Vaseline Buddha (20 page)

And now I remember my night with the mice as one of the most memorable experiences I've ever had, and I've come to feel grateful for those mice . . . No, I did feel grateful for them in a way, but the experience wasn't one of the most memorable I've ever had. It was merely one of the many things that were nothing at all.

And having returned home, I thought that if I went to Paris again, I could perhaps run into someone in a park and be invited to his home, and he would take me to a residential boat on the Seine, with an interior like that of an ordinary home, and I could spend the night on the boat, which would rock in the current when other boats passed by. No, that's not true. The day before I spent the night with the mice at the hotel, I actually spent the night on a residential boat floating on the Seine at someone's invitation. The inside of the boat was quite similar to the inside of an ordinary home, and the only thing that indicated that it was a boat was the small, round windows that looked like windows on a boat. But the person who invited me was not the owner of the boat, and he had come to stay on the boat because he met an old woman at the park, and she asked him if he could watch her boat for her, which would be vacant when she went to her summer house. I spent a strange night on a house floating on a river, which wobbled whenever other boats passed by.

I once stayed in a house for several days because the person who was watching it for someone who was on a long trip was going away himself for several days and asked me to watch the house for him, because someone had to take care of the cat there. I had someone else come to my house to take care of the goldfish there. In other words, someone took care of my goldfish, and I took care of someone else's cat. I thought that my goldfish, which lived in a small fishbowl, could go without eating for a few days, or could live on water since it lived in water, but also thought that it would be all right to have someone take care of it for me. I said goodbye to the person going on a trip by telling him to have a good trip, and not to tell me anything about it afterwards.

The cat was somewhat socially inept, and tried to keep as much distance from me as possible. It was very wary of me, and I made it grow even more wary of me by slightly threatening it in a playful way. At the same time, I tried to become better friends with the cat by turning on the television and watching, side by side, programs that I thought cats would like. I mostly turned on programs with cats or mice in them. But although the cat cautiously watched the programs with cats or mice in them, hiding behind the sofa, it never came near me, and perhaps it thought that the cats or the mice, characters in animations, had nothing to do with itself.

Then, seeing on a program a puppy that liked to sing, I tried to get the cat interested, but to no avail. The puppy, which lived in the home of a musician, barked merrily as if singing when it heard the family sing or play an instrument, and curiously, although it didn't react in any way when it heard a pop song, it leapt to its feet when it heard vocal or classical music, even while resting, playing, eating, or even sleeping, and barked in a way that sounded like music.

I once saw on television, while the cat watched me from behind the sofa, the news that someone threatened a taxi driver with a weapon and made him drive somewhere, and then paid him much more than the fare and disappeared. He was a robber, but I wasn't sure if he ended up regretting what he was doing, for some reason, while he was in the act of robbing, or if he had everything planned out from the beginning, from the robbing to the regretting. Did he plan the thing beforehand, and think that by doing so, he could have a pretty good time, and get some sort of a satisfaction from it? Or did he have no choice but to threaten the taxi driver to make him abandon him in a remote and lonely place where taxi drivers were reluctant to go? But to be precise, the cat and I didn't see the news together. I told the cat a story about a serial killer I saw on television another evening. The killer murdered many people, two on a single day once. I tried to imagine what it must feel like to kill two people in a day, but couldn't.

And I took down the family portrait of that someone, which was hanging on the living room wall, a picture that had clearly been taken long ago, and looked, side by side with the cat, at the people in the picture—people who looked like the person's mother and father and younger brother. Also in the picture was a cat that must have died long ago. I fed the cat regularly, even as I tried to think of a way to bring the cat, which avoided me, almost to the point of death without making it quite starve to death. And looking at the cat, I recalled certain facts about cats, such as that they express themselves in mysterious ways, and that in ancient Egypt, where people worshiped cats, people were put to death if they killed a cat, and expressed their sorrow when a cherished cat died by shaving their own eyebrows, and that some cats were clever enough to turn a fan on and off, and I smiled, picturing a cat turning on a fan and enjoying the breeze (animals make us smile so easily, in unexpected ways).

In any case, I felt very comfortable living in someone else's house, taking care of someone's cat in behalf of someone else, so I didn't go outside at all, and for some reason, stayed naked without any clothes on the whole time I was there. Being naked in someone else's house brought me an unusual pleasure, and I felt a little as if I were striding down the street naked, when I was only going from the bedroom to the living room. It was different from being naked in an unfamiliar hotel room.

The house was quite different from my own, in that everything was so well organized. I felt intense displeasure with organized things, and liked to make a mess of the things in my house on purpose, or put them in somewhat unexpected places. I may have developed this habit after getting drunk one night and getting a potato from the kitchen, unaware of what I was doing, and putting it in a drawer in a wardrobe in the living room, which showed how timid I was, never getting out of control even when I was drunk, and finding the potato in the drawer several days later, which made me feel as happy as if I had found a relic. Next to the bottles of sleeping pills in my kitchen cabinet there are Bolivian milk someone gave me as a present, a bottle of salt I brought from a desert, and again, bottles of salt and other seasonings and pepper shakers, and a little stuffed salamander which was also a present from someone. And under my bed there are several shoe boxes, some of which contain dried up flowers with long stalks, including poppies, and some of which contain pictures I took while traveling, although I don't normally like taking pictures, of chairs and benches I sat or lay down on, and of myself reflected in a mirror in a hotel room I stayed in, feeling somewhat awkward in the room I was staying in for the first time, and strangely, my eyes looked fierce in the pictures. In a little room in my house you couldn't really call a library, full of messy piles of books, as well as suitcases and other odds and ends, there's an organ that someone threw away in an alley, which I brought home. The organ is missing a few keys and a pedal, but it still sounds like an organ. I've never learned how to play the piano or the organ but can read music a little, so from time to time, I'd go into the little room and play Bach's Toccata and Fugue, pressing the keys very slowly with one hand, and I thought repeatedly that the music suited death, and also thought that the performance was solely for the things in that room, such as the chairs and drawers.

Anyway, what I took care of mostly, in the house I went to in order to take care of a cat, was a plant in that house. It was a sweet oleander, poisonous from the leaves to the roots, and its white sap, in particular, could kill you if it so much as touched your bruised skin. I say I took care of it, but all I did was water it once, and what I did mostly was think about the poison that filled up the body of the plant.

I spent a lot of time thinking random thoughts, sitting naked, motionless like a chameleon, in a wooden chair that was at a corner of the living room of someone else's empty house, which I left my own house to stay in, and among the thoughts were the memory of looking at the Eiffel Tower, a part of which could be seen through the window, and the wallpaper in the room, in a hotel in Paris, and the memory of the sound of a kitten crying, which I heard in my house once, and the memory of being indescribably touched as a child when I fell asleep one day in the middle of the day, listening to the sound of countless silkworms quietly munching on mulberry leaves in a corner of the room, and then woke up to see them squirming quietly. The sound of silkworms munching on mulberry leaves was a sound that was at the heart of the kind of peace I experienced only in my childhood, a sound that wasn't quite a noise, although it was a noise, and sounded infinitely pleasant for that reason, and it brought me great pleasure. It suddenly occurred to me that there may never have been a moment in my life when I was genuinely happy, except for the moments when I was happy for no reason at all, and for that reason, I was sad for a moment.

And I also thought for a moment about the person who was taking care of my goldfish for me at my house, and about the time when I watched the goldfish for several hours wanting to learn something about its everyday life. And I thought about a woman I used to know. She had a six-year-old nephew at the time, and although he was very young, he was so wicked as to lead you to reflect deeply on evil, on human nature. It was nothing unusual for him to hit other children, and he touched women's bodies without feeling any shame at all—he mostly tried to get his hands into women's skirts one way or another, and not being content with that, tried to get himself into women's skirts—and went around cursing all the time. No one was able to figure out what extraordinary phenomenon took place in the child's mind to turn him into such a fiend. It was nearly impossible to change his nature, and he ended up in a juvenile delinquent facility when he got older. When he was little, when people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he always said that he wanted to be a soldier in the national armed forces, which was distinctly different from a child saying that he wanted to be a soldier when he grew up.

And I recalled something the woman told me, how when a military
coup broke out in the city she lived in as a child and citizens were slaughtered, the first victim in the city was probably a cat, not a person, although she wasn't sure if she had dreamt it or imagined it (I realized at that moment that the reason why I thought, in mist-shrouded Venice, that the first victim of some wars or revolutions was a cat or some other animal was because of what she told me). Perhaps that was true. Perhaps the soldiers of the armed forces deployed to suppress the protesters had no experience killing, and shot to death an animal, a cat, before they committed their first murder, whereby they gained confidence and carried out genocide. During the French Revolution, in fact, it was a sheep, not a man, that became the first to die at the guillotine. So people used a sheep to test the performance of the newly invented guillotine. Anyway, she thought that an anecdote about the sacrifice of a cat should be included in the history of the well-known massacre.

What I spent the most time thinking about while thinking about her, however, was someone she knew. A friend of hers went on a trip with several people, said he was stepping out for a moment while having a meal at a seaside restaurant, and left, never to return. With that, he disappeared without a trace. No one knew if he was abducted or disappeared on his own. She believed that he must have committed suicide by jumping into the sea. People who committed suicide could show different behavior from usual just before committing suicide, but it was quite possible for them to act no different from usual.

And recalling how I once spent time making a list of things that were neither good nor bad for passing the time, I tried to
recall the list, but nothing came to mind other than that I played my own requiem with a few notes on the broken organ. When evening finally came, I took out a handful of wilted lettuce from the fridge and quietly chewed on it, and the first thing I knew, I was chewing, without realizing it, the way a goat chews grass. And eating a banana after finishing the lettuce, as if having dessert, I felt as if I were a goat, as well as a monkey, a hairless ape. I realized that in order to suddenly realize that you were distant relatives with monkeys, it was enough to sit naked, imitating a monkey, scratching yourself without thinking, or eating a banana.

And I thought that the reason why I thought a lot about other animals was because a general lack of interest in human things led me to descend and ascend into an animal world, and into a transcendental world. And there seemed to be a world somewhere between the descent and the ascent where you couldn't stay, but could at least go in and out of.

And the next day while quietly eating an apricot I'd brought with me, I recalled how I gave apricots to a cow I encountered on a country road in France, and thought about a man who stayed home alone doing nothing for a period of time in his youth, then suddenly became a bulldozer driver one day and drove bulldozers for several years, and then went on an ocean ship for several years, after which he returned home and spent several years doing nothing—or did he go on an ocean ship for several years in his youth, then return home and do nothing for several years, and then one day suddenly become a bulldozer driver and drive bulldozers for several months, and again spend a period of time staying home alone doing nothing?—and was found dead, sitting on a chair in a corner of his living room.

The story about the man, which I wasn't sure was true or not, was something I heard from an anesthesiologist. When I thought about the man, I always pictured him with his back turned to the world, or, rather, with the world's back turned to him, and imagined that he drove a bulldozer and got on an ocean ship with the lethargy of his lone years in which he did nothing. For at times, lethargy becomes the greatest source of strength. Could it be that perhaps a strength that was the complete opposite of passion had provoked the greatest passion in him?