Norman Manea - The Lair

He seemed to have reread the text recently, unsatisfied with what he’d found.

He was a winner; he had Lu and his friends on his shelves, who kept vigil over his aristocratic solitude, its civilized hypocrisies.

“Coupling means empowering the surrounding loneliness. When someone gives himself with complete abandon to someone else, it’s over; nothing remains, there’s nothing. Rilke was young then.”

He’d stopped speaking for the moment; he had probably also picked up one of the many colored folders, bringing it near, the way you might bring your ear to the ground, to listen for the oncoming train; he listened for a second to the nocturne of the lunatics, then leisurely put the folder back in its place, reconnecting with the wanton world.

“When two people give themselves entirely to one another, when they no longer belong to themselves … ”

I realized that now he was reading, either from a book, or some notebook of his own.

“When the two give themselves entirely, in order to belong entirely to each other, their feet leave the ground. And living together becomes a continuous failure. A continuous failure, what do you think of that?”

He was reading only because he’d been asked about his reading, and, as usual, he was addressing himself to someone absent. His voice was calm, normal.

The following weeks and months, I spoke at length with Augustin Gora about old age.

The subject didn’t strike him as somber, not even after the confirmation, albeit in dubious circumstances, of the death of our younger friend, Peter Ga par. He didn’t respond, either, when I confessed to him my suspicion that, after this recent and belated news, he would write his own obituary, who knows how true to his actual biography. It would have been presumptuous to assume, I added, that after our increasingly frequent conversations following Peter’s death, I myself would have become the hero of a similar composition. He didn’t answer; he returned to the subject of old age.

“Until the shock with the angioplasty, I never felt my age coming on. Without children, I ignored the speed of the calendar. Forty-and fifty-year anniversaries were registered and forgotten. The meeting with the doctors, with their machines and their hospital rooms, brought me to my senses. What followed was a tough year, a really tough year. The Nymphomaniac, as the departed called it, kept taunting me; I was living in constant tension. I felt, then, that the disease was a warning. That’s what old age is, isn’t it? Ever more acute awareness of fragility. Initiation in exhaustion, initiation in dying. Alert and hurried time pushing us every day and night closer to that beyond that horrifies us. As if all of life didn’t come down to just that. Every new morning is a threshold to an unknown that could be anything, including the end.”

He was right; illness prepares one for extinction. Without such preparations, you think you can prolong the ambiguity for as long as you want.

“Melancholy and the abyss? You look into the distance into which you’ll splinter just as if you’d never been here at all, but routine is stronger. It returns you to the here and now. Your instincts are still alive and intact. You reenter the chaos that consumes time imperceptibly and ruthlessly.”

“Just when the verdict is clearly pronounced, perception changes. The end of your journey is announced to you. Expiration. Just like with any product. The term of expiration, twenty-three years, thirty-four years, sixty-one years and three months and two weeks and five days. The tumor is incurable; you have six months to live. The last postponement. Today’s doctors don’t have the liberty to lie to you about the prognosis.”

“Yes, and every day becomes a gift, ignored up to that point. You become aware of every moment, every leaf, every breeze, every page. You’d like to sip them, to hold them like this, endlessly, inside you. Were you scared? Are you still scared? Of the void, of the nothing that you become?”

“Then, yes. The surprise found me unprepared, it ravaged my insides. Now, less so. A little less. I’m calm.”

“Bitterness helps, in the end? Fury, disillusionment, exhaustion, contempt for everything, not least of which for disgusting death?”

“Maybe. But fury is vital; it’s not acceptance.”

“And kindness? Serenity and gratitude. Resignation, surrender to destiny.”

“Like an enlightenment? Candor, abandon? Like faith?”

“Faith promises hope. Unverifiable hope. Maybe we’ll get to a point when we can verify hope.”

“Palade wasn’t a man of faith, but he believed in the transmigration of souls. Successive reincarnations.”

“He’s not alone. He claimed that he received coded signs. Those who don’t receive them can’t contradict him,” said Gora, quietly.

I asked Gora to tell me what he saw out the window. He announced, first, what time it was: eight past four in the afternoon.

“We can’t ignore the hour. We’re talking about old age, death, and so, about time. The time of expiration.”

After a pause, he added: “July. July 19.”

I was waiting for him to announce the year, but he didn’t. What did the nineteenth of July look like out his window, when so many people are born while others die, just like any other day?

He described a garden to me, then a green valley. A vital, vigorous green. And then further, a tall, verdant forest. In the garden facing the window, a family of wild turkeys. A mother and nine chicks, the father absent, at the library. Squirrels. Two young and timid deer. A fat, lazy cat.

“Paradise! Paradise, right?”

“Yes, but I’m not getting bored. I have my books on the shelf and my words inside me.”

“They’ll disappear.”

“They’ll no longer be my books? Or I will no longer be among them? Is that what you mean?”

“Do you envy those you’ll leave behind? Are you sorry to leave?”

“Envy? Those who remain aren’t immortal. They remain provisionally. When they disappear, they’ll also be mentioned for a while. By relatives and friends, in books and photographs. Until the last trace is gone. It doesn’t matter when. Yes, it makes you lightheaded to think about your loved ones. Even if you haven’t seen them for a long time. You know that they are still here, somewhere. Our tiring sun will also disappear, won’t it? Terrible, right?”

“Is there someone over there that you’d like to see again?”

“Oh, yes. My parents. From time to time. And others … in the same way, from time to time. If we keep them in mind, it’s enough and it’s more certain. Without depressing changes.”

I asked him how he imagines the final moment. Extended to infinity, or brief, brief, like a spasm.

I believed myself resigned, calm, biologically calm, the way an interlocutor from the faraway land used to say, but it so happens that the thought of the final hour overwhelms me. Impotence, regret, the insurmountable, drained my vital energy instantly. Like in a sensual and doomed atonement, with no way out.

“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about the moment; it’s an unbearable thought,” Gora said, unconvinced.

We weren’t talking about old age, actually, but about life. Old age was life slowed down, but still life. Enfeebled, diminished, but life nonetheless. Death doesn’t exist without life.

“Material death? The perishable, the organic. What about transcendence? The prayers, the books, the manuscripts, the scores, the drawings that attempt to defy matter, even while they represent it. Mozart and Venice and Borges. All in vain?”

“Intensity. Not more futile than other futilities. Our privileged intensity. Our gift and our dedication.”