It was probably a morning when the light radiated differently. My arms, throat, and collar felt cold. I turned suddenly to meet what seemed to be Dona’s hands and hair, which I stubbornly persisted in not seeing. The light was faltering; metallic glints crossed each other from the corner of a corridor. My hands trembled. I found the cold knob of a door — a room.
Big eyes and a lusterless forehead: the darkness entwined her head as if it were Dona’s black hair, as if she still had those long, powerful braids of yore gathered into a crown. Dona, my dead sister, was watching me from the end of the corridor to confirm I was living, running, skipping steps. She haunted my gestures to convince herself and me that I was alive and could see her — pale, beautiful, shaved bald. Mature now, I wasn’t crying like a stupid little kid because they’d shaved her again and not a single strand of hair was left on her head or because we were dragging out our transparent days without the courage to release a door, a voice, a sound.
I was seeking voices, laughter, and doorbells so that people would find that I was hurling myself on the young body of the orange afternoons. Yes, yes, orange. I could wait for the phantom from the end of the corridor to come toward me, to rouse me, to take me by the hand, and for us to advance slowly, falteringly, in slow-motion, on the screen of a story in which I was turning into my formerly orphaned self with fierce, dark-circled eyes, slipping among patrols and horses on the edge of the dark water and the endless, black nights.
• • •
Had received the envelope Tuesday. Tuesday evening: was on the train. Wednesday I would encounter the old town’s silent streets again. No one waited for me behind the windows. On Wednesday I met my mother’s pain, my punished father’s absence and shame, the illness of the one who was becoming my sister, the terrible illness that was corroding her skin, her hair, her romantically cadenced sadness. It was Wednesday that was hard for me — for them too, and for the roles waiting for us under the city’s wide eyes. Eva and Dona had their sights trained on us; we had no more strength.
Thursday: picked up the courage to walk through the streets of the sloped town, where only yesterday I’d been a precarious little celebrity. I would need to meet Father so that I could talk to him. Every step through the autumn mud told me I should meet with him alone. Then I’d be able to say:
“When I was young, you avoided me and my overblown words. You rejected my suspicions and reproaches. Great expectations sharpened the way I looked at things, and you must have sensed I’d catch you red-handed at the miserable games you played to readapt. You didn’t have the strength for my kind of candor anymore — or reproaches or remorse either. And I was too young: I dreamed of cementing impossible moral absolutes, so I distanced myself from you. You were a man of duty, of course, so maybe our conflict was simply a generational affair, which would have made it remediable. Still, I saw you as an enemy. Sometimes I wanted to kill you — just like a real son. A lot of people feel that way during a teenage crisis. In the end, I saw your zeal as honest and stupid. I knew you were always completely upright. That was a reason for trust, maybe even pride, but in the battle against myself that I’d eventually lose, nothing but sarcasm would do.”
Skidding, my rubber sole sank into the soft autumn clay. I gripped the auditorium’s wall with my palms. Here, lifted in a whirlwind of applause, I had recited poems of assault and ardor to my fellow citizens’ delight. I had been their hero, their resounding echo. Famished for spectacle and glory, my frenzy had taken this form, but I gave all that up the day I became capable of imagining what work would have been like in a salt mine. I suspected my Father of the discipline of submission and slavery. I thought he lacked fire and force. I was blind and young: it might have been fixed, oh, yes, our incompatibility might have been solved through minor adjustments — the confusions might have been cleared up.
“You didn’t know that I was starting to stray into dangerous experiments, to see the unsuspected possibilities of the double game, to listen for anything off-key in the ambient arias — all those falsified false notes. I had discovered ways of using my weaknesses. Yes, I had discovered my weakness. . weaknesses. . I was no longer the hero: I had discovered the path of dissimulation; I was trying to make something of myself, proudly convinced that I could make anything of myself, and I was amazed and delighted, disgusted and subjugated by the farces I was preparing.”
Narrowing, the street descended toward small houses with green, tapered roofs. Below, to the left, a shabby old abandoned building with elongated windows: the Jewish bathhouse. Before it, unharnessed horses chomped at the yellowing autumn grass, tethered beside carriage roofs, gray and damp. The street came to a halt in front of the former Jewish bath where another street curved up to the right. I was climbing up. At the crest, the two tiers of latticed windows: the high school.
It was quiet. Right now the little ants were listening to the schoolmaster ants and the police ants: they were waiting for recess, for the street — their brief dash toward freedom. Heard the grating of wheels behind me, the tossing of bells: a carriage.
— Greetings, young fellow, greetings! Let me know when you’re leaving.
His cloth cap gleaming like leather, the little red-haired coachman grinned at me with his same old enormous teeth. He greeted me familiarly, and I wondered if he knew about my victories and entanglements.
Oh, Father, you weren’t able to admit that I might be so impressionable that this man’s greeting could rattle me. I hadn’t the courage to show you this face of mine. From the very moment when I dared to tell you that any sister of mine needed to be named Eva or Dona, you let me understand — you wouldn’t encourage my delayed reactions. Out of prudence for my life, you naturally wanted to shelter me from complications. You simply didn’t have the courage to look at this gift of mine, even if it seemed negative from your point of view, so I tried to make myself the object of little prankish, premeditated games.
I was weak. I lacked tenacity. Maybe I lost my convictions too quickly, and imagined that this gave me the right to make anything of myself, anything at all. By the time the last “laurel” — legal adulthood — settled on my brow, I already knew: long ribbons of colored words unspooled from all the dirty streets, the moldy corners, and the filthy mouths. The words had blossomed, and they were proliferating, invading the wounded world. I couldn’t be prey to the pairing of words anymore, as I had been, as you were; this was a good justification for my desire to serve only figures, hypotheses, numbers, methods, clear, rigorous, measurable results — at any cost. I despised you when you urged me toward a career of rhetorical speculations, of “ultimate learning” — that whole domain made of words. You had remained their slave. There was an instant when I could have loved you for such gratuitous staunchness. Only, if I’d been too young to defend myself from the glamour of words, my parent really couldn’t have invoked any circumstance like that.
I was already separating myself from everything. You had no time to notice. You still owed me something, though, after a life that had tried you in so many ways because you were always ready to start over again: no matter where the thread had been broken, it would need to be retied. Father, you should have taught me that I had limitations, or that the cost of denying this is always too high. My alienation from myself ended by transforming me into a timorous beast, impoverished of beauty and innocence by too many old, innocent emotions. The shame I’m enduring now seems appropriate: it allies me with the lepers, who I can walk beside through trauma and silence, in defiance of the masquerade. The real education fondly reserved for my future only begins now.