Design of the non

by David Odell

  He's always looked at me like that, ever since I was a child and had to look up to him at his great height, unless he crouched down or was sitting or lying. Now we're more or less the same height, but his eyes still look at me with that slightly ironic tilt of his eyebrows, open like sunshades, and the brilliant fixity of his pupils, black spots on his solar irises, like the two centres of a single target. Or at least that was how he always used to look at me up until a short time ago. That was how he looked at me on the day of my marriage to Luisa, the young wife of the man who was no longer a child but whom he'd known and treated as such for too long to be able to consider him anything else, whilst he'd known her, the bride, only as an adult, or more than that, as a fiancée. I remember that at one point during the reception, he drew me aside, led me out of the room we'd hired in the lovely, old Casino de Madrid in Calle de Alcala into a small adjoining room, after the signing by the witnesses (false witnesses, testimonial friends, purely decorative). He placed a hand on my shoulder (yes, a hand on my shoulder) while the other guests came and went, until at last we were left on our own. Then he closed the door and sat down in an armchair and I leaned against the table, my arms folded; we were both very dressed up for the wedding, he more than I, even though it had only been a civil wedding. Ranz lit a slim cigarette, the sort he used to smoke when he was in public and which he smoked without inhaling. He raised his eyebrows extravagantly high, so that they formed two peaks, then gave an amused smile and fixed his fervent gaze on my face, which at that moment was higher than his. And he said to me:

  "So, now you're married. Now what?"

  He was the first person to ask that question, or rather to formulate the question that I'd been asking myself since the morning, since the ceremony and even before that, since the previous night. I'd spent a restless night, I probably had slept, albeit lightly, even though I felt as if I hadn't, dreaming that I wasn't sleeping and every now and then waking up for real. Around five o'clock in the morning I'd wondered if I should turn the light on since, as it was spring, I could already see through the raised blind the beginnings of the dawn filtering into the street below and I could make out the objects in my bedroom, the furniture. "I won't sleep alone anymore," I thought, as I pondered whether to put the light on or simply to watch the dawn encroaching on buildings and trees, "except occasionally or when I'm travelling. From tomorrow onwards, and I imagine for many years to come, I'll no longer experience the desire to see Luisa, because I'll see her the moment I open my eyes. There'll be no wondering what she'll look like today or what she'll be wearing, because I'll see her face the moment I wake and maybe even watch her getting dressed. She might even dress the way I want her to, if I tell her my preferences. From tomorrow onwards, there'll be no more of the small unknowns that have filled my days for nearly a year now, or have meant that my days were lived in the best way possible, that is, in a state of vague expectation and ignorance. I'll know too much, I'll know more than I want to know about Luisa, I'll be confronted by what I find interesting about her and what I don't find interesting, there'll be no possibility of selection or choice, the minimal, tenuous daily choice involved in arranging a date, meeting, standing watching at the doors of a cinema or searching amongst the tables of a restaurant, or getting dressed up and going out to see the other person. I won't see the result but the process, which I might not find interesting. I don't know if I want to see how she puts on her tights and how she adjusts them at the waist and the groin or to know how much time she spends in the bathroom in the morning, if she puts cream on her face before going to bed or what mood she's in when she wakes up and sees me at her side. At night, I don't think I want to find her already under the sheets in her nightdress or pyjamas, I'd rather take off her street clothes, strip her of her daytime appearance, not of the appearance she'll have taken on before my eyes, alone in our bedroom, perhaps turning her back to me. I don't think I want that intermediate phase, just as I probably don't wish to know that much about her faults, nor be obliged to be fully informed of any faults that may surface with the passing of the months and years, but of which other people who see her, who see us, will know nothing. I also don't think that I want to speak about us, to say we went or we're going to buy a piano or we're going to have a baby or we've got a cat. We may have children, I don't know if I want them or not, although I wouldn't be opposed to the idea. I know, on the other hand, that I am interested in seeing her asleep, in seeing her face when she's unconscious or drowsy, to know what her expression is like then - gentle or cruel, tormented or calm, childlike or suddenly old — while she thinks of nothing or is unaware that she's thinking, while she's inactive, while she's not behaving in any studied manner, as we all do to some degree when someone else is present, even if that person is of no importance to us, even if they're our own father or wife or husband. I've already seen her asleep on a few nights, but not often enough to be able to recognize her in her sleep, a state in which we do after all sometimes cease to resemble ourselves. That's doubtless why I'm getting married tomorrow, because of that day-to-day life, but also because it's the logical thing to do and because I've never done it before, the most important things in life are always done for reasons of logic and out of a desire to experience them or, which comes down to the same thing, because they're inevitable. The random, inconsequential steps you take one night can, after enough time or enough of the abstract future has elapsed, end up carrying you into some unavoidable situation and, confronted by that situation, we sometimes ask ourselves with incredulous excitement: 'What if I hadn't gone into that bar? What if I hadn't gone to that party? What if I hadn't answered the phone that Tuesday?

  What if I hadn't accepted that job on that particular Monday?' We ask ourselves these things naïvely, believing for an instant (but only for an instant) that in that case we would never have met Luisa and we wouldn't be poised on the brink of this unavoidable but logical situation, which, precisely because it is unavoidable and logical, we can suddenly no longer tell if we want it or if it terrifies us, we cannot know if we want what, up until today, we seemed to want. But we always do meet Luisa, it's naïve to ask such questions because everything is like that, being born depends on a chance movement, a phrase spoken by a stranger at the other end of the world, an interpreted gesture, a hand on the shoulder and a whisper that might never have been whispered. Each step taken and each word spoken by anyone in any circumstances (hesitant or assured, sincere or false) have unimaginable repercussions that will affect someone who neither knows us nor wants to, someone who hasn't yet been born or doesn't know that they'll have to suffer us and become, literally, a matter of life and death. So many lives and deaths have their enigmatic origin in something no one notices or remembers, in the beer we decided to drink after first having wondered if we had time, in the good mood that made us be nice to someone we'd just been introduced to — not knowing that she'd just been yelling at someone or hurting them - in the cake we were going to buy on the way to lunch at our parents' house but didn't, in our desire to listen to a voice regardless of what it might say, in the risky phone call that we made anyway, in our unsatisfied wish to stay at home. Going out, talking, doing, moving, looking and hearing and being seen all place us at constant risk, not even closeting ourselves at home and sitting very still can save us from the consequences, from those logical and unavoidable situations, from what is today imminent and from what, almost a year ago, or even four or ten or one hundred years ago, or even yesterday, is so unexpected. I'm thinking that tomorrow I'll be getting married to Luisa, but it's already 5 a.m. and it's today that I'm getting married. According to us, the night belongs to the previous day, but not according to the clocks, my watch is on the bedside table and says that it's a quarter past five, whilst the alarm clock says that it's five fourteen, neither accord with the sense I still have that it's yesterday and not yet today. In seven hours' time. Perhaps Luisa isn't asleep either, lying awake in her bedroom at a quarter past five, not putting on the light, alone, I
could call her since she's as alone as I am, but I might startle her, alone for the last time apart from on exceptional occasions and when I'm away - the two of us do travel a lot, we'll have to change that - she might think I was calling her in the middle of the night to cancel everything, to go back on my word, to go against what is logical and to provide a remedy for the irremediable. No one can ever be sure of anyone, no one can be trusted, and she'll be thinking: 'And now what, now what?', or she'll be thinking that she's not sure she wants to see me shave every day, the razor makes a noise and there are a few grey hairs in my beard, I look older when I don't shave and that's why every day I go through the noisy process of shaving, I'll do it when I get up, it's late and I can't sleep and tomorrow I need to look my best, in seven hours' time I will state before witnesses, before my own father, before her parents, that I'm going to stay by Luisa's side, that that is my intention, I'll state it legally and in public, and it will be recorded and set down."

  'That's what I want to know," I said to my father. "Now what?"

  Ranz smiled even more broadly and left an extravagant cloud of uninhaled smoke dancing in the air. He always smoked in that ornamental way.

  "I like the girl a lot," he said. "I like her more than any of the others you've brought to me over all these years of playing the part of some absurd Lothario — no, don't protest, that's what you were, a Lothario. I have fun with her, which is unusual when there's such an age gap, although I can't tell if she's been making such a fuss of me because she knew she was going to marry you, or because she didn't quite know if she was or not, just as you will have been charming to those idiot parents of hers and will doubtless cease to be after a few months. Marriage changes everything, down to the smallest detail, even nowadays, although I know you young people don't believe it does. Whatever your relationship has been like up until now, it will bear little resemblance to your relationship in future years, you'll probably even notice a slight change after today. At most, all you'll be left with from before are a few worn-out old jokes, shadows, which you won't always find easy to recapture. That and a deep mutual affection, of course. You'll miss these past months when you forged alliances against the rest of the world, against anyone, I mean the small, shared jibes, in a few years' time the only alliances you'll forge will be one against the other. But nothing too serious, don't worry, the inevitable resentments of a life lived in prolonged proximity, a bearable tedium, and one which, in general, no one would give up."

  He spoke slowly, as he usually did, choosing his words with great care (Lothario, alliances, shadows), more for effect and to ensure that he had your attention than for the sake of precision. He obliged you to remain alert, even if you'd heard what he was saying a thousand times before. Not that he'd ever said this to me before, not that I could remember, and I was surprised at the ambiguous tone he used, as ironic as ever but less friendly: he sounded almost like a killjoy, even though there had been moments, ever since Luisa and I had fixed the date of the day that was now today, when I might have thought similar or even worse things. I'd thought better things too, but it's different hearing someone else saying them.

  "That's nice," I said, "that's very encouraging. I didn't expect this of you. You seemed quite happy a moment ago."

  "Oh, I am, I am, believe me, really I am, ask anyone, I've spent all day celebrating it, since before the ceremony. Alone at home, before I left, I drank a toast to you both in front of the mirror with a glass of Rhine wine, a Riesling, I opened the bottle especially, the rest will go to waste. So you can see how happy I am, wasting a good bottle of wine in order to drink one small, solitary morning toast."

  And having said that, he raised his eyebrows innocently, an innocence composed this time of a mixture of pride and feigned surprise.

  "What are you trying to tell me, then?"

  "Nothing in particular. I just wanted to be alone with you for a few moments, they won't miss us, once the ceremony's over we're not important any more, the wedding reception is for the guests not for those who're getting married or for those who organized it. It was a good idea coming here, wasn't it? I only wanted to ask you that one question: And now what? But you didn't answer."

  "Now? Nothing," I said. I was feeling slightly irritated by his attitude and anyway I wanted to return to Luisa's side and to my friends. In so far as I was in need of reassurance, I wasn't finding Ranz's company at all reassuring. In a way, it was just like my father to take me aside at the least opportune moment, in another, it was quite unlike him. It would have been more like him to have simply clapped me on the back and wished me good luck, although he'd have done so rhetorically and taken his time over it. He pulled up his socks before carefully crossing his long legs.

  "Nothing? What do you mean nothing? Come on, this is no way to begin, you must be able to think of something. You've left: it very late getting married and at last you have, or perhaps you don't realize that. If you're afraid of making me a grandfather, don't worry, I'm about the right age for the task."

  "Was that what you meant by 'And now what?"

  Ranz rather smugly patted his polar-white hair, as he did sometimes without realizing he was doing it. He smoothed it down or rather made as if to smooth it down, barely brushing it with the tips of his fingers, as if his unconscious intention was to smooth it down but as if the actual contact startled him and made him realize what he was doing. He always carried a comb with him but he never used it in public, even if the public in question was his son, the child who was no longer a child or who, in his eyes, continued to be so despite having used up half his life.

  "No, not at all, I'm in no hurry, nor should you be, I don't want to meddle but that's how I feel. I just want to know how you intend confronting this new situation, right now, at this very moment. That's all, it's just curiosity really."

  And he spread his hands out before me, like someone showing that he's carrying no weapons.

  "I don't know, I'm not confronting it in any particular way. I'll tell you later on. I think the very least I could expect from you is not to be asked that question, today of all days."

  I was leaning against the table, on it still lay the useless signatures of our last-minute witnesses. I stood up a little straighter, the first sign that I felt the conversation was over and I wanted to go back to the party; but he didn't join me in my gesture by putting out his cigarette or uncrossing his legs. For him, the conversation needed to go on a little longer. I thought that he must want to say something concrete to me, but didn't know how or wasn't sure that he wanted to. That was entirely like him, for he often forced others to answer questions he hadn't even asked or to discuss some subject that he hadn't mentioned, even if that subject was the one thing on his mind, beneath that striking head of hair white as talcum powder. I knew him too well to help him out.

  "The least you could expect," he said. "I don't think anything can be expected. I, for example, no longer expected you to get married. Only a year ago I would have laid bets to the contrary. In fact, I did do so with Custardoy, and with Rylands by letter, and I've lost a fair bit of money too, because here we are. The world is full of surprises and of secrets. We think we know the people close to us, but time brings with it more things that we don't know than things we do, comparatively speaking we know less all the time, there's always a greater area of shadow. Even if the illuminated area grows larger too, the shadows still win. I imagine you and Luisa have your secrets." He remained silent for a few seconds and, seeing that I didn't respond, added:

  "But, of course, you can only know about yours, because if you knew about hers they wouldn't be secrets."

  There was still a smile on Ranz's oddly defined lips, those lips identical to mine, although his had lost their colour and were invaded by vertical lines that rose up from his chin and from beneath the place where his moustache would be, the moustache he'd worn as a young man according to photos taken at the time, although I'd never seen him with one. His words seemed somehow malevolent (at first I thought he
must know something about Luisa and had waited until after the wedding to tell me), but his tone was different now, it wasn't even ambiguous. I don't think I'd be exaggerating if I described his tone of voice as helpless. It was as if he'd got lost shortly after he began to speak and now no longer knew how to get back to the path he originally set out on. I might help him, then again I might not. He was smiling in a friendly manner, a slim cigarette in one hand, burned down, with more ash than filter, he hadn't got rid of the ash for some time now, he probably refrained from putting it out in order not to increase his sense of helplessness. I picked up the ashtray and held it out to him and then he stubbed out the cigarette and rubbed his fingertips together, the burning filter smelled bad. He interlaced his fingers, which were large like the rest of his body and like his flour-white head of hair, they showed their age a little more, but only a little, not much, they were lined but were unmarked by age spots. As was his custom, he was smiling affably, almost pityingly now, though without a trace of mockery, his eyes were very clear — those eyes like plump drops of whisky or vinegar — we were more in the shade than in the light. As I said before, he wasn't an old man, he never was, but at that moment I saw that he'd aged, that is, I saw that he was afraid. There's a writer called Clerk or Lewis who wrote about himself after the death of his wife, and he began by saying: "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." Perhaps it was grief that I could glimpse in Ranz's smile, in my father's smile. Everyone knows that mothers cry and feel something like grief when their offspring marry, perhaps my father was feeling his own particular happiness and also the grief that my mother would have felt, my dead mother. A vicarious grief, a vicarious fear, a grief and a fear that came from another person whose face we'd both slightly forgotten, it's odd how the features of those who no longer see us and whom we can no longer see become blurred, out of anger or absence or attrition, or how they become usurped by their photographs fixed forever on a particular day, my mother, for example, isn't wearing her glasses, the reading glasses she tended to wear rather too often in her latter years, she's remained fixed in the picture I've chosen of her when she was twenty-eight years old, a woman younger than I am now, her face calm and a slightly resigned look in her eyes, which she did not, I think, normally have, her eyes were usually smiling like those of my Havana-born grandmother, her mother. The two of them used to laugh together, often, but it's also true that sometimes in the eyes of both of them I would glimpse a prolonged look of grief or fear, my grandmother would sometimes stop rocking in her rocking chair and sit gazing into space, her eyes dry and unblinking, like someone who's just woken up and can't quite remember where they are, sometimes she'd sit looking at the photographs or the painting of the daughter who'd disappeared from the world before I was born, she'd look for a minute or perhaps more, certainly without thinking, without even remembering, but feeling grief or retrospective fear. My mother also looked at her like that sometimes, at her distant sister, she'd interrupt her reading and take off her glasses, keeping one finger between the pages of the book so as not to lose her place and, holding her glasses in the other hand, she'd sit looking sometimes at nothing in particular and sometimes at the dead, at the faces she'd watched grow up but not grow old, three- dimensional faces that had grown flat, mobile faces that we suddenly become used to seeing only in repose, not them but their image, the living face of my mother would stop to look at them, her eyes made melancholy perhaps by the barrel-organ music that used to drift up from the street in Madrid during my childhood and which, when it started, always made everyone in the house stop for a moment, mothers and lazy or sick children and maids, who would look up and even lean out over the balcony or from the window in order to see again the same scene, a man with a tanned face wearing a hat and playing a barrel organ, a mechanical man who would interrupt the women's singing or would provide a channel for that singing and for a moment — or in my mother's case for more than a moment, for grief and fear are not fleeting emotions - would fill with melancholy the eyes of the people living in the house. Mothers and children and maids always reacted to that sound by looking up, raising their heads like animals, and they reacted the same way to the swooping whistle of the knife-grinders, the women wondering for a moment if the knives in the house were as sharp as they should be or if they should run down to the street with them, making a pause in their labours or their indolence to remember and to think about knife-blades, or perhaps becoming suddenly absorbed in their secrets, the secrets they kept and the secrets they suspected, that is those they knew about and those they didn't. And it was at that moment sometimes, when they raised their heads to listen to the mechanical music or to a repeated whistle that came advancing down the street, when their gaze would fall upon the pictures of those who were absent, half a lifetime spent glancing at eternally enigmatic photographs or paintings with fixed eyes or foolish smiles, and another lifetime, or half a lifetime, that of the other person, the son or the sister or the widower, receiving those same fixed, foolish glances in the photograph, which even the person looking at the photo cannot always remember when it was taken: my grandmother glancing at her dead daughter and my mother at her dead, supplanted sister; my father and I looking at her and myself now preparing myself to look at him, at Ranz, my father; and my beloved Luisa, the newlywed in the room next door, unaware that the photographs they've taken of us today will one day be the object of her glances, when she no longer has half her lifetime ahead of her and mine is over. But no one knows the order of the dead or of the living, no one knows who will be the first to feel grief or fear. Perhaps Ranz now embodied the grief and fear which had reappeared in his expression, smiling, compassionate and calm, and his now cigaretteless hands, the fingers interlaced and idle, and his socks pulled up so that not an inch of bare flesh was showing, flesh as old as that of Verum-Verum the Cow, fodder for photographs, in his patterned tie a little too wide for today's taste but the colours of which were perfectly matched, the immaculate knot also a little too large. He seemed comfortable sitting there, as if he were the owner of the Casino de Madrid rather than someone who'd hired it, but in a way he seemed uncomfortable too and I wasn't helping him to tell me what it was that was bothering him, what he'd decided to tell me - or had still not told me - on the day of my wedding when he'd taken me aside into that room next door to the party and placed one hand on my shoulder. Now I understood: it wasn't that he couldn't, it was superstition that was paralysing him, not knowing what might bring good luck and what bad, speaking or remaining silent, not remaining silent or not speaking, letting things follow their natural course without invoking them or deflecting them or intervening verbally to affect that course, verbalizing them or saying nothing, alerting the person to danger or not putting ideas in their head, sometimes the very people who warn us against certain ideas end up putting those ideas in our heads, they give them to us precisely because they warn us about them and make us think about things that would never have occurred to us otherwise.