The Angel Esmeralda

by Don DeLillo

  I tried to exchange glances with the girl across the table. This was the first time we’d been seated face to face but she kept looking down at her notes, her hands, maybe the grain of the wood along the edge of the table. I told myself that she was averting her eyes not from me but from Ilgauskas.

  “F and not-F,” he said.

  He made her shy, the blunt impact of the man, thick body, strong voice, staccato cough, even the old dark suit he wore, unpressed, to every class, his chest hair curling up out of the open shirt collar. He used German and Latin terms without defining them. I tried to insert myself into the girl’s line of sight, scrunching down and peering up. We listened earnestly, all of us, hoping to understand and to transcend the need to understand.

  Sometimes he coughed into his cupped hand, other times into the table, and we imagined microscopic life-forms teeming toward the tabletop and ricocheting into breathable space. Those seated nearest him ducked away with a wince that was also a smile, half apologetic. The shy girl’s shoulders quivered, even though she was sitting at some distance from the man. We didn’t expect Ilgauskas to excuse himself. He was Ilgauskas. We were the ones at fault, for being there to witness the coughing, or for not being adequate to the seismic scale of it, or for other reasons not yet known to us.

  “Can we ask this question?” he said.

  We waited for the question. We wondered whether the question he’d asked was the question we were waiting for him to ask. In other words, could he ask the question he was asking? It was not a trick, not a game or a logical puzzle. Ilgauskas didn’t do that. We sat and waited. He stared into the wall at the far end of the room.

  It felt good to be out in the weather, that wintry sting of approaching snow. I was walking down a street of older houses, some in serious need of repair, sad and handsome, bay window here, curved porch there, when he turned the corner and came toward me, slightly crouched, same coat, face nearly lost inside the hood. He was walking slowly, as before, hands behind his back, as before, and he seemed to pause when he saw me, almost imperceptibly, head lowered now, path not quite steady.

  There was no one else on the street. As we approached each other, he veered away, and then so did I, just slightly, to reassure him, but I also sent a stealthy look his way. The face inside the hood was stubbled—gray old man, I thought, large nose, eyes on the sidewalk but also noting my presence. After we’d passed each other I waited a moment and then turned and looked. He wasn’t wearing gloves and this seemed fitting, I’m not sure why, no gloves, despite the unrelenting cold.

  About an hour later, I was part of the mass movement of students going in opposite directions, in wind-whipped snow, two roughly parallel columns moving from old campus to new and vice versa, faces in ski masks, bodies shouldering into the wind or pushed along by it. I saw Todd, long-striding, and pointed. This was our standard sign of greeting or approval—we pointed. I shouted into the weather as he went by.

  “Saw him again. Same coat, same hood, different street.”

  He nodded and pointed back and two days later we were walking in the outlying parts of town. I gestured toward a pair of large trees, bare branches forking up fifty or sixty feet.

  “Norway maple,” I said.

  He said nothing. They meant nothing to him, trees, birds, baseball teams. He knew music, classical to serial, and the history of mathematics, and a hundred other things. I knew trees from summer camp, when I was twelve, and I was pretty sure the trees were maples. Norway was another matter. I could have said red maple or sugar maple but Norway sounded stronger, more informed.

  We both played chess. We both believed in God.

  Houses here loomed over the street and we saw a middle-aged woman get out of her car and take a baby stroller from the rear seat and unfold it. Then she took four grocery bags from the car, one at a time, and placed each in the stroller. We were talking and watching. We were talking about epidemics, pandemics and plagues, but we were watching the woman. She shut the car door and pulled the stroller backward over the hard-packed snow on the sidewalk and up the long flight of steps to her porch.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Isabel,” I said.

  “Be serious. We’re serious people. What’s her name?”

  “Okay, what’s her name?”

  “Her name is Mary Frances. Listen to me,” he whispered. “Mar-y Fran-ces. Never just Mary.”

  “Okay, maybe.”

  “Where the hell do you get Isabel?”

  He showed mock concern, placing a hand on my shoulder.

  “I don’t know. Isabel’s her sister. They’re identical twins. Isabel’s the alcoholic twin. But you’re missing the central questions.”

  “No, I’m not. Where’s the baby that goes with the stroller? Whose baby is it?” he said. “What’s the baby’s name?”

  We started down the street that led out of town and heard aircraft from the military base. I turned and looked up and they were there and gone, three fighter jets wheeling to the east, and then I saw the hooded man a hundred yards away, coming over the crest of a steep street, headed in our direction.

  I said, “Don’t look now.”

  Todd turned and looked. I talked him into crossing the street to put some space between the man and us. We watched from a driveway, standing under a weathered backboard and rim fastened to the ridge beam above the garage door. A pickup went by and the man stopped briefly, then walked on.

  “See the coat. No toggles,” I said.

  “Because it’s an anorak.”

  “It’s a parka—it was always a parka. Hard to tell from here but I think he shaved. Or someone shaved him. Whoever he lives with. A son or daughter, grandkids.”

  He was directly across the street from us now, moving cautiously to avoid stretches of unshoveled snow.

  “He’s not from here,” Todd said. “He’s from somewhere in Europe. They brought him over. He couldn’t take care of himself anymore. His wife died. They wanted to stay where they were, the two elderly people. But then she died.”

  He was speaking distantly, Todd was, watching the man but talking through him, finding his shadow somewhere on the other side of the world. The man did not see us, I was sure of this. He reached the corner, one of his hands behind his back, the other making small conversational gestures, and then he turned onto the next street and was gone.

  “Did you see his shoes?”

  “They weren’t boots.”

  “They were shoes that reach to the ankle.”

  “High shoes.”

  “Old World.”

  “No gloves.”

  “Jacket below the knees.”

  “Possibly not his.”

  “A hand-me-down or hand-me-up.”

  “Think of the hat he’d be wearing if he was wearing a hat,” I said.

  “He’s not wearing a hat.”

  “But if he was wearing a hat, what kind of hat?”

  “He’s wearing a hood.”

  “But what kind of hat, if he was wearing a hat?”

  “He’s wearing a hood,” Todd said.

  We walked down to the corner now and started across the street. He spoke an instant before I did.

  “There’s only one kind of hat he could conceivably wear. A hat with an earflap that reaches from one ear around the back of the head to the other ear. An old soiled cap. A peaked cap with a flap for the ears.”

  I said nothing. I had nothing to say to this.

  There was no sign of the man along the street he’d entered. For a couple of seconds an aura of mystery hovered over the scene. But his disappearance simply meant that he lived in one of the houses on the street. Did it matter which house? I didn’t think it mattered but Todd disagreed. He wanted a house that matched the man.

  We walked slowly down the middle of the street, six feet apart, using rutted car tracks in the snow to make the going easier. He took off a glove and extended his hand, fingers spread and flexing.

  “Feel the air. I say minus nine
Celsius.”

  “We’re not Celsius.”

  “But he is, where he’s from, that’s Celsius.”

  “Where is he from? There’s something not too totally white about him. He’s not Scandinavian.”

  “Not Dutch or Irish.”

  I wondered about Andalusian. Where was Andalusia exactly? I didn’t think I knew. Or an Uzbek, a Kazakh. But these seemed irresponsible.

  “Middle Europe,” Todd said. “Eastern Europe.”

  He pointed to a gray frame house, an ordinary two-story, with a shingled roof and no sign of the fallen grace that defined some of the houses elsewhere in town.

  “Could be that one. His family allows him to take a walk now and then, provided he stays within a limited area.”

  “The cold doesn’t bother him much.”

  “He’s used to colder.”

  “Plus, he has very little feeling in his extremities,” I said.

  There was no Christmas wreath on the front door, no holiday lights. I didn’t see anything about the property that might suggest who lived there, from what background, speaking which language. We approached the point where the street ended in a patch of woods, and we turned and headed back.

  We had class in half an hour and I wanted to speed up the pace. Todd was still looking at houses. I thought of the Baltic states and the Balkan states, briefly confused—which was which and which was where.

  I spoke before he did.

  “I see him as a figure who escaped the war in the 1990s. Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia. Or who didn’t leave until recently.”

  “I don’t feel that here,” he said. “It’s not the right model.”

  “Or he’s Greek, and his name is Spyros.”

  “I wish you a painless death,” he said, not bothering to look my way.

  “German names. Names with umlauts.”

  This last had nothing but nuisance value. I knew that. I tried walking faster but he paused a moment, standing in his skewed way to look at the gray house.

  “In a few hours, think of it, dinner’s over, the others are watching TV, he’s in his little room sitting on the edge of a narrow bed in his long johns, staring into space.”

  I wondered if this was a space that Todd expected us to fill.

  We waited through the long silences and then nodded when he coughed, in collegial approval. He’d coughed only twice so far today. There was a small puckered bandage at the edge of his jaw. He shaves, we thought. He cuts himself and says shit. He wads up a sheet of toilet paper and holds it to the cut. Then he leans into the mirror, seeing himself clearly for the first time in years.

  Ilgauskas, he thinks.

  We never took the same seats, class after class. We weren’t sure how this had started. One of us, in a spirit of offhand mischief, may have spread the word that Ilgauskas preferred it this way. In fact the idea had substance. He didn’t want to know who we were. We were passersby to him, smeary faces, we were roadkill. It was an aspect of his neurological condition, we thought, to regard others as displaceable, and this seemed interesting, seemed part of the course, displaceability, one of the truth functions that he referred to now and then.

  But we were violating the code, the shy girl and I, seated face to face once again. This happened because I had entered the room after she did and had simply fallen into the empty chair directly across from her. She knew I was there, knew it was me, same gaping lad, eager to make eye contact.

  “Imagine a surface of no color whatsoever,” he said.

  We sat there and imagined. He ran a hand through his dark hair, a shaggy mass that flopped in several directions. He did not bring books to class, never a sign of the textbook or a sheaf of notes, and his shambling discourses made us feel that we were becoming what he saw before him, an amorphous entity. We were basically stateless. He could have been speaking to political prisoners in orange jumpsuits. We admired this. We were in the Cellblock, after all. We exchanged glances, she and I, tentatively. Ilgauskas leaned toward the table, eyes swimming with neurochemical life. He looked at the wall, talked to the wall.

  “Logic ends where the world ends,” he said.

  The world, yes. But he seemed to be speaking with his back to the world. Then again the subject was not history or geography. He was instructing us in the principles of pure reason. We listened intently. One remark dissolved into the next. He was an artist, an abstract artist. He asked a series of questions and we made earnest notes. The questions he asked were unanswerable, at least by us, and he was not expecting answers in any case. We did not speak in class; no one ever spoke. There were never any questions, student to professor. That steadfast tradition was dead here.

  He said, “Facts, pictures, things.”

  What did he mean by “things”? We would probably never know. Were we too passive, too accepting of the man? Did we see dysfunction and call it an inspired form of intellect? We didn’t want to like him, only to believe in him. We tendered our deepest trust to the stark nature of his methodology. Of course there was no methodology. There was only Ilgauskas. He challenged our reason for being, what we thought, how we lived, the truth or falsity of what we believed to be true or false. Isn’t this what great teachers do, the Zen masters and Brahman scholars?

  He leaned toward the table and spoke about meanings fixed in advance. We listened hard and tried to understand. But to understand at this point in our study, months along, would have been confusing, even a kind of disillusionment. He said something in Latin, hands pressed flat to the tabletop, and then he did a strange thing. He looked at us, eyes gliding up one row of faces, down the other. We were all there, we were always there, our usual shrouded selves. Finally he raised his hand and looked at his watch. It didn’t matter what time it was. The gesture itself meant that class was over.

  A meaning fixed in advance, we thought.

  We sat there, she and I, while the others gathered books and papers and lifted coats off chair backs. She was pale and thin, hair pinned back, and I had an idea that she wanted to look neutral, seem neutral in order to challenge people to notice her. She placed her textbook on top of her notebook, centering it precisely, then raised her head and waited for me to say something.

  “Okay, what’s your name?”

  “Jenna. What’s yours?”

  “I want to say Lars-Magnus just to see if you believe me.”

  “I don’t.”

  “It’s Robby,” I said.

  “I saw you working out in the fitness center.”

  “I was on the elliptical. Where were you?”

  “Just passing by, I guess.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  “Pretty much all the time,” she said.

  The last to leave were shuffling out now. She stood and dropped her books into her backpack, which dangled from the chair. I remained where I was, watching.

  “I’m curious to know what you have to say about this man.”

  “The professor.”

  “Do you have insights to offer?”

  “I talked to him once,” she said. “Person to person.”

  “Are you serious? Where?”

  “At the diner in town.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “I get off-campus urges. I have to go somewhere.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “It’s the only place to eat, other than here, so I walked in and sat down and there he was in the booth across the aisle.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “I sat there and thought, It’s him.”

  “It’s him.”

  “There was a big foldout menu that I hid behind while I kept sneaking looks. He was eating a full meal, something slopped in brown gravy from the center of the earth. And he had a Coke with a straw bending out of the can.”

  “You talked to him.”

  “I said something not too original and we talked off and on. He had his coat thrown onto the seat opposite him and I was eating a salad and there was a book lying on top of h
is coat and I asked him what he was reading.”

  “You talked to him. The man who makes you lower your eyes in primitive fear and dread.”

  “It was a diner. He was drinking Coke through a straw,” she said.

  “Fantastic. What was he reading?”

  “He said he was reading Dostoevsky. I’ll tell you exactly what he said. He said, ‘Dostoevsky day and night.’”

  “Fantastic.”

  “And I told him my coincidence, that I’d been reading a lot of poetry and I’d read a poem just a couple of days earlier with a phrase I recalled. ‘Like midnight in Dostoevsky.’”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Does he read Dostoevsky in the original?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “I wonder if he does. I have a feeling he does.”

  There was a pause and then she said that she was leaving school. I was thinking about Ilgauskas in the diner. She told me that she wasn’t happy here, that her mother always said how accomplished she was at being unhappy. She was heading west, she said, to Idaho. I didn’t say anything. I sat there with my hands folded at my belt line. She left without a coat. Her coat was probably in the coatrack on the first floor.

  At the winter break I stayed on campus, one of the few. We called ourselves The Left Behind and spoke in broken English. The routine included zombie body posture and blurred vision, lasting half a day before we’d all had enough.

  At the gym I did my dumb struts on the elliptical and lapsed into spells of lost thought. Idaho, I thought. Idaho, the word, so voweled and obscure. Wasn’t where we were, right here, obscure enough for her?