Out of the Line of Fire (19 page)

Finally the last notes died away. It was some time before Chavez could pull himself together. The three judges sat there outraged.

Is that all you have to say for yourself? one of them finally asked.

No, your Honour, he said. With the court’s permission I would like to ask the orchestra to play the piece again.

Again! said the judge.

Yes, your Honour. But this time with one change. I want them to play it backwards from the end. And slowly, very slowly.

A murmur passed around the crowded courtroom. Was this a joke? Was this man really mad? The players looked at each other with puzzled expressions on their faces and then at the music.

Absolute silence settled over the courtroom as the musicians took up their instruments again.

Slowly, hauntingly, a single cello began to play. A stark, seven-note melody of ethereal beauty floated up to fill the air above their heads. It rose and rose, and then seemed to hover, to stagger, and then to die away. Then a chorus of violins repeated this motif in a long lingering answer until finally the whole orchestra was swept away by the music, drowned in an elegiac hymn of such haunting tenderness that each person in the courtroom, from the chief presiding judge to the most humble peasant, felt shamed, shamed to the soul that they had called this man a traitor. It was as though in his music Chavez had incorporated their entire history, their suffering, their defeat, their tragedy and, ultimately, their victory such was its greatness.

When finally the last note had sounded a strange silence had settled back over the courtroom.

This was the story Placido would teach his son. And now as he began to wind the handle in the opposite direction he heard the melody he had come to know so well, and he watched as the tiny soldier-figure turned and seemed to stagger, first once and then again, after a battalion of tiny tired and battle-wounded soldiers returning home before him.

When the train reboarded it was six in the evening. He looked up at the sun. He would be by Inocenta’s side, all being well, he thought, by nine-thirty.

But when he stepped down from the train at Charada it was already after ten. He had been the only passenger to get off. He poked his head into Don Miguel’s office.

Buenas noches, Don Miguel.

Ah, Placido. Cómo estás?

Muy bien, Don Miguel. Muy bien.

He waved his hand.

Adios.

Adios, Placido. Adios.

He walked, his bag slung over his shoulder, up through the darkened side-streets that would lead down the hill on the outskirts of town to his home, to Inocenta and to his young son. He heard music coming from a gramophone in one of the houses as he passed. Out of the darkness a voice called softly, Buenas noches, Placido. Buenas noches, Doña Isabel, he called back into the night.

When he began walking down the dirt track that led to his and his brother’s house he could see that his own lay in darkness and only a solitary light burned in his brother’s. This would mean that Inocenta had gone to his mother’s again. He would sit for a while drinking coffee with his brother and discuss with him his plans to stay at home.

As he stepped up onto the verandah he heard a muffled cry. There was no mistaking that sound. He would recognize it anywhere. It was the sound of a woman making love. He hesitated for a moment, smiled and turned to go. So, he thought, Santiago was not the celibate bachelor everyone believed him to be.

Then he heard the cry again. Clearly this time. A short breathless, single syllable. He stood looking across at the darkness of his own house. Then it came again, that same horrible, familiar sound. No, he said to himself. It could not be. Then, unmistakably, he heard her laugh. Inocenta. No! His whole body, his whole soul screamed into the infinite darkness above him, a never-ending, silent No. He felt his legs go weak beneath him. He clutched at one of the verandah posts, felt its cool rough texture against his cheek. He heard their voices again, their subdued laughter.

He half stumbled down the steps of the verandah. He felt sick, delirious. Like a dead man he walked back up the road beneath the dark vault of the sky, insignificant against its vastness. All around him he heard their voices, the ecstasy of their love-making. Inocenta’s laugh echoed through the void. In his mind’s eye he could see her, see her head thrown back, her full mouth smiling, her white teeth flashing, her eyes closed. He thought of his son. His son? He lifted his arms in a powerless rage against an invisible, malevolent God above him. He felt like falling to the ground, beating it with his fists until they bled.

When he arrived at his mother’s house a light still burned in the kitchen. The front door was ajar. A mosquito coil glowed on the window ledge outside.

He pushed open the door.

Quien es? his mother called.

He saw her appear in the lighted doorway.

Placido?

He walked past her to the far end of the corridor, felt for the key in the drawer until his fingers found it and opened the cabinet door. He took his father’s rifle from its rack and loaded it with two bullets from the box on the shelf beside it.

Placido? He felt the tremor in his mother’s voice. He walked past her again. He felt her hand brush the sleeve of his shirt.

Outside the night was still. He knew she would stay standing there, that she would hear the muffled echo of the shots from the surrounding hills. First one, then a few seconds later, another.

For the second time that night he walked down the hill towards a bright rectangle of light dancing in the blackness of the valley beneath him. He felt the weight of the rifle in his right hand, heard the crunch of gravel beneath his feet.

As he stepped softly back onto the verandah a first breath of cool air stirred the dark stillness. He stood looking at the compressed plane of light less than a man’s length away from him, listening. The room was quiet. Perhaps they had already fallen asleep. Perhaps they always left the light burning. Perhaps Inocenta had already gone back to her own room. He watched as a corner of the pale thin curtain fluttered momentarily and then hung limp.

Then, imperceptibly, he heard a sound, unidentifiable, like the frame of a chair settling under his own weight. He heard Inocenta’s voice, soft, languid.

Slowly, far out from the wall, he felt his body being drawn along the verandah. Through the window a tall vase filled with red flowers came into view. Above it, a series of photographs in thin wooden frames hung on the wall. One showed his mother and father on their wedding day outside the old church of Charada before it had been pulled down. Another, he recognized, would be the one his father had taken of himself at the entrance to the mine. A corner of an old-fashioned bed appeared. His feet passed silently through the pale sliver of light cast onto the verandah. Then, through the thin transparent veil of the curtain, he saw his brother Santiago’s smiling face. He was lying on a pillow, his arms outstretched, reaching up to touch Inocenta’s lips. She sat straddled across his naked body rocking gently.

Placido stood in the darkness watching them, watching his brother looking up at Inocenta’s angelic face. He saw his hands descend to encircle her waist. The breeze parted the curtains in a shallow arc, momentarily unveiling the two lovers before settling back against the window frame. He raised the rifle to his shoulder.

When Placido fired the shot that instantly killed his brother, Inocenta’s body gave a short involuntary shudder. In that instant, she felt the muscles that enveloped Santiago’s sex contract around him and as his head slumped to one side, she felt his body stiffen, then felt the dead man’s life being drained from him in a series of short sharp spasms within her.

Placido raised the rifle again. He saw lnocenta’s face turn towards him along the barrel. He felt his finger against the smooth, polished arc of the trigger. He had expected Inocenta to cry out, to flee. Instead she sat there, mesmerized, looking unseeingly out into the darkness at him. He looked into her eyes, into the wound that had begun to bleed in her soul. She raised her arms to her breasts to hide her nakedness from him. He watched her turn back to his brother, watched her head sink slowly over his body until her forehead rested on his chest.

Then he heard voices coming down the hill behind him. There were people running, shouting. Lights flickered in the darkness. He lowered the rifle and leaned back against the verandah rail.

Now as he looked impassively across at Inocenta standing beside his tiny mother in the crowded makeshift courtroom, standing only metres from where they had been married, he felt a certain sense of solace settle over him. His life had come full circle. No longer did he feel that somewhere, at some particular moment in the past, years ago, he had lost his way. That he should be standing here in this courtroom, waiting for a judge to pass sentence on him now seemed inevitable. This thought comforted him. He felt strangely euphoric.

The judge rose and cleared his throat. Placido’s gaze floated over his sad, embarrassed face, over the faces of his mother and Inocenta, over the faces of the crowd turned expectantly towards him and up towards the small blue square of sky set high in the wall at the far end of the church. Up it floated until he felt as light as the light itself. He could hear Chavez’s music playing. He felt his body dissolving, scattering in the wind. Somewhere, in his soul, he was rejoicing.

*

We simply have to face the fact that the reality Kant discusses is different from our reality. The realm of the senses for him was the world of nature, the world of Goethe’s Werther, of Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic vision which saw man as part of a pure and untainted universe, dwarfed by its majesty. Today, arguments about the existence or non-existence of a world independently of the mind that perceives it are irrelevant. Nor is it still valid to talk of the perversion of the essential nature of the external world through the act of its perception. Kant’s natural world has been, at best, conquered or, at worst, displaced by the human imagination. Our reality is literally a construct of the human mind. This is what so distressed Wittgenstein on his visit to New York in September 1946. New York for him represented an entirely man-made [menschengebaut] reality, a gross and barbaric projection of the human imagination. The world, he felt with horror, had become literally a metaphor for the mind. The distinction between the real and the imaginary had simply ceased to exist. New York was his Armageddon. After his years of isolation in Norway he felt overwhelmed by what confronted him. He left the city having stayed there for less than two days and never referred to his visit again.

It is impossible then to do as Alexander would have us do:

to de-anthropomorphize; to order men and minds to their proper place among the world of finite things; on the one hand, to divest things of their colouring which they have received from the vanity or arrogance of mind; on the other, to assign them along with minds their due measure of self-being (as) one finite thing amongst others, not the ruler and lord of the universe.

It is far too late for that.

Erich Maiberger
, The Transcendental Dilemma,
Lügner Press, p.78.

BERLIN

Das Leben als Kino.

Life as Cinema.

Karl’s fingers grip the pliers and he tears a short section of protective plastic coating from the wire. He twists the bared strands together tightly, pushes them into the fuse-box and screws it securely into place. Then he replaces the safety cover. In his overalls, with his eyes squinting in his lean face, he could be mistaken for a terrorist. In fact, the whole group of us look like terrorists.

There, that should do it. Try the switch.

As the lights come on a collective cheer goes up.

Let the bastards figure that one out.

I had moved to Kreuzberg about a month before, into a graffiti-covered building which had been earmarked for demolition. But like many other buildings in the area, it had been occupied by squatters before the demolition order had been carried out. Now, because of a loophole in the law, it could not be torn down. To do so the owner had to prove it was uninhabitable and since the group had moved quickly most of the windows were still intact, the toilets had not yet been sledge-hammered and the floorboards were still in place. To make it uninhabitable the owner had to gain access to the building and again, because the law now considered the building to be tenanted, if he tried to gain entry by force he was technically trespassing on his own property. The group who occupied the building, most of whom belonged to one of the local experimental theatre companies, were not about to invite him in.

Normally, of course, we would not have had a leg to stand on. The authorities would have just turned up one morning and thrown us into the street. But because there had recently been a number of violent demonstrations protesting against the critical shortage of accommodation in Berlin, such forced evictions were no longer politic.

Pressure was being put on local councils to buy buildings such as ours and convert them into low-cost accommodation. So, for a time, there was a stalemate while the council negotiated to buy a building it couldn’t afford and in which it really wasn’t interested in the first place. From time to time the owner would turn up accompanied by three or four councillors and they would pace up and down on the broken concrete outside, gesturing to one another as we looked down on them from our second-storey vantage point. And then, exasperated, they would leave.

But things seemed to be on the move again. The electricity supply, which someone had reconnected some time previously, had now been permanently cut. They had dug the line up. A hurried meeting had been called of the ten or so of us who occupied the building to decide what to do. Perhaps the time had come to find somewhere else to live. It was Karl however who suggested boring a hole through the common wall of the still legitimately tenanted block of flats adjacent to us and tapping their electricity supply. After a brief discussion it was decided that he and one of the others whom I did not know would enter the block of flats disguised as council workmen to see if this were possible. According to Karl, nothing had been simpler, with the result that once again we had lights, hot water and heating—at least for the time being.