How is it I had failed to notice it before? I looked all over the room when I entered. To verify it really existed, I looked away for a moment, then looked back. There they were, exactly where they had been: large, red. . Then how had I failed to see them? I began to doubt my arboreal certitude: an object had appeared out of nowhere in the room. Was my sight still good? Perhaps there were remains of weakness and darkness circulating in my body amidst my new luminosity like clouds in an otherwise sunny sky, obstructing my sight as they passed my eyes as a haze might suddenly screen the sun and throw a part of part of the landscape into shade.
“Aren’t those flowers beautiful!” I said to Edda.
“What flowers?”
“The ones over there, on the shelf. .”
“What flowers?’
“Those beautiful red dahlias. .”
“What dahlias?”
“What do you mean ‘what dahlias’?”
I stood and rushed over to the shelf. I found a red scarf thrown over a pile of books. As I reached out to verify it was in fact a scarf, something within gave me pause. It was like the wavering courage of the amateur acrobat at the peak of the pyramid hovering between skill and dilettantism: I too had arrived at my peak. Now the problem was how to come down and return to my chair. And what to do after that, what to say.
For a few seconds I was so preoccupied with the problem that I could not make the slightest move. Just as flywheels seem motionless because of the great speed at which they turn, my profound distress gave me the rigidity of a statue. The nails of sound that were the clock’s powerful ticktock kept me in place. It was with great difficulty that I managed to break the spell.
Edda was in the same position in her bed, watching me with the same cool surprise. One would have thought that a malicious power had made things look as ordinary as could be to make me as uncomfortable as possible. Such is what I had to struggle with, what implacably opposed me: the ordinary look of things.
In a world so precise any initiative was superfluous if not downright impossible. What made the blood pound in my head was that Edda could not be other than a woman with well-groomed hair, violet-blue eyes, and a smile at the corners of her lips. What could I do with a precision so severe? How, for instance, could I make her understand that I am a tree? I would have had to send its giant, magnificent crown with all its branches and leaves through the air using immaterial, formless words. How might I have done that?
I went up to the bed and leaned against the wooden frame. My hands radiated a certitude that seemed to come from their having suddenly been made the nexus of all my concerns. What now? The intoxicatingly limpid air separating Edda and me, impalpable, yet palpably inconsistent, contained all the forces within me that could lead nowhere: procrastinations weighing tens of kilograms, pauses lasting hours on end, trials and tribulations of the flesh and the blood — they all fit easily into that miserable space without revealing the black tints and shadowy matter it contained. Distances in the world were not as I saw them with my eyes, small and easily overcome; they were invisible, populated by monsters and timid midgets, fantastic projects and undreamed-of gestures which, if reincarnated in the matter that had originally constituted them, would impose a terrifying cataclysm upon the world, an extraordinary chaos fraught with cruel misfortune and ecstatic bliss.
The materialization of the thoughts running through my head as I gazed at Edda at that moment would have resulted in the simple gesture haunting me: I would have picked up the paperweight on the desk (I could see it out of the corner of my eye, a medieval helmet resting on a pile of paper) and hurled it at her. The immediate consequence would have been a formidable stream of blood — vigorous as a torrent from a tap — issuing from her breast and filling the room little by little until my feet, then my knees would be sloshing through a warm, sticky liquid, and finally — as in those American horror movies where a character ends up in a hermetically sealed room with the water level constantly rising — I would feel it entering my mouth and I would drown in its pleasant, salty taste. .
My lips started moving impulsively, and I gulped.
“Are you hungry?” Edda asked.
“I. . No. . no. . not hungry. I was just thinking of something absurd. Utterly absurd.”
“Tell me what it is. Please. You haven’t said a word since you’ve come, and I haven’t asked you to. But now I am. Please.”
“Well,” I began, “it’s actually quite simple, couldn’t be simpler. . I hope you won’t mind my telling you, but. .”
What I wanted to say was “I am a tree,” but it no longer meant anything now that I was in the mood for blood. It was now lying dead and buried in the recesses of my soul, and I could scarcely believe it had ever had any importance.
I began again.
“The thing is, I wasn’t well. I was feeling weak and miserable. Being with you always does me good. All I have to do is see you. . Does it bother you to hear that?”
“Not at all,” she answered, and started to laugh.
Now I really felt like committing some absurd, bloody, violent act. I quickly picked up my hat. “I’ll be going,” I said. And in no time I was running down the stairs.
What was now clear was that the world I had fallen into by mistake would never let me be a tree or kill anyone, nor would there be any waves of blood. All things and all men were hemmed in by their petty, pathetic obligation to be precise, nothing more than precise. What good did it do me to see a vase full of dahlias when the only thing there was a scarf? If the world was so limited by its petty passion for precision that it could not permit itself the luxury of taking that scarf for a vase of flowers, then it lacked the ability to undergo the slightest change.
I suddenly felt as if my head had been crammed into my cranium and held prisoner there. A painful captivity.
Chapter Fourteen
That autumn Edda fell ill and died. All those days of aimless wandering and agonizing, debilitating questions were compressed into the pain and misery of a single week just as several ingredients mixed together in a solution may suddenly condense into a powerful poison.
The silence in the upper story increased another notch. Paul had come upon an old overcoat and a threadbare tie in one wardrobe or another. He knotted the tie around his neck like a string. It was purple, like a thin veil left on his face by sleepless nights.
“She had a terrible night,” he told me. “Yesterday I again asked the doctor what he thought, and he told me everything, the whole truth. ‘It’s as if her kidneys had exploded,’ he said. ‘It is extremely rare for the disease to be so acute and to come on so abruptly. It usually insinuates its way into the system, making its presence known by this or that symptom long before it becomes serious. What we have here is an explosion, a veritable explosion.’” Paul spoke fast but with long pauses, as if he wanted to leave time for the terrible pain he felt to flare up and die down.
The downstairs office was as dark as a cave, but old man Weber, his nose in the accounts, feigned work. Every morning the doctor came to the house and tiptoed through the rooms with the three Webers in tow. I would follow, engaging Ozy in conversation. It had been a long time since we played the game we invented, and now we had the perfect opportunity, though how much better it would have been if we could have talked about Edda’s illness as though nothing had happened.
Going up the stairs, I began to think this might merely be one of our games, directed by Ozy and including the doctor, Paul, and the old man: the hunchback might merely have made the whole thing up. By the time I had reached the top, I felt like crying out, “Enough! It’s over now. Paul’s mask was impressive, and old man Weber was the picture of suffering, but we’ve had enough. The game is over. Tell them, Ozy. Tell them you don’t want to go on with it. .” But things had gone too far for them to stop at the top of the stairs. .