A Dream of Horses & Other Stories (9 page)

XI

Rest a moment dear storyteller, move with caution, else the thread may slip past your fingers and defile that which you have persevered to present with a restrained elegance. So take my advice and inhale deeply. Allow yourself for once to think of that night in Paris when the moonshine entered the two fastened bodies and cast its spell.

We reach the room in half unconsciousness. I totter about to the balcony. As I open the windows, the light filters in; on the wall behind her a Monet replica shimmers in its caress. A pleasant draught is blowing into the room. I know I must not let this moment pass. It will haunt me forever, I will feel its throbs far into time, it will break me bit by bit. But I let it pass, I touch that skin, I raise the hem.

Inside her is a desert and I slither like a snake in it. I look into her eyes; there is no life in them. She is staring through me straight into the void. A sudden panic makes me retreat. But she cuts it off halfway, tightening her legs around me. I am in her like a sword in its sheath. She moves and she takes me with her. I feel her hot breath on my brow and at last I fall into the sea.

When I awake, she is in the balcony, silhouetted against those facades, each a twin of the other. When she turns to look at me, the rays break into smithereens at her shoulder.

We went to Montparnasse to eat in a restaurant located in an alley off Boulevard Raspail. The sun did not reach into it and the shade emphasized the sky above. Somebody had hung out underwear to dry, and we had to duck quite low to cross to the other side. In times past the place had been frequented by not a few writers and artists. As was expected it was popular with both students and tourists, and attracted them in large numbers. Although full at that hour, we somehow managed to find a table near the counter. Behind it was a painting and a calendar. The painting was the work of some Cubist – a triangular face with
both eyes on the same side, one below the other. The calendar was a few months behind. Waiters crisscrossed past the tables and the air was full of voices and the clatter of knives and forks. It was also full with the smell of buns and coffee.

Later we went to the library at Sorbonne. From its central courtyard, the dome glowed a bright purple in the noon sun. My task there was simple but exhausting: I wished to collect all of Sartre’s love letters! And do what with them? I wasn’t sure of that. Yet I busied myself with this absurd project. In two hours I had amassed nearly sixty. I was tired and further prospecting didn’t excite me very much. I left it at that.

I join her. She has been reading from Proust. Outside in the street she tells me why she named me so: It’s your eyes. The same round, slightly protuberant eyes.

That evening Amelio is playing at the jazz bar in St-Germain. He is on a trumpet, and a woman is lilting out words in a deep coppery voice. The song goes on for a while. After it is over, Amelio walks up to us and asks us to follow. With a glass of wine swinging between his fingers, he takes us up on the terrace. In a corner against the parapet, his knees fold and he sinks to the ground. Then he removes from his pocket a pack of cannabis that makes his eyes twinkle.

XII

How during those days the city spread its arms and how gladly we ran into them. We walked past those tombs in Père Lachaise. We lunched beneath the modern high-rises at the Grande Arche. We dined in Place Vendôme. We went to the Louvre. Under a chestnut in Bois we lay watching an airplane dash off the name ‘L O L A’ in the sky.

On one such evening, lost like a dream, we were walking up the Champs-Elysées when my sight fell on a beautiful silk scarf in a shop window. At once, I made a present of it to her and she
wore it round her neck with something of an imperial air. We took the metro to Trocadéro and, walking through the complex, soon reached Pont d’léna from where you could see the ivory dome of Sacré-Coeur towering above the city at the far end. Below, the pier was brimming with activity as tourists embarked and disembarked the many ferries that took them along the river.

Bateaux Parisiens? I point to the boat. She nods her pretty head.

Then I had to go to Frankfurt to attend a writers’ fair. It is important to be there, my publisher had told me. What could my books say to a reader in Germany, I thought, when they had said nothing elsewhere? I didn’t have a good feeling from the start. The weather would only confirm this.

Heavy, bituminous clouds trailed low over Frankfurt and it rained almost all the time of my stay. When it didn’t, a dense mist descended over the city. At night the sky over my hotel in Sachsenhausen was dark and luminous by turn. I longed to get back to Paris. And so I was only too glad when my plane landed there after two sombre days.

Finally I got to my place. Climbing up to my room, I began to wonder why the concierge had handed me the keys. Maybe she went out for a walk, I said to myself. The room had a stale air. The French windows were shut fast. I opened them and went out into the balcony. I stood there awhile watching the activity in the street. Slowly a suspicion had been taking hold of me, and its full blow turned me to stone for a moment. I ran into the room and leapt towards the cupboard. The tinkling of empty hangers resonated through my fast-hollowing heart.

The concierge was unable to help. He seemed even more baffled than me to be questioned like this. What else could I do, I set out to find her.

Once in the street, I knew not where to look. I began walking hurriedly but aimlessly. Spiders of anxiety were crawling down from the sky and weaving a frosty, oppressive web round me.

Amelio had told me in passing that he often played chess in the afternoon at a certain café on Rue de Lappe. I located it without much difficulty (instinctive faculties, it seems, were working with a miraculous lucidity). What relief the sight of him gave me! Sitting in one corner of the café, he was lost in an empty chessboard in front of him. Next to it, from a mahogany box, a black bishop was struggling to escape. A dense concoction of pain and anxiety had completely filled me up by then. I sank in the seat opposite, sweat collected on my temples and on the nape of my neck. My voice sounded not my own. He looked at me, but did not see my anguish. He was lost to some conundrum. I was beside myself, yet I asked him about it. It turned out that he had lost a game after months and was now pursuing the pieces in his mind’s eye to their imminent doom. All along he kept caressing the bishop’s crown that jutted out of the box. After this he rolled his eyes and broke into a soliloquy of sorts that, given my state, threw me into delirium: The game is a labyrinth…of unfathomable depths…It is a mirror of our lives…like chessmen, we move through days and nights…forever prisoners of glowing passions and dark reflections…

I didn’t know how to interrupt him. When I got my chance, I said something. The words felt heavy against my tongue and seemed to burn holes in it. My mouth was dry, as if glazed with sand. At first, he absently stared at me, but then asked me where we had met before and if I’d not like a cup of coffee, for he was surely ordering one for himself.

By that time my head was throbbing madly and my face was flushed. A lone tear had burst on my cheek. The wind took it away leaving behind a prickling sensation. A sudden drowsiness overwhelmed me, forcing me to halt at a stall for a sip of water. From a billboard across the road, a model in a white blouse and a short skirt wearing a most distasteful shade of lipstick smiled at me.

I reached my room and, tired and depressed, sank into a deep
sleep. I woke up late next morning. I hadn’t eaten in a long time, yet felt only a slight hunger. I took a shower and had some soup at a restaurant. I retraced our movements of the previous days but she was nowhere. Slowly the anguish I had felt the day before changed into a mere heaviness of the heart.

A few days later I was walking up the Montparnasse cemetery when I saw an old man collecting dead leaves in a wheelbarrow. Watching him I could barely breathe. A terrible pain rose from the pit of my stomach. Tears of which I was unaware stretched over my eyes to form a film so dense that the world appeared nebulous, throwing me into a sort of white blindness.

At eight in the evening, the early September sun was a smudge in the sky and the Seine shimmered in its dying light. I had been sitting on a bench lost in the infinite ephemeral folds of water. The din of automobiles behind me did not trouble me. To my left, the Tower stretched its legs and watched over the city. I knew that Paris had nothing further to give me, that my stay was at an end.

XIII

Maybe all this never happened. Maybe it’s part of a myth coming to me at birth. But why then have I held so close to my chest this slow roving sadness which knows not its own source and takes form unannounced, like clouds that build up in a clear sky from nowhere – this melancholy which has all but made me impervious to love or nostalgia?

I could write no more. Instead I took to walking each day for hours. In the woods that shone a deep green in the summer sun, I found new paths to the stream, and here I rested, dipping my legs in its plashing water. Emptiness gradually filled me and, for long periods, I’d gaze at my reflection in the water which the blue fish cut through with their sharp movements. They also cut through the dead skin of my soles, providing a free pedicure.

Finally two of my books had come. I thought of showing them to the old man. At our last meeting, he had gifted me a book by Carl Spitteler.
Olympian Springs
. An English translation from the time of the War. I decided to go the next day.

That night I had a curious dream. I saw myself running to the library, a miniature book in hand which was a torch too. It was intolerably heavy like a piece of a dying star, and soon my arm hurt from the burden. In its light I saw that I was moving on a giant chessboard. Above, the black arc was collecting blacker clouds. The wind had slowly turned into a gale, and the ghosts of trees performed a terrible dance in it. When I reached the clearing, the library had come apart from its base and was tilting over the abyss…

The swallow had flown in from the open window and was now perched on the desk. From there it watched me move, but soon jumped over to the window sill and flew off.

Late that morning, I went up to the library. The wind was heavy and it loudly whistled through the building’s cavities. My shirt’s collar fluttered madly in it. A light mist lingered on treetops and the sun glowed indifferently. But the building was there, solidly holding its ground. Inside, the old man was perched on a ladder, inspecting the spines in the topmost shelf of a cabinet. I shouted a hello. After this, what happened could have come from a movie, could have occurred in a dream. He started, lost his bearing, and came crashing to the ground. Shock numbed me. By the time I rushed to his side, he lay on the floor motionless, neck twisted to one side. A few drops of blood still trickled from his ear.

I was on the floor, transfixed, stupidly looking at him. The attendant came running from the kitchen. Then things happened very fast.

I remember being at the funeral that very evening. No elaborate rites were deemed necessary, for none knew of the man’s religious inclinations. Three men had dug a small grave at
one end of the garden next to the church. Roses and lilacs decorated the body wrapped in country linen. Those about me had the look of men merely concerned about performing their duty fittingly. I tossed my books into the grave.

I decided to leave soon. Grief was beginning to break the walls again. I busied myself in my work. It became an exhaustion, an obsession. I worked for hours on end, neglected my food, nearly ceased my walks.

When I hadn’t spoken with anyone in over a week, I thought of going to the bar. The house-servant had returned to his village to attend a marriage in the family. Yet meals always appeared at the right time, though I never once saw another soul in the cottage.

The manager, too, was on leave and had gone down to the plains. I don’t know why but I felt defeated. Two men were drinking beer in a corner, talking of past times and laughing aloud. I had a couple of drinks and went my way. For the next few days, I avoided the club.

A slow rising mist had come to drown the hills. The sun shone intermittently, vaguely, uninterestingly. The wind carried with it a chill which one wouldn’t have called pleasant. I had progressed much during this time with the book, yet I didn’t know how to end it. I decided to leave it in the drawer for some days.

Then one day I thought of the library, of the tombal silence that must now cover its walls. I was curious to learn what had become of it. Had it been abandoned like the church to the corrosive forces of time and seclusion? No, it was too early.

As I climbed up to the library, a faint orangey smell reached me. Just before the clearing, a tree had sprouted bright red flowers that made it look lavish. I approached the building from the side. Pigeons had built a nest in its cupola and they fluttered impatiently round it. But the place had a stillness as if it was even now in mourning. Then the silhouette of a woman came into view. Sitting on the steps of the library, her arms cradling her legs, her
chin resting on her knees, she was observing the ruined façade of the church. A traveller, I thought, as I moved towards her.

XIV

Dreams and reality are but different chapters of the same book. Wasn’t it Schopenhauer who said so? That book through which at times you drift serenely, while at other times you tramp with thoughts tied to your step like large, prehistoric stones closes one day. Then, as one chapter merges into the other, loses its distinctiveness, you begin to see the true, enduring wisdom of its words.

Astray I had wandered in these mists for long looking for a place to rest, to relieve my burden. But the mists did not depart. They collected around me and solidified like nebular dust. How much further? I cried despairingly. Whither do I belong?

I am barely a few steps away when the traveller turns towards me. Her face, tanned golden, is mysteriously elegant, smooth forehead, hair straight and lustrous that curls behind the ears. Her gaze pierces through me and I come to look into those clear brown eyes.