Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

In the door out to the terrace from the café stands a waiter: the hands folded behind his back are waving a napkin; he inspects the points of shoes worn of their elastic; he casts a glance here and there; his puckered lips vacillate between contempt and petulance.

Opposite, across the street, there’s a jeweler’s. The proprietor is on the doorstep. He’s turned toward the shop. (A few words.) A woman is surprised by a man taking her around the waist, her eyes were moving along an asymmetrical imaginary triangle: from the doorstep to the seated man, from there to the youth — who, as if chasing after himself, was already walking away again — and from this manifest, triumphant Sodom, so alluring that she suppressed her derision and reprimand, toward the nape of her husband’s wrinkly neck, where she smacked a kiss that undresses.

The following morning, when he arrived for breakfast, the stranger had already drunk half his coffee. He was reading a newspaper and ferreting around. And having ferretted him out, he immersed himself tenfold in his reading.

He went in and ordered. — The waiter’s original intention was a half-turn away, but something very strong and evil stopped him halfway.

The waiter extended his index finger, despite its black nail, and the index finger indicated a table that was already occupied.

“Would you like to take your repast here?”

The guest’s eyes popped out.

“No!” he said, and he added more quietly: “Why?”

The attendant brought a small plate and a glass. He flung them upon the table without a word. — And it was a good while before he returned with the coffee pot. He poured with his back to the youth; and as he poured:

“I thought. . Given what happened yesterday. . And that you’re both always alone. .”

He was saying this as if to himself, well aware that the new guest was looking. But that didn’t confound him. Yet, when he had finished pouring, he put down the carafe, leaned his hands on the table, picked up the service key, and said, this time actually to him, “You are the gentleman from Benedictine Mill, yes?” whereupon he gathered up the coffee pot again, and, going back inside, stood momentarily on the doorstep with his torso twisted in such a way that it almost hurt, with these two words: “That’s right!”

He disappeared; just at that moment, however, the young man sort of came to. Having wandered the environs and ascertained that they were alone, all alone with each other (even the street was abandoned), he turned his face toward him, so permissibly that it might be that we’re only looking at our brother, at that beloved brother whom we have sometimes allowed, with a mute look, always to tell us who we really are . And this face was inundated with a smile; a smile-flood.

“I knew it. .”

But there are dams against flooding. Sometimes.

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, pardon ,” the youth said, “I see that you’re a stranger here, as am I. .”

But he wasn’t averting his gaze. He wasn’t! On the contrary, he started staring like a fisherman at a line when it has begun twitching. And this look, even though it was as though irremediably stuck, was attempting an appropriate retreat. It had, after all, been suddenly, astonishingly satisfied, and it moved on.

The smile slipped out again. A smile that was no longer afraid, for it had grown skeptically curious and haughty. A smile that suspected that the word-lair, from which no one would now drive him, the gopher, away, was nearby.

He was waiting, encouraging discreetly. And the waiting was over.

“As you can. . How does it strike you?” — But neither the words, nor the gesture, nor the look that he found threatening drove off that confident smile; they fell like poorly-thrown stones, somewhere toward their goal, and he knew that he was tossing out of fear that he might not happen to hit his target. . Our man dug around in his pockets for change; he was seized with panic; he glanced around surreptitiously, as though for a malevolent beast that would leap out if you stayed, and surely would if you attempted to flee. The confident smile came to trust in familiar address, and while he was in fact using familiar terms with the apples of his coked-up, motionlessly nagging eyes, his mouth, so small that it was disheartening, was lewd, having released its corners and these words: “You silly! Why are you against yourself?”

After the initial quick steps, nearly a flight, he stood as if nailed there, not actually knowing whether he had stopped because he didn’t know up from down, or was it at the call of the mysteriously explosive, unexpected memory of a small sycamore terrace on ramparts, of its bench, of the proud, impassive shabbiness of such places, of the view into the dale, of the facing slopes where shouts fluttered from tennis courts like bright flags unfurled all at once. A memory, and at the same time the intrepidly massive ringing of an open, enthusiastic affection for those places, as though toward a living being in whom he, all of a sudden, held an inexhaustible trust.

But as he was running past the Romanesque church, he was confronted by several bars of portamento on an organ. It really did confront him, albeit only with a timid warning, albeit only as a begging street vendor offers his wares: with such aspiring subtlety, and making sure that he’s swept himself from your path even before you’ve shown your intention to pass with disdain. He couldn’t not stop, and standing there he started to listen. He caught a Gregorian chant, and he heard it as if he were looking at a heavy, yet hovering veil that sweeps farther and farther away and waves with a mighty, regular, and tranquil breeze. And this breeze was again just the panting of words whose sound was at the same time, astonishingly, also the incarnation of their sense, the words “vanity of vanities” in the form of the vain pulse of the sea, in the vanity of which is nevertheless also its fulfillment.

“Vanity of vanities”: not a threat, not a preacher, not a giver of joy, but rather an equals sign between extinction and origin, life and death, beginnings and endings. Unifier of the empire. — He didn’t think this, he saw it: like a white-hot heat that does not burn.

But with this glowing calm, as sudden as catastrophe, there were two waves from below, two mutually antagonizing, and yet coordinated, hatreds: a hatred toward the flattering, lazy, and lying reconciliation by which he had allowed himself to be led astray even before his dishonor had been redressed, before he could even attempt revenge, and a hatred toward himself, that he is unable to allow himself to be led astray, that he has to oppose reconciliation, that there is nothing he can do but long for revenge, knowing that he’s the one paying for it. Two hatreds, equally strong and antagonistic, yet still they add up: to senselessly enraged self-pity, to pitiable, bloodthirsty rage at everything he could possibly lean and rest on, to a savage wail of hope that is secretly counting on what is shouted to finally just drown it out.

The chant was as though felled, and the passer-by, not doubting that he has already, once again, murdered one of the obvious signs of desecrating mercy, entered with a suspicious hope that the dead might still rise from the dead. . A blinded legato fumbles through the yielding cathedral gloom, like a perverse, wrinkled angel whose magnificence has not yet burned out completely. Four forgotten old ladies in indigo cretonne skirts have already forgotten even what the withered hope was that they carried here daily. In the apse, a sacrilegiously embroidered cope is decaying, and the horrors of a metaphysical comedy are playing out. Two ruddy ministrant’s surplices are thinking only of the fleeting kiss a neighbor’s daughter had planted on one of the acolytes last evening (in the darkened passage where only one of the two gas burners was burning, and filthily at that), and they aren’t thinking of anything else. One of the boys reaches for the open Gospel to bring it over, and has to reach up on tiptoe. Our fellow sees the hypertrophic ankles of a child and the calves of a future footballer.