Some people say that the first Parsifal, Parsifal’s namesake, wasted his whole life in search of a cup with the power to heal all wounds, but according to others there never was a cup to be found — only a black stone that had fallen from the sky.
Furthermore, there is a difference of opinion over whether he ever found it or not.
Lightning or sand?
“The sand,” Parsifal told Joe.
Parsifal’s first girlfriend, a librarian, once asked him this: “Have you ever considered that the reason people dream is so they won’t have to believe the rest of life is all there is?” They were in her bedroom, a different bedroom from the one of the librarian he watched the forest fire with, and so the bed was different, too. There was no canopy, for one thing, and also this bedroom had no sliding doors. Plus it was night, so even if there had been smoke they couldn’t have seen it. Then she asked him if he ever dreamed, and as she waited for an answer she stood naked in front of the mirrored doors covering her closet. She raised her arms above her head and then slowly lowered them.
“The only dreams I have,” Parsifal told her at last, “are those in which I die.”
“You poor man,” she said.
Her name was Trellis, and she was the same librarian who had brought up the subject of monsters.
Another time, when Parsifal and Trellis were standing outside a bakery trying to decide whether to go in, she told him she had read that blindness was a condition at least as much psychological as physical. “I’m not saying that those blind people have themselves to blame, but it’s something to consider,” she said, and Parsifal watched as her reflection in the window mixed in with the pies and cakes and cookies that lay behind it.
“Where did you read that?” he asked, because he wanted to know more, but Trellis claimed she had forgotten.
On yet another occasion Trellis told him that certain animals were able to smell death months, or even years, before it arrived.
Another time, while waiting for a completely different librarian to finish her shift, Parsifal sat at a library table and read an article about a woman called Mother Teresa. According to the article, Mother Teresa used to say, “God in His infinite wisdom will provide for his children.”
This woman, Mother Teresa, ran a hospital that was so crowded with dying patients that they had to sleep in chairs and on the floor, and sometimes, in her hurry to reach a person who was about to die any second, Mother Teresa would accidentally step on a dying person’s arm or finger.
“I’m so sorry,” she would tell the injured person at those times. “I’m afraid it can’t be helped.”
There were two theories on how the objects got into the sky. The first was that the awesome power of the wind would draw these objects upward, and then, when the sky was ready, they would be released back to earth.
The second theory was that certain unscrupulous humans were somehow in league with the sky — for financial reasons, no doubt — and, by means of silent aircraft or balloons, carried these objects up into the air to drop them.
These two ideas were essentially all anyone had to offer about the situation.
Entrar.
To enter.
On Parsifal’s first trip to the ocean he watched two boys, about four and eight, play a game with their dog. The dog was small — a mix with short legs, a silky blond coat, and black protruding eyes. Because in his forest there were only foxes and the like, the ways of dogs were still mostly unknown to Parsifal.
The game consisted of the children dragging the dog into the waves by means of a rope attached to its neck so it would be knocked over and try to get up. Then the dog would be knocked down again by another wave. The waves weren’t large, but were large enough to knock over a small dog, and when by chance the dog made it back to the shore, the boys would pull it in again. The boys appeared to be brothers.
Eventually the dog stopped struggling. It lay still as the water washed back and forth over and around it, moving its fine hair, lifting its body ever so slightly and then dropping it again onto the sand. When the dog finally drowned, the brothers began to leave, but then one of them, the older and more responsible, remembered the rope, so he returned and untied it from the dog and took it back home.
In the forest Parsifal had lived primarily on fungus, moss, and slugs — things of the earth, his mother called them — but also they ate eggs, and sometimes Parsifal would bring home a dead squirrel or raccoon, which they would eat as well. Because in the forest things break more rapidly than in other places, Parsifal and his mother, Pearl, were forced to work every day repairing their simple hovel. Later, when he was old enough, it became his job to carry long strips of bark up to the roof in order to replace those pieces that had blown off during the night.
In the forest scarcely a day went by that Parsifal did not receive a bruise, or cut, or rash from some unusual and deadly species of plant or insect, not to mention scrapes and plenty of sprained ankles from tripping over roots, because Parsifal’s ankles weren’t the greatest. Surprisingly often, a branch would drop onto his head without warning, so afterward he would have to lie on a bed of leaves looking at the canopy of the sky until he had regained enough balance to walk safely back home again.
A monster.
Back when Parsifal lived in the forest, not much seemed to be falling out of the sky. Or it may have been that things were falling, but the thick, green canopy of trees deflected them. Or it may have been that the canopy did not deflect anything so much as muffle the sounds of the falling objects, so the only objects he could hear were those that fell extremely close by, and they — as mentioned earlier — were mostly branches.
Once when Parsifal was lying in the completely ordinary bed of yet one more librarian, after having made love, she sighed. “Parsifal,” she said, “you have a big name to live up to, but I’d say you do pretty well.”
“Huh?” he said.
“I mean,” she said, “a child raised in the forest among animals.”
“That’s not exactly true,” Parsifal said. “There was also my mother.”
This same librarian wrote down for Parsifal a definition of a monster: a deformed or oversized creature frequently dangerous to men.
“The silence of a falling star.”
Pearl used to sing that.
One day long after Parsifal left the forest and had settled down in the city (by then having started his business of repairing fountain pens), he was in the process of replacing the sac on an old Eversharp when there was a knock on the door of his house. When he opened his door, there stood the most beautiful woman he had ever seen outside of various photos of beautiful women or those in paintings in museums. In fact, this woman was more beautiful than many in paintings because museums do not choose paintings for the beauty of their subjects, but for their craft and for the brilliance of their execution.
So this woman stood at Parsifal’s door holding a Lady Waterman pen with gold trim, and the barrel of the pen seemed to be in good shape except for a little scuffing where the cap had been posted.
She said to Parsifal, “I heard you fix fountain pens.”