Only a very naïve person, some unthinking teetotaler for example, could imagine that this was just another symptom of drunken disorder, that in his vodka-induced delirium Don Juan the Rib had simply been in the habit of removing his footwear and flinging it willy-nilly into the corner; after all, drunkards who remove their footwear methodically are in the minority, while the majority of drunkards remove their footwear in a haphazard manner. That is true, but first, Don Juan belonged precisely to the minority of drunkards who remove their footwear methodically, and second, he was someone who in general avoided disorder; after all, he was a hairdresser and a musician, and both an artful hairdo and a musical harmony represent the antithesis of all disorder.
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Don Juan the Rib, for instance, unlike most drunkards did not remove objects from his home, but, on the contrary, he accumulated objects there. He neither sold nor threw out old furniture; Stalinist-era suits still hung in his closet, many of the kitchen utensils in his kitchen had been inherited from his ancestors and came from the beginning of the century, and the wedding ring from his only marriage still lay at the bottom of a drawer, though Don Juan was not quite as certain which drawer it was as he had been ten years ago.
That’s right — it was not only in recent times that Don Juan the Rib had drunk denatured spirit, yet he did so not out of ruination but because he enjoyed it. (As it happens, he prepared his denatured beverage according to his own special recipe, about which I will say more in a moment.) Don Juan the Rib, then, was a man who had fallen in a particular way; he was a paradoxical alcoholic, for what kind of alcoholic, other than a paradoxical one, would have so many pairs of shoes in his closet that, simply by throwing them, he could eventually cover up the terrible thing, the thing that was in the corner of the room.
I know only too well that the mysterious pyramid of shoes was not a sign of disorder. Its purpose was to drive away, or at the very least conceal, the thing that stank of shit; it was a sign of fear and trembling, it was the relic of a final struggle, a battlefield over which a crematorial pall still hung. I know, because I once heard you weeping, Don Juan, and I hear you still, and I see your eyes, which are like two craters of terror sunk into your skull. When at a certain moment you woke up, you did not yet believe, and you reached for the bottle at your bedside, and you drank what was left, and fell into the last drunken sleep of your life.
It’s true, in between his final stays on the alco ward Don Juan exclusively drank denatured spirit, but it was denatured spirit prepared in a precise and masterful way. This was no vulgar dilution in tap water, this was no technologically horrific neutralization of the episcopal purple with the aid of Ace brand bleach, nor the addition of three containers of mint essence so as to lend the concoction a passing resemblance to mint-flavored vodka.
Don Juan the Rib began by making ersatz coffee. He used a large amount of coffee and brewed it for a long time; at the end, so as to give it the thickness of tar, an ebony hue, and the strength of a steam locomotive, he would add a single spoonful of honeydew honey, four spoonfuls of instant coffee, and two sachets of vanilla sugar. This mocha he mixed with the denatured spirit, in other words he poured a bottle of denatured spirit into the pan containing the ersatz coffee, which, already enriched by the extra ingredients listed above, had to be chilled to freezing point. (To the trivial question of why the coffee had to be chilled to freezing point, I will not respond.) Using a wooden ladle, he would stir the cocktail for such a long time that he would enter a sort of stirring trance, and he began to think he would never stop stirring. When Don Juan the Rib realized he might never stop stirring the denatured spirit, he would break off his stirring, remove the wooden ladle from the pan, touch it with his tongue and taste the ever more arid taste. Then he would place a colander, from which the enamel had almost completely worn off, over the pan, and he would line the inside of the colander with sterile gauze. The season of citrus fruit was beginning. Don Juan would take two handsome lemons, chosen with great care at the market, and with a precision that was quite natural in a hairdresser and musician, yet at the same time quite surprising in a drunkard with trembling hands, he would slice the lemons in two. This operation brought him satisfaction, and for a long while (though not to the point of entering a trance) he would stare at the four identical lemon halves. Then he would squeeze the juice out of each half in turn, with extreme thoroughness, over the gauze-lined colander. He would press out the gauze ever so gently and then toss it away casually — for the time of extreme thoroughness, in fact the time of any thoroughness whatsoever, was over. Even so, Don Juan the Rib faced one more round of stirring (the last, thank goodness), and he faced the job, demanding the utmost attention, of transferring the nearly ready beverage (with the aid of a funnel from which the enamel had almost completely worn off) into an old Johnny Walker bottle that Don Juan the Rib kept for sentimental reasons. (It reminded him of a certain high school senior who had debuted in his arms.)
And still he faced a wait. A dramatic wait, as the drink, with its outstanding and incomparable taste, was placed in the refrigerator till it became as dark and profound as an ocean overgrown with mouldering vegetation.
And it was the final sip of this very beverage that Don Juan had just taken when at a certain moment he came to and still did not believe that he was seeing what he was seeing, or smelling what he was smelling. He fell asleep for a moment, and when he woke up again the thing in the corner was even more distinct, it was so distinct Don Juan thought that he could see cankerous innards pulsating beneath a skin covered in pig-like stubble. And there was a stench, an unbearable stench. But when Don Juan the Rib finally understood that what he was seeing (he clearly saw a beckoning claw-shaped finger) was not a hallucination, he showed courage and decided to defend himself. Since he knew for sure the bottle was empty, he decided to fling his keepsake at the diabolical creature lurking in the corner. Yet when his hand began (with a cautious, lizard-like motion) to grope about on the floor, instead of his memento it encountered a house slipper, and Don Juan the Rib flung first one house slipper, then the second, at the diabolical creature. And it was then that fear and trembling made his hair stand on end. It was then that he was overcome by a true fury, because after he threw the second slipper at the diabolical creature he began to feel like a soldier who has run out of ammunition, and he was horrified that he had no more slippers to throw, because he had deluded himself into thinking that the first two slippers had had some impact, that it was only with slippers he could overcome the evil, that slippers alone were the only effective projectiles, that the diabolical creature would only succumb to an artillery barrage of footwear. With a superhuman effort he crawled from the bed and reached the closet, which was filled with various sorts of footwear, and he began convulsively flinging slippers at the diabolical creature, and when the slippers ran out he threw sandals, and when the sandals ran out he threw mules, and after that he resorted to any kind of shoes that were in the closet, and there was an extraordinary number of these shoes, so many that in the end they brought about victory for Don Juan, though it was quite literally a last-minute victory. At the last minute the last shoe covered up the last fragment of pulsating skin covered with pig-like stubble. Don Juan the Rib felt a slight relief, and his quaking heart may even have known a brief moment of calm; he was panting terribly and his awful physical exhaustion may at least for a moment have made him forget about his fear. He closed the door to the room in which the evil was breathing its last beneath a pyramid of shoes; either it was no more, or at least it was entirely hidden. He went into the kitchen, lit a cigarette, and looked around. Everything was where it belonged, nothing was moving, nothing was crawling, nothing was making a scraping noise. The refrigerator, the dresser, the dishwasher, and the gas stove were all where they had stood for centuries. On the dresser, just as in the days under the Muscovite yoke, there stood a small black-and-white Yunost television. Don Juan the Rib raised his hand and turned it on; a moment later the screen lit up like a mercury mine, and the voice of the singer who was immensely popular that season was heard. Amid flashes of mercurial lightning, on the unseen stage she was singing a song about a silken scarf. A terrible sadness transfixed Don Juan’s heart.