Up until now the narrator has been given no opportunity to speak with someone in authority who would have a better idea where this story is heading; and so the course of events takes him by surprise time after time. Having no binding agreement to rely on, he had wished that three characters would be the end of it, but it was not in his power to insist. And so the figure with the umbrella is crossing a damp terrace covered with dead leaves. It’s still the same November. Somewhere in the corner, garden furniture has been stacked in a soggy pyramid. The torpor of autumn has deprived its forms of lightness. Raindrops tremble on the upturned backs of chairs; the fancy cast-iron legs jut skyward. The season is over, and nothing more will happen; as for the next one, no one knows if it will ever come. The whole property is for sale, and has already been assigned a number in the listings of the real estate agency; the description is accompanied by a photograph in which the succulent green of the trees stands out against a cream-colored facade. Under the heading ‘garden’ is frozen the mute echo of bursts of laughter at a table adorned with red wine stains and lambent patches of sunlight filtering through the glass tableware. By the gate next to the bell push a metal nameplate of no use to anyone has been put up; never mind what it says. The narrator will ignore the first letter of the surname; he’s already grown tired of the game involving initials. When the key grates in the lock, an empty interior will open wide to reveal white walls and ceilings; a staircase will lend the space depth. Rectangular marks on the wall are mementos of frames that must have held pictures; but of what? The punctured remains of a colored rubber ball will be lying in the corner beneath the stairs, until the sale of the house summons new owners; but this is foreordained, and so the floor will seem to show through the rubber integument. The lighter things are, the easier it is for them to disappear, as if they were blown away by a gust of wind produced by the difference in air pressure between future and past tenses; in recesses they last longer. It would seem that when buying, for instance, such a solid thing as a grand piano, one could count on its weightiness, on the boundless durability of its black lacquer, and on the immutable laws of harmony. But it was placed, as sometimes happens, in a draft, and so the piano passages, volatile shoals of triads that cannot entirely be taken seriously, died away first, before the murmur of voices, and even before the smell of coffee had dissipated. The perfection of a silence capable of containing all sounds will no longer soothe any ear. The furniture has vanished, along with a colorful mist in which life was pleasant and imposed no thoughts about its direction or its meaning. Even the umbrella stand has gone, and so water drips onto the floor, onto the perfectly maintained beechwood tiling, while the female figure turns in her hands an envelope taken a few moments ago from the mailbox. It can be surmised that the trick involving the juggling of passions worked perfectly for her for a very long time; the golden balls of love, jealousy, and longing, obedient in her hands, passed through the emptiness of the spheres as they described their giddy, collision-free double and triple trajectories high over the depths of despair, far from the misery of ruination, leaving no trace other than streaks of light. Ink can stain; a mark has been imprinted on her index finger. It’s a capital F from the last name of the addressee, turned back to front. Stubborn, it managed after all to find a way to appear. The first letter of the sender’s name, also smudged from the dampness, tries to squeeze into the next sentence, but without success. The forwardness of these capital letters has gone too far, thinks the narrator. In any case the woman still tears the envelope into shreds, along with its contents. Now she needs to get rid of the pieces and doesn’t know what to do with them; she ought to throw them into the toilet and flush them away. After all, she must know where the bathroom is. While she’s at it she ought to put the red umbrella in the bathtub. But whatever she does now, it will not satisfy the narrator, who has already allowed the insidious word ‘ought’ to take control, peremptorily imposing its weight on the sentences. And thus, because of the last name beginning with F, probably her husband’s, out of wifely loyalty she ought to stick to the metaphor of life as a sea voyage, and especially avoid the circus images associated with the character in the black sweater. Either way, little here depends on the opinions expressed by the narrator. All he can do, and that only to a certain degree, is to govern grammatical forms, an essential element, especially as concerns the verbs, which are constantly striving to escape into open space, of their own accord taking on the forms of the future tense, without any obligations. Brought forcibly down to earth, while they still can they steer clear of perfective forms; they thrash like kites and drift toward waters into which one cannot step twice, and even at a distance it’s evident that as the lesser of two evils they prefer to spin in the eddies of the present.
In the narrator’s view the future tense doesn’t give facts the necessary grounding. It’s as shapeless as clouds in the sky, and if it brings any order whatsoever it is only an ephemeral and unimportant kind. On the periphery of the landscape the clouds assume new forms, tattered and swirling, and they are illuminated all of a sudden or, on the contrary, darken in shadow. In this way the feathery clouds of summer evenings have been transformed into storm clouds creeping ponderously across a leaden sky on dark bellies that bleed purple from their lacerated sides amid fireworks and the rumble of drum-rolls, in the cascades of a downpour. Water is the only thing they are capable of turning into when floating through the sky eventually becomes impossible: a process as violent as the transformation of future into present. After the repertoire of special effects is exhausted, the storm clouds sail on in the guise of night clouds, black against a black background, invisible. In the end, even if weeks later, they manifest themselves as white billows against a white backdrop, equally invisible, bringing an image of nothingness from which the female owner of the still-conjectured piano turns away with repugnance. The early dusk falls quietly, without the extravagant splendor of the afterglows that, for instance, during the preceding summer flamed over the garden every evening, lighting up the charming little wisps of pink fluff scattered here and there over the horizon — the same material that lends softness to padded furniture and plush toys. The same that eases sorrow, providing warmth and smoothing the merciless hardness of edges. Without which life would not be possible. It hovers high up, light, elusive. In the heavens there is nothing but transient states, nothing that can be taken into possession.
The dry land so longed for, the solid ground of the past tense on which the foot can find support, unfortunately contains much more than necessary. It’s filled with the leftovers of other similar tales, and the fading dreams and desires of figures who are absent and irretrievably lost, mixed with the shallow sand of all the parts of speech. In the darkness of the subsoil the suns of past summer afternoons are extinguished; transitory romances crumble into dust. Eternal love gravitates toward deeper levels of ground, where it grows damp and bereft of luster, like a tarnished wedding band. Along with it molders spurned love. The heavy layers of earth crushing it can be regarded as a metaphor for a memory incapable of forgiveness.