break with him? And was Filopater another coward who knew a good many intellectual options outside the Church and settled for the protective cupola of the ecclesiastical dome?
“I avoid rebellion and scandal,” he told us the last time we saw him, Jerico and I both knowing that when we left school we would not visit Filopater again, or the students, Professor Soler and his restless hands, Director Vercingetorix and his trampled gladioluses. Why? Because it was simply a rule of life that the attachments of adolescence are lost in order to become adults, without weighing the loss of value this can signify. Filopater would become the object of our self-satisfied contempt because his instruction consisted of teaching the thought of others, with no contribution of his own.
But wasn’t the inquiry itself, the ability to ask and to ask
“He did not accept his family’s inheritance. He died in poverty because that is what he wanted. He left with nothing.”
“Nature is happy with very little. So am I.”
The candles drip wax on a barrel filled with blood.
MARIA EGIPCIACA’S EMPTY bed became the symbol of my being abandoned inside the mansion on Calle de Berlin. Nurse Elvira had disappeared, I suppose forever. The imperious doctor had no need to return. Now the lawyer named Don Antonio Sangines put in an appearance. I wanted to solve the mysteries that surrounded me. Where was my warden, Maria Egipciaca? What did the empty bed and rolled-up mattress mean? Where were her clothes, her cosmetics (if she had any), her basic possessions: dentifrice and toothbrush, hairpins, brush, comb? The bathroom was as empty as her bedroom. There were no towels. And no toilet paper. It was as if a ghost had lived in the room of a woman whose physical reality was obvious to me.
The mystery of her absence was no greater than my sense of it, except that the enigma of the woman never became anything else, while in my own case, absence signified solitude. It was strange. The customary presence of Senora Maria Egipciaca somehow filled the empty spaces of this mansion untouched by reversals or novelty. It wasn’t a beautiful house, or historic, or evocative. It was huge, and I had to admit that the occasionally amiable though almost always hateful presence of my jailer filled all the spaces that now were not only empty but solitary, for hollowness as sidereal as the universe evoked by Father Filopater is not the same as a disappearance of the concrete and customary, no matter how odious it may have seemed to us. I imagine the worst injustices, the concentration-camp universe created by the Nazi regime, and try to imagine something that might have been a consolation. Suffering with others. The prisoner in Auschwitz, Terezin, or Buchenwald could see his death in the eyes of other prisoners. Perhaps that is the mercy no one could tear away from that group of victims.
How could I, wretch that I was, compare my insignificant abandonment in the mansion on Berlin to the fate of a victim of Nazi racism? Was my vanity so great it placed my minuscule abandonment above the gigantic abandonment of the millions of men and women whom no one could or wished to help?
Well, yes. You can attribute it, now that I, a victim myself, am nothing more than a severed head lapped by the waves of the Southern Sea, to the failings of self-pity, the rupture of the customary, even a certain nostalgia for the presence, odious or amiable but at least habitual and constant, of my old guardian, to calibrate the solitude that invaded me at the time with a sense of being abandoned that brought me dangerously close to the sin of believing that the world was my perception of the world, that my particular image of things was as momentous as the injustice committed against an entire people, religion, or race.
I’m being sincere with you and make no apology for my absurd anguish but do criticize my narrow perception and arrogant presumption in believing that because I was solitary I was persecuted. But who, in a situation comparable to mine, does not project his personal misery onto a greater screen, a collective experience that saves us from the sadness of the trivial and insignificant? Perhaps, looking back, I realize that what I perceived was inside me, and what lay outside was so small that to endure it I had to sketch it on our time’s large collective screen of grief, abandonment, and despair.
Forgive me for saying what I have just said, you who still live and give definitive value to your existence. I do it to punish myself and situate the small crises of my youth within their real limits, which are limits only because we first extended them to the entire universe, turned our small problems into matters of universal transcendence, and compared ourselves, grotesquely, to Anne Frank or, more modestly, David Copperfield. All this is to say that the disappearance of Maria Egipciaca, preceded by my illness, the incident with Nurse Elvira, and the suspicion I was not who I believed myself to be, confused my existence and left me, like a shipwrecked sailor, wanderering in the solitude of the mansion on Berlin. Waiting for a solution to this new stage of my life, fearful it wasn’t a stage but an insurmountable condition. What would become of me? Following my guardian, would I disappear too? Would I be expelled? How long would a wait continue that was a torment and brought me to the ludicrous extreme of comparing myself to a victimized Jewish girl or an abandoned English boy?
The attorney, Licenciado Don Antonio Sangines, appeared one Saturday morning to explain the situation to me. Which was what it had always been. Except that Senora Maria Egipciaca would no longer look after me.
“Why?” I dared to ask in the unyielding presence of the lawyer, a tall, imperturbable man who looked at me without seeing me, so heavy were his eyelids and so meager the light that came in or went out through those curtains.
“That’s the way it is,” was his only response.
“Did she die? Move away? Was she dismissed? Did she grow tired of the work?”
“That’s the way it is,” Licenciado Sangines repeated and proceeded to lecture me about my new situation, as if nothing had happened.
I would continue to live in the house on Calle de Berlin until I finished my preparatory studies. Then I could select my course of study and stay in the house until I completed it. At that time, new instructions would be given to me. I would receive a stipend sufficient to my needs. Matters would be arranged in accordance with those needs.
The lawyer read the document containing these instructions, folded it, placed it in the jacket pocket of his blue pinstripe suit, and rose to his feet.
“Who will look after me?” I said, alarmed at not having anyone to fix my food, make my bed, prepare my bath, and ashamed at having to admit to this catalogue of requirements.
“That’s the way it is,” Sangines repeated and left without saying goodbye.
I asked myself if I could live with so many unanswered questions. I saw myself lost in the big old house, left to my own devices and the question Sangines had posed: What were my needs?
As soon as the lawyer had left, the usual maid came in and, without saying a word, began her work. I believe it was this resumption of custom in the midst of an unaccustomed situation that disconcerted me more than anything else. The attempt to mollify me by assuring me everything would be the same did not resolve the mysteries I found troubling. Who was Maria Egipciaca? Where was she? Had she died? Had she been dismissed? Would I see Nurse Elvira again? Who was I? Who was supporting me? Who was the owner of the house I lived in? How did those proverbs end?
“… does dawn come earlier.”
“… wakes up crazed.”
“… the old woman’s in the cave.”
“… lets in no flies.”
“… shuffling the deck.”
Jerico completed the proverbs Maria Egipciaca had left dangling and gave me an order:
“Come live in my apartment.”
“But the lawyer-”
“Pay no attention to him. I’ll arrange it.”
“And if you can’t?”
“That can’t happen. You have to learn to rebel.”
“And be left without-”
“You won’t lack for anything. You’ll see.”
“You’re pretty rash, Jerico.”
“Sometimes you have to take a risk and ask yourself: Who needs whom? Do they need me or do I need them?”
