Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (13 page)

I.
The name of T
HELONIOUS
would remain in the memory of generations to come, like that of Casanova de Seingalt
⁵
who visited Saint Petersburg in 1764. A fragment of his
Memoirs,
which I consulted before undertaking my own journey, struck me as premonitory. Casanova says:

M’étant ecarté de la maison impériale d’une centaine de pas, je découvris une jeune paysanne dont la beauté était surprenante. L’ayant fait remarquer au jeune officier, nous nous acheminàmes vers elle; mais, leste et svelte comme une biche, elle s’enfuit jusqu’à une chaumière peu éloignée, où elle entra. Nous l’y suivons . . .

Sa gorge n’était pas encore parfaitement développée, car elle avait à peine quatorze ans. Blanche comme la neige, elle avait des cheveux d’ébène d’une longueur et d’une épaisseur prodigieuses. Deux arcs d’une extrême perfection et d’une grande finesse recouvraient deux yeux admirablement fendus, qu’on aurait pu désirer un peu plus grands peut-être, mais qu’on ne saurait imaginer ni plus brillants, ni plus expressifs.

Cette jeune fille, que je baptisai [Zizi], monta en voiture et nous suivit à Pétersbourg vêtue de gros drap et sans chemise. Je m’enfermai quatre jours, sans la quitter un instant, jusqu’à ce que je la vis habillée à la française, sans luxe, mais très proprement.

Or:
I was about a hundred paces from the imperial residence when I saw an enchanting young peasant girl. I pointed her out to my friend and we walked toward her, but she ran away, light and graceful as a gazelle, into a sad little hut. We followed her inside . . .

Her breasts were not yet completely formed; she had just turned fourteen. Her snow-white skin contrasted with her thick ebony hair. Her fine black eyebrows rose over a pair of magnificently shaped eyes that I would have preferred a little larger, but that seemed to shoot out flames. I must also mention her teeth, made for kisses . . . I christened her [Z
IZI
] and she got into the carriage and returned with us to St. Petersburg dressed in coarse clothes, without a chemise of any kind . . . For four days I stayed home, never leaving her until I had dressed her modestly in the French style.

II.
A few notes for P.O.A.

¹
At the end of the summer we’ll take a trip to Y
ALTA
.
It was the old dream of a vacation in Hawaii. Yes, some readjustment of scale was required, but that couldn’t change the significance of the journey or of the sea in our lives. The Crimean coastline, the antique resonance of its city’s names—Feodosiya, Livadia, Yevpatoria—suited my project perfectly. The beaches, the sea, symbolized freedom in the abstract, connoted laxity, luminosity, the diaphanous air filling our lungs. Then, if my experiment turned out to be successful, we would travel to the real Riviera, which, for me, was also Fitzgerald’s
Tender is the Night.

²
Winged lions.
The medieval bestiary known as the Physiologus tells us that the winged lion is the symbol of the E
VANGELISTS
, who are often represented as the lion of Saint Mark or the bull of Saint Luke, as well. A happy coincidence. When I was location-scouting for P
ANIS ORIS INTUS ANIMAE MEAE
, I’d chosen the lovely bridge that spans the Griboedev Canal, a few meters from Nevsky Prospekt. From there, one of the most beautiful views of Saint Petersburg opens out before your eyes.

³
And what about the title? Not only does it include the word “soul,” it’s even in Latin
. A
NIMAE
or “soul” was a concept as readily mass-produced as any other. Everything acquired another life within the easy world of
now.
I could make Saint Augustine a hero of
frivolous
culture, transform B
READ FOR THE
M
OUTH OF
M
Y
S
OUL
into a terrific marketing slogan, magnifying the story of his renunciation of paganism (the mirror image of my own conversion to the idolatry of the present) and taking his
Confessions
along with me to the top of the best-seller lists by publishing this E
NCYCLOPEDIA
to coincide with the launch of P.O.A.: a triple-decker cheeseburger. Obviously it wouldn’t be enough for my book simply to tell the truth about
frivolity;
I would also have to mint the idea anew, render it accessible, transform it into some gesture
or characteristic that would make it easily and positively identifiable, a topic of fashionable conversation during
TEA
time.

⁴
. . .
Borges, an Argentine writer, and therefore suspect.
Quite surprisingly, I was Cuban. This earned me accusations of being a
PSEUDO
D
EMETRIUS
, an imposter. How could I pretend to represent the rich O
CCIDENT
? While this seemed a valid objection, it was, in fact, a serious error. An entirely O
CCIDENTAL
man, if such a thing exists, would never have discovered the important role that
frivolity
had played in discrediting the Doctrine, would not have perceived the ravages wreaked by
FLUORIDE
upon the old Russian soul. My adolescence spent in an
essentially frivolous
country, but one that had placed all its bets on the seriousness of the Doctrine, had endowed me with perfect mastery of the casuistries that an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon required. For on more than one occasion, fearful of having been contaminated, I had knelt to make my confession before the barred window of my own conscience and found myself
full of love
for (S
WISS
)
CHOCOLATES
. What I mean is that I’d never taken my eyes off that other side of life, even when I was bound hand and foot, and this dual existence had, over time, contributed to my discovery.

⁵
. . .
Casanova de Seingalt.
The author of the
Nights of Saint Petersburg,
Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre, must also be mentioned here, if only for the coincidence of José(ph): J
OSIK
, J
OSHELE
, J
OSEPH
. (Russia had been waiting for me to introduce its citizens to the elaborate structures of my island’s literature. I’d lived long winters in its very heart, like Bowles in Tangiers: the desolate snow, the age-old despair of the dunes.)

P
ASARELA
(
or
C
ATWALK
). Here’s the final speech I managed to deliver on the roof of our hotel in Y
ALTA
, as filmed by L
INDA
. A very slow pan takes in the depth of the sky, a flotilla of cirrus riding out
over the sea. A serene introductory moment, flooded with light, for by then we believed the danger was past and we were safe from the jaws of the ravenous pack, the bolt securely drawn.

I watch myself balance along the edge of the roof and come to a halt. With my back to L
INDA
, I study the landscape, the beauty of the view that expands in my lungs. I turn to the camera, arm extended, and say something we cannot hear, the beginning of a last discourse of farewell to the summer, the beautiful view, the play of shadows at twilight, words that fall into the void and die without being registered, because of some defect in the camera or some carelessness on the part of L
INDA
, who may have neglected to engage the sound button, I will never know.

It was my last lecture of the summer. I don’t recall a single point I made in this “presentation,” which now, owing to its muteness, has taken on far greater force than all the others I delivered that summer for—as I’d explained to L
INDA
—the truly wise teacher “preaches the doctrine without words.” I began with a broad circumlocution, addressing—or so it would appear—general definitions: the sun on the line of the horizon, the blue sea, the vastness my open arms sought to embrace. Then, rejecting the vague imprecision of the landscape, the natural order, my right hand sketched a circle of light around myself, the contour of the soles of my feet, my personal world. With my palm turned upward, fingers wide, I reviewed my clothing, the impeccable crease of my pants, the thick silk tie. This resplendent attire clearly demonstrated the immense sense of well-being that could be extracted from the neutral material of a few bodies, a summer like any other. I gave signs of satisfaction. My lips pronounced a single word three or four times, a word that, when I first watched the video, I couldn’t decipher. Until it dawned on me that I was speaking in Russian. Then I understood: “Хорошó!” “
Horosho
!
Horosho
!” (“Good! Perfect!”)

An affirmation followed by an ample parenthesis of my hands, my fingers, touching each other at the pads, outlining the shape of a narrow cell, the slope of a roof. My brows respond with astonishment, I close my eyes . . . my mouth emits sounds of indignation with particular emphasis on the letters
o
and
z
. I speak without pausing for breath (now seated on the parapet). The bleary look in my eyes betrays the fact that I am on the verge of a serious bout of blindness. During a pause I see myself raise my head and rub my temples desperately, my eyesight gone. Very little illumination reaches the rooftop by now, only the oblique light of a sun slowly sinking. The white blur that is my shirtfront appears at evenly spaced intervals when I lean forward to underscore a phrase or stretch my chin away from my throat so that my words—highly profound sentences, important conclusions—can reach L
INDA
on the opposite parapet, from where she is filming me. The light’s fluctuation now seems rhythmic, imbued with unmistakable significance, and at a given moment it speeds up as if announcing the imminent advent of the tragedy, endowing the scene that will soon erupt with its desperate tempo.

My face undergoes an earthquake: I give a start, one, two, three times as the air transports the vibrations of a hail of kicks against the trapdoor. R
UDI’S
men have taken a long time to appear, but here they are, come to attack me and steal all my money. I stand and walk toward the camera but L
INDA
pans away for a second and we see the trapdoor jumping. Then comes the eruption, a black substance spewing forth. Five portions of magma, all in a state of inexplicable fury.

Then I reappear standing on the parapet. I slap my chest and let out a yell I have no trouble deciphering. “Over here, R
UDI
!” A move designed to distract him from L
INDA
. I pick up the bouquet of carnations and walk away, balancing along the narrow wall. Then I turn and offer the thugs a scowl of deepest disdain. I extend my right
hand and hang a text in the air (as in one of La Khalodnaya’s silent films), a text that shines white against the deep blue of the sky: “One more step and I’ll jump!” These five little men (one of them wielding an
AX
) stop in their tracks, terrified: my suicide would greatly complicate their flight across the snowy mountains of the Caucasus. While their surprise lasts, I pretend to weigh my options and, finally, make a gesture of reconciliation: “We could reach an agreement,
gospada.
” I lower my eyes, arrange my face in an expression of resignation, and slowly take out my wallet. I make a show of counting the amount of our costly ransom, but suddenly straighten triumphantly, fling all my credit cards at them and shout: “No cash at all,
muchachos
.” Which I followed with a gale of Homeric laughter, a final ray of sun glinting against the barrier of my teeth.

Now I can confess: I’d decided to die, put an end to the suffering caused by seeing so
deeply,
having so full an awareness of the unbearable beauty of the world. I’d managed to conceal from L
INDA
the constant attacks of my malady, when the world fell apart into gems and quartzes whose
BRILLIANT CORNERS
I studied, entranced and blinded by their gleam. And now, on this rooftop, it no longer mattered to me whether I died, whether I threw myself into the abyss like a Hyperborean (see E
URASIA
, Pliny’s notes) committing suicide after a life of excess. Neither the success of my experiment nor the love that, I could almost swear, I’d been able to awaken in L
INDA
, had managed to calm my despair, alleviate my fleshly existence, halt the course of my sickness. There, at the edge of the parapet, two steps away from the ravenous pack that was gaping at my credit cards without yet understanding a thing, I turned to L
INDA
to say good-bye. I see myself raising my eyes, seeking some motive that will explain my decision, pointing my index finger toward the sky, opening my mouth to emit a first phrase—the all-important fact, the new line of discourse we decide to embark on when we suddenly realize we’ve
wasted two-thirds of the allotted time, and we organize our thoughts, take a deep breath, the central thesis blazing in our mind—“Listen, L
INDA
, the notion . . .” and then I begin to blur, affected by an actual earthquake, furrows of fire that shoot across my face: L
INDA
, who at that moment throws down the camera and bolts for the trapdoor. Apparently, the fall activated the sound button. It’s the last thing the camera recorded: my image, vanishing, and a cry that now fills me with joy and sadness: “T
HELONIOUS
, jump!”

(The real world is naught but appearance. If we continue to have some sort of objective existence when our eyes are closed it’s only because we’re imagined by a being, a
BOGATYR
, asleep outstretched in a field, head resting on a hummock. He is the last bastion, the final dream that contains us all. L
INDA’S
cry, almost a scream, made him crack open an eye, blink for a second, and then o dark dark dark they all go into the dark: me, L
INDA
, R
UDI
, Y
ALTA
, Russia, immensity itself, all go into the dark.)