Richard Weiner
The Game for Real
THE GAME OF QUARTERING
He boarded the metro at La Trinité. — It was after midnight. After midnight on an empty, ordinary night at the start of the week. In the first class car, no one but us two.
He boarded at La Trinité. I won’t say that he merely reminded me of someone, because I put my finger on it faster than that. He was just as alluringly unhandsome as the Spanish dancer Vicente Escudero, which struck me immediately. Who knows; maybe it even was Vicente Escudero. — Vicente Escudero, at his ease, looks like a man betrayed, standing over the body of the woman who’s betrayed him (and in whose death he’s played a part) and with his gaze, which is like a lead line, measuring how deep his hatred must plunge into vengeance to be appeased. And which determines that the lead line is too short for something as deep as this.
And Vicente Escudero is, when dancing, like an assassin amused by the thought that one can do just fine without a lead line, that one can plunge headlong into a bottomless hatred, and that this bath can be refreshing, if we only plunge into it without thought of return.
He was unhandsome. Broad Spanish feet, almost fake. And maybe they were. . Words, which he would not have uttered for anything in the world, withdrew into the steep wrinkles that fell from the downturned corners of his mouth, and which were rather like perfectly conjoined scars. Vicente Escudero knows many, many words of this kind.
I don’t know what prayer is. But, having seen him, I was quick to compose one. An ardent one. I prayed that Vicente Escudero would not assume the empty seat opposite me. (He had twenty-five to choose from.) I prayed, knowing that he would sit exactly where I was afraid he would: opposite me. I knew this with such certainty that my plea inadvertently became more ardent just as he was moving in the other direction, for I was praying with the certainty that I was praying in vain. And indeed, after two steps he turned around and sat down there, opposite me. Opposite me.
From his pocket he drew a program from L’Apollo and started reading it intently. He read with the unsettling interest of a spy. He paid no attention to me. He wasn’t not paying attention in a provocative way, but with the kind of strained impassivity by which a misfortune is placed before us, a misfortune that is already at our doorstep, though not yet set in motion. I countered with an unspoken question. A question? Only from a twitch of one of those two scars, so perfectly conjoined, did I realize that I may have actually asked him something. It was a distinctly responsive twitch, if an inadvertent one. It was an answer to the question: “Are you following me?” — He replied (through that twitch of his scar-wrinkle) without looking up; he immersed himself in reading his program, maybe even more deeply than before. And suddenly there came a certainty that he would not get off at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, that he wouldn’t even be getting off at Saint-Georges.
At each stop he leaned out and read the station name, which he happened to know by heart. This he demonstrated I no longer know how. He was reading the names of the stations, but it was directed at me. After Saint-Georges is Pigalle. That’s a transfer station. So how did it sound — How do you think it sounded? — that unspoken question I posed to him as I was pretending to inspect my (trembling) hands? Perhaps it sounded like: “Get off at Pigalle!” — No, not like that, it sounded like: “Aren’t you getting off at Pigalle?!”
The interest with which he was reading his program from L’Apollo now attested so cynically to its own phoniness that a chill ran through me. A chill, plus the certitude that he had understood (not raising his head) what I had been silently asking him to do. And, of course, he didn’t get out. — After Pigalle is Abbesses. But the question “Aren’t you getting off at Abbesses?” was so pointless that it fell away automatically.
After Abbesses is Lamarck. That’s my stop. It’s not the last stop. Vicente Escudero could still go three more! — But shortly before we came to the station the certainty that we would both be getting off at Lamarck took on an air of necessity to his will or my own, already so self-asserting that my considerate gesture—“We’ll be arriving presently, see that you don’t miss it, sir” (for he was reading) — broke off of its own accord. He looked at me. With a look as though in generous confirmation that, yes, this was no fantasy: of course he’d been sent, of course he’d been handed a mission.
“And sent by whom, and a mission to do what?” I said with a benumbed smile. And he replied with a smile as well. An exceedingly solicitous smile at that.
He got up. We got out. He walked beside me. The flamboyance (but was it flamboyance?) with which he didn’t let me out of his sight from that moment on was equal to the flamboyance with which he had ignored me until then. When we stepped into the elevator (for there’s an elevator) he paid me the same polite attention I had shown him in the car, stepping aside humbly and affably so that I might be the first to enter. — The building where I live is not far from the station. He walked beside me the whole way. He looked into my eyes as though they (these eyes) had been stolen from him. He matched my step. He did so with a kind of naïve and deferential ardor.
A woman was standing at the door to our building. She was wearing a checkered loden dress and green silk stockings. She was heavily made-up. She had even applied carmine to her nostrils, and with such senseless brazenness that it occurred to me that she might have wanted to say something particular by it, for example, that she had fallen into despair while making herself up, or that makeup is one of the guises of her desperation. She was leaning against the doorframe. He leaned against the opposite doorframe, waiting for the door to open. They did not converse, not with a look, not with a smile. But how to put this? They were from the same team. They were from some sort of team. Not only was this certain, it could not have been any other way. They were from the same team — not like spouses, not like lovers, not like friends, not like acquaintances, not like castaways on a raft, but they went with each other. — I know the building’s residents. Neither he nor she lived there. Nevertheless, they were waiting at the door, just like me. The door finally allowed us in.
I stepped aside so that she could go first. I followed her, and once inside I swung around; no, not to check whether he, too, might have been coming up behind me, but merely to be sure to shut the door behind him. And now I see I am walking along with him on one side, her on the other. I don’t know how this happened, but they’d gotten me between them. I say that they’d gotten me there, for it reeked of utter violence, without my being able to recall how they’d moved me into this position. Their walk, their gestures, their glances (which crossed like the arms of adults rock-a-bying babies) were synchronically symmetrical, as if these two were posable puppets mounted on a single shaft. But what naturalness, what ease! Could these really just be people, nothing more? I felt no fear, no alarm. Perhaps I was a bit curious, but with a curiosity that was disinterested, confident.
I called my name out in front of the porter’s door, as usual. The sound of my voice was like a veil that had suddenly fallen from something. And it was only then that things took on the air of “something’s not quite right.” Panic weighed down so sharply and unexpectedly that my lower back completely buckled, my torso heaved. The word “help” started prying at my lips like a crowbar. Here, however, both of them gave me an admonitory wag of the finger, though they did so without withdrawing their eyes’ and mouths’ strict, if cheerful, watch. Needlessly: the panic had already settled down in the meantime, flat and unbleached, like a thread of jute. Yes, I strode past a panic already tamed. The admonitory fingers had done their work; now their symmetrically summoning hands expressed a mute and gracious “This way, please.” I slowed a little and replied with a similar gesture. Thus, for a moment, we were playing a très magnifique scene of gracious and unpretentiously worldly gentlemen. We played it carefully, conscientiously, like in the theater, and it popped into my head that maybe that’s what we were here for. They yielded at last to my gracious insistence: they took a small step before me, languorously hunched over, as though from embarrassment and an acquiescent desire to please. — When we’d gotten to my door, they stood again like they had at the building’s entrance, one to each side of the frame. But it was no longer as it had been — out of the blue they were wearing a severe, hard look. Their mute appeal for me to open up was overbearing and threatening. I dug into my back pocket for the key, looking from one to the other. And still there was that confident curiosity within me. Their gestures, always so peculiarly simultaneous and symmetrical, became impatient and curt: now a finger pointing toward the keyhole; now a derisive and contemptuous jerk of the head; now an exaggerated collapse against the doorframe, like that of people who are waiting before a still-closed theater and affectedly pretending that they will surely never live to see the day; now tapping their feet angrily, if quietly.