The young man in the familiar blue shirt quickly crosses the corridor again. You linger there. He hurries or runs carelessly. Sometimes his hands squeeze his throat. . and you saw the jump rope. You pulled him down. The cord fell over the waste of childhood, so you turned him over, rolled the jacket under his back, and you went on repeating the movements you’d learned for saving the drowned. It was clear then: Father had died. No daughter had ever been born. He was a lifeless puppet worked by an adolescent female stranger. His livid face sought resurrection from a thread of blood that oozed from the corner of his lips. He would writhe for weeks until his unwanted rebirth.
The agony of endless weeks: liquefied gestures, milky mornings, dispensing with objects, people — annihilating their movements, swallowing their haste, rarifying their muddled signs. Work shift one, shift two, shift three, shift one, shift two, again, shift three: Wednesday’s day and night had passed. Thursday evening he kept laughing. That was the final vacillation, the hesitation of the finger on the trigger, the rope that had yet to lengthen into a knot, the poison still licking the bottom of the glass — the last moment of weakness. By then, though, he was waiting for the end: his plunge into the industrial melting pot. No one could bring him back from that sea of flames. A final embrace: ash, smoke — ignition.
The freezing walls burn; your fingers tremble. And the stranger passes hastily toward nowhere, once more through the dark, silent corridor. Still young, unapprised, prisoner of increasingly difficult, deadening mornings: Thursday, Monday again, Tuesday, Wednesday, an engulfing fog. Years of delay, until finally one Wednesday, one Thursday, at around ten o’clock, amidst the tumult of spies, the rustle of papers, the whistle of the telephone, the cadence of the typewriters, everything becomes unbearable: alone, a solitary man in the scorching rain faces his destiny, his reconciliation.
The young man goes by. He doesn’t suspect he’s being watched. He hasn’t seen you, embittered in your mourning clothes, cursing the way people go cheerfully about their games as if skipping a rope made of days. You are an outsider to their appetites and pleasures, discarded among books that enchant and lie, lie and enchant, just like the grownups, the cowards, the runaways, the idiots: those paternal braggarts — those cheaters.
Frightened again by the power of death that brings your hand to your throat (withdrawn quickly, uselessly, too late), you come to yourself. There you remain, resigned to waiting. The stranger doesn’t see you. He can’t see the smooth wall of this vestibule where a blizzard of waiting scorches your fingers. Hidden by the shadows of the corridor, you repeat the gesture spasmodically and quiver, startled as if the intruder of tomorrow had snuck between the deceased past (as well as the past deceased) and the daughter deserted by the present. In a rush, the stranger goes by, blind as a forgetful ghost in an abandoned corridor. But he’s not like you. He hasn’t held a suicidal father in his arms, and if he had, it would have meant that he was retrieving his parent from the alienation that separated them.
Whatever we think, whatever we do, we drag them behind us. We deny, curse, forget them. Their ballast oppresses us, bends us, joins us. Time is nothing in this equation. After fifteen years you find yourself repeating the verbal tic of the dear departed, and the same pain in your left leg torments you the way it did him. Maybe your fictive brother repeats the words of his absent shadow, too.
Back when you had to wear schoolgirl pigtails with mournful black bows, which you hated so much you chopped them off, the stranger was a young Party star, the wonder kid of his little town. The offspring of correct, zealous parents, you were on the way down: even then you shrank into yourself. He was rising, though, unknowing, blind, burning with big slogans he believed were his own, ready to denounce his parents for any deviation. He had no hesitations, and he would have been ready to give you away if an intransigent code demanded it, you, with your politically dubious parent, you and all of those like you — or the hypocrite Sebastian Caba, who used his winning cordiality to hide the secret of his dubious parents, relocated as enemies from the banks of the Danube on the basis of who knows what varying suspicions. He’d have sent all of you down the river, with your cunning loser airs, ready to sneak into the crowd, hiding behind sacrifices and towing the party line.
The cold of his own ascension shook him. Dislocated, he turned fragile, lazy. He threw away his chances. Your spine suddenly stiffened, meanwhile. Refusing to sink, you understood you needed to resist, to die again, many times over, until you could return to the others, without ever actually being among them. At the same time, rounds of amnesia spiraled, redoubled. Precursors of birth, recognition, tropisms lazed by warm currents, undermined all chances of revolt. Or maybe his halt wasn’t voluntary. Maybe an unexpected accident, a family nuisance, or some unlucky swindle flung him suddenly into the camp of the defeated and the wronged where he adapted just as easily to the reversal of fortune. Sadness, obsession, humility, fear. Perhaps even your return from defeat didn’t signify a choice, but only happened because it could be no other way: the unbearable had gone on for too long and something had to be tried — anything, because time kept passing. You cursed the cowardice of a father who abdicated: caught up inside himself, without escape, ignoring his responsibility, his promises. Perhaps the hypothetical brother was cursing the perseverance of a parent who didn’t abdicate but who was eager to raise protective walls, spaces of doubtful safety.
How is your isolation different from his indifference? To what extent is indifference an end and isolation a beginning, a way of waiting without hope? To what extent do they stand on the same crumbled rock?
You went down into the damp tunnel, groping. Each step took you further from the patch of sky left in the little window of aloneness. Distance narrowed that rectangular eye. Another slope closed the distances behind: the vastness increased. The light grew scarce. Whoever says there’s a moment of terror greater than this is a liar. You look back and see: there isn’t enough time to turn back. That would take more than a lifetime. Whoever claims they’re tough is a liar: they’ve made up their loss. They’ve recovered from abandonment without knowing how the cold pours over you when you can’t find a scrap of light from behind. You two have met in the risky game of banalities, though, and have both heard the suspect’s nightmarish undertones where masked figures bark at the funeral masquerade.
Damp, high, close walls: the course descends; there’s no right or left. Time grows dark, cold. Your skin covered with sores, dregs, you fall prey to stammered, startled gestures. In the distance: the torturers’ carnival. We cannot lose what we have understood and gotten close to, you said once. Yet only this do we lose — we have nothing else to lose. We squander, we abandon what we’ve understood and have grown close to: closeness dies over time. Understanding flutters for a deceptive instant. You can live in the mountains for four years or forty, always ransacking the same false idea. . what miraculous powers could have grown in the lonely little girl in a year, or two, or ten if what happened could have been delayed, if Time allowed itself to test her later, but Time raced through the defeated Captain’s damaged laugh. Nothing could support him or keep him upright. He didn’t have time, however much he might have been watched over. He needed to speed toward the moment when he’d finally embrace himself in the pyre of forgiveness and atonement.
The walls close in along the corridor. Fingers splayed, your hand slides over the narrow, moldy wall; nearby other fingers grope; a slippery step, another slippery step: your breath trembles. Your hand and the other’s should meet and clasp. You listen to the drumming of fingers on the walls, fingers bloodied by another fall. Shortening the distance, you try to reach out.