José Manuel Prieto - Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia

II. I could never explain to myself the strange fascination that particular painting exerted on me, the strong attraction of the interlaced fingers, the languor of the powerful arms, captured in a relaxed and almost feminine pose. I’d discovered him at the end of the gallery, poised atop his lunar landscape like a rare species of lepidoptera, a gigantic Vanessa atalanta. His sadness, the blue marble of the landscape, those crystalline blooms, spoke to me of an ascent to a distant star: the exhausting journey, an extremely long effort rendered futile by the lunar desolation. They told me in the museum — or maybe I read it somewhere — that he represented a dejected or defeated demon. Was he the victor in full ascent or the victim of a fall? Unable to resolve the enigma I bought the best reproduction available — the one with dimensions closest to the original’s immensity — and hung at the foot of my bed.

In the morning, as I emerged from long dreams, I would open my eyes in the room’s semipenumbra and was invariably surprised by the presence of the daemon there. His coffee-colored torso and curling mane, the greens and blacks of that landscape, always posed the same question. Was this a lofty victory, though with no air to breathe in the void that surrounded him, or was he back on the earth, downcast, unable to break away from the pull of its formidable mass? One morning I leapt out of bed and without looking even once into his eyes went to the bathroom for my Solingen straight razor and resolved the question in the best way possible. The sad eyes, the weight of disgrace, the lunar despair — all that was rolled up and stowed away on top of the bookshelf. I cut out the bloom of octahedrons to his left and had it framed, a fragment of the most exquisite mineralogical exuberance. This painting, I decided, was far more suggestive than the other one, and for years, as I contemplated these unfathomable gems, entranced, I grew more convinced that this was the true and only contribution of Bruvel, the mad painter, to my formation: the human (in the old sense of concern for the human ) was absolutely unnecessary. I was entirely wrong about this, I could not have been more wrong. As we shall see.

VIEW OF FALLING SNOW. It had been snowing since ten that morning. I asked the male nurse for a TEA and sipped it slowly without taking my eyes from the window, surrendering myself to the hypnotic power of the light snow that, agitated by the wind, seemed to ascend in inverse sequence, upward toward the distant floodgates of the heavens.

For the silence of this hospital room, for my legs encased in plaster, and for the depth of the sky, I had Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky, wounded at the Battle of Borodino: the unbearable splendor of our cosmic insignificance. The obvious existence of a baleful God who, with a single slash, had severed all the delicate threads of my story. Which of the two bodies touched the striped awning first? The small packet that was P.O.A. or my own eighty kilos of weight?

Downward: “A long way down since the time you had everything,” which was another idea for a title, perhaps a more precise one. How long does it take a snowflake to fall from the sky? A month and a half? Two months?

When I awoke it had stopped snowing and I learned that I’d been here for sixty days. I also discovered a woman I did not know next to my bed. A young woman with hard features, her hair cut in layers at the back of the neck. It was LINDA. By now I could reach this type of conclusion very quickly. But her face was worked in shades of gray, as if bleached. Only the green of a pair of very expensive emerald earrings stood out, earrings I didn’t recall having seen her wear before.

“They cut off my ponytail,” I explained.

She turned to display her own bare nape.

I said, “I almost can’t see, Anastasia. Because of the fall, apparently. I haven’t suffered any attacks since I’ve been here. But why has it taken so long for you to come? Where have you been all this time?”

“I’m leaving, THELONIOUS.”

“Dear God, no. Call me José, JOSEPH, if you want.”

“ Well, I’m going to New York, JOSEPH. ”

“Speak Russian, Anastasia, for the love of God. Don’t you understand? I was one step away from death. And what’s more olvídalo (in the clear sense of forget about that ). There’s nothing in the OCCIDENT either. I’ll explain this to you in detail if you like. A voice whispered in my ear and I heard it very clearly, as I’m hearing you now. I wept in rage, thinking about how to proceed with our journey, get more money. I was never that rich, I lied to you, all those stories about Chinese merchandise and chartered cargo ships . . but a young boy’s voice said to me, in a whisper ‘A long way down since the time you had everything.’ It was like being kicked in the head. It’s a lengthier title than BREAD FOR THE MOUTH OF MY SOUL, but even more apt.”

“No. I knew you were right when I saw you stretched out on the awning.”

“But I didn’t see anything as I was falling. I thought I would have time to study the trigonometric increment of the lines, but I didn’t see anything. Only the final impact. That’s what awaits us. I was impatient to tell you.”

“That’s ridiculous, THELONIOUS. What about As I Lay Falling ? I could find two or three other good titles. .” LINDA suddenly broke off and raised her palms to her temples.

“Are your temples throbbing?”

“Yes. . No. . Look. .” she went on. “Aren’t your striped pajamas the same pattern as the fabric of that awning? Weren’t you trying to make me see precisely that sort of thing? As if when you fell. .”

“My God, you’re right! I hadn’t noticed it.”

“. . you became organically integrated into its pattern. Seeing you down there with your arms outstretched, like a starfish against the rippling seabed, I understood everything. It was a very eloquent ending. I thought you’d arranged it all. Even if you didn’t, you should thank RUDI for it.”

“But not New York, Nastia; at least Rotterdam.”

( But not New York, Nastia; at least Rotterdam . Anastasia was making the same mistake as everyone else in Muscovy. A momentary and foreseeable error. There were many worlds within frivolity. I had tried to expand the perception she had of her beautiful little boots, to segment them into the fifteen lacquered nesting dolls of their softness, their texture, their pretty silver buckles, et cetera, although — I now saw with absolute clarity — it had been naive of me to anticipate that Anastasia would develop in that direction. In reality, she would never succeed in living in both worlds (that of heightened vision and that of the most sublime frivolity ) with the requisite intensity or abandon. The boots she was wearing, so comfortable, polished with such great skill, did not touch her soul. She would never paddle happily in the sea where I’d moved with such ease. The time when I interrupted her dissertation on ice cream, shouting VANILLA ICE in jubilation — which was not the flavor that the waiter was bringing us but the joy I felt at being able to bring together, in my novel, the name of that rapper with a passage taken from Proust — she was left in a state of utmost incomprehension, and since I could provide no satisfactory clarification of the reasons for my happiness, she came to believe that I’d shouted VANILLA ICE because his music interested me as much as THELONIOUS’S did and that these two artists’ respective achievements allowed for some element of equivalence. I mean that it cost her a great deal of effort to discern what was present, what was rapidly taking place before her eyes, and though I had confidence that a woman of her talents would succeed in doing so at some point in the future, the most I could boast of, in the specific case of LINDA, was my success in making her adopt a lighter outlook on life, one that overlooked all the duties she’d always thought it necessary to carry out. You’ll tell me that she was an atypical case, out of sync with the times, someone into whom the Doctrine and its central theses had sunk deep roots. Agreed. In essence, this was the cause of her current decision. She had come very far, though without undergoing any radical change. She’d suddenly begun to abhor her gray former life and was dreaming of a career as a model. She was going to New York.)