To the Chief. Finally, to the Chief! Get there quickly, to Sebastian. The chair knocks the corner of the table. Misha naps. The door slams. The Chief. The stairs. Ascending. Ascending the stairs to the Chief.
• • •
His smile like a slit, Sebastian Caba had personally opened the leather-padded door. Amiable, decorous, well-meaning, he knew right away that remaining in the doorway and refusing to advance would result in the visitor abandoning himself to hastily tell, beg, liquidate; then he would have to offer protection, calm, understanding. Decorously planting himself in the doorway, Caba ushered in his guest.
Advancing behind the desk, he gestured to the armchair on his right. The old games of cordiality would have to be maintained at any price, along with the well-known lines of attack, defense, and encirclement. He knew how to engage the old laws of cordiality. They were Caba’s most notable prize.
— What has happened?
“To shatter your will,” Caba might have said, as he might have continued woodenly: “This formerly eminent colleague should have been the light of his generation. Through what evil, unsupervised game have all those hopes and promising signs come to naught?”
The formerly eminent colleague, now a humble civil servant, has evidently forgotten Caba’s weaknesses or how to take advantage of them, and instead he ineffectually measures out the silence in pencil rotations, as they circle between the two fingers of his current chief — Sebastian Caba’s long, fine fingers, made for leafing through parchments, wrappings, banknotes.
— I can’t stand typewriters anymore.
The words travel from the door to the desk as if a hired actor had fired off an impromptu line. It falls flat, though the awkwardness assures verisimilitude.
Sebastian Caba can’t tolerate his guest’s prolonged confusion, arguments, or poorly timed jokes, and salvages as much of the conversation as possible by trying to find convenient solutions to the traps of confrontation. The elegant fingers abandon the pencil. Caba’s palms turn upward. He shrugs his shoulders to indicate powerlessness, for Saint Sebastian will have tried fitting words, soothing syllogisms. . up to the point of entrapping the subordinate by the side of the door, escorting him through the little foyer, and remaining on the threshold of his office, grieved, thoughtful, and disturbed (as much as necessary) by the other’s disquiet and his own. . only to stand silhouetted in the frame of his upholstered door, gazing toward the receding steps that now seem to collapse beneath the guest, who had exhausted his truth or “truquage” — perhaps a deceptive trick disguised as certainty — too quickly, in a hurried moment. . and the office worker races down the steps with his hand forgotten around his throat.
The stairs, the street: belated spots of rain. Hands in pockets, the rain streaming down his forehead, his nose, his lips, the hole shaped like a crocodile in the damp wall. Shoulders stooped, the cold, the fear, the hand lifted again to his throat — his sidelong gaze, ready to beg or to bolt upward to the indifferent, dappled skies.
Suddenly: the street appears as useless freedom, fatigue. The wet hand circling the throat. . the narrow, labyrinthine streets under the rain, under the laziness, under the silence. The wandering son of the earth has thrown himself onto the streets like a foreign hooligan, a visionary, an outcast, hunted, happy to belong to this moment of rain, earth, and the lights in the sky.
Just then Monica Smântănescu stepped down from a tram and was about to climb up the little hill; to her left, the racket of the school was breaking out, that assault of little cannibals.
• • •
The electric switch is to the right of the door. Beside the switch is a meter: a small shiny, black-plastic block with a dial and red numbers. Above the meter, framed in white marble, are four porcelain knobs with serrated edges: the electric fuses. The window, the curtain. The massive desk under heaps of paper. A flowerless vase, black with oily fingerprints. A pair of large tailoring scissors. A small hollow bottle. Two lemons, one halved. Old newspapers coated with dust. A large red handbag with handle. Inside the handbag, notebooks wrapped in blue paper. Books. Tous le Monument de Paris, Prix 2f50. Dr. G. Coman. Romanian-German Dictionary (small format, the cover unglued). Marcel Saras: Lectures en français facile. Books.
The room drives the vagrant into a state of blind, murderous rage. However, it might only be a trap, in which the assassin no longer gets to kill. The professor will crush her prisoner with her large body. Covering his face with enormous, loosened breasts, she’ll whisper smutty little nothings with her fairy’s voice — she’ll bury him under mountains of hot, soft, sweaty flesh.
A red cap with a large button at the crown hangs from a peg. Every evening, the giantess adjusts the wisps of hair on her upper lip and pulls on the red cap. Roguish, satisfied with her ambiguity, pink complexion, infantile smile, and syrupy voice, she hunts forbidden distractions by night: the small black purse stashed under her pudgy arm hides the powder compact, the condom, the freshly sharpened kitchen knife. Oily arms like tentacles will encircle the prisoner. Damp lips will glue themselves to his mouth. The large naked body will descend upon his tiredness, suffocating his flesh and sating his hunger. The prisoner will muddle through rolls of flesh, swallowed by her bland, maternal groans: “forget it, banish it, erase it all, the Captain turned to smoke, and so did his lonely daughter, we are smoke, caress me, forget it, goodnight, baby, forget, you’re smoke, baby, forget.” And the cowardly prisoner will forget his desire to kill her, will die une petite mort, defeated by her whimpering and will forget everything.
In the middle of the room, the round table covered by thick embroidery, like a blue bedspread on a sandy beach. The typewriter, a sheet of white paper with a carbon behind it — the text interrupted by a hasty departure: La bonne aventure. / Je suis un pe-tit gar-çon / De bel-le fi-gur-re / Qui ai-me bien les bon-bons / Et les con-fi-tures / Si vous voulez m’en donner / Je saurais bien les manger / La bonn’aventur’/ Oh gai! / La bonn’aventure!
Near the typewriter, a little glass vase filled with a bouquet of slender red and pink flowers: blades of grass sprout between the blooms. A yellow cup with coffee stains on the rim and a teaspoon inside. A full ashtray. Breadcrumbs. A jam jar, one fourth consumed, a teaspoon sticking out of the jar. Between reading two paragraphs of the instructions for an assassination: a slurp from the jam spoon. A transparent mauve scarf. The giantess lightens her nocturnal sojourns with this mauve scarf tied around her neck, the fabric twisted jauntily to one side. A silk stocking gathered into a ball. Somewhere else, its mate. Let the assassin discover that everything in here gets mixed together, covered over, wiped out; one cannot apply pressure to anything, fabric and dust, pastas and sticky sauces, fruit compotes and confectionary. The green terracotta stove, the gas pipe with a screw-tap. Rotate to the left, rotate to the right, the right, always the right — to salvation — all the way to the end! A chair, a white towel resting on the edge of the piano. Lid open, the keys dirty from sweaty fingers. A book: La bonne aventure. A little blond boy smiling on the cover. In his right hand he holds a jar flowing with confiture, in his left, a ginger cat, dagger between its teeth. Three staves with notes and text. Je-suis-un-pe-tit-gar-con. De-bel-le-figure. Qui-ai-me-bien-le-bon-bons. Et-le-fi-con-fi-tures.
Heaps of scores, Bülow-Haendeclass="underline" Zwolf leichte Klavierstücke. A little plastic monkey under a small, plastic tree. A white porcelain vase with painted flowers, violets. Another black vase, empty. Attached to the piano, the bookcase. Shelves full of books and magazines and scores. K Čapek. Perruchot. Perruchot. Perruchot. Märchen der Brüder Grimm. The Eskimos. Light, Gravity and Relativity, Resin-Scented Canada. Doctor Writers, Writer Doctors. Haydn. Divertissements for the Piano. Brahms, Walzer. Czerny. Erster Lehrmeister.