We will get there. Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem … And we will get there because we are there already, because we have a toehold, because we are amphibious, because, paradoxically and miraculously, we are already part of the machinery that invents us from moment by moment, we participate second by second in our own drawing, sculpting, conception, and knitting together. If this wasn’t so, we wouldn’t be able to move a finger, since the finger’s flesh, cartilage, and bone would not be obliged to heed our command. Because we already participate in the Divine, from everywhere, from the tufts of our armpits, from the fat of our hips, and especially from the shell on our shoulders, we emanate a scented light that envelops us like a weaver’s shuttle. It is the mandorla that will someday lift us toward the sky, the shell that seats a living embryo. Yes, we are neural embryos, tadpoles caught in atavistic organs, belonging to two environments at once, two zones of being at once. How strange we will be when, like cetaceans, we complete our departure from the firm earth of inert flesh and adapt to the new kingdom, where we will bathe in the mental fluid of an enormous knowing, completely one with it and lost within it, like transparent animalcules of plankton, or like a single animalcule filling the entire ocean, indiscernible from it, a marine flea with trawlers and fishing boats sailing on its back …
It is almost six in the evening of a late and suffocating summer … One thousand, nine hundred, eighty-six years ago a prophet came from Judea. After thirty-three years he was crucified, and after another three days he rose and ascended to heaven, not before he promised to return. So far, though, he hasn’t. I attribute this delay to the fact that, as you have seen, I still have perplexing hands. I have not yet been transformed, in the wink of an eye, and I have not yet seen a new earth and new heaven …
19
I SIT in my chair for a little while longer, in my attic with the oval window, on the edge of a galaxy. A quiet grows rosier as evening falls, interwoven with volatile and benign noises: the continuous song of the doves (they often stop on the ledge and peer a round eye into the cave behind my window), toilets flushing in other apartments, the limpid cries of the boys playing soccer between cars parked in front of the block … Now I am writing in the heart of the night. The little lamp on my desk is no brighter than a wick in oil, so it leaves the corners of my room dark, and my bed disappears into a triangle of pitch. The haze of alcohol fills the room, alcohol and sweat. Because in my home, in my bed, for the first time after months and months, someone is here, completely obliterated by the dark. If I push my head and shoulders out of the sphere of yellow light over the desk and accustom my eyes, slowly, to the tenebrous air, I think I can make out a crumpled structure, an engraver’s needle cobweb, a plaque almost unattacked by acid. After a long time, I perceive the phantom-like cloud of a crumpled sheet, veiling and simultaneously unveiling a human form. It all looks like a heavy plaster cast thrown onto the plank bed, a statue that creaks and bows the slats. But Herman is light, a skeleton that the wrapper of his skin can barely hold together, glued tight to his skull and flapping free everywhere else, because his metabolism is a haze of alcohol vapors. “Poor him,” Mamma said twenty years ago, “so young and polite, he tells me ‘kiss the hand’ ten times a day when we pass on the elevator or the stairs — poor kid, look how he ended up, look what drinking will do to a person …” But I, holding her hand, without imagining I would one day know Herman as well as I do myself, looked with fright over my shoulder, toward the entryway, where I could still see the drunk, unnaturally hunched over, silhouetted by the weak light of the yellow and red elevator bulb. His neck was at a right angle to his body, as though one of his cervical vertebra had bent his spinal cord horizontal, and his head, always looking at the ground, was the image of oriental humility. Whenever we met, he scared me, because all drunks scared me, they were strange animals — I heard them sometimes howling and cursing behind the block — and, even though Herman was gentleness itself, when he put his hand on top of my head, I jumped and Mamma pulled me close. He still wouldn’t take his hand off my hair, cut short, with bangs, and, if the elevator was coming from the seventh floor, he might stay like that for more than a minute. During this time he would gaze at us, in the shadow of the stairway, revealing very, very blue eyes beneath his eyebrows, grimacing with the effort of looking straight ahead. His face was handsome and young, intelligent, but his breath, reeking of vodka, made us hold on to each other for the entire time that, crowded in the elevator, it took to reach the fifth floor. When we closed the metal door behind us, with its crack of matte glass, and we stepped onto our calming landing, in front of apartment 20, we breathed deeply a few times, while Mamma unlocked the door and the elevator went another two floors higher, with Herman.
Aside from the customary “kiss the hand, ma’am,” he never opened his mouth, but he smiled at me and absentmindedly patted the top of my head. He always wore the same suit, dark and proper, with a white shirt open at the neck, showing a little of the soft, rosy skin of his chest. He was always drunk, and when we went shopping with Mamma, on Lizeanu, we could usually spot him in the bar, wasting his time with ordinary drunkards, but Herman never trembled. He never rambled when he spoke, and he never left his clothes undone or dirty. He was so different from Mimi and Lumpă’s father, a porcine gypsy, who would come home with a train of musicians playing the violin and accordion, while he howled his favorite song as best he could:
On my mother’s grave, on her grave
If tonight I don’t get you
Naked in your slippers