When the doctor entered Edda’s room, old man Weber, Ozy, and I went next door. It may have been the first time old man Weber had tried to keep a major emotion under control. Leaning back into the armchair, he looked out of the window with the vague, detached stare of someone who knew nothing and expected nothing. Then, like an actor embellishing a role, he went over to a picture on the wall to have a better look at it. And like the actor who, raising the volume of his voice for a tragic tirade, overshoots the mark and produces a howl worthy of even the gallery’s disdain, he spoiled the effect by drumming a finger angrily on the back of a chair while supposedly lost in the picture.
Paul took me by the hand and said, “Edda wants to see you. Follow me.”
Edda was lying in the white sheets, looking in the direction of the window. Her hair was spread out over the pillows, blonder and finer than before: an illness can trigger subtle changes. The room was imbued with a kind of white decomposition of things, its light so radiant that Edda’s face had disappeared in it.
Suddenly she turned her head.
So it was true. . At that moment I had made a discovery so surprising yet so plain that it could have been a truth come from without: Edda’s head was identical with the ivory head of my feverish nights. Stunned by how obvious it was, I almost thought I had devised the precise form of the porcelain head there and then, as one contrives an episode in a dream with the speed of a pistol shot. Now I was certain that something violent and evil was soon to befall Edda, or did I imagine it only later? In matters concerning Edda I was unable to distinguish what came from me and what from her.
She tried to meet my eyes but, exhausted, soon closed her own. As her hair was brushed to the side, I could see the block of yellow wax her forehead had become. Again I was hermetically enclosed in her presence, in what she represented now and during my nights of delirium. In not one of my walks, not one of my meetings, had I thought of anything but myself. It was impossible for me to conceive of another’s sufferings or even another’s existence. The people I saw around me were purely decorative, ephemeral, and as material as any object, as houses or trees. But in Edda’s presence I felt for the first time that my concerns could move beyond me, resonate in new depths and a new existence, to return in disturbing and enigmatic echoes.
Who was Edda? What was Edda? The one who, because the meaning of my life resided in her presence, enabled me for the first time to see myself from the outside. And in the moment of her death she moved me in the most profound and genuine way: her death was my death, and everything I do now, the life I live now, is a projection of my future death and its cold, dark immobility as I perceived it in Edda.
I arose that day at dawn, stone-heavy, ruffled by the presence of someone at my bedside. It was my father, waiting silently for me to awake. When I opened my eyes, he walked across the room and returned with a crock of water and a white basin. My heart was gripped by a painful convulsion: I realized what this meant.
“Wash your hands,” my father said. “Edda is dead.”
It had begun to drizzle. The rain went on unabated for three days. On the day of the funeral the mud was more aggressive and more filthy than ever. The wind hurled gusts of water upon the roofs and windows. All night one window remained lit in the Webers’ upper story, the room where the candles were burning.
Old man Weber’s study was in shambles: everything had been pushed aside to make room for the coffin to pass through. Mud had made a triumphal entrance into the office, insinuating its way like a hydra with myriad tentacles: spreading over the walls, climbing up the people, even attempting to scale the coffin. When the oilcloth on the floor was taken up, the wood showed long wrinkles of dirt resembling the black wrinkles that furrowed Samuel Weber’s cheeks. The mud — sticky, heavy, filthy — rose slowly but tenaciously around his elasticized shoes, penetrating skin and, doubtless, soul. It was mud and nothing more, the floor and nothing more, candles and nothing more. “My funeral,” Edda had once said to me, “will be a succession of objects.”
Something deep inside me was struggling to find confirmation of a truth — as distant as it might be — superior to mud or even merely different. In vain. My identity had long been established and was now, as usual, simply reaffirming itself: there was nothing in the world other than mud. What I perceived as pain was nothing but a weak bubbling of mud, its protoplasmic prolongation in words and thought.
The rain poured down over Paul as if he were a bottomless barrel. It covered his clothes, his heavily dangling arms; it bent his back; it mixed with the tears running down his dirty cheeks in rivulets like the raindrops on the windows.
Swaying slowly on the men’s shoulders, the coffin passed Samuel Weber’s steamer, the old ledgers, and any number of ink and medicine bottles that had come to light when the office was being tidied up. The funeral was a mere succession of objects. .
Later a few incidents connected with the life here below occurred. In the cemetery, for example, when the corpse in its white shroud was lifted from the coffin, the shroud showed a large patch of blood. Such was the last and least significant episode before the coffin descended to the hold of the cemetery, its warm, moldy basement full of yellow, gelatin-like, purulent bodies.
Chapter Fifteen
Whenever I return to these matters, trying in vain to fuse them with what I might call my person; when I revive them in my memory and old man Weber’s office suddenly becomes the room I am in, inhaling the musty odor of old ledgers, only to vanish in a flash and leave me to ponder the painful age-old problem of how people spend their lives: living in rooms, for instance, or — like strange bodies with the ramified fronds of a fern or the inconsistency of smoke— sniffing an unusual odor like the deeply enigmatic odor of mold; when people and events open and close within me like fans; when my hand attempts to write these strange and incompressible simple truths, then for an instant, like a man condemned to death who unlike everyone surrounding him has a quick glimpse of the death in store for him (and hopes that his struggle is unlike any other in the world and will lead to his release), I feel that one day an authentic new truth will emerge from all this, a truth warm and intimate, capable of summarizing me clearly, like a name, and striking an entirely new, unique note in me, and it will be the meaning of my life. .
Why else does this fluid — intimate yet hostile, proximate yet jealous of its freedom — persist in me, turning capriciously into the vision of Edda, into Paul Weber’s hunched shoulders or the over-precise detail of the tap in a hotel corridor? Why does the memory of Edda’s last days revisit me with such clarity? Or why, to put it another way (and questions can go off chaotically in thousands of directions as in a game we played as children — folding a piece of paper with an ink spot in the middle and leaning down heavily on it to make the ink spread, then opening it to find the most fantastic, never before imagined contortions of a design bizarre to begin with), why, to put it, I repeat, in another way, does this memory come back to me and not another?
Each memory, incomprehensible yet precise, demands my complete attention. Like a sharp pain it pushes all minor inconveniences — the pillows’ lumping together, a pill’s bitter taste — into the background and, encompassing all my doubts and worries, demands my complete attention, petty and vague as it might be. For every memory is unique in the poorest sense of the word: it is only one in a linear series of events in my life, each with its precise character and lacking the possibility of change, of departing in the slightest from that precision. “That is your life, that and nothing else,” it says, a statement replete with nostalgia for a world, hermetically sealed as it is in its lights and colors, from which no life is allowed to extract anything but the precise image of its banality, a statement redolent of the melancholy of being alone and limited in a world of solitude, pettiness, and aridity.