Regarding the manuscript you hope to publish, you have asked me to give you permission to present it as the testimony to a life. If you insist, I have no objection. Even though as far as I’m concerned your book is still a novel. I read it as a novel. I did not see myself in your idealized protagonist, any more than I did in the relation with the husband. This relation has been sublimated, like all the characters. At the risk of disappointing you, I am far more ordinary—at least as an individual—than the Vima in the book. The scientist might eventually become admirable if she works at it. I haven’t reached that point. Ala was blinded by his love. Would he have continued to be so blind if he had known and seen my shadow side? But then, how could he have, I hid it so well myself. We all do, to a degree, I think.
To try and help you understand me, I’ll tell you briefly about myself. I was born into a lower-middle-class family. My mother was a teacher, my father an accountant. I was a studious child, I liked school, I worked hard, but no more than that. The discovery of my gift for mathematics dates from the time of my mother’s death. I lost her when I was eight years old. I was raised by my father, who never remarried. He cherished me, protected me, and encouraged me. But gradually I withdrew into myself. A sort of autism, due to absence. But while I was turning into an introverted little girl, I also became increasingly curious. I made up for the lack of a mother through a quest for knowledge. I interrogated the sky, where my mother was supposed to have found eternal rest. I wanted to understand the world beyond my immediate surroundings, there on solid ground. I was obsessed by shapes and space, and naturally by figures and numbers. My professors could see I was brilliant at math. I was not much older than ten when, without knowing it, I happened upon the golden ratio. How did I do that? While playing. My games were solitary. I would draw shapes—squares, rectangles, triangles. I measured them, and constructed mathematical diagrams with the few tools I had at my disposal. The multiplication tables and a compass, basically. Purely by chance I discovered the so-called golden rectangle, whose side lengths are in the golden ratio. It was by juxtaposing rectangles of varying sizes hundreds of times that I obtained the visual result that was so surprising. I aligned two rectangles along their base, one horizontally, the other vertically. Then I drew a diagonal from the first rectangle and prolonged it into the second. Result: the diagonal line joined the tops of the two rectangles. I was in a trance. I tried the same thing again with certain rectangular books and it worked. I measured the sides of these rectangles and intuitively understood that it was the ratio between the two measurements that gave me this result. But I didn’t know how or why. My father couldn’t explain the miracle to me. He took me to see one of his friends who was a math teacher at the high school. It was a memorable day for me. The professor explained that this sort of rectangle is known as a golden rectangle because, indeed, the proportion between the long side and the short side of the rectangle is the same as that between the entire rectangle and its largest part. In other words, it is the golden ratio that makes a golden rectangle. To his great surprise, I understood everything he explained because I had already guessed it, even if I hadn’t calculated it. He taught me how to do this: one plus the square root of five, divided by two. Everything became clear and a new world opened up to me. He had me take a test. At the end of this test he told my father, This little girl will go far. She’s gifted, very gifted. Not long after that, thanks to this professor, to whom I owe my vocation, I was enrolled free of charge at the school for gifted children in the capital. I have wonderful memories of the two years I spent at that school. During the day I learned, and as soon as it was dark I studied the sky, playing with figures. I calculated the distances between the stars of the Big and Little Dippers with the help of a compass and some information I found in a science magazine. I was never wrong. My world fell apart when the revolution came. I had just turned fourteen. The school for gifted children closed its doors. My father was transferred to the provinces. He sank into depression, and the country was thrown into a state of unrest. Increasingly, I found refuge in the embrace of the Milky Way, while I waited for better days. And so I found out that the reason the galaxies seem to curl upon themselves like rose petals has to do with the golden ratio. I surpassed the level of all the instructors at the only school for girls in the little provincial town where we were living. They were all newly hired, on the basis of ideological criteria. My father was killing himself working as a taxi driver after his day at the office so that he could buy my books and pay for me to have private lessons. I became a true autodidact. That was the situation at the time I celebrated my fifteenth birthday. I had reached the level of the math baccalaureate, but I couldn’t obtain it. I was expelled from high school, in spite of my grades—straight As in science—because I got an eliminatory F in ideological instruction. Naturally this F also disqualified me from the right to sit for the baccalaureate exam as an independent candidate.
This long preamble is to explain the circumstances in which I met Ala. I was desperate, but I hadn’t given up. Already for some time I had been thinking that marriage might be a way out, although I scarcely believed it would. Of all my suitors, not a single one would have been any help. The help I wanted was to be able to go on studying. When I met Ala, I immediately knew that here was my chance. I didn’t try to understand why I seemed to have so much power over him. But it was real, and completely different from the simple physical attraction which any man feels toward a desirable woman. How did I know that Ala would be the unconditional lover? It was more calculated than intuitive. From our first time alone together I knew I could get whatever I wanted from him. In addition to his physical attraction, another criterion which made him precious in my eyes was his future potential within the new regime. He was a soldier. He had been noticed at the front. He would be rising through the ranks fairly quickly. For me this was a guarantee of protection, and of the possibility that I might be able to go on with my studies under the best possible conditions. In a word, Ala and his position were the rampart I needed so badly if my projects were to succeed. There was no place in my life for the love with a capital “L” by which you set so much store. By the time I met Ala, calculating my probabilities where a predetermined life choice was concerned was more important than anything. Some people might qualify this behavior as purely cynical or opportunistic or who knows what else. Which would be wrong. As far as I am concerned, love—at least as it is understood by the great majority of individuals, and women in particular—should not have the vital importance that is granted to it. Given the choice, I would never have married and I would never have had any children. I would have dealt with my instincts by means of passing relationships. But such dreams were unthinkable, impossible, forbidden. In that country even more than anywhere else. A woman who dares to think such things leaves herself open to the worst consequences. I confess that if someone more interesting than Ala had come along, I would not have hesitated for a moment. But given the circumstances, I could not afford the luxury of letting this chance slip. One’s vocation is founded on a projection into the future. Determination alone is not enough. The environment has to be favorable. I knew that at the first opportunity I was going to have to leave the country. With or without Ala. But I would proceed by stages. Ala never suspected a thing about my most secret intentions. Either before the marriage or afterwards. There was no point giving him any reason to worry. I had no intention of cheating on him, or abandoning him, or wronging him in any way. I let him love me. And I returned his love through my presence alone.
The heroine of your novel lives in a space-time of her own. You have done a very good job explaining how she manages to disregard everything going on around her, even though you justify it in an incredibly romantic way. My distance with regard to emotional outpourings is structural. My vocation is egocentric. I may seem inconceivably cold to people like yourself or Ala, who can burn like torches for love, for a cause, for an ideal. I have always rejected any feelings of belonging
to a nation, a religion, a given place, or even a family. My homeland is science. When Ala used to talk to me so enthusiastically about defending the Fatherland, or the strength that faith can give, or his concern for the underprivileged, I wanted to burst out laughing. Like at the theater. But I held myself back. Regarding his work, as long as I needed access to the Army’s observatory, I went along with it. I urged him to resign as soon as the conditions were ripe for us to leave and go abroad. The dissertation advisor for my doctorate by correspondence had assured me there was a position waiting for me. Ala knew nothing about any of this. But he suspected something. He knew me well enough to have an idea about my ambitions. Only abroad could I have a career. I think that unconsciously he was afraid of this. He thought I would slip away from him. He was right, and wrong at the same time. I had always been slipping away from him, even though I was physically by his side. And there was no reason for that to change. Physically we got along well. There was good chemistry between us. Which is what drew me to him, above all. Other than that, I did not really pay much attention to what he was doing. I wasn’t really interested. When he claimed that he had resigned, I was very happy indeed. So happy. The timing was perfect. We could leave. What could be easier for a businessman than to travel around as he pleased? I could never have imagined what actually lay behind his front of a job. I didn’t have time to look into it any closer, even though a number of details, obvious clues, should have warned me that something was up. My own space-time, the silvery poetry of the heavens, occupied me entirely at that period in my life. I was preparing my doctoral dissertation. And the fact is, I trusted him. Now I know I was wearing a blindfold. Please forgive me for using this expression, but there is nothing innocent about it. I will get back to this.
My deep passion has always been and will remain astrophysics. No one, not even my children . . . could replace it. In short, my need for love to exist, to survive—in both senses of the term—has never had anything to do with Ala’s. Instinct is in the DNA of all mammals. Of course I love my children. I will bring them up as best I can. But the love I feel for them is not a priority, nor is it in conflict with what constitutes the driving force of my life, the competitive spirit of research, a thirst for deciphering the fabulously complex phenomena of the universe. Orgasms in my case are above all cerebral. I will never understand women who talk about breast-feeding as the most supreme of pleasures. I hope that with these brutal confessions I will only disappoint the woman in you, and not the novelist. In your letter you confess to what transpires in your novel: your jealousy of the Colonel’s wife, or rather, of the love she inspired in him. We do not inspire love, I don’t believe that. Sometimes we elicit it when the other partner is in sync with us. Feelings are the result of a mental disposition. It is a strictly personal matter one keeps to oneself. Ala was afflicted by lovesickness. He had a visceral need to love beyond all bounds. The Commander, the Fatherland, his wife, his children, the underprivileged . . . He adulated them, and alternated between them, depending on the circumstances. I’m convinced he would have loved another woman with the same intensity if he and I had not met. He came upon me at the right moment. Happenstance. He needed to escape. I was his great escape. Indeed, I am convinced that love has no axiomatic reality. Which does not prevent me from telling you how much I admire your ability to love, to transcend. You surpassed yourself, you went beyond anything a human body can bear, in order to remain faithful to your concept of love. But this superhuman, or inhuman challenge—is it not a matter for one’s private life?
I am in your debt, and that is why I have been pressing the point where all this is concerned. I saved your life, and you rehabilitated me in my own eyes. I cannot find a better term to make myself clear. Now we are even. Thanks to you, I can accept my shadow side and my failings. I watched the CD several times, of our crimes toward you and so many other innocent people. I can say it without trembling, our crimes, even though, for years, I distanced myself from everything that I eventually reproached Ala with so violently. I was at odds with the situation and did not want to admit it. It was only after his departure that I had to face facts. Of the two of us, who was more to blame? The young devoted soldier caught in the tyrants’ vice, or the scientist cloistered on her Olympus, refusing to see what was there before her eyes? An Olympus that Ala destroyed with a CD. The deep reason for my rage against my husband, which you render so well in your novel, is too shameful to admit. Why did he have to wrench me from my ivory tower just before we were due to depart? It was a question of his own survival. This constant need for an inconsolable love, a betrayed utopia. If I have an experience of soul-searching, it is something that I owe to you. It did not transform me. One can never change radically. But I won’t lie to myself anymore, nor will I lie to my children. What is prodigiously human—not to say monstrously human—in Vima 455 cancels out the monstrosity, pure and simple, of the murderers at Ravine: that is a message I shall not forget. It is you I have to thank for enabling me to see what human beings can attain if they look inside themselves. I could never have imagined that a few inches of ground in the most sordid of prisons could elevate a person to the same degree as the constellations of the Milky Way. I have my work cut out for me, to meditate on my flaws and to reconsider the way in which all the world’s believers are certain of a human purpose, something I have never paid any attention to before now, or very little. Science does not recognize either right or wrong. Before meeting you through that terrifying CD, I did not recognize any kind of truth other than the relative truth of science. Now, thanks to you, I can conceive of the complexity of the mystery of beings, the way that mystics experience it. Love is its axiom, and Utopia its motor. One day a poet friend told me that true meetings are merely instants, the fleeting magic which we call happiness, just to give meaning to the word.
Finally, as regards the parcel, it was handed to me at the airport. It is your husband’s former lawyer who gave it to me. I took it. I trusted him. That’s all I know about it. I will let you know as soon as I have the dates for my trip to Europe. You are in my thoughts, dear Vima, and I will see you soon.
Vima folds the sky blue silk veil, and places it next to the shoebox. Her hands begin to tremble when she sees the pair of little red boots in the box. A rolled sheet of paper, tied with a blue ribbon, is wedged between the boots. She picks it up, holding her breath. The poem that Del wrote to her years ago has been typed up and is followed by a sentence written in the hand of his eternal love.
The emotion is unbearable. She grabs the boots. Hurries down the stairs, barefoot, and enters the café on the corner of the wide boulevard. She orders a double cognac and drinks it in one go. The waiter who brings it to her hears her murmuring incomprehensibly. “I miss you, one grows weary of an apple, of an orange, of life sometimes. I cannot do without them, your feet, they’re so small, stamping the floor with anger. I ate my apple, drank from the orange, life goes on, when will you return, with your little feet?” Vima recites her love poem, over and over.
The waiter brings her another cognac, and hears her saying to him, absently, He’s asking me to forgive him for not being here with me, and he’s telling me he replaced the sandals with little boots to keep me warm, that’s what he wrote. I should tell my namesake that love is the only axiomatic reality, the diagonal line to the divine ratio connecting kindred spirits. The mystery of our being is God’s only refuge for when he feels like letting go.
Her eyes brim with tears but they do not spill. The pale, barefoot woman squeezes a pair of little red boots to her heart, then puts them on and slips out the door.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fariba Hachtroudi decided to leave her home country following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. After relocating to Sri Lanka in 1981, she taught at the University of Colombo for two years and studied Teravada Buddhism. Hachtroudi then pursued journalism and eventually went on to write a full-length non-fiction account about her revisit to Iran after 30 years in exile c
alled The Twelfth Imam’s a Woman? In addition to writing, Hachtroudi also leads a foundation called MoHa for the advocacy of women’s rights, education, and secularism.
The Man Who Snapped His Fingers Page 12
