Norman Manea - The Black Envelope

Slippery Gina was sitting open-mouthed, thoughtlessly repeating the words she heard. As if she were preparing a play or an expedition into a jungle inhabited by Martians. “The instruction must respect some elementary rules of communication. They should be addressed in such a way that, without any reduction or decrease in the speed of delivery, they can hear at a distance of.5–1.5 meters, and the speaker’s position should be well lit. The speaker’s mouth should be lower than the hearer’s eyes; he should never have a cigarette in his mouth or be chewing a sweet. The speaker is not permitted to wear sunglasses or to turn his head while engaged in dialogue. He should use simple, repetitive sentences, should not display impatience, but should be persevering and remain in good humor. The greatest difficulty is presented by the verb.” Gina returned several times to some rather obscure passages, and then they would go over the stage directions together. They did not see that the ears of the surrounding collective had grown larger in trying to grasp the code of their bizarre intimacy, nor did they notice how Corkscrew excitedly raised and lowered his eyebrows, or how Uncle Gic ’s eyes kept bulging as if he had seen a ghost. “Tactile memory. The hallucinatory gratification of certain needs through dream. Dream, being both the road to the unconscious and the expression of the unconscious, may be used as a force of induction — to consolidate the group and direct it toward greater efficiency; that is, toward respect for secrecy, belief in the goal, execution of orders, and solidarity in action.”

Was this instruction in parapsychology? Frater Vancea and dulcissima Chick were apparently preparing for cosmic or subterranean encounters invisible to the uninitiated, by learning the rules of cooperation in some organization of the future. Mr. Vancea did not seem too wary of the dangers, although there were dangers all around. He had no time for those who gathered together cowering, so that their thoughts could not somehow be read before events were ready to be set in motion, nor for those whose membership could be read on their face or their wallet. Provocations, nonchalance, and insolent behavior proved to have a protective dimension, as it were, after you had achieved the status of a scatterbrain capable of the wildest eccentricities, of which the wildest of all was precisely the peculiar status of a tolerated person. Tolerated by shadowy forces — that was what he had gradually made those around believe him to be.

So that one more bit of tomfoolery hardly counted any longer. They knew that Frater Dominic could not stand being bored; he hated nothing more. Therefore, Gina did not dare express surprise that her colleague had suddenly decided to look for a former neighbor or colleague or a friend of his brother in Argentina; nor that he told her in excessive detail about Gafton or Marga, when the whole dark story that had seized his passionate interest was not exactly of the kind that you confide to a colleague at work.

To a colleague, to some colleagues.

Tolea had chattered away in front of both Gic and Corkscrew about his correspondence with the family in Argentina and all the rest. In the end, it might be asked whether the risky display of things best kept from public view was not part of the same capricious strategy of disclosing precisely the most troublesome facts in order to place a question mark over them. To reveal and emphasize them in an offhand manner came to look suspicious, incredible, unreal. Was that perhaps what the incautious Tolea, the scatterbrained Tolea, was basing himself on? To insist on recovering through “the language of mime and gesture,” from a mute photograph, an old and complicated happening about which both Gafton and Marga could have recounted something much more coherent, probably? To appear convinced of Dulcissima’s capabilities as she listens to you? A kind of mystical kid sister, prepared to use the metempsychosis of her nomadic ancestors to help you in unraveling the sorcery of the disabled? As if, anyway, you wouldn’t find your way alone to the door with the fugitive’s wonders — a fugitive hidden in the gypsy part of town, to the right of the supermarket, after the soda-bottling center, in the vague topography of fiction, as in the cowrie hidden between a colleague’s breasts at the Tranzit observation post. So you can’t tell anymore what is invented truth and what is plausible falsehood in the real world just a step away?! Shadows, magnetic accident, nervous deviation, jumbled codes, borealis illusion. He had disappeared, quite simply! The fakir had suddenly vanished, with questions and answers and everything. After so many tender introductory sessions on the subject of disabilities, the suspect had vanished. Sick, do you hear! Professor Vancea sick?! As if the Prince of Darkness were to catch a cold — the poor thing! — and snuggle into bed wrapped in burning leaves of leprous hemp, so that he, the orphan boy, can also warm himself up. Drinking from a pail of prescribed beladonna tea and bone filings, and tossing a blood-red aspirin into each mouthful.

When no one was expecting it, he disappeared! Sick, medical leave, fancy that. But he reappeared after a few days: purified, pale, rose-colored. Dressed in white, would you believe it! On workdays he never wore anything but black, like a gravedigger or a night-soil collector. But he made his next entrance all in white! Penitent, festive, so everyone could see that although he was paler, as befitted his role, there was actually nothing at all wrong with him. Snow-white, purity itself, with his same old smile: slanting, sinuous.

His partner held out her delicate hands to the master. Her face glowed with the frail, wild beauty of a loose adolescent. She kept closing opening her work coat, smiling conspiratorally, showing white piano keys, white fangs. Her lips moistened, soft and pink. She looked coyly at the master juggler, but with a predator’s gleam. Lewd, maternal gentleness.

The skunk didn’t even see her! With a single movement he flung his bag onto the peg. He did not notice anyone, remember anything; he couldn’t care less.

But when he passed behind the desk on which reception was written in large golden letters, Monsieur Anatol Dominic Vancea Voinov accidentally touched his colleague’s electric elbow.

So Gina could be patient no longer.

“Well, what was it like? Come on, tell me. Have you been there? Did you go?”

The professor opened his eyes wide, not understanding whom and what she was talking about. Not about himself, obviously. The poor man did not understand the confused state of the office worker who was his colleague.

“Piss off!”

The whistling of the words coiled the greenish air and seemed to extend into a long white hand. From the silken sleeve a shiny white bag dropped onto the red desk.

Long fingers of polished ebony took from the paper bag a long, parallelepipedic, pink sweet. Then another — coffee-colored, cylindrical, shiny. Sweets, sugar candy!

A brief snigger could be heard. Gina began furiously to crunch the poisons.

COMRADE OREST,

I approached him at last. It seems Chatterbox does not want to talk to me. He answers politely and tries to get away as fast as he can. Narcissus? I know that for him, too, days and nights are divided into hours for eating and shitting and sperm, films, sleep, clinic. That’s all, he’s not a Martian. The key aspect remains the economy, I know. Precisely here people forget the great Marxist discovery: being determines consciousness, not the opposite. The capitalists have learned to use the weapon well. That’s the real question, the central point; that’s where the stethoscope should be placed, I know. It’s not like thirty years ago! What matters isn’t what you think but what you eat and how you pay for it. Since we’re all state property, it’s easy to find the answer. Economic studies also become political and psychological, I know that. The great human dilemmas? In a place without paper, even toilet paper? Do you remember what I requested for our correspondence? Durable, good-quality paper, that’s what I asked for! Acid-free paper, acid-free, that’s what I wanted. You gaped in astonishment. You couldn’t believe I wasn’t afraid of paper that lasts; that is, of my own actions. Then you understood what kind of correspondent you were dealing with, I know that. No whining, complaints, and retractions, as with so many others … Forgive me: I’ve been rather drifting from the subject. It’s my bad mood after meeting one of those people who like to put on airs. Their mysteries aren’t worth a penny, believe me. I know that: they’re state property, too. I’ve also got other reasons, it’s true. Uncle hasn’t received any medicine for two weeks. He’s on the point of exploding, I know. The only hope is for you to step in, as usual. Otherwise no one will do their duty, I know that.