The sieur Vlilv has a long yellow face, deeply bruised by age, notched and chopped, crocheted in downhill creases. Above the forehead his hair waves, dead as winter’s grass covered with hoar frost. He holds his two hands with the knuckle-fingers stretched so that the tips, interlaced, touch lightly, the two indexes resting on the chin. His fingers a slender spire. (Many years ago, in another country, I knew him as Alberto Giacometti. Evenings, at dinnertime, he sat sketching figures around a glass of red wine, over and over, the more lines he added the more elongated they became, disappearing into the paper napkin over the table. And then he went away with the cancer.) We have a weighty problem which we want to discuss with him, concerning which we need to obtain his advice. His eyes are burning quiet and yellow in the slanted light. He sits there, deeply withdrawn in the labile armchair.
“Why did you wish to see me?”
I hem and slide forward on my dusty chair. My father places both hands on his knees, he too leans forward, the eyes black swallows in the orbits, looks intently, looks small nests; on his pinky glows a ruby set in a broad golden ring. The coffee cups are still empty; just now, when the train puffed by, they were tinkling in the saucers with the pattern of blue flowers. Dust whirled and settled again. Against the gauze of the back porch the whisper of flies, the whirr of shadows.
“We have a weighty problem we want to discuss with you,” I say, “concerning which we’d like to have your advice.”
A voice in the yard screams: “Out of my sight! Fuck off! Viola-a-a, he tricked me!”
And then more remote (with a sob?): “I don’t screw around with goats. . ”
Because this is what had happened in the meantime: In Paname we, my wife and I, had a lodger, a household god, so we thought, protecting us — for me, in fact, it was the same god of which I’d become conscious when young, something or someone issuing from me and yet not part of me, something or someone bleeding me white and therefore revitalizing me (a rumbling, a blinding flash, a shaft of light, a wetness) — Rab was his name and he was most sad and timid with a hollow yet soothing voice. He was big, taller than I, more solidly built too, and absolutely black. His body — up to the shoulders — was that of a human man, the flowing lines of a youth at home in his body like an animal in its own physicality, black and with pleasing proportions; his head was that of a bull, oblong and sleek and black and agreeable to the touch, and huge pitch-black eyes with extraordinarily long silky lashes. The lines from forehead over the raised eyebrowcrest and thence to the muzzle — which was damp, and of the same dark pigmentation as the hide — could only be described as noble. Below the broad lips and lower than the ridge of jaws the heavy dewlap swung in folds and dimples. (From side to side when he moved.) It was ever a joy for my wife to caress Rab’s dewlap, to grasp hold of a slim fistful.
Often Rab stood in the hallway, just this side of the half-open front door, from where he could observe the happenings on the street, the wet sidewalks with their superficial glistening of lights. There the transparent glimmer of coloured glass panes set into the door fell over him, the Rouault blue, the wine rosé, the evening ochre — and was reflected in his eyes so that, between the lashes, these seemed to have small windows. And he appeared melancholic and lonely: someone from a totally different civilization longing for a mate which probably never existed: and still he was too shy to risk it outside. Sometimes we suspected that he stood there listening for something — perhaps the sound of the shepherd’s flute when the sinking sun clothes the bamboo groves in a downy blond gold, or the shinily hissing wheels of a train at night during the winter, or the white rustling of a lady filing her nails in a blue bed in a room overlooking the sea, or the ping-ping and the clackety-clack of steel balls on a pin-table, or the slow tearing sound (like orgasm) of a mirror breaking with the likeness still captive in it; or the movement of an articulation in a linen sleeve still protruding above the earth when the rest of the body is long since buried — something, a noise, a belief, something beyond our hearing.
He was meek and without defects. At night the three of us sat around the table. On the table was laid a glistening white tablecloth crackling with light. Then there was nourishment put on the tablecloth but of that we (I at least) were hardly aware. We sat waiting for the light of the room to be a full ruby red pulsating in our wine glasses. Rab at the head of the table with a snowy white serviette by his left hand, straight, unmoving, both his hands lightly fisted on the table, his aristocratic head with an expression of silence. Later I would not remember if our hands ever really moved, although there was the clicking of silver shoots. When my wife had cleared the table, but the glasses were still deep with wine (and after having gently rubbed one hand over his dewlap, or sometimes both, when she put the dishes and plates to one side), we placed the chesspieces on the board and started playing. Rab was very keen on the so-called Polish opening (the one to which Rutger refers as the ‘orang-utan’) and in my riposte I always attempted to lure his queen forward as rapidly as possible and then to trap her. I wanted to annihilate the queen and thus disrupt the rhythm. Between my middle finger and the index a cheroot burned its thin tendril of smoke. Then Rab silently and deeply looked into my eyes until I entered the domain, the moon-shadowed gardens, the empty palace in the night, the dormitories of sleep without ever knowing exactly when the line separating flying from falling was crossed. When I then stretched out on the bed next to my wife, her body under the nightdress smelled of carnation.
One evening, the sidewalks and the streets were wet like new black coins, Rab asked if he might borrow my car. But of course. My wife and I still accompanied him outside to where the automobile was parked in the stained shadow patterns of a street tree. He got in behind the wheel, started up the engine, and left. The tyres swooshed over the wet surface. Many hours later, when he did not return, my wife — and I too — became very anxious. With a crease between the eyebrows she decided to go look for him outside, and after phoning and commandeering her brother, Pip, to keep her company, she left the house with a yellow raincoat. Before the chessboard I sat listening to rain murmuring on the roof. I moved the pieces, move and counter-move, but without an opponent it was a sterile and schizophrenic game which I was fated to lose and to win. Each individual drop I could hear plopping on the rooftiles. When later on it was very late, and night soft and secretive, I went to take up a position in the hallway by the half-open front door, Rab’s favourite vantage point; his odour still lingered there and I could insert myself in the area of this aroma to stand there in nearly the same way as he was accustomed to do — in the illusory wholeness! I was the stranger at the masked ball. My heart was clear, translucent, brittle glass.
And still later, I don’t know what time it was since the night started drifting, I saw my wife and her brother, Pip, returning home. When she was just outside the door I could see the raindrops touching her, meandering over her face and the collar of her coat. The drops were big and slow like oil, like dying moths ending up in oil, like worms crawling through oil. (Just like that it had been earlier in the evening when we escorted Rab to the car and when I closed the car door behind him and leaned forward with one hand on the windscreen, the fingermarks under my fingers were grey against the glass and with fine concentric labyrinth lines. Silver the drops were on the glass, the light beaded in the globules only, no reflection of my face, hard behind the windscreen and draped in these luminescent beads Rab’s dark head looking straight ahead, a moment before the wipers would come into action with a swosh-swush and a light spray.)