What do we, basically, mean? What are we? Fluffs of seed that tickle God’s intergalactic nostrils. Our existence at most makes him sneeze — his only talent for poetry. And apart from that, according to Darwin and his prophets: creatures constructed mainly of carbon, descended from an ape that one fine day fell out of its tree. Since then we have been laboriously learning to sit on the bumps, impossible to calibrate definitively. Nevertheless I am grateful to the roughly four billion years that life has folded up in our genes because the coincidence of evolution has equipped us with, among other things, mouths with blood-red stamp pads, with which we seal a host of light-footed fates, and can at least frank our tragic farces adequately.
Tomorrow we shall wake up and it will all be over. We’ll hear you downstairs, at about seven in the morning, opening the cupboards and heating the kettle for coffee. We’ll hear you crossing the kitchen floor in your veteran, worn-out slippers and we’ll count the taps on the table top with each plate that you put down. We’ll hear you moaning when the plastic round the vacuum-sealed packet of ground coffee won’t budge using the scissors or your fingers, after which you’ll tear it open with your teeth and spill coffee everywhere — and also the morning mood that sounds in the rattling of the cutlery and the rummaging in the cupboard when you fill our lunch boxes with bread and an apple or a piece of chocolate. We’ll hear the commotion that was the medium of your stubbornness and the concern, which you could never express in subtle language, but bottled up until it spewed out as rage. Were you frightened of us? Probably you were, but equally, when the school results were disappointing or we had unsuitable sweethearts, you were probably angry at what you yourself had missed.
I threw away my own future, you said, by not giving two hoots about it at school, but you never freed yourself from the well-behaved Catholicism that you imbibed with your mother’s milk. I wasn’t allowed to go to art school when I was fourteen — no reproach. Too decadent, a place of free love and worse, according to the pastors for whom you cherished so much respect that every syllable that escaped them was Living Bread. And yet later, when I made my own way, you felt guilty, and were angry at your own anger back then.
Tomorrow you’ll get up. You’ll have put on your pink padded dressing gown and will fry eggs, and surround us with your haze of sleep and concern.
Death, let her go in a kind of forgetfulness, like one of her numerous absent-minded episodes from the past. So that without giving it a second thought she leaves life behind on the edge of the cupboard and exits the room, running her fingertips over the table top, for example one afternoon in June, when there were still poplars in front of the house and the dark grey of an approaching storm compressed the light into a bright yellow band on the horizon, behind the trunks. And then the wind getting up and the first heavy rain pattering on the leaves. And she’s gone, and has long since forgotten the way back.
There is a dream that keeps recurring since you’ve been ill. I’m trying to find my way through a building where it is pitch-black, so dark that I am only aware of rooms that I feel my way into through the echo of my breath and my footsteps resounding from their walls, sometimes far away, sometimes nearby. Sometimes my feet bump into steps, and I pull myself up via the banisters of a staircase which leads to still other landings, other rooms and other staircases.
Sometimes I seem to be walking through long chambers, sometimes through back rooms, one after another. And everywhere the same impenetrable darkness, and everywhere the dry smell of dust, as if in an attic while the summer sun makes the tiles tick with the heat. Sometimes I feel beneath my fingers the surface of doors that will not open. And always there is that moment of gruesome realization that there is no “outside” in the dream, that I am shut up in a universe of darkness and rooms, chambers, staircases, passages and corridors that stretches out endlessly in all directions. The vast desolation of that universe, in which I am utterly alone, vomits me up out of sleep bathed in sweat.
And there is that other dream, a dream that as time goes on returns more and more frequently. I am staying with friends, family and loved ones in a house somewhere in woody hill country. It is early in the morning, a golden-yellow morning of a day at the height of summer. I walk through the house, and in the rooms hear the breathing of all those still asleep, past the table with the empty glasses and plates from the evening meal, onto a terrace, descending the steps into the garden, which slopes down to the wood. The grass gives off an overpowering smell of the earth; the sun is playing in the tops of the trees.
I sit down on a bench by a stream, suck in the air, the silence and the sounds of the sleeping life in the house. And there is always a voice that says: this is your last day. I’m not seized by fear at that moment, not even sadness. Only a yawning regret that everything will soon be over. I feel it as a bout of nausea and cramp in my jaws, deeply in love with life as I am, gruesome, majestic life.
Being ill was a kind of weightlessness when I was a child, a treat, taking leave of myself through fever and the shivers, as if I was going to evaporate. When I lay on the sofa at home racked by flu, I would wait until time shivered perceptibly through the rooms and death invariably followed at two-thirty, the time when objects lost the memory of their use. The fingerprints of their purpose slid off them and they appeared to me in a threatening nakedness, just as the worn-out things in the attic, liberated from any context, entertained each other with cheerful promiscuity and no longer cared a fig about habits.
But nothing could equal the abysmal feeling when the awareness revealed itself that it did not matter at all to objects whether I was there to see them or not. I waited for that shock, time after time, with the same mixture of rapture and terror that drove my pals towards the bumper cars at the village fair. They screamed their heads off at every collision, in something halfway between a guffaw and a cry of fear. Beneath the veils of habit objects demonstrated solemn indifference. I could sometimes be deadly jealous of their superior ability to be filled with what was absent. That ineffable privilege objects have of being not at home in themselves.
Then you would bring me glasses of diluted lemon juice, in order to tear me free, with the bitter aftertaste and the sudden assault on my taste buds, of my daily death.
We are not aware of even a tenth of the extent to which, long after the physical umbilical cord has been cut, we remain present in the membranes of our parents. Only when they disappear and die, when that alarmingly banal transition from life to death takes place in their bodies, is the last link severed. Then the weight of their fists slides from our shoulders, a weight we only feel when it is lifted.
It is a catharsis that liberates and wounds in equal measure. I feel like making music, crying languorously, rejoicing — all at once. And also cursing and hurling the kind of cries at the incomprehensibility of the universe that, equipped with more music, we used to call prayers. Nothing is unambiguous, to the extent it ever was.