His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)
Page 37
I froze in that position, afraid to move and completely overcome by an already icy chill. That moment I had never even imagined and had never sought, that chance encounter with someone else’s fate, chilled me to the bone. This will be no homespun provincial Rodichka Raskolnikov going after an unknown old woman with a hatchet. This will be worldwide fame, instantaneous and sinister fame! I thought. By tonight the whole world will know my name and peer at my face. My picture will be in every paper. The world, which has pushed me aside for so many years, will speak only of me! All my diaries, my poems, my novels will be published, as will everything else I’ve ever written, down to the very last line, and before they put me in the electric chair, although maybe they won’t, I’ll bask to my heart’s content in the attention of this fucking world… What’s poor Lee Oswald next to me, who will pass himself off as a political murderer who acted on principle! And I won’t even have to pass myself off — my Diary of a Loser alone, with the part where it says, “Kill them all! Kill them all!” will tomorrow become a manual in the struggle of thousands of failures, and from the obscure housekeeper Edward, I shall make a figure of history.
I gasped from horror, from fear of myself. My right hand lay on the rifle stock, and my fingers moved quietly toward the trigger. I’m not exaggerating. A sort of autosuggestion, animal magnetism, a demon in love with terrible events — I don’t know what pushed me to it, but my hand moved toward the trigger.
“It’s the mescaline!” I said out loud in a suddenly sober voice. The mescaline, Edward! Have you forgotten you swallowed two tablets? You did, don’t forget it!
My future began to pass very quickly before my eyes in movie frames. Not my past, but my future which I myself shall achieve by my own labor and perserverance, step by step, in about… I saw the bright covers of my books now finally published and in the bookstores. The publishers won’t always reject me, I persuaded myself. I saw the faces of beautiful women, my girlfriends, whom I would have there at the top as a reward for all my trials and tribulations after I’d become successful…
But part of my mind, the criminal part, the same part that makes me cast sidelong looks at the open holsters of policemen on the streets, and that invariably reminds me, whenever I pass a bank, that it can be robbed — that part cried, That’s all bullshit, Ed! That’s the way of timid souls. You’re destined for something else. Squeeze the fucking trigger, and the world will at once take form, and people and things will arrange themselves in a shapely pyramid reaching to the sun, and you will be at its apex. And the electric chair, even if it means the electric chair (I tried to put that out of my mind at once, or at least shove it into its darkest corner), well, we all have to die sometime. Sometime — if not today, why then tomorrow! On the other hand, you’ll determine your destiny and your future in an instant. Doesn’t the hero of Diary of a Loser — you yourself — kill a president in his dreams? So is it really such an accident that you’re lying here right now? And since you’re already here, fuck it, shoot! Shoot, Ed! You still have a lot of life ahead of you, it’s true, but aren’t you sick of the world and all those faces, and your dreams, and the sunrises and sunsets, and the cocktail parties, and the world’s timid politics, and its girls for sale? And what’s next, anyway? You’ll get old and slip back down, and they say it happens very fast. You already have a few wrinkles on that long, beautiful neck of yours which your girlfriends like so much. Can you imagine how pitiful and shitty it is to be old, even for a famous writer? After all, if you go out today at thirty-six, you’ll be young and passionate forever. You’ll be a hero, a black angel maybe, but still an angel. Didn’t you inscribe one of your books once, “From the dark angel of literature”?
I grew rigid conversing with myself like that, blurting it all out like that to myself, and lying there in a position that belonged to someone else, and facing a destiny that wasn’t mine either, and holding someone else’s solution in my hands. I needed to make a decision, but I was rigid from all that mysticism, paralyzed by it. I remember the same thing happening to me many years ago when, as an eighteen-year-old poet, I had slashed my veins, and my legs and arms grew cold as the blood flowed gradually out of me. And my heart sucked noisily, and the warmth gathered in my chest, until I lost consciousness…
The telephone rang. I leaped to my feet and ran to pick it up. I was, it turned out, expected at Anna’s that day, Anna, my new girlfriend, my new cunt.
“I made dinner, Edward. We had a date. But if you don’t feel like coming over here, then I can come to you,” said the complaisant Anna.
“Stay where you are, don’t move!” I said. “I’ll take a taxi and be right there.” And I skipped out of the house without looking back.
When on Saturday mornings I appear in the doorway of the five-story mansion in the best and most expensive neighborhood in New York, dressed in my customary snow-white shirt, blue and white striped pants, and elegant white boots of Italian make, and with round glasses in a thin frame resting on my nose, those passing by look at me with unconcealed curiosity and envy. Some of the young girls smile flatteringly. Sometimes the old women smile too, perhaps from a polite and cautious respect for the house I’ve just come out of. I am for them an unexpectedly live representative of that unattainable, extraordinarily sweet life they read about in the picture magazines.
With an unhurried gait and freshly washed, carefully cut hair combed a la James Bond, I set off for a walk. How could those passersby, out walking themselves and their dogs by the fresh East River with its link to the sea, how could they, mere pedestrians, know that the sleek and dignified man with the tranquil face is just a servant in the millionaire’s five-story house, and that his aristocratic custom of a morning walk is due simply to the fact that on Saturday and Sunday his employer is never at home — that the multimillionaire employer invariably spends his weekends at His Highness’s multimillionaire estate in Connecticut, and that that’s the reason the servant plays master on Saturdays and Sundays.
The day is already warm, and as I walk in the direction of the beautiful windows of Madison, calmly and superbly playing my role, a New York springtime breeze pleasantly plays with my hair.
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