milling around like shadows, lit up only by the screen. I felt as if I were dreaming. Then I started to walk with them. Our bodies brushed against one another in the dark, and the contact was like a rustling, like souls touching. The boys were like sleepwalkers, tiptoeing around. No one spoke. We walked like that for hours, as if pacing the perimeter of a prison yard. We looked at one another, but we couldn’t make out any faces in the dark, or didn’t want to. Only the bodies, the bodies, the hips, the backs. Hands stroked my face and I stroked others. We were like blind men, condemned to walk in circles forever.
One boy stood in front of the screen. I could see him clearly. He was very handsome, kind of wild, with a gold ring in one ear. He was smoking, and his head made a black stain on the screen. His earring was perfectly visible. There were two men on the screen.
Fuck me, you bastard! Fuck me! one was shouting to the other.
But the things happening on the screen were wild and savage, while the atmosphere in the room was oddly sweet, like an unfamiliar wine.
We wandered like that for hours. Then suddenly we climbed up onto the balcony.
Now the couples changed at a frightening pace. I must have had twenty or thirty boys, and ten or twenty more had me.
We clung to one another like grapes. One man’s breath would ripple out, becoming a source of pleasure for us all. We went wild. I bit the boy with the earring, hard, and sucked at his blood. If we hadn’t stopped when we did, we all would’ve died. At some point I found a door and pushed my way out onto the street. I ran off.
That night I dreamed of Dante’s Inferno. It was full of boys and bathrooms, and an angel with hair down to his waist kept flushing the toilets.
19.
Alkiviadis and I divorced hurriedly, nervously, the same way we’d married.
I didn’t see him for two years.
Sometime in the spring, I received a prize in Paris for the best foreign novel. I had a party at my place and got flowers and telegrams from all over the world.
It was five in the morning when I heard Alkis’s voice on the answering machine.
—Congratulations, little monster. It seems to me that this calls for a celebration.
I hadn’t heard his voice in two years. It sounded different, but I couldn’t put my finger on the change. Then it hit me: his voice was warm and open, so unlike his old, distant haughtiness.
The doorbell rang before I had time to get completely dressed. I opened the door and saw Alkiviadis standing before me. He was so handsome, his manner so changed that I couldn’t bear it and closed my eyes. When I opened them again he was still standing there, glowing. The harsh lines around his mouth had disappeared. In the past, his smile always used to twist into a grimace, but now he was smiling sweetly. He had always been handsome, but now he was blindingly so, since there was no harshness or pettiness about him anymore. He looked so brilliant, so magnificent, that I remember putting a hand to my chest, feeling as if my ribcage would burst and my heart would plunge to the floor. He’d lost a lot of weight. His purple eyes were huge. And his hair was longer. His face drank me in, consumed me. He folded me in his arms.
—Congratulations, my little Proust.
He was holding an enormous bouquet of red roses. He looked at the flower arrangements that covered every surface in the room.
—They’ve sent you white roses, yellow, pink. I’m glad to see no one has sent you red.
We went to a bar. As we clinked glasses I laughed happily and asked:
—So what are we celebrating?
—Your award, of course. He looked thoughtfully out the window and lit a cigarette.
Then, suddenly, he grabbed my wrist.
—We’re celebrating other things, too, he said. First of all, the fact that I haven’t seen you in two years, and now we’re going to spend the night together.
He squeezed my wrist tightly and I began to sweat, from fear, just as in the old days. Was it the lighting in the bar, or had his face lost the peace and calm I had seen at my place just a short while before? The bar was completely empty. Our table was in a corner. The two of us were sitting like statues on a stage, seconds before the curtain was to rise.
—I’m working on something fairly big myself, Alkis told me.
I knew he had been doing veterinary research.
—Something unique, he continued, that has nothing to do with my work. So we’re celebrating that, too. That, and our night together.
—And my award, I said.
He didn’t answer. Again, he looked thoughtfully out the window.
At my place we made love. Afterward, stretched out on his back, Alkiviadis smoked a cigarillo.
—You must have missed me these two years, whether you know it or not. You must’ve missed it all, he said. You may have hated it, but you liked it, too. You divorced me out of fear, precisely because you liked it.
In the morning, he smiled at me as he left.
—Will I see you again? I asked.
—From now on, you’ll be seeing me all the time.
I fell asleep. When I awoke, something was bothering me. I replayed my night with Alkiviadis over and over in my mind, as if it were a chess game. After two years without contact, there was something unfinished, something impenetrable about our single night together. Something important had escaped me, but it was hiding in some detail that I couldn’t pin down. Was it some gesture, some expression, some phrase Alkis had used? This bizarre chess game played itself out incessantly in my mind, and I couldn’t give it an end. I had the white pieces, but on the other side of the board, the black king was missing, as if it had withdrawn from the game, no longer desiring a confrontation.
That afternoon I started calling Alkiviadis. At the office, at home
. It was five. He was always at the office at five. But the answering machine didn’t even pick up. No one picked up anywhere.
At six I called his apartment again. An unfamiliar voice answered.
—Sorry, I must have dialed the wrong number.
I hung up and dialed again. The same voice answered.
—Sorry, the lines must be crossed.
I hung up and dialed again.
—Is this Alkiviadis’s house?
—Yes. May I ask who’s calling?
—I’m his ex-wife. Who are you?
—I’m with the police.
—Alkiviadis… it’s a car accident, isn’t it?
—No, he answered.
We were both silent.
I heard the man light a cigarette and inhale.
—Your ex-husband committed suicide. He’s dead.
I heard a scream sweeping through the room, over the furniture, the curtains. It was coming from me.
—Please come right away. We’re expecting you. His family is here. We’re looking for some papers of his.
Again, after two years, I took a cab through those same streets, with the same ugly buildings, the traffic, the noise, the shop windows full of bridal gowns. Though I didn’t quite know it then, as I stood in front of the building where he’d lived, a mechanism of hate and survival had already been set in motion inside of me. For the first time I noticed how shabby and depressing his building was. Now, whenever I close my eyes, that building appears before me, nameless, unmentionable.
The apartment was crowded, a tangle of relatives and policemen. The only person crying was one of the officers.
—I have a son the same age. Handsome, too, just like him.
Alkis’s father was lying face-down on the floor, his arms crossed.
—Son, why did you do this to us? What did we do wrong? Speak to me, son, speak to me.
His mother was sitting like a mummy in one of the chairs. She wasn’t crying. She didn’t even blink. Whenever anyone came up to comfort her she would push them away.
Rien Ne Va Plus Page 2
