genera, or whether one is a rare flowering of the other on the Walpurgis Night of my murky soul; for, if they are two separate entities, then there must be two separate kinds of beauty, and the aesthetic sense, invited to dinner, sits down with a crash between two chairs (the fate of any dualism). On the other hand, the return journey, from the special to the simple, I find somewhat more comprehensible: the former is subtracted, as it were, at the moment it is quenched, and that would seem to indicate that the sum of sensations is indeed homogeneous, if in fact the rules of arithmetic are applicable here. It is a strange, strange thing—and strangest of all, perhaps, is that, under the pretext of discussing something remarkable, I am merely seeking justification for my guilt.”
Thus, more or less, fidgeted his thoughts. He was fortunate enough to have a refined, precise, and rather lucrative profession, one that refreshed his mind, sated his sense of touch, nourished his eyesight with a vivid point on black velvet. There were numbers here, and colors, and entire crystal systems. On occasion his imagination would remain chained for months, and the chain would give only an occasional clink. Besides, having, by the age of forty, tormented himself sufficiently with his fruitless self-immolation, he had learned to regulate his longing and had hypocritically resigned himself to the notion that only a most fortunate combination of circumstances, a hand most inadvertently dealt him by fate, could result in a momentary semblance of the impossible.
His memory treasured those few moments with melancholy gratitude (they had, after all, been bestowed) and melancholy irony (he had, after all, outsmarted life). Thus, back in his student days at the polytechnic, while helping a classmate’s younger sister—a sleepy, wan girl with a velvety gaze and a pair of black pigtails—to cram elementary geometry, he had never once brushed against her, but the very nearness of her woolen dress was enough to start making the lines on the paper quiver and dissolve, to cause everything to shift into a different dimension at a tense, clandestine jog—and afterward, once again, there was the hard chair, the lamp, the scribbling schoolgirl. His other lucky moments had been of the same laconic genre: a fidget with a lock of hair over one eye in a leather-upholstered office where he was waiting to see her father (the pounding in his chest—“Say, are you ticklish?”); or that other one, with shoulders the color of gingerbread, showing him, in a crossed-out corner of a sunlit courtyard, some black salad devouring a green rabbit. These had been pitiful, hurried moments, separated by years of roaming and searching, yet he would have paid anything for any one of them (intermediaries, however, were asked to abstain).
Recalling those extreme rarities, those little mistresses of his, who had never even noticed the incubus, he also marveled at how he had remained mysteriously ignorant of their subsequent fate; and yet, how many times, on a shabby lawn, on a vulgar city bus, or on some seaside sand useful only as food for an hourglass, he had been betrayed by a grim, hasty choice, his entreaties had been ignored by chance, and the delight of his eyes interrupted by a heedless turn of events.
Thin, dry-lipped, with a slightly balding head and ever watchful eyes, he now seated himself on a bench in a city park. July abolished the clouds, and a minute later he put on the hat he had been holding in his white, slender- fingered hands. The spider pauses, the heartbeat halts.
On his left sat an elderly brunette with a ruddy forehead, dressed in mourning; on his right a woman with limp, dull-blond hair was knitting industriously. His gaze mechanically followed the flitting of children in the colored haze, and he was thinking about other things—his current work, the attractive shape of his new footwear—when he happened to notice, near his heel, a large nickel coin, partially defaced by the pebbles. He picked it up. The mustachioed female on his left did not respond to his natural question; the colorless one on his right said:
“Tuck it away. It means good luck on odd-numbered days.”
“Why only on odd-numbered days?”
“That’s what they say where I come from, in———”
She named a town where he had once admired the ornate architecture of a diminutive black church.
“…Oh, we live on the other side of the river. The hillside is full of vegetable gardens, it’s lovely, there isn’t any dust or noise….”
A talkative one, he thought—looks like I’ll have to move.
And at this point the curtain rises.
A violet-clad girl of twelve (he never erred), was treading rapidly and firmly on skates that did not roll but crunched on the gravel as she raised and lowered them with little Japanese steps and approached his bench through the variable luck of the sunlight. Subsequently (for as long as the sequel lasted), it seemed to him that right away, at that very moment, he had appreciated all of her from tip to toe: the liveliness of her russet curls (recently trimmed); the radiance of her large, slightly vacuous eyes, somehow suggesting translucent gooseberries; her merry, warm complexion; her pink mouth, slightly open so that two large front teeth barely rested on the protuberance of the lower lip; the summery tint of her bare arms with the sleek little foxlike hairs running along the forearms; the indistinct tenderness of her still narrow but already not quite flat chest; the way the folds of her skirt moved; their succinctness and soft concavities; the slenderness and glow of her uncaring legs; the coarse straps of the skates.
She stopped in front of his garrulous neighbor, who turned away to rummage in something lying to her right, then produced a slice of bread with a piece of chocolate on it and handed it to the girl. The latter, chewing rapidly, used her free hand to undo the straps and with them the entire weighty mass of the steel soles and solid wheels. Then, returning to earth among the rest of us, she stood up with an instantaneous sensation of heavenly barefootedness, not immediately recognizable as the feel of skateless shoes, and went off, now hesitantly, now with easy strides, until finally (probably because she had done with the bread) she took off at full tilt, swinging her liberated arms, flashing in and out of sight, mingling with a kindred play of light beneath the violet-and-green trees.
“Your daughter,” he remarked senselessly, “is a big girl already.”
“Oh, no—we’re not related,” said the knitter. “I don’t have any of my own, and don’t regret it.”
The old woman in mourning broke into sobs and left. The knitter looked after her and continued working quickly, now and then, with a lightning motion, adjusting the trailing tail of her woolen fetus. Was it worth continuing the conversation?
The heel plates of the skates glistened by the foot of the bench, and the tan straps stared him in the face. That stare was the stare of life. His despair was now compounded. Superimposed on all his still-vivid past despairs, there was now a new and special monster…. No, he must not stay. He tipped his hat (“So long,” replied the knitter in a friendly tone) and walked away across the square. Despite his sense of self-preservation a secret wind kept blowing him to one side, and his course, originally conceived as a straight traverse, deviated to the right, toward the trees. Even though he knew from experience that one more look would simply exacerbate his hopeless longing, he completed his turn into the iridescent shade, his eyes furtively seeking the violet speck among the other colors.
On the asphalt lane there was a deafening clatter of roller skates. A private game of hopscotch was in progress at its curb. And there, waiting her turn, with one foot extended to the side, her blazing arms crossed on her chest, her misty head inclined, emanating a fierce, chestnut heat, losing, losing the layer of violet that disintegrated into ashes under his terrible, unnoticed gaze… Never before, though, had the subordinate clause of his fearsome life been complemented by the principal one, and he walked past with clenched teeth, stifling his exclamations and his moans, then gave a passing smile to a toddler who had run between his scissorlike legs.
“Absentminded smile,” he thought pathetically. “Then again, only
AT DAYBREAK HE DROWSILY laid down his book like a dead fish folding its fin, and suddenly began berating himself: why, he demanded, did you succumb to the doldrums of despair, why didn’t you try to get a proper conversation going, and then make friends with that knitter, chocolate-woman, governess or whatever; and he pictured a jovial gentleman (whose internal organs only, for the moment, resembled his own) who could thus gain the opportunity—thanks to that very joviality—to collect you-naughty-little-girl-you onto his lap. He knew that he was not very sociable, but also that he was resourceful, persistent, and capable of ingratiating himself; more than once, in other areas of his life, he had had to improvise a tone or apply himself tenaciously, undismayed that his immediate target was at best only indirectly related to his more remote goal. But when the goal blinds you, suffocates you, parches your throat, when healthy shame and sickly cowardice scrutinize your every step…
