Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

“You silly, why are you against yourself?” — He is fleeing. The street. Shops, a candy store, a stationer, a large bazaar, a motor car for hauling. Stock boys are loading goods: one astride on the freight bed, the other handing up from below. Their frostbitten ears haven’t shaken their blue, not even in summer. They speak in monosyllables, and each word is a condensed boyhood event behind a gate or on a bench, and behind each, two chummy adolescent coochie coos at some dame, coochie coo at hoochie-cooch. Their bared elbows are like knobs and clearly say that the day has twenty-four hours, eight hours of work and sixteen hours of what the blood incites, which either you listen to, and then you live a little, or you don’t, and you get pimples. — A heavy country woman is walking in front of him. She might be thirty, and she might be fifty. He sees her buttocks and can’t not think of her guy, how they throw him off with a single get-going once they’ve gotten what they wanted; and the calves, the calves skilled at kicking away a duvet when the night is too hot.

Over there, two girls are walking — he’d almost say they’ve avoided him. And what’s with the reproving motion of that mommy over there, that her precious daughter not run away from her? That she might cut her off in front of him? — Yes, and the day before yesterday, those two girlfriends on the empty road who were fleeing from him all the way up to the first residential building? And that slacker high schooler who listened so knowingly when his father, upon realizing who was coming (him!), called out: “Get over here! Quit dawdling!” — The blindest of the blind are those who don’t want to see. Yes, the landlady for example — how is it that it hadn’t occurred to him before! — it’s clear, after all, that she not only “looks the other way” (when she’s paid), but that she even turns her head. There’s a difference, sir, a difference! — And the postman, when he was delivering a registered package to him the other day: what was it he’d mumbled? And what was with that stubbornly lowered head? — And the waiter at the empty café, who was pouring for him as if in a hurry, God knows why. .

“You silly, why are you against yourself?”

He was wont at times to stare into the mirror. . Some of his features, after all, must reflect that ! Were it not written in his features, it wouldn’t be visible. But they see. For if they didn’t see it, he wouldn’t see it either. . yes, and then he’d have no reason to cower before variations of this look, which was actually always the same. . This look that we have suddenly inferred. . This look like when a hand jolts away when it’s touched cremains or filth unawares. — He knows this look well, as definitive as a tugged noose: the look of women seated nearby at a café, when out of the blue they call to the waiter to take their glasses elsewhere; the look of that mommy with whom he’d struck up a conversation late one morning on “lover’s lane,” when she was leading away her eight-year-old little girl, whose hair he had patted. — But when we get down to it, that’s just how the Paris cops look at him, too, brushing him off when he’s asked for a street (all he did was ask for a street!); and it was just like that, with the unexpected period at the end of the incomplete sentence, with which they all wrapped up, clearing off quickly — the baker woman, the owner of the tiny little café, the junk dealer, the mailman, the passer-by he’d greeted.

What’s giving him away? He was looking, not flattering himself. He was looking with the slightly fearful animosity with which we look upon a stranger. He knew that he was seeing an unattractive face; he could go further: judge what was unattractive about it. But where might it be, the reason all those looks were like sentences broken by a sudden ugliness? The bottom lip? Is this the lip of a miser? The bags under his eyes? They hold the strangled cravings of sleepless nights; maybe it was visible — all those limp corpses? The gerbil cheeks? The runaway stubble and eyebrows? He was hiding his rotten teeth: yes, such a perfidiously crooked-toothed smile. . But let’s be fair! Heaping shame upon oneself, and nothing but shame, reeks just as bad as self-praise. — That’s not all there is, there’s also this here (and he knows it; for he has known it): this exposed stringer of a forehead — disparage, if you can, that glacis , the likes of which doesn’t take the wicked into its confidence! And the eyes: they look upon him as though into an abyss they fear, but without despair. Why mightn’t he at least feel sorry for them? He pities strangers who’ve suffered a wrong, too. .

And now another nice about-face: hadn’t he said a moment ago that he was searching his features for what had been giving him away ? But didn’t he just say that it was his eyes that were being wronged ? And that they therefore didn’t take their own side! And that he therefore doesn’t brag as though he were any better than what they take him for! What misery, not to get out of this vicious circle. For every “guilty” there was also, immediately, a mitigating circumstance. And what a mitigating circumstance! Ablutions, apology, exaltation. And when it’s still so simple to say, “They’re moving their seats away, so I suppose they have a reason; a person can’t be litigant and judge at the same time, isn’t that so?”

But here was heard something so quiet that it might have been a voice other than his, and it said, “And why would it be that it’s only the judge who is infallible? Because he knows less than the defendant? Why would ‘more’ be less than ‘less’?”

That’s what he said, but to himself he concluded with this: “So be it. Surely they’re right.” — He added: “This thought is sinful.” — But he held something back, and it sounded like this: “But it’s a sin that I delight in, for it’s a sinful hope.”

He bared his rotten teeth.

“The Church warns against excessive humility. It’s right. The Church forbids you from disdaining your own soul. It’s right. Disdain your own soul?: too easy an alibi; and who knows, maybe it’s laziness, and who knows, maybe it’s pride in disguise?”

The worst thing was that the words “you silly, why are you against yourself?” were stuck in him like an indigestible morsel; worse was that they thwarted his equivocation; “jerk,” he said, thinking of himself as if thinking of a stranger. “Jerk,” which, to any personal question, keeps spouting the same lie: “Like I’d want something like that? Abstinence madness? Ach! Spiritual hunger, spiritual hunger!”; worse was that it reminded him not of hunger, but of denying hunger. Liars are disgusting. Not because they deceive, but because they fake. Faking is a synonym for ugliness. –

The following day, strolling on the ramparts, on top of which people lived — the only wise people in this petty-bourgeois town — who didn’t even fake curiosity, he was suddenly handed — it had just gotten dark — a key: “ Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bête. ” — Not words, not a thought. Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bête. — Like a thing he grasps in his hand, a thing forged with care, with distinct, even somewhat exaggerated contours, a thing that has weight, and that unlocks. A key. To him it was like it was for the person who has already been working a big ring of keys in front of a locked door for a long time, so long that it’s now just more for his conscience than out of hope that he might still finally arrive at the one that fits; without reveling in it — for he is so weary — only with dull surprise: “ Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bête. ” And right there, a common denominator! For here we have a common denominator, and it comes out to: sex.