---

Elegy for a Cinematic Death

A lament for all those souls condemned to drift through a limbo of celluloid and production assistants, of homosexual set designers and lights too hot to even stand near. I can see you there, you who cannot have a room of your own in which to drink a bottle of sparkling San Pellegrino, where you might enjoy some particular privacy while wearing a costume that was sized over the phone. I think I’m a forty-eight — you said — but I’m not sure — you added — and the production manager did not seem to care much about the second half of your sentence because his pen had already written your future, the last suit you would ever wear.

Now you are moving toward the great warehouse they insist on calling a soundstage, as if to underscore its innocence, but — dear God — they should rechristen it the place of death, the end of humanity, the trap for existence itself. You enter through the wide door and no one seems to care much about you, but then, after minutes during which your eyes have wandered, lost and unaware, a hand grips your hip and a callused index finger points to a footbridge of plywood painted anthracite gray, set against a vast blue cyclorama.

Walking to meet your funereal fate you manage a small smile and take your mark beside a partner who will accompany your passage in a contemporaneity of straight lines breaking. He smiles at you, and you smile back. And then, in the pride of his six-foot-two, down there, wrapped in a half-light that sharpens his elegance and his importance to your sad eyes, the executioner arrives, and nothing could be more beautiful than dying at the hands of a star of that caliber. Damn, he has been in a lot of movies, one with Bruce Willis, that tall guy from Friends, and he was second lead opposite Tom Hanks. Dear God, how you love Tom Hanks.

The star approaches and an assistant invites you to follow his instructions to the letter, given to you directly from the director, a Hollywood parvenu who came up through music videos, distracting you from the celestial view of your assassin. And then everything happens quickly while the perfect mechanics of the moves you rehearsed in front of the mirror for months, in preparation for this moment — so quick now in its receding, but so awaited since the phone call that startled you on the worn-out chair of your tiny study, in an apartment you can afford only by giving up every small pleasure — takes possession of your limbs, not in any real way but according to some strange metaphysical attraction, and you actually feel life leaving you as a futuristic sword, designed to kill without blood, runs through your body after a sterile combat.

I can see you fall in plastic poise toward the electric-blue mattress that will be replaced in post with a fathomless abyss. You are marvelous in your succumbing to the hero, and when you land, in the wait for the director’s amplified voice, you are proud — because you died at the hands of a great man, a hero of the galaxy, born on distant Urias Nine, who now, having defeated even you, may finally fulfill his destiny: after rescuing Heias, his promised bride with the very long blond hair, kidnapped by the wicked Gahromod, he will become the just and good and merciful and equanimous king the universe has been awaiting, anxiously, for millennia.

I sing for you, righteous souls deceived by destiny.

I sing, to all of you, your sacrifice.

---

Stavvi Minòs orribilmente, e ringhia:
essamina le colpe ne l’intrata;
giudica e manda secondo ch’avvinghia.

Dico che quando l’anima mal nata
li vien dinanzi, tutta si confessa;
e quel conoscitor de le peccata

vede qual loco d’inferno è da essa;
cignesi con la coda tante volte
quantunque gradi vuol che giù sia messa.

Sempre dinanzi a lui ne stanno molte;
vanno a vicenda ciascuna al giudizio,
dicono e odono e poi son giù volte.

— Dante, Inferno, Canto V

I am speaking to Michael with a heart full of pride. I confess to Michael that I am not afraid. The only thing that frightens me is not being able to go home, not being able to watch the blades of grass grow centimeter by centimeter and the snow falling and covering the driveway my father made me shovel from the time I was eight, when my hands were still too small. No, Michael, I am not afraid, because I know I am here for a reason. I know that one day a man, or perhaps a woman, a child or a teenage boy who can’t yet call the hair on his face beard, will remember me. Perhaps not in my present physical form, Michael, but he will remember this heart that is speaking to you, this brain that translates feelings into words. He will be standing there, doing nothing, admiring the stars or the raindrops falling during one of those long summer storms, perhaps in New Hampshire where you were born, perhaps in some small inland town in the French countryside, or the German, or the Italian, or the Chinese, or the Australian. Perhaps in those damned places where Communism rules now and where one day, thanks to me and to you, they will be free of that curse. Perhaps in Africa where it is too hot even to think. Father George is always talking to me about those places, I tell Michael, and I smile. He will look at the world around him, that boy — not Father George, damn it, Michael, try to be serious for a moment — a world still too large to be understood, and he will think about me, about Joseph Kendrick Correll, about my mission, about everything I have done for the human race and for our Lord Jesus Christ. You understand this, Michael. Do you understand?

The sirens begin to sound, the lights chase each other in a flashing, frantic dance. Private Powell, who the night before won thirty-seven dollars at two-card poker, slams into the shoulder of Captain Correll, who, swept along by the river of his men — children ready to chase the afternoon ice-cream cart for a quarter — notices that something is wrong. There are men who run fast and seem to take an eternity to pull on a shirt. There are men who, moving slowly, vanish from sight in an instant. Could it be Colonel Olafsson’s damned whiskey?

— Correll, you must know.

— Yes, sir.

— Sir? We are between men, Correll, men who have large and ripened testicles and who do not need to … how shall I put it … stand on formality in front of a bottle.

— Yes … (in a low voice), sir.

— Correll, you must know. (A pause of several seconds, during which he appears to lose any sense of where he is.)

— Yes … sir?

— Yes.

— You were saying?

— Correll, I never wanted to be a soldier. Every time one of your men looks at me with admiration, or respect, I want to throw myself at his feet … weeping … and apologize, with all my heart.

— …

— I wish you had been born in another world, son. A different world from this one.

— Sir, we are doing the right thing. It is our responsibility.

— This is not responsibility, Captain. This is just bad luck.

In the blink of an eye the sea, not particularly calm, is already stirring the spirit and the stomach. Powell vomits, copiously, something yellow — orange, really — onto the Captain’s sleeve, and for the second time there is no formal apology, just a look that says as much as a thousand words. Michael, a little behind them, squares the horizon, impassive.

---

2

Fifty years after those hours that were minutes or seconds, instants and then again hours, in which so many universes prepared to collide and to fall one after another, among the prayers, the litanies, the perjuries, the confessions, the certainties and the pride, a Catholic priest in a large church in New York is saying mass. He raises his eyes to the ceiling as he recalls the most famous of the extreme sacrifices of the chosen ones, of men, of God’s people.

A woman bows her head during the offering of the Eucharist and thinks about her sins, while a girl of nineteen with auburn hair, a few hundred meters from that supreme offering of sacrifice, leaves the baby she gave birth to with pain only a few hours before, in Liz’s apartment, in a donation bin meant to collect clothing for the city’s poor.

A black firefighter named Julius Carmichael hears the cries of the newborn coming from inside the enormous metal container while his sky-blue iPod queues up Dig a Pony, which, let’s be honest, is not a great track, and Julius Carmichael is still thinking about Nicole.

— A child? Christ, do you have any idea what it means to have a child?

— I feel ready, Jul.

— Ready?

— Yes. Ready.

— Yesterday you left half the laundry at the place over by Lincoln. Does a woman like that strike you as someone who can have a child?

— I’ll change, Jul. I know I can do it.

— Sweet Jesus, you think Mrs. Grave is going to be standing there ready to bring back the little bundle — Excuse me, you must have left him when you broke the bills, don’t worry, these things happen. Monday I had to cross half the city to bring a sweet little four-year-old white girl back to her mother. Who knows why she’d brought her to us in the first place to do her laundry. Who knows — you think it works that way, out in the real world?

— Jul, you’re being unfair. And please don’t be angry.

— Oh no, I’m not the one who’s angry. It’s my common sense, Nicole. The thing that should make you think before you say … bullshit … like this. A child. Christ Almighty, a child. Not from me, Nicole. Not from me.

He pulls on a coat.

— Then I’ll go get fucked by the first black guy who walks down here, all right? (crying) And then I’ll go to Sherman Oaks to my mother and I’ll never have to hear about you again, I won’t have to … put up with … that tone of yours … like you’re … like you’re my father, Jul. Is that what you think you are? My father? Or are you content with being my goddamn husband?

— We aren’t married. You didn’t want to be.

— I know, Jul, we aren’t married. I know. I remember it every morning, the second I wake up. It’s the very first thought that comes before the thought of a child, of a gift that would keep us up at night, that would make us fight over a smile, damn it (crying), a gift that would give us a reason to stay together.

— A gift?

— … (sobs)

— What more do you want from me, Nicole? I’m killing myself for you. I’m killing myself for the privilege of loving you, do you understand? I’m killing myself to make you change.

— I’ll change! (she screams) With all my strength, I’ll change.

— Change, Nicole. And when you have, ask yourself, and if you’ve changed enough then come back to that chair where you’re sitting. You’ll look me in the eye and you’ll tell me yes, I’ve changed, Julius, I’ve changed for you.

Paul McCartney’s velvet voice occupies the same frequency as the baby’s crying, so Julius’s right hemisphere is forced to react in a small riot of impulses and his ears fill with a deafening whistle. Instinctively his eyes shoot to the canary-yellow donation bin, which, lit as if by some supernatural light, draws the firefighter toward it, and the whistle recedes in inverse proportion to the distance shrinking between Julius’s five foot eleven and the container.

And then Julius understands — no, he comprehends — the truth, in an instant.

The girl, in the alley next door, is too far away to be followed. She turns toward Julius, who is now cradling a tiny body; the distance is too great to make out the features. Then she runs, hair too short to swing in the air, swallowed into the traffic like a McDonald’s onion ring when you’re too hungry to think.

When the sonic torture fades entirely, Joseph Kendrick Correll manages to open his eyes again, heavy as stones. He is losing blood from his right arm — a bullet from that endless burst grazed him, and shortly after a grenade exploded no more than ten meters away and damaged one of his eardrums beyond repair. It hasn’t happened yet, but his left leg will also be damaged, by a German bayonet, and he will have to move Greta to the other leg in order to hear her report from school.

— Timothy hit me.

— Hit you? An actual punch?

— Where, Greta?

— Here. Right here.

Greta will point to an arm and an almost invisible reddening.

— How did he have the nerve, that Timothy? Look here … Timothy … the Parks’ boy?

— Yes.

— I’ll be having a little talk with his father, down at the store.

Greta will smile, pleased and triumphant.

Michael has been dead for four minutes, but the brain hasn’t yet stopped working, and life passes quickly, a confused tangle of bullshit. Electrical impulses growing fainter and fainter, words mixing with images and music and more words, faces and street signs, while it all flows away like grains of sand that the waves carry off one by one, feeding them to their immense master.

Fifty years after that instant in which so many universes collapsed one after another, crushed by universes with a greater probability of cosmic survival, while Julius takes that tiny living thing he holds pressed to his chest as he drives to the Santa Chiara hospital between Fifth and Madison, a small man looks up at the sky after tying an expensive shoe manufactured in the basement of a Beijing suburb and sees Joseph Kendrick Correll. He thanks him, without what we commonly call awareness, and he runs, with whatever strength he has left in his body.

When the oxygen can no longer carry the extraordinary workload, with his heart hammering, Sam stops, planting his feet on the dusty ground and skidding for a few centimeters. The clouds slide by much faster today and the earth beneath them seems to spurt away like soap from the hands when the hot dish is already on the table and that goddamn wooden airplane has taken every ounce of stored-up energy, so much so that the parts seemed to multiply on the workbench in the shed.

Sam thinks about George W. Bush and finds he can’t hate him, even though this isn’t the first time he has tried. The happiness that just a few moments earlier had thrilled him and lent him an extraordinary strength has dissolved like that gigantic cloud he had been chasing, but the hatred won’t enter the heart that fits inside the fist of a man, with the blood and everything else you can stuff into it.

Groobe has been dead for five weeks now and Sam feels great shame. Not because he laughed, during the reception, at a joke from a disgustingly fat cousin from Philadelphia while his mother stared at him — but because he hasn’t cried, not a tear, not once.

When Toby had gone, Toby, the dog his father had placed in his hands when he was so small and so furry, Sam had cried for a week or maybe longer. He hadn’t eaten — they’d had to admit him for dehydration. The phone was ringing in a composed tone that morning while some men in dirty white tank tops were making a racket repaving Pennsylvania Avenue. Sam had come down the stairs treading even on the fourth step, where Toby normally slept — a warm pipe ran underneath it and made the spot extremely comfortable in winter — heading for the white phone, but he hadn’t gotten there in time. In those moments, so plastic and slow, in which his mother bowed her head onto his father’s shoulder, the tears forming like a river ready to burst the dam that has held it back too long, Sam understood that something had gone wrong, and he also understood that he would never cry again. While he watched the receiver — which had made itself the messenger of the most baleful of messages — fall into the void that had opened up all at once, in space, too slowly to be real.

Now, in his desperate effort to hate George W. Bush, Sam was also spotting the chance to return to crying. In the middle of nothing and the silence that Groobe used to tear open with his imported two-stroke Yamaha, throwing himself at the haystacks, jumping at sunset over the little stream that still runs, despite the Yamaha being flooded and refusing to start — Mr. Taylor tried to get it going but there was nothing to be done — and despite Groobe being down there, motionless — Sam sees Karen’s face, the anger that pulls at her facial muscles, while she speaks those words of hatred toward the government of the prehistoric country where she is forced to live and toward its primitive rulers.

That son of a bitch deserves to be sodomized by every boy he sends off to die for his whims, says Karen with that unsettling expression of hers, and Sam watches her in mute stillness while he imagines Groobe sticking it up George W. Bush’s ass. He would like to tell her that Groobe would never have stuck it up George W. Bush’s ass — that when Groobe had had the honor of meeting him he had shaken his hand with such warmth that the President had paused to look at him for a few seconds and had told him Keep it up, son. But he knew that saying so would only make things worse. He would rather make a play for her, Karen, with that centerfold body. He would have put it between her legs, Groobe had confessed one night in the barn where the Wednesday poker games were held — front and back. No, he had added, after Karen had buried him under a tirade worthy of being delivered to a cheering crowd, I can’t hate George W. Bush because Groobe didn’t hate him, and in his stupid loyalty to a man the whole world knows to be obtuse, naïve, incapable of leading a country that important, he died.

— How can you keep from hating the man who took your brother? This isn’t being idealist, or Democrat, or communist, or — this is listening to your own heart.

— I just can’t, Karen.

— I’m amazed that a person with your intelligence can stay stuck in a stalemate like this. Hatred is a natural feeling. Positive, in some cases. Therapeutic.

— Karen …

— No, listen to me, Sam.

— Yes.

— Hate that man, damn it. Hate him with all the air you can hold in your lungs.

— I’ll try. I can’t promise anything.

Sam comes out of the trance the wind had been rocking him into. The sun is going down, far away, where the plain seems to end but where other trees, other rivers, other Sams and other Groobes are playing tag with other Tobies, perhaps slightly lighter in coat. On the porch of the house his grandfather had begun before leaving for the war and finished on his return, his mother smiles when she sees him coming home.

— Where’ve you been, Sam?

— I went for a walk. Thought about things. A lot.

— Can you manage to hate George W. Bush?

— No. Not yet.

— Don’t worry about it.

— Do you hate him, Mom?

— No.

— Why?

— Because he isn’t responsible for Groobe’s death. It would be like blaming Michael Jordan for the Bulls’ losing season this year.

Sam smiles.

— Sooner or later, I’ll manage to hate him.

— I hope so, Sam.

— What are you making for dinner, Mom?

— Whatever you want.

From across the street, Greta watches the scene. She wants to walk over to Sam, to kiss him with everything she has.

— Are we together now, Sam?

— I think you could think of it that way.

— You think of it that way.

— I think so.

— You think too much, Sam.

Climbing the creaking stairs, unaware of Greta’s thoughts and her long blond hair — Greta, who will be the woman with whom he will lose his virginity, and nine dollars, the following Wednesday, in the barn — Sam notices an imperfection in the parquet where Groobe, as a child, had tripped, giving himself the scar on his neck that had made it easier to identify the disfigured body. He thinks that maybe this is the right moment to open the drawer that has stayed closed for too long and to read what is inside that little notebook.

I hated holding her hand, but it made her so happy that her pupils would widen and a fairy-tale glimmer would appear in her large blue eyes. So, every so often, when it seemed to me she was least expecting it, I would take that white hand, beautiful as few things in the world are, and I would squeeze it a little, swinging it back and forth, lightly. Then I would search for her eyes, even though she tended to hide from me the reaction that my gesture had provoked. She knew my game. I think she loved me. I loved her the way one can love the very idea of love. We walked along, wrapped in serenity. I would squeeze her hand and look at her. One evening I told her that before I had met her I had thought life was something else. It was true. But I was an asshole because in pronouncing those words I felt like a character in a movie too predictable to have been written by anyone with a shred of self-respect. She told me for the first time (maybe the second) that she loved me, and I started to cry.

I was saying. We walked along, serene. The lake sparkled and the birds sang. I was looking at the villas and picturing myself inside them. Her by my side, beautiful, with a giant pregnant belly, a couple of other little kids running around the yard.

How many times have I told you not to climb the elm, Peter?

Lily! Stop tormenting poor Toby — the golden retriever puppy we’d have bought for the kids.

I, busy building Toby’s new doghouse, would get the measurements badly wrong, cut a finger, and demonstrate, yet again, my incompetence at carpentry. She would look at me and smile and I would smile back. The pain would pass at once.

Dad? Did you hurt yourself?

No, Peter, it’s just a little cut.

But you’re bleeding, Dad, look how much blood!

Don’t worry, Peter, I’ll put a Band-Aid on and the blood will stop in a second.

Lily would come over and stay quiet, as usual. Lily at twenty-one will write a post-feminist novel. Little Lily, my greatest joy. After reassuring the children I’d go into the bathroom — a pretty luxurious bathroom, mind you — and once I’d disinfected the cut (which is actually deep — Peter snuck a movie the other night, there was a guy slicing people up, it made an impression) I’d put on a nice long bandage. Then I’d look at myself in the nineteenth-century mirror (with that ugly scratch she calls antique and I call hideous), I’d fix on my own eyes, and I’d think back to this afternoon, here at the lake with her, so damnably young and beautiful.

We get to my car, which has a hundred and sixteen thousand and eighty-four miles on its back. Maybe it’s time to replace it. Maybe not. She gets in and kisses my hand. I kiss hers. While we are driving back home she tells me a lot of things. One stays with me.

You know — man passes through nine cycles in his life, before reaching the end. Nine cycles of despair and resurrection. Then nothingness.

And I say to her, Who said that?

She replies, A monk. From some strange place. In the East. Maybe Chinese, maybe Indian.

So I say, Is it true, do you think, or is it bullshit?

She says, I believe it. Or at least I assume it could be possible. I think I’ve gone through two already.

And so I think it over for a moment and, to tell the truth, I think it over the whole rest of the drive, until we pull up in front of her house. She says goodnight and gives me a kiss. I say, Want to have dinner at my place tonight? She smiles. Of course. And I say, I’ll wait for you whenever. She smiles again and goes inside.

I cut myself on a bent piece of sheet metal once I’m home. Goddamnit, I say. Out loud. Then I look around but there’s no one. The woman on the fourth floor, a few days ago, called me a boor. I go up to the bathroom and look for a Band-Aid. While I’m cleaning the cut my eyes are caught by my own reflection in the mirror. I stand there for four, five good minutes. And in the end the only thing I see in that mirror isn’t me. It’s a real man, a person more mature than I am, very different physically. A complete stranger who nevertheless inspires great calm. I see him leave the bathroom, walk out into the park of a large villa. And Peter is running to him, not to me. Lily stands in the middle of the lawn with her mouth open, staring at him. But she isn’t staring at me. And then her. She, who no longer loves me.

I switch off the light in my little bathroom, throw myself onto the couch, turn on the TV. There’s a movie I love. I let myself sink into it, slowly, into my present and into my future. Loser.

And so, without faith, I walk to meet my destiny without Peter. And without little Lily.

---

If she hadn’t known the source of those words, she would have thought it some tasteless joke. But interpreting the shapes of ink pressed onto the lines, in appearance detached from any context of reality, almost as if they were the transcription of a dream that had occurred on a night of full moon and restless sleep, her heart was beating faster, and that was all.

Martha reread, more than once, the printed pages, pulled out of an anonymous envelope, with nothing written on it but her name. She had never been dumped by letter, if you don’t count that strange guy in high school with the red hair and a Mustang as conspicuous as a pink feathered hat. A repeater. Joshua, maybe. Or Martin. Groobe was the love of her life and now he was going off to college and would marry a Republican with a house in Aspen. Lily would be a little tart, smiling and brazen on the David Letterman Show, where she would promote her own biography, the downward arc of a rich girl who becomes a Hollywood screenwriter under a pseudonym. Despite the purpose of those words, so balanced and weightless in their flow, being terribly clear, Martha could not accept that their story was finished. So, gnawing greedily on a fountain pen, she watched the telephone a few meters away, sunk into a feathered loveseat, without finding the impulse to reach it and ask Groobe why he no longer loved her.

— What do you mean, did you get my letter? Of course I got it, Groobe, it’s right here in my hands. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize the handwriting, did you think your brother had thrown it in the river to play a prank on you?

— …

— It’s my turn to talk, Groobe. You think you can dump me with a little story? You think you can leave me here to rot while you go God knows where? At least … did you ever love me, did you ever see me for who I really am? Did you ever, even once? Groobe, don’t be an asshole, don’t leave me here, on the bed where we used to fuck … don’t leave me here … (crying).

Martha is still there, thinking about all those threatening declarations of storm and about her own decisive rhetoric — a real woman’s rhetoric, not some slut, daddy’s little girl, no sir — never spoken. Martha is still there, seated on a candy-pink bedspread, watched over by a poster of François Truffaut and a giant blue bear, staring at her pink cellphone, in a pose that lasts like eternity, in a moment that perhaps happened so fast that no one noticed time passing, and so it cannot even be narrated or documented and, who can say with certainty, does not exist.

Perhaps there is a way of deforming the flow of seconds and minutes, of hours, of weeks and months, and some of us know the secret — some unconsciously, others, the more cunning, with full awareness. But once an event has happened, there is no going back. We can savor the joy or leave behind us, like a breath of wind, the boredom and the pain. When we give something up we do it with the awareness that that moment — be it a meeting, a kiss, or a yawn — will never come again.

— Martha, do you know this secret? — I write to her, character after character, hammering keys that are too loud. Hunched over the only chair in my basement, I watch the screen and every refresh of the frequency, one by one, while I crunch sugary cereal loudly and drink ice-cold orange juice. No reply from the cursor that keeps blinking on and off in front of my tired eyes.

Piotr Kirilenko’s life, as far as he could remember, had always been miserable. It wasn’t possible to point to a specific period in which the smallest glimmer of happiness — or perhaps it is better to call that sensation serenity — had swept away the sea of uncertainties and of precarious balance, physical and mental. Now he lay on an expensive mattress made by a Swedish guy in collaboration with brains over at NASA, in a fiber whose name is too peculiar to record, resting on a frame built to order in solid hazelwood from an inaccessible forest in Germany, eating M&M’s and pitching the green ones — which he had never been able to stand — into a vase set against a wall a few meters off.

The phone rang, but Piotr continued his mechanical gesture, indifferent to the obsessive sound coming from the titanium-fiber cellphone. Resistant to any kind of impact, the TV commercial promised, starring a decidedly provocative Slovak model — even, the voiceover said, to a fall from a twenty-story building.

When he came fully awake she was already there beside him, exploring the television schedule with scarce interest in anything she encountered. When he asked her how she had gotten in, she replied that he himself had given her the keys to the apartment, on Monday. Meanwhile the television filled the room with the logorrheic voice of a presenter of debatable artistic worth, but possessed of an enormous bosom held in good view by an evening dress with a vertiginous neckline. After a few seconds of silence she began speaking to him, like a robot in response to an input transmitted by a short Japanese programmer.

— The more the days pass, the more I feel like a Barbie, a stupid doll in the hands of a girl with braids. Look at this hair … God, how I hate it, I love it and then I hate it again. So beautiful but so … in need of my constant attention, my love, as if — you’ll think I’m crazy to be thinking these things — as if they weren’t part of my body and as if they had to make me jealous and win me over. That stupid car is going to die on me one of these days and I’ll have to take the bus and the train, and on that day my worst nightmares will take their shape. God only knows how much I hate public transportation and all that … filth you find on it. It might just be the time that the hair comes off my head and goes looking for a richer woman who can take better care of it. Being beautiful, being pleasing, turning the heads of men and of little boys on the street, that’s a responsibility you don’t appreciate — and don’t, please, look at me like that, like you’re talking with someone who doesn’t spend half his life on appearing and not on being. I have the moral duty to be at the maximum of my physical and erotic potential, at all times, and this is unjust, the way the children who die in Africa because they have nothing to eat are unjust. How I hate it, seeing the flies and them just standing there and doing nothing to chase them away. It’s scandalous. You want to fuck? You want to keep eating chocolates?

Piotr stares, hypnotized, at the girl who, while she speaks, in turn stares at the English garden of the elegant nineteenth-century building. Time is extremely slow. She has a strange voice that makes her petulance all the more aggressive, but in some way fascinating, almost morbid and sexual.

The phone rings again — this time Piotr answers — and I keep watching that girl whose name I don’t know, but whose geometric eyebrows imprison the gaze like steel cables. Piotr earns his living by sleeping with wealthy older women who, before they see him, perfume themselves as if the scent they wear had to last for eternity, as if they thought that this might be their last chance to feel, once more, like a real woman. I leave the house and look up again, with my eyes, for the window of Piotr’s bedroom, to enjoy once more the sight of that angel and perhaps exchange with her a complicit glance. She is no longer there. I stop for a few seconds and pray, because cupid’s arrow, devastating, has pierced my heart.

Yes. I am in love with those eyes and those eyebrows, so — you would have to see — so perfect. This morning I am happy, my heart pounding away at full pitch in my chest, I am in love. When I kill, that morning, the sadness that usually accompanies the passing of my victim seems to have vanished. Love is the cure for every illness of the soul, of that I’m certain now.

That evening I run into Piotr in the lobby outside the elevator. I greet him and I ask him whether it would be possible, one of these days, to meet the angel at his window. Piotr tells me it isn’t possible, because that angel at that window was never there, that he, Piotr, doesn’t live on the first floor, and that, above all, he, Piotr, is not named Piotr but Reggie.

And then, as Reggie moves off and goes up the stairs because the elevator is taking too long to come down, I — in communion with my own soul — ask myself whether Reggie’s life had really always been miserable, whether his expensive furniture was really expensive, whether the mattress and the frame were really so sought-after, and whether his cellphone, in titanium, would really have survived a fall from a twenty-story building. While I am opening the security door of my apartment a woman brushes past me, distracted by the handheld computer that governs her life. She apologizes as she moves on toward the lighted lobby. Perhaps there is a tear in the eye of that unknown woman, but her face escapes my view, so it is impossible for me to confirm this with any reasonable certainty.

The door of apartment 21 is slightly ajar. A thread of light is forcing its way through.

— Are the apartments all this big? — asks the blonde of the realtor, also a woman but less attractive.

— No, certainly not. You see … there were some errors during the building’s design. A few apartments — twenty-one is one of them — are visibly more spacious and taller. See here? (She tries to touch the ceiling, despite being barely a meter sixty.) I dare you to find an apartment with a ceiling this high. You could even build a loft — increase the total surface area.

— Right, of course!

Meanwhile the husband reappears from the corridor and whispers something into her ear.

— Have you seen the bedroom area yet? — asks the realtor, trying to get out ahead of him.

— Yes, it’s really spacious. Maybe too much. We aren’t planning, for the moment, to grow the family! (He smiles at the blonde, looking for complicity.)

A sound of medium intensity passes through the wall behind the realtor, who clumsily tries to mask the event with a plastic smile.

— Every place needs a few small defects — says the man, and bursts into a convincing laugh.

The realtor feels the small droplets that are forming on her forehead while she thinks that this time she might actually pull it off, the sale of apartment 21.

When a small bead of sweat touches the worn linoleum of apartment 21 — the haunted place, in the cursed tower, in the city forgotten by God — the first snowflake ends its descent on the asphalt. It becomes water and works its way into the imperfections of the ground, contaminated and never again pure.

My son, in a bed of cold metal, dies without my having been offered the chance to save him. No choice of sacrifice. No possible donation of parts of my body to keep him here with me. No master has asked me to join him in order to save him, to leave the upright and illuminated path to embrace dark powers thanks to which I might have spared him.

My son has died at the age of eight, while the snow falls more and more densely, on the living and on the dead, as if it wanted to cover the skull devastated by the accident and the smile that opened the heart. The hospital is warm, safe — the light white and cold, the sounds muffled, except the squeal of a cart bringing the patients’ dinner.

— Steve, go home.

— No, I’m fine here.

— You need to sleep.

— I don’t need anything. My son is dead and I, small as a grain of dust, cannot rebel.

— Would you …?

— Would I what?

— Well …

— Boozer, don’t be coy.

— I was wondering … Julia … if you would … take it in your mouth … you know. Forgive me …

— You know how I feel about these things, Booz …

— I know, love. It’s just that … tomorrow I’m leaving. We may never see each other again.

— Don’t say that, not even joking. It’s just that …

— You don’t have to do it. It was only an idea. Not even a particularly good one.

— All right. Even though my father would kill you if he found out. And he’d kill me too.

— After he saw that photo, your father worships me.

— Don’t overdo it. He’d kill you even if you were Roosevelt’s own son.

— Remember the look on his face, with the Daily in his hands?

— Yes. I remember.

— That was the moment to ask him for your hand.

— When you come back … we have a whole life ahead of us.

— Yes, but that was the perfect moment. He couldn’t have said no.

— He isn’t an impulsive man. Nothing would have been different. We have a whole life ahead of us.

— Maybe not, Julia.

— I told you not to joke. Come back here and marry me, Boozer Spencer. Come back to that damned house of yours or there’ll be hell to pay.

— I love you, Julia.

— All right. I’ll take it in my mouth. There’s no need for these little tricks.

(She smiles.)

— I love you, Julia, and I will come back and make you the happiest woman in this world. I promise you, Julia.

When the pleasure was over and he opened his eyes, the world had changed. The first thing he saw was a number of photographs gathered into a single frame. The subject was his wife. Sad, carefree, busy, distracted, industrious, exciting, attractive, loving. He paused in particular over one stolen shot that, more than the others, reminded him of the personality of the woman he loved. Her looking at the sea, ignoring the presence of the camera. He interrogated himself on the relativism of beauty, still dazed.

He observed the path covered in leaves outside the window. September had not been this cold in centuries. A boy lost some of the books he was carrying in his hands — a dozen in all, of various sizes. As he tried to pick them up, others fell from his grip, opening on the asphalt with their spines to the sky and their pages fluttering. Frightened by what had happened, the boy — who was wearing a red coat too large for his frame — fled at top speed, leaving on the ground a small slim book covered in a white jacket. The man, safe behind the window and the cream-colored curtains, regained, as he came fully awake, the certainty that this was indeed his world: the kingdom of fear.

In a leather jacket and a pair of worn slippers, he stepped out and recovered the small book, which in the meantime was being leafed through by a cold morning breeze that the book resisted, discontinuously. The boy had by now disappeared over the rise in the road, and the harsh cold penetrated the light fabric of his pajamas, sending an intense shiver through Louis Carlisle, who hurried back inside the single-story house that belonged to him.

I am speaking to Margherita with my eyes lowered, lifting them only for brief moments to catch what her reaction to my words might be. I confess to Margherita that I am madly in love with her, and in my inability to sustain her presence and her green eyes, I look out at the still-uncultivated fields and at the forest that encircles the town, holding it in its embrace.

While the leaves stir in the distance, strange figures emerge from the dense dark mantle. Men armed with gigantic swords, rusted axes, and colored kilts deploy with little discipline before nothing. Instinctively I turn my gaze west, toward the danger those men seem to fear but which does not appear — or perhaps it has been kept from me. The cavalry paws at the ground and rides off toward a low place a few hundred meters away. A group of archers receives orders and forms up. The bagpipes strike up war songs, propitiating the outcome of the battle. A man on horseback with a painted face and a proud look approaches the window of Margherita’s bedroom on the second floor, and, solemn, addresses to me his salute.

By the time Ben regains consciousness, the battle has probably already begun, or perhaps even reached its conclusion. Perhaps that man, so resolute, has found his honorable end. Perhaps he is feasting on the blood of his enemies. When Ben tries to make out where he might be, a woman of three hundred pounds is staring at him in the eyes. Ben meets the gaze of the formless mass of flesh, and the fat woman begins to speak.

— Do you see them. Watch them. Watch the perfection of the world they live in. It is an organic system. A closed society. Bounded in its volumes, bounded in its rules. None of them objects. None of them files a grievance. They have no freedom of movement, they have a perimeter, they have water that is changed for them on a schedule they do not need to understand, and they have not for one second considered any of this a problem. Come closer. Watch them carefully.

The more I look, the more it seems to me each of them has a well-defined role.

— No — she smiles. — That is what you would want to believe. They have no professions. They have no trades. There is no division of labor in there. There is something better than a division of labor.

What is it, then.

— The fact that they cannot speak only refines them. Speech is overrated. Speech is the most primitive of our overrated equipments. There exist a great number of communication systems more elegant than ours, more efficient, more honest, and you will not find any of them in a human mouth. We produce sounds. We produce grunts that have been polished, over centuries, into what we are pleased to call language, and we then mistake the polish for the thing. Look at them again. They have already passed us. What do you think of my fish.

Ben loses consciousness again, who knows for how long, and when his eyes reopen he finds himself surrounded by dozens of aquaria, taped with packing tape to a wheelchair. In front of him an enormous old woman, whose name he knows: Bubble.

Now that the truth is coming up to the surface, Bubble explains it to him. Out of apartment 21 a wave will leave. It will leave at a velocity she does not specify but appears to have computed. It will pass through walls in the manner of certain frequencies, it will pass through ribcages, it will pass through the small and large hypocrisies that the species keeps in its pockets, and it will install in their place the peace and the regulated joy of an animal kingdom, which is to say of a perfect one. In her cold and precise sentences there is the unmistakable architecture of a plan that exceeds our world — a plan whose blueprints she keeps somewhere behind her eyes, in tidy rooms. Has the fat, somehow, served as insulation, has it shielded that brain enough to let it evolve in private, to acquire a dimension we have been kept out of for our own good? Apartment 21 will detonate, the water will smother the fire, the useless lives will be wet ash and inventoried as such. Ben has been called, in short notice and without consultation, to be counsel for the survival of the species. The defense of the world has been entrusted to his mouth. God will not be at his side; God is too distant, God has business elsewhere. Neither will the Marines.

I turn to Margherita, but she is not lying on my unmade bed, leafing through a women’s magazine. Even though that is her place — on that bed — Margherita is somewhere else. The eyes that half-close become a long sequence of zero, one, one, zero, zero, zero, and then one again. The slender fingers, with nails painted in a showy pink, explore the place I have dreamed of so much, and a man, in a place perhaps far away, perhaps too close, watches them with an understandable delay due to the speed of his modem.

Ben takes nearly an hour. He works himself into a long speech, trying to avoid Bubble’s gaze, attentive in a maniacal way to every word that leaves his mouth.

— Look at yourself, Bubble. You are sixty years old. You may be more, I haven’t asked. You are disgustingly fat. You live alone. Your husband left you thirty years ago, which is to say he was the first to figure it out, and by the standards of marriage that constitutes a kind of victory. Your children do not want to see your face. They do not want to hear your voice on the line. To see your grandchildren — one of the great pleasures that have been crossed out of your account — you go down to the bus stop and you stand there and you smile when they smile, like a person watching a film through a hole in the wall. Don’t you disgust yourself, Bubble. Don’t you. There is a pistol in this apartment, there must be, a woman with a plan of this magnitude does not keep her drawers empty — use it. Use it on yourself and have done. You are not the executioner. You are not the victim. You are not the witness. You are not anyone’s mother. You are a quantity of flesh that has confused isolation for revelation and now wants to take the rest of us down with it. Get out of the way. Get out of the way of the people who are still trying. Let them live and let them die in whichever way they have managed to invent for themselves. You are no one. You are nothing. Kill yourself and leave the species in peace.

Bubble rises from the chair. She holds her gaze on Ben’s, who now, fortified, finds the strength to bear the heavy, yellowed eyes of his jailer. The pupils dilate. The breath comes hard. She relaxes, then slowly, turned toward one of the tanks, Bubble takes a pistol and shoots herself, straight through the temple. The head drags the body behind it, thrown by the force of the bullet. His eardrums fill with a whistling that tears through the silence. Ben closes his eyes. The head ends up in one of the aquariums, immersed among the fish, who promptly draw near and begin to nibble at the skin, the ears. And the nose.

Ben imagines her mouth shaping the last sentences she did not get the chance to deliver. Do you see them. Watch them. Watch the perfection of the world they live in. When one inhabitant dies, the other inhabitants feed on him. This is not cruelty. This is hygiene. This is the system maintaining itself.

Bubble keeps staring at Ben. Dead. The blood pouring from her skull mixes with the crystalline water of the tank, creating a suggestive effect. The fish seem to enjoy this warm current and dive into it, chasing each other and courting one another.

When I explain everything to the police, Margherita is right there beside me. Then, before I leave, I take the notebook with the white cover and I carry it away, hiding it so that no one can ever know the truth.

— God … is not turning against you, Jack.

— Well, Father, I think He is.

— His is not a punishing gesture, son. He desires only that you grow, day after day. His aim is to make you a better Christian. A better person.

— And, Father, do you think obstructing a man who, honestly, is trying to pursue his own ends — who is looking for … a happiness that need not be eternal, but that gives the concrete possibility of expressing a positive judgment on life — is the right way to make oneself loved? Do you really think so?

— Your judgment, my child, is undermined in this moment of pain, and it is not pure. Life holds back moments of distress for which God is not directly responsible.

— Free will?

— Exactly, Jack. You suffer because God gave you the freedom to suffer, just as you were given the freedom to seek out happiness and love.

— But this isn’t freedom. It’s chance. It’s throwing yourself into the fray and seeing what happens, without any prospect of foresight.

— And what is life, Jack, if not a great mystery? God gave it to us, gave us the chance to live it according to His teachings, showed us that death is no more than an illusion on the way to eternal life, sacrificed His own son. What more do you want?

I want him to stop sticking it up my ass, Father. That’s all.

God’s heart leaps, in the four seconds that separate Him, eternally, from Jack Potter. A tear runs down His face and falls, onto us, in the form of a beating rain, under a gray sky. The water, cold, sweeps over the face of a young German soldier who, with fingers dirty with earth, rubs his eyes, fixed up toward the clouds. One drop, heavier than all the others, seeps through the wet walls of a narrow bunker and wets the pages of a diary. The water deforms the sequence of one, nine, two, four, so that the year seems different, even though the young soldier is to die only three days later, killed by history.

Jack taps quickly on the small keys of his cellphone a message. A weight tightens his stomach as he is stuck inside the church because of the heavy rain. The reply arrives after a few minutes and says that things have changed. Things change, Jack, it is free will, you can’t do anything about it. Father Abraham is still in the confessional. Jack can see him nodding to the words of a young woman, penitent. God allows you to look for happiness, but the price you have to pay is the fact, mathematically obvious in its simplicity, of colliding with the will of other men. Each, in his mad rush toward self-realization, toward wealth and love, collides with the other, the brother to whom you ought to dedicate yourself, as we were taught — who often will have no scruple at all in crushing your head like a tomato. No, Jack, this is not malice. The evil that man creates is always unaware and innocent. Premeditated evil could never compete with the terrifying evil of the unintended. It’s free will, Jack. It was not given only to you, but to all of us. These are the rules of the game.

Jack, disoriented, wonders where the voice has come from. From himself? Or has God perhaps decided to communicate with him, at last. The rain keeps falling, incessant, and Jack defies it with the cellphone, silent, vibrating in the pocket of his jacket — too light a jacket for a day like this. His feet hit, violently, the already-full puddles. His eyelashes fill with water, blurring his sight. The signs flow past, peripheral. The cars make no sound. The road climbs, toward the hill. Jack keeps running, and the strength seems to double miraculously with every step, without the cold being able to chip away at the empty athletic gesture. Jack is coordinated in his run, a champion at football — or soccer, as the Yankees call it. Don’t tell an Englishman that football, here in America, is called soccer. He will be offended.

When I was in England, studying film, I had a girlfriend named Chelsea. She was from Liverpool, and she told me that her mother had fought hard to give her that name, even though her older brother and her husband sang You’ll Never Walk Alone before going to sleep at night. She had a chipped tooth, Chelsea, but she was very beautiful. Perhaps now she is a model, or a clerk in some fashionable little shop in Notting Hill.

When he reaches the top of the hill, Jack stops and hesitates before turning toward the city and admiring the panorama wrapped in the damp haze. He twists his torso. The city has vanished into nothing, under the rain.

When there are only twenty seconds until the firing of the accelerator of particles and sub-particles, and the two thousand physicists who have worked on it for fifteen years cross — some physically, some mentally — their fingers, George Harrison walks into Studio Four, the one Abbey Road had always reserved for him, and finds John Lennon stretched out on the floor, his back arched slightly upward, a black shirt protecting a thin chest.

— I think this is the best solution for Revolution — the power of the voice is better, amplified, with a kind of … decisiveness. The timbre changes, too. Listen here.

George Harrison steps into the control room — the control room, as Ringo loved to call it — and prepares to listen to the voice, decisive, of John Lennon, who, stretched on the floor, seems to want to push himself with the strength of his abdominals toward the microphone set a few centimeters from his mouth, at every word, at every revolutionary jolt of the lyrics. George watches him and envies him for that fervor that will make him one of the most famous men of history.

— It works — says George, the most talented of those boys.

— I know — replies John, the most aware.

John gets back on his feet and breathes deeply for a few seconds. Revolution will not be a single, but the B-side of Hey Jude. Not punchy enough — Paul had commented, the most natural commander, and everyone, in varying degrees, had agreed, except John, who had nevertheless swallowed the bitter pill without too much creasing, aware, perhaps, that he would swallow much bigger ones later, and that this slight did not deserve too sharp a polemic. John looks George in the eye and signals to him with his thumb, the exit of the studio.

When the particle accelerator finishes its initialization sequence, and the world prepares to understand — no, to comprehend — the greatest mystery of all, a German physicist types the start sequence on a black keyboard, and the four seconds that separate us from God, created by Lucia Manzoni, vanish into oblivion, forever, among the life-forms that never see the light, at the bottom of the oceans, and Johnny Depp pocketing twelve million dollars for his latest cinematic effort. A drama.

The young German soldier tries to dry, with the palm of his hand, his soaked coat, and reproaches with a string of insults a fellow soldier who has not noticed the leak that is wetting his rations and the diary with the white cover, dirty with mud and earth.

— Where will they come from?

— From the farm.

— Which farm?

— Over there. In the valley, to the south.

---

End.

A bow, walking off the stage.

No, thank you. I do not need Viagra, nor Cialis, Sandra. Yes, I admit it: my penis is not all that long, but, hell, no one has ever complained. It must be the blue eyes. It must be the things I tell people I am, or am able to do. Not always true.

But — don’t take offense — I am always your friend, and even though the filter on my mailbox tends to delete your messages, I think of you, always, and I beg you to remember me when I need it. I, my friends, am always here, ready to extend a hand and to draw you to my chest.

I’ll send you that computer, Njemba, there in beautiful Lagos, because I know your children need it. No, this offends me, my friend, I don’t need you to give me any money. I have faith in you, in your honesty, in your serious reputation. Whom can one trust, if not people like you, dear Njemba. There, my computer is on its way and I hope your children will have something to be glad about when they open the package. Give them a kiss on the forehead, Njemba, from me.

Hug them as I would hug them.