THE ROOM NEXT DOOR
I was once, if I remember rightly, present at a gathering of madmen. Most of them were suffering from auditory hallucinations. A guy came up and asked if he could have a few words with me in private. We went to another room. The guy said that his medication was unhinging him. I’m getting more nervous every day, he said, And sometimes I have weird thoughts. That often happens, I told him. The guy said it was the first time it had happened to him. Then he rolled up the sleeves of his sweater and scratched his navel. He had a hand gun pushed into the top of his trousers. What’s that? I asked him. It’s my fucking belly button, said the guy: It itches and itches and what can I do? I’m scratching it all day long. Sure enough the skin around his navel was red and raw. I told him I didn’t mean his navel, but what was below it. Is that a gun? I asked. Yes, it’s a gun, said the guy, and he pulled it out and aimed it at the only window in the room. I considered asking if it was a fake, but I didn’t. It looked real to me. I asked if I could have a look. Weapons aren’t for loan, the guy said. It’s like with cars and women. If you steal a car, you can lend it. Not something I’d recommend, but you can. The same if you’re with a hooker. I wouldn’t do it myself, I’d never lend any woman, but, you know, you could. When it comes to weapons, though, no way. And what if they’re stolen or fakes? I asked him. Not even then. Once your fingerprints are on a weapon, you can’t lend it. You understand? Sort of, I said. You have a commitment to the weapon, said the guy. In other words, you have to take care of it for the rest of your life, I said. Exactly, said the guy, you’re married and that’s all there is to it. You’ve got it pregnant with your fucking prints and that’s all there is to it. Responsibility, said the guy. Then he raised his arm and aimed the gun straight at my head. I don’t know if it was then or later that I thought of Moreau’s belle inertie, or maybe I remembered having thought about it earlier, in a feverish and futile sort of way: beautiful inertia, the compositional procedure by which Moreau was able, in his canvases, to freeze, suspend and fix any scene, however hectic. I shut my eyes. I heard him asking me why I’d shut my eyes. Moreau’s tranquility, some critics call it. Moreau’s fear, say others who are less drawn to his work. Terror bedecked with jewels. I remembered his transparent pictures, his “unfinished” pictures, his gigantic, shadowy men, and his women, small in comparison to the masculine figures and inexpressibly beautiful. J. K. Huysmans wrote of his pictures: “An identical impression was created by these different scenes: that of a spiritual onanism, repeated in a chaste body.” Spiritual onanism? Onanism period. All Moreau’s giants and women, all the jewels, all the geometrical poise and splendor drop like paratroopers into the zone of chastity or responsibility. One night, when I was a sensitive young man of twenty, I overheard, in a boarding house in Guatemala, two men talking in the room next door. One of the voices was deep, the other was what you might call gravelly. At first, of course, I paid no attention to what they were saying. Both were Central Americans, though perhaps not from the same country, to judge from their intonation and turns of phrase. The guy with the gravelly voice started talking about a woman. He weighed up her beauty, the way she dressed and carried herself, her culinary skills. The guy with the deep voice agreed with everything he said. I imagined him lying on his bed, smoking, while the guy with the gravelly voice sat at the foot of the other bed, or maybe in the middle, with his shoes off, but still wearing his shirt and trousers. I didn’t get the feeling they were friends; maybe they were sharing the room because they had no choice, or to save some money. They might have had dinner and some drinks together; that was probably as far as it went. But that was more than enough in Central America back then. I fell asleep several times while listening to them. Why didn’t I sleep right through till the next morning? I don’t know. Maybe I was too nervous. Maybe the voices from the other room got louder every now and then, and that was enough to wake me up. At one point the guy with the deep voice laughed. The guy with the gravelly voice said, or repeated, that he had killed his wife. I assumed that it was the woman he’d been praising before I fell asleep. I killed her, he said, and then he waited for the other guy to respond. It was a load off my mind. I did what was right. Nobody laughs at me. The guy with the deep voice shifted in his bed and said nothing. I imagined him with dark skin, with Indian and African blood, more African than Indian, a guy from Panama on his way home, maybe, or heading north to Mexico and the US border. After a long silence, during which all I could hear were strange noises, he asked the other guy if he was serious, if he’d really killed her. The guy with the gravelly voice said nothing; maybe he nodded. Then the black guy asked if he wanted a smoke. Why not, said the guy with gravelly voice, one more before we go to sleep. I didn’t hear any more from them. The guy with the gravelly voice might have gotten up to switch off the light, while the black guy watched from his bed. I imagined a bedside table with an ashtray. A dark room, like mine, with a minuscule window that looked onto a dirt road. The guy with the gravelly voice was skinny and white, for sure. A nervous type. The other guy was black, big and solidly built, the sort of guy who doesn’t often lose his cool. I stayed awake for a long time. When I reckoned they’d gone to sleep, I got up, trying not to make any noise, and switched on the light. I lit a cigarette and began to read. Dawn was infinitely distant. When I eventually started to feel sleepy again and switched off the light and stretched out on the bed, I heard something in the room next door. A woman’s voice — it sounded like she had her lips to the wall — said Good night. Then I looked at my room, which, like the room next door, contained three beds, and I was afraid, and a scream rose in my throat, but I stifled it because I knew I had to.