Don DeLillo - The Angel Esmeralda

We walked slowly down the middle of the street, six feet apart, using rutted car tracks in the snow to make the going easier. He took off a glove and extended his hand, fingers spread and flexing.

“Feel the air. I say minus nine Celsius.”

“We’re not Celsius.”

“But he is, where he’s from, that’s Celsius.”

“Where is he from? There’s something not too totally white about him. He’s not Scandinavian.”

“Not Dutch or Irish.”

I wondered about Andalusian. Where was Andalusia exactly? I didn’t think I knew. Or an Uzbek, a Kazakh. But these seemed irresponsible.

“Middle Europe,” Todd said. “Eastern Europe.”

He pointed to a gray frame house, an ordinary two-story, with a shingled roof and no sign of the fallen grace that defined some of the houses elsewhere in town.

“Could be that one. His family allows him to take a walk now and then, provided he stays within a limited area.”

“The cold doesn’t bother him much.”

“He’s used to colder.”

“Plus, he has very little feeling in his extremities,” I said.

There was no Christmas wreath on the front door, no holiday lights. I didn’t see anything about the property that might suggest who lived there, from what background, speaking which language. We approached the point where the street ended in a patch of woods, and we turned and headed back.

We had class in half an hour and I wanted to speed up the pace. Todd was still looking at houses. I thought of the Baltic states and the Balkan states, briefly confused — which was which and which was where.

I spoke before he did.

“I see him as a figure who escaped the war in the 1990s. Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia. Or who didn’t leave until recently.”

“I don’t feel that here,” he said. “It’s not the right model.”

“Or he’s Greek, and his name is Spyros.”

“I wish you a painless death,” he said, not bothering to look my way.

“German names. Names with umlauts.”

This last had nothing but nuisance value. I knew that. I tried walking faster but he paused a moment, standing in his skewed way to look at the gray house.

“In a few hours, think of it, dinner’s over, the others are watching TV, he’s in his little room sitting on the edge of a narrow bed in his long johns, staring into space.”

I wondered if this was a space that Todd expected us to fill.

We waited through the long silences and then nodded when he coughed, in collegial approval. He’d coughed only twice so far today. There was a small puckered bandage at the edge of his jaw. He shaves, we thought. He cuts himself and says shit . He wads up a sheet of toilet paper and holds it to the cut. Then he leans into the mirror, seeing himself clearly for the first time in years.

Ilgauskas, he thinks.

We never took the same seats, class after class. We weren’t sure how this had started. One of us, in a spirit of offhand mischief, may have spread the word that Ilgauskas preferred it this way. In fact the idea had substance. He didn’t want to know who we were. We were passersby to him, smeary faces, we were roadkill. It was an aspect of his neurological condition, we thought, to regard others as displaceable, and this seemed interesting, seemed part of the course, displaceability, one of the truth functions that he referred to now and then.

But we were violating the code, the shy girl and I, seated face to face once again. This happened because I had entered the room after she did and had simply fallen into the empty chair directly across from her. She knew I was there, knew it was me, same gaping lad, eager to make eye contact.

“Imagine a surface of no color whatsoever,” he said.

We sat there and imagined. He ran a hand through his dark hair, a shaggy mass that flopped in several directions. He did not bring books to class, never a sign of the textbook or a sheaf of notes, and his shambling discourses made us feel that we were becoming what he saw before him, an amorphous entity. We were basically stateless. He could have been speaking to political prisoners in orange jumpsuits. We admired this. We were in the Cellblock, after all. We exchanged glances, she and I, tentatively. Ilgauskas leaned toward the table, eyes swimming with neurochemical life. He looked at the wall, talked to the wall.

“Logic ends where the world ends,” he said.

The world, yes. But he seemed to be speaking with his back to the world. Then again the subject was not history or geography. He was instructing us in the principles of pure reason. We listened intently. One remark dissolved into the next. He was an artist, an abstract artist. He asked a series of questions and we made earnest notes. The questions he asked were unanswerable, at least by us, and he was not expecting answers in any case. We did not speak in class; no one ever spoke. There were never any questions, student to professor. That steadfast tradition was dead here.

He said, “Facts, pictures, things.”

What did he mean by “things”? We would probably never know. Were we too passive, too accepting of the man? Did we see dysfunction and call it an inspired form of intellect? We didn’t want to like him, only to believe in him. We tendered our deepest trust to the stark nature of his methodology. Of course there was no methodology. There was only Ilgauskas. He challenged our reason for being, what we thought, how we lived, the truth or falsity of what we believed to be true or false. Isn’t this what great teachers do, the Zen masters and Brahman scholars?

He leaned toward the table and spoke about meanings fixed in advance. We listened hard and tried to understand. But to understand at this point in our study, months along, would have been confusing, even a kind of disillusionment. He said something in Latin, hands pressed flat to the tabletop, and then he did a strange thing. He looked at us, eyes gliding up one row of faces, down the other. We were all there, we were always there, our usual shrouded selves. Finally he raised his hand and looked at his watch. It didn’t matter what time it was. The gesture itself meant that class was over.

A meaning fixed in advance, we thought.

We sat there, she and I, while the others gathered books and papers and lifted coats off chair backs. She was pale and thin, hair pinned back, and I had an idea that she wanted to look neutral, seem neutral in order to challenge people to notice her. She placed her textbook on top of her notebook, centering it precisely, then raised her head and waited for me to say something.

“Okay, what’s your name?”

“Jenna. What’s yours?”

“I want to say Lars-Magnus just to see if you believe me.”

“I don’t.”

“It’s Robby,” I said.

“I saw you working out in the fitness center.”

“I was on the elliptical. Where were you?”

“Just passing by, I guess.”

“Is that what you do?”

“Pretty much all the time,” she said.

The last to leave were shuffling out now. She stood and dropped her books into her backpack, which dangled from the chair. I remained where I was, watching.

“I’m curious to know what you have to say about this man.”

“The professor.”

“Do you have insights to offer?”

“I talked to him once,” she said. “Person to person.”

“Are you serious? Where?”

“At the diner in town.”

“You talked to him?”

“I get off-campus urges. I have to go somewhere.”

“I know the feeling.”

“It’s the only place to eat, other than here, so I walked in and sat down and there he was in the booth across the aisle.”

“That’s incredible.”

“I sat there and thought, It’s him.”

“It’s him.”