So greatly did the light swell within me and fill me with the power of a sun arising from the depths, that I felt my sight fail me and I leaned heavily against the table.
There was doubtless a sudden, extravagant change in the air: our presence there, as though touched by some incantatory power, etched itself onto a space that was not ours and that lay beyond our understanding. I was seized by a kind of vertigo and, suddenly, indeed entirely unconsciously, I raised my hand and slapped the corpse’s face. What impetus, what hidden will drove me? I wanted him to remember (if such a thing were possible) and to witness my repentance; I wanted him to know that I scorned his existence now that I had seen him and knew that he was still as beautiful as before. Nobody understood my gesture; perhaps they did not even see it. For some time, the soft, slack tissue of her cheek bore the dark mark left by my fingers. Make no mistake, Nina—it was our pact that I slapped. Yes, the truth. I had always sought the truth above all else. That had always been my defense, the august cloak in which I clothed my wretchedness. But what is truth when it is torn from its essence, and left naked and shameless? What is the untarnished truth, pure, dispassionate? No, that is not what interests us, Nina. I understood everything as I looked again at the people standing around me, my people, my worldly family, and then looking again at him, alive, the young man with the violets. No, it isn’t truth, but charity that matters. Truth without charity is but blind, uncontrolled action, the voice of pride.
I don’t know what happened to me then, but it was as if everything inside me came tumbling down, like an enormous building crashing to the ground. An icy wave rose up from my guts, engulfing my heart, stabbing it like a knife. I tried to cry out and raised my hands to my chest. Then I heard a shout bursting from my mouth. Everything around me went dark, I lost my balance and fell unconscious to the floor.
55.
Valdo’s Statement (vi)
The sun had passed its highest point and was slowly beginning to set. In the drawing room, abandoned by all the curious onlookers, complete silence reigned. The inhabitants of the house were gathered around Timóteo, who had been carried to his room. The doctor, summoned urgently, had diagnosed a brain hemorrhage. Ana was there (taking the opportunity to fumigate the room), as were Betty, the old black servants, and even one or two neighbors who did not want to miss anything and, taking advantage of the general confusion, were observing the scenes with eyes full of malice.
Thus, as the sun’s rays gradually lost their strength, the body lay alone, guarded only by the four candles, now nearly burnt out. I could not bring myself to leave her: for, at that moment more than at any other, it seemed to me that Nina needed someone by her side. Forgotten by everyone, she lay abandoned at the end of the drawing room, a white shape, neither a threat nor an attraction. Now that I was alone with her, I could finally gauge the distance between what she had been and what she was now. No, I wasn’t being ungrateful—I simply felt that everyone had given up trying to grasp what lay behind that thin sheet and were clinging to the image of what she had once been, rather than what remained. It was as if they had completely lost touch with reality. I, on the other hand, knew very well that she was dead—truly dead—and this moved me even more. I sat down on a stool not far from where the body lay, paying close attention to the peculiar silence that death thrusts upon us: the silence of goodbyes, of letting things slip away like a mist heavy with nostalgia and remorse. But perhaps because of the hour and the soporific tranquility of late afternoon, I found my thoughts gradually turning to the future and of how I would leave that house and start a new life.
I believe it was at exactly that point that I saw a stranger enter the room. I say a stranger because, immersed as I was in my thoughts, I did not immediately recognize him or pick out any identifying features. He was a young man, almost a boy, reasonably tall, with fine features and fair hair. He moved gently, cautiously, as if he were afraid of waking someone sleeping nearby. There was something noble in the way he walked, and he carried himself with the grace and lightness of youth, an almost feline suppleness—yes, the person before me was, how can I put it, a young tiger, his body swaying in a nonchalant display of energy as yet unexpended. He had clearly waited for the room to empty before entering. He was wearing a pair of dark, rather old trousers and a light-colored sports shirt—from his clothes he could easily have been one of the servants, and I would indeed have taken him for one if there had been anything else in him to confirm that. In fact I’d go further: had it not been for the enquiring look he gave me, he would have escaped my notice entirely among all the many strangers who had passed through the house that day. It was not as if he were trying to work out who I was, nor that he was attempting to read my thoughts, no, but his cold, unfamiliar eyes pierced me, not so much as a means of establishing contact as of keeping me at a distance. Slowly, as if they had at last formulated a question, his eyes moved from me to the body in the coffin. Then once again he looked at me, with an expectant stare I could not even begin to understand. Was it an invitation, or was he simply asking permission? What did he mean by looking at me like that? Some inner impulse brought me to my feet: now it was my turn, and, without taking my eyes off him and without thinking that this would in any way diminish the distance between us, I went over to him, or, rather, to the corpse, which lay like a barrier between us. I took a few more steps and saw that his eyes were still following me. At that moment, I confess, I detected in them something familiar, something cunning and furtive that I had seen many times before, but so long ago that I could not identify who or what it reminded me of. It was nothing but a memory, if that’s what one can call the physical sensation of an unidentifiable memory, and which awakened in me something familiar, something I had once been a part of, but which, along with so many other things decayed or scattered by time, lay buried like the remnants of a former self that had already had its day and disappeared into that continuous evolution of who we are, of what we do, and what we feel. But whether I knew him or not, that was the force propelling me forward until I was standing right beside the corpse.
Let me repeat, just to be clear, it was, by then, late afternoon. Shafts of thick, golden light filled with dancing particles of dust filtered through the yellow glass at the top of the windows. The heat was unrelenting, but an occasional breeze carried in from outside the hot breath of sun-scorched plants; a whole crackling, rust-red world seemed to impose itself on all things quiet and pleasant, creating an artificial atmosphere of harsh, restless shapes. More than anything else it was that feeling of disquiet—like a premonition inside me, beating its funereal drum—that made me lean forward and lift the sheet covering the dead woman’s face. (As I did this, and as if drawn in by my gesture, the stranger also moved closer.) I wanted to say my final farewell. Before I left this place, before I abandoned her forever to the stagnant waters of memory, I wanted to see her one last time—for this was where her physical presence would end, and I wanted to take with me a final image of her, so that my eyes at last would close upon the sight of her flesh and then, if possible, transmute it into something merely perishable and meaningless.
I leaned over. (I sensed that, from the other side, the stranger also leaned over—what one saw, the other saw.) There was Nina, and I gazed at her for the last time. I don’t think I have the strength to describe what lay before my eyes, nor the strange enchantment of the moment, created not so much by the absurdly brilliant light flooding the room as by the force of that unfamiliar gaze accompanying mine. No, it was Nina, just Nina, and this was where I would leave her, because I had no way now of fathoming the secret of her existence. What I saw neither shocked nor surprised me: on the contrary, combined with the sentiments welling up inside me, the sight of her assuaged the disbelief that was already taking hold of me. Only a muffled groan came from my lips, as if what should have been an expression of surprise had also become an expression of grief. I don’t know if it was due to the stifling heat—the cicadas were screeching furiously—or th
e process of rapid decomposition produced by that particular type of disease, but the dead woman’s appearance had changed completely. (I say “the dead woman” because I can no longer bear to say her name. We are poised on the frontier where human habits cease, and what I now have to relate is a vision of what takes place beyond the known world, rather than a demonstration of the shortcomings of this our terrestrial sphere.)
I wasn’t struck only by how thin she had become, but by what you might call the slow obliteration of the firm lines of her face, a slackening of the nerves and the tension that had held her features in equilibrium. Everything familiar had gone, vanished, sucked in by some subcutaneous force, her skin, if you can call it that, was slowly falling into loose folds as if it no longer had the strength to sustain its human form. Behind this cascade of lava, not yet liquid, but impregnated with the oil of disintegrating tissue—all that was left of that fermenting, slowly dissolving matter—I could already see the outline of the only thing in her that was firm and unassailable by time, heat or disease: her bones. Her skeleton was already visible through the fragile fabric, and, in some places, was almost threatening to break through; it was clear that it would not be long before it emerged completely, free both of its enveloping flesh and of the pink, shifting light that had illuminated that flesh. Bumps, pockmarks, and black-lined cavities erupted here and there, like the carcass of a ship left high and dry in the sun by the retreating tide.
It was then, looking up, that I heard a voice and realized that the stranger opposite me was André. Yes, it was my son and I hadn’t recognized him, neither his fair hair nor his manly bearing, his wary, feline gestures. As this information sank in, I felt disorientated and almost afraid of his presence, which I had completely forgotten about. Deeply troubled, I tried in vain to understand how such a thing could have happened and why he had seemed so different. Perhaps—and here I make my ultimate confession—perhaps it was because I had never really looked at him. I repeat: I had never really looked at him. This revelation stunned me and, like a trail of fire stretching back into my past, it made me realize the full extent of the havoc Nina had left in her wake. Ah, how I had loved that woman, even to the point of neglecting all my other duties . . .
“Listen,” he said to me, and his voice was perfectly normal, as if what he was about to say was the most banal thing in the world: “Up until now, until this very moment, I have never in my whole life heard you say anything of any significance or that helped me in the slightest. Watching you, I’ve often asked myself what kind of empty nonsense fills your head. And yet there she is,” and he pointed to the coffin, “there she lies. Before she died, she asked me if there was such a thing as life after death. Not just once, but several times, as if she were tormented by the idea. I replied categorically that there was no life after death, neither for her nor anyone else. I don’t believe that Christ rose from the dead. Nor do I believe that he appeared on the road to Emmaus. But now,” and he again pointed at the coffin, “I have such a horror of death and that disgusting smell, that now it’s my turn to ask: is there such a thing as life after death?”
He fell silent for a moment, his hands resting on the edge of the coffin. Then he continued, speaking more quickly, almost breathlessly:
“So tell me, since you’re the one who fathered me, and ought to be the one to teach me what I need to know. You are my father, aren’t you? Aren’t you meant to look after me, pay me some sort of attention? So tell me, then, is there such a thing as life after death? Do we rise from the dead someday, somewhere?”
Such strange things, uttered by someone who had previously barely spoken to me, left me in a state of shock, rendering me speechless. I had never been a believer, but nor had I ever dared to defy God. Despite everything, however, I sensed that at that moment I could not and should not lie. I have believed in many things, most of all in the power of good, the victory of morality over immorality, the necessity of religion, in short, everything in this world that is considered right. I have even believed in sin and its destructive power. But I could never believe in the resurrection of the flesh. How could I say that to someone so desperate? (Now I know that what was tearing him apart was his complete lack of hope. How we burn, dear God, as dry as a scorched cinder, simply because of the absence of hope! For it was God he did not believe in, and for a man as passionate as André such disbelief was dangerous, even deadly. He didn’t want to know if there was life after death in order to fall on his knees and make his peace with God. No, he wanted to know so that he could then confront and insult God directly. It was Creation itself he couldn’t forgive—God’s invention of man, man’s existence, and subsequent banishment.
“Tell me,” he implored, almost in a whisper. “Tell me something, because everything you say is important. I don’t trust invisible signs any more, and I want some kind of tangible, worldly proof. I am your son because I was conceived from your flesh, and it is you who must tell me, yes or no: is there such a thing as life after death?”
He stood there, waiting for my answer, and I merely bowed my head and stepped back, as if I no longer had the strength to look at what lay in the coffin. Taking this as a refusal to speak, he exclaimed with a force that literally made me shudder:
“Ah, I knew it. I don’t believe we will be reborn, and I never have. There is no eternity. She’s dead, utterly dead, so dead that it’s impossible even to think about her, or only as a piece of rubbish, a pile of rotting flesh, a heap of animal dung you might step in. Is that what we are, God? Is your image, in which they teach us we are made, is it nothing more than a mask to conceal the underlying putrefaction? Are we doomed to fade into nothingness? Ah, the injustice of it! There’s no mercy, and without mercy how can we imagine God or have any respect for him? Well, God, here you are: here’s what I think of your creation.”
And with that he leaned forward over the dead woman’s body and spat on it. He spat not once, twice, or even three times, but over and over again until he had no more saliva left. He was exhausted, and the sweat ran down his forehead.
“There’s one thing I want you to know,” he said to me. “I don’t love you and I have never loved you as a son should love his father. I don’t even think of you as my father, just as I don’t think it’s my mother who’s lying dead in this coffin. In fact, I don’t feel anything at all toward my family. I don’t love any human being. And do you want to know why? Well, listen carefully, because if it wasn’t true, then I might well love you as my father, and respect the other members of the family, and acknowledge this corpse as my mother. But none of that will happen, because Christ is nothing but a lie.”
After uttering these fateful words, he stared at me so intensely that he seemed almost to want to pierce my very thoughts. Then he sighed wearily and left the room. The corpse lay between us, and I shouted after him:
“André!”
Chronicle of the Murdered House Page 58
