SUNDAY DINNERS
A long time ago, before the war, generals, good friends of my grandfather’s, used to attend my grandmother’s dinners, she remembers. Those days are over; a lot of time has passed. The generals of today couldn’t care less about congenial Sunday dinners; they sit in their offices, clicking on screens, they don’t seem to care about my grandmother and her famous stuffed duck. Understandably, these days, my grandmother can’t just sit around waiting for the next war. Frantically she hoards the ingredients for stuffed duck in her cellar, her deep freezer is full of headless bodies in plastic wrap, she’s bought an oil generator because it’s common knowledge that electricity is one of the first things to go in wartime, and the oil should last for a few Sunday dinners at least. On Sundays, my grandmother calls up her grandchildren, one by one. “Will you come when the war starts?” she asks. “Will you come?” We explain that there could be complications, there could be roadblocks, there could be shooting, someone might even be drafted. “I’m not eating my duck by myself,” grandmother sobs into the receiver on her end, “not all by myself, dinners like that make no sense. I hate war, I hate wars like this, wars used to be comme il faut in the old days, they didn’t interfere with my stuffed duck.” Those days are over, Grandma, we explain patiently, it’s all mixed up now, no one knows what it will be like when it happens. Grandmother’s whimpers slowly subside, we put down the receivers and go over to our closets, concerned, wanting to make sure that everything is in place, the weapons all loaded and the safeties all off, ready, we must be ready now, nobody knows when it will happen, when it happens.
QED
“So you’re saying you’ve traveled a lot,” says the woman I met yesterday, three hours and quite a few drinks ago.
“A lot,” I say. I have, actually.
“You must be used to everything then, nothing can come as a surprise anymore,” she says.
“Nothing whatsoever,” I say securely, “I’m used to absolutely everything.” Okay, more or less.
“So you’re saying that,” she says, “if that kid by the bar stripped, if she dropped all her clothes on the floor, that would be something totally ordinary for you, something you’ve seen hundreds of times?”
I look at the kid. She’s cute all right, not wearing much, but too drunk to do much of anything, she can barely hold on to the bar. The only trick that girl’s likely to pull is falling over.
“Oh, that would just break me up,” I say superciliously. “Because, you know, there are limits, I’m a decent man, there are things I can’t stand, this rampant nudity everywhere, it’s really disgusting—” I’m getting into the part now, just a little more and I’ll end up believing myself.
“Oh come on,” she says. “It’s just skin, it’s no big deal. Look.”
She pulls up her shirt. She has nothing underneath it, nothing but—
I can’t look, though it’s a pleasant sight, but—everyone can see! Is she nuts? How can they just carry on drinking, how can the guy behind the bar go on rinsing out glasses while this woman here…Is this normal for them? Does she do this regularly? With a different guy every time?
She gives a mock smile, only turning up the corners of her mouth.
When I calm down a little, when my eyes stop flitting all over the place and I stop blushing, she gives me a penetrating look: “So, of all the places you’ve visited, which was your favorite?”
MELTING POINT
Pressing the stop button on the tape recorder, she was nervous. Legend had it that he’d slept with every woman who attended his famous pottery class, even those who didn’t care for men, even those who didn’t care for anyone. What would happen now that they’d done the interview? How would he make his move? His swelling ceramics bulged towards her, she felt she couldn’t think straight with all those exposed, polished curves around. Legend had it that she’d never slept with anyone, not even the people who never gave interviews to anyone, the people who never gave interviews to anyone but her.
Smiling, he said: “I really enjoy listening to you, you know.”
Aha, here we go. “You—you listen to the radio?”
“It’s quite lonesome here in the studio for the most part—” Getting personal.
“—and I’m always so happy when I can fill the room with such a sensuous voice…like yours.” Do you really think I’m as easy as all the others?
“The thing is, I’m rather lonely.” Sure, and I really feel for you, shithead.
“I’ve had a lot of women, you know—” I know, I know, they all know.
“—but none of them turned out to be the right one.” Now he’s going to say, “Until I met you!”
“You’re just the opposite, I hear. There haven’t been many—”
Haven’t been many? Who on earth could he have heard about?
“—so I’m sure that when you find one, it’ll be the right one for you.”
Now he’s going to say, “Are you sure it isn’t me?”
“Well, it was nice of you to come by. See you around. Good-bye.”
She stood in the street, listening to the recording, smart questions, evasive answers, and couldn’t believe it.
That was it? Just that?
She went back and said:
“I’m sorry. Something went wrong. The tape is blank. We’ll have to give it another try.”
LET’S SAY THAT
Let’s say that you’re kissing a strange girl. Yes, things like that do happen. Let’s say that you’d gone to a bar, you’d drunk even more than usual, let’s say you hadn’t gone along with your colleagues this time, remembering your wife sneering as you picked up your suitcase: “Do all these meetings have to end up in a strip joint? Couldn’t you go, I don’t know, pick up used needles around the train station instead?” So you’d thought of her and told your colleagues you wouldn’t be coming with them today, and then you’d ended up in this bar. And when this girl joined you at your table because all the other seats were taken, it didn’t feel wrong. And when you’d paid for the drinks and she thanked you and lightly touched your arm, it didn’t feel wrong. And when you leaned close to her and spoke into her ear because it was getting noisier and noisier and her skin was nearer and nearer, it didn’t feel wrong. You thought: if you look down into an abyss, there’s a force that pulls you in, you can’t help it, there’s nothing wrong with that. But when you caressed her knee, sort of inadvertently, and then a bit more and a bit higher, you felt that there might be something there, something possibly slightly wrong. That things might not be what they seem.
Sure, you’d read that funny dating-advice book. How can you tell the gender of your date in advance? In men, the ring finger is longer than the index finger, the knuckles are hairy, the Adam’s apple is prominent, the shoulders are broader than the hips. That sort of thing. But the bar is dark. Too dark. And you don’t know if perhaps something might be terribly wrong.
These things happen, things that are terribly wrong. Your wife doesn’t like you going to strip clubs, you think. But there, in a strip club, things are clear. They are what they look like. Everything’s in plain sight. You’re told the prices at the bar. But what about now? What now? You reach for your cell phone. No, your colleagues won’t give you advice, they’ll laugh at you, they’ll say: “Go for it, go the whole nine yards. If you can’t tell the difference it doesn’t matter anyway.” But it does matter. There is definitely a difference. Who can you call? What would your wife say if you called and said: “I’m not at a strip club, and I’m not picking up used needles either, I’m kissing someone and I’m not sure—”
No, this isn’t acceptable. That’s why the warm lips moving up your neck fill you with dread: it’s nearly closing time, and maybe even then they won’t turn up the lights, maybe you’ll just both rise to leave and probably that’s when that little question will be posed: “Coming with me?” What do you say then? There are, as always, two options. But which one’s the right one? You wish you were in a strip club with
your friends, you’d know what to say, you’d say: “Check, please!” and leave, everything would be all right. When they asked you if you were coming along, you should have said: yes. Soon now the same question might get asked. And what are you going to say?
MARKS
All my lovers give me bookmarks. They seem to think I must read a lot. I put all the marks into the same book, the one I never open. When I can’t sleep at night I think about how I should, how I ought to open it and see what I’ve marked. What would a story made up of only my marked pages be like? I never do, though. Perhaps I don’t—or so I think when the night feels just a little too long—because whatever this story might be like, it would be about its being all over already, and about the impossibility of adding any new marks. About there not having been any sense in reading this story in the first place. Because it’s all happened before. That’s why I just look at the tops of the bookmarks peeking out of the book. Thinking.
TRANSLATED FROM SLOVENIAN BY TAMARA M. SOBAN
[SPAIN: CASTILIAN]
JULIÁN RÍOS
Revelation on the Boulevard of Crime
Our sulfur-scented scene is set in Paris among the marvels of the Romantic era, amid all the attractions and the crowds of curiosity-seekers who flocked to the Boulevard of Crime—or, as it’s now known (melodramatically enough; perhaps in honor of its many theaters), the Boulevard du Temple; Aparicio, however, didn’t hear the story until a little more than a century later, in 1969, as he was returning from London on the train, on the leg of the journey between Calais and Paris, as he was trying to photograph the dawn cloud-forests in the sky outside, through his compartment’s tiny windows, when his traveling companion first broke his silence.
The stranger spoke in English, spoke in dreams—or so it appeared to Aparicio at first. Later he would come to understand that the stranger was speaking a perfect, if somewhat hesitant, and thoroughly old-fashioned, French. The story he told was equally strange, mixing extraordinary events with the most mundane details imaginable. It was in the peculiar atmosphere of their compartment—almost like a confessional—that Aparicio admitted to the stranger that he wasn’t a photographer, at least not in the usual sense. Still, because he was just finishing a degree in radiology, you might say he was a photographer of interiors. The stranger, dressed in a dark oversized coat, had propped his feet on the seat across the way. When he spoke, he didn’t change position. He neither gestured nor cocked his head, but simply remained in this virtually horizontal pose. His long face stayed in shadow, making it difficult for his traveling companion to judge his age. Perhaps he’s no older than me, thought Aparicio, who at that time was around thirty, tall and bony; and who, after some consideration, thought that he could discern a certain resemblance between his body and the other—the stranger’s—stuck in the same compartment. The stranger unfolded his story slowly, lingering at the most unusual places…or so it seemed to his listener.
Aparicio repeated the whole tale to me the following summer, imitating the stranger’s labored, though somehow urgent voice, as we were on call one night at Saint Mary’s hospital in London. I told the story myself on the eve of a new millennium to Delsena in his studio in Paris. Throughout my narration, Delsena listened without blinking, without moving, adopting the relaxed posture of someone listening to a tall tale by the light of a campfire.
As I talked, I noticed how the white hair and dark skin of the photographer Delsena blended with the chiaroscuro of his studio—which is on Rue Daguerre—and was duplicated again, as if in a negative, by the painting hanging over the mantle of the fireplace, a painting by Mons, the tenebrist.
What Doctor Aparicio heard on the train that early morning required a certain suspension of disbelief, as it was a tale that left itself open to all sorts of criticism and conjecture—not least that it was the result of drugs, delirium, or outright fabrication. Nonetheless, thanks to Delsena, we were able to ascertain a number of years later that the events in question did indeed take place, on the Boulevard of Crime, in the afternoon hours of a splendid early May in 1838.
The protagonist of our story was a budding actor, though at one time or another he had also been a playwright, musician, painter, and had even experimented with several different branches of science. He was an indecisive young man, convinced that he would find success and a place in history no matter what discipline he turned his hand to. The only problem was, he couldn’t decide on a path.
Be number one in whatever you do. This was his personal motto, his mission—instilled in him since birth.
And it was with this motto in mind that he directed his steps through the fragrant flower market on the Plaza del Château d’Eau (now called la République) on his way to the crowded Boulevard, struggling to control his impatience as he walked, contemplating the brilliant future that awaited him.
He paused before a large mirror hanging next to the door of a café, studying his artificially elongate figure and making sure that his suit still gleamed like new under the early spring sun.
He walked a few more paces and then, stopping suddenly, pulled out a handkerchief and bent down to wipe some dirt off his shoes. It was then that an old man, wearing a worn, checkered vest, stepped out from behind a water pump and sank to his knees in front of the young man. He then took our protagonist’s right foot in his hands and it seemed for an instant that he was about to beg for mercy; what he did, however, was simply place the young man’s foot on a black box adorned with gold ornaments and take out a large can of shoe polish that likewise gleamed in the sunlight. He promised to make the young Monsieur’s shoes glisten like the glory of Solomon.
The bootblack began to practice his magic, blending his polish with saliva, rubbing back and forth, back and forth as the minutes stretched on and twelve o’clock passed, and yet the old man continued to daub at the young man’s heels, even revisiting the places he’d already polished; meanwhile, with his hands at his back and his right foot balanced on the box like a statue, the young man became engrossed in the coming and going of the fiacres and cabrioles, the multicolored parade of ladies and gentlemen, women with small dogs, children with hoops, decorated soldiers, vendors who cried Voilá le plaisir, beggars and dentists.
The young man had plenty of time. Later he had an appointment to meet with Frédérick Lemaitre at the Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques, who would arrange his debut as a captain of industry in the sequel to the adventures of Robert Macaire, and could even set him up as a a playwright—that is, if he wanted to talk to the celebrated actor about his sketch for a proposed play to be entitled A Visit to Beau Brummel (about the famous ex-arbiter of fashion, now spending his final, miserable days in an asylum in Caen).
In order to secure a role in the revue Les Folies Dramatiques and introduce himself to Lemaitre, the young man had had to submit himself to an affair with an infatuated grisette, a vile vaudevillian who called herself a ballerina, but who had both connections and influence. (You know what they say: Lemaître bien vaut la maîtresse…) Even after so many years, in that train compartment which resembled a confessional, the stranger still remembered that she was blonde and slight; that she jumped for joy whenever she received a present; that she had danced with spirited elegance in a dress made of rose percale. Her name was Rosette and she smelled of the rose water sold by a perfumist in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. At the same time, he couldn’t remember her frequent exclamation, Hélas!, nor any of the verses he’d composed to immortalize her.
He had other projects, of course—something in the sciences—though I’d prefer not to mention that quite yet.
By the time he reached his thirtieth birthday, he’d still been unable to settle down, was still pulled in various directions—he obsessed about mechanical laws, about celestial bodies, about terrestrial formations; his restless genius continued to encourage him to set his feet on several paths at once. He pursued various arts and explored several branches of science, because—as I’ve said—he was also gifted in this area
.
A few years earlier he’d spent some time as a pensionnaire in the Villa Médicis and had vacillated between painting and the violin—he’d studied the latter under his increasingly disconcerted master, Ingres—but had soon realized that he would never be the best painter, nor violinist, in Rome; and, anyway, he had little chance by way of either discipline of paying off his debt to a certain young woman with certain cravings and her moneylending husband. As such, he decided to move back to France and follow in his father’s footsteps by enrolling himself in the military school of Saint-Cyr, near Versailles. It wasn’t long before he left this school, however, because—according to a gypsy who read palms and played the mandolin out in front of the cafés on the boulevard—his day of glory hadn’t yet arrived, and, moreover, would never arrive via the military. Your lifeline’s too long for an adventurer of that type, she pronounced in the garden of Café Turc as he tried to remove his hand from her grasp. And anyway, he hadn’t followed in his father’s footsteps with much conviction—since his father had never actually known he was going to be a father: the man had been promoted to grenadier captain during the Battle of Friedland, where eight thousand of his comrades lost their lives, only to die of typhus at the gates of Warsaw two months later.
Although more people die by the scalpel than the sword, occasionally he regretted abandoning his medical studies after the disillusionment he’d experienced when he couldn’t heal the people dying of cholera during the cruel April of 1832. Along with his indefatigable colleague, Labrunie, he had worked tirelessly day and night. He could still remember their endless debates, the way they’d argued over actresses and the daily news, how they’d always returned to the theme of Dr. Faustus and Mephisto, to Rosicrucians and mystical transubstantiation. In vain Labrunie had tried to bring him back to reason with help from Holbach, La Mettrie, Helvétius, and other materialists and encyclopedists. Dry theories, he’d reply, theories only fit for the fire. And then he’d return the discussion to the pact Faust made with the devil, how he signed the contract with a single drop of his own blood. What nonsense, though, to waste a piece of paper on a pact with the devil, he’d thought. Selling something that doesn’t exist to someone who doesn’t exist. There’s only one eternity open to us mortals: posterity. And Aparicio imitated how his traveling companion had lingered over every syllable of that word. Glory is the sun of the dead, he’d recited. You have to strive to be the best at what you do. He’d repeated the words then as he’d repeated them to his stern tutor, as he’d repeated them distantly to his distant mother, totally absorbed by her devotions. You have to be number one at what you do and then you’ll be remembered forever. This made perfect sense. He didn’t regret that he’d spent his entire inheritance—it’s too bad it was so insignificant—on this quest for glory. The goal is to remain when everything around us has vanished, he thought as he considered the crowds passing by on the Boulevard. He’d gladly trade his poor soul for enduring fame. The transaction wouldn’t cause him the least inconvenience.
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 32
