Raya opened the door and Valentin could immediately see that she had been drinking.
Her eyes were shiny, her words tripped over one another. Like a spoiled child, she slurred her syllables and paused after banalities like “of course,” “whatever you say,” or “okay.”
Their daughter was running around the rooms, hugging the plush monsters he had brought her. He managed to understand that Raya was planning to spend New Year’s Eve with some girlfriends, and he left, feeling oppressed by the smell of unwashed clothes, the dirty dishes, and the reigning chaos. What a nightmare. What had happened to her house. How much he needed her house the way it was before, how much he needed it now when he no longer wanted anything from her. How much this house could help him, if only she could be happy again.
He left with a sense of hopelessness, thinking that in spite of all her qualities and her mild temper, Raya was never going to find a man for herself.
And that was all he wanted — to know that there was a man to take care of her and the child.
He asked himself why. Why this torment, this riddle. The solution seemed to be just around the corner, sitting like a sphinx, beckoning. It had scared him at the time and he had decided not to deal with it. But the thing was still there, waiting. It didn’t seem like it was going anywhere.
What the hell, Valentin thought to himself and suddenly cheered up. Raya needed a man. It was easy. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Ergo…
40. Love Stuff
Their story seemed unfinished and weaving a pattern of its own. Raya was not showing interest in anything, Valentin was pursuing his studies, their daughter was growing up. But there were two things that resembled knots in the whole affair. One was out in the open — Raya was drinking; the other was hidden — Valentin was unable to make love. This, in a strange way, brought them together, as neither was doing anything with anybody else.
Raya gravitated toward journalism. She hung around radio stations, newspapers; wrote freelance news reports, interviews, reviews of the foreign press. She could speak many languages — French, English, German, Italian. But she neither cared to define herself as having any particular profession, nor wanted to make herself in some way irreplaceable. She had languidly accepted Valentin’s attentions, then his lovemaking, then his child. When he had bristled at the news of her pregnancy, she had realized that she was in love. That she could not live without him.
He secretly admired her daring, her charm, which was winning her so many friends. Admired her flexibility in changing from one thing to another. Until he felt the weight of that lightness. And it filled him with inexplicable fury. He blamed himself, but pushed Raya away anyway.
At that moment, Raya was just discovering how much she needed him. But her need made him panic. While these complex states were evolving, no decision could be taken and the baby was born — to everyone’s relief.
Maria offered to take them home, both Valentin and Raya. Raya said no, Valentin said no. Raya continued to live with her parents, with the baby. Unsurprisingly, her parents accused Valentin of being irresponsible, he stopped going there and the first few years were a nightmare. Later Raya started working and moved with her daughter to a place of her own. She did something Valentin had dreamt about doing with her, back then when the time had been right.
Every now and then both reassured themselves that all was well, time was passing, things were fine. But whenever they met, the space between them filled with strange ambiguity, a thick cloud annihilating all possibility for shared thrills and desires. When either of them managed to pierce through the cloud, as now with the plush Christmas monsters, both behaved like amateur actors unexpectedly forced into an unfamiliar play. They tried to guess what their lines should be, to keep things from falling completely apart. At least that was what her father thought. And Raya’s father was no ordinary man. He was a bigshot. Apart from the fact that he looked like Jeremy Irons, he had the capacity of gathering the world around him and twisting it around his pinky. And the world was happy. Well, such people existed, nothing to be done about that.
Valentin vaguely suspected that Raya’s father played a significant role in the whole misunderstanding, even if only in accepting the baby with open arms, as if it were one of his own. He had even heard him say “the children of my children are also my children,” with such boundless, yet exclusive generosity. At least that was how Valentin felt about the situation. But he could never talk about it to anyone.
41. In the Fog
Valentin went back to his room and hurled himself onto the bed, covering his head with a blanket. Something was knocking on the door of his mind, but he had no desire to let it in. His thoughts kept crashing against the same words, “once the decision taken…” His daughter’s age, the years, like the beginnings of a bridge extending from one side of the river, but with no support, like a floating arch over the water, and every Christmas he was adding to it. But what was he adding? Length? He was just making it more fragile. Did he have any chance of reaching the opposite bank?
You could look at it the other way — the bridge, once built in its entirety, was blown up on the opposite side of the river, so that whatever was left stood hanging on this side, as if by magic, like the bridge in Avignon.
He let the images flow, drifting with them, half-seeing, half-hearing, giving in to the tingling in his stomach, like a child in its cradle, swinging down into an abyss with squeals of delight. One of the last half-formed tendrils of thought he felt before falling asleep was that he needed to write something, to glue some pieces together…
He woke up with the image of Raya’s face in his dream. He could not remember anything except her face. She had accompanied him to the gates of the waking world as if not allowed to cross over. He sat up in his bed and propped his back against the wall. He could hear the blood pounding in his head. He closed his eyes and tried to descend back into the sensation of his dream and elicit its unarticulated meaning. It held a key to something. But his mind had never been able to roam freely and he soon became angry with the futility of his attempt.
Things can be thought about. Valentin believed that every equation led to a solution. The problem was that he was not very good at math. States of mind such as this indefinite, wandering sensation exhausted him. How strange that all of these things, decided upon a long time ago, kept hovering about, refusing to ebb into the past. His decision to leave Raya, for example.
The past was not at all a quiet background, a foil to his new adventures. There was still something to be done, but what was it — that was the riddle. He suddenly thought of his mother and shivered. What would Maria do in such a case, or rather, what did she do? Nothing. The answer was nothing, she did nothing.
On the other hand, he couldn’t stand the idea of doing nothing — and wasn’t that what it meant to be Valentin? Or at least try to be Valentin?
Then he thought that if Raya got married, maybe he would be able to make love again.
42. Post
Fanny was as fretful on the inside as her cat was on the outside. The inevitable awakening. Cleaners had been hired over the phone and asked to come and bring the place to its previous state, its only state — one fit for logarithmic functions.
But the reason Fanny was irritated was not the cleaning. For the first time in her life she did not feel like working, she did not feel like dealing with the gallery at all. She went there anyway, sat down in her vast office, wrapped in the silence of Christmas day, and stared blankly at the piles of papers and catalogs. She flipped through her agenda, but everything seemed devoid of interest. She suddenly felt like doing something ordinary people would do — let some stupid guy take her to the cinema, for example. Her system did not include the option of just calling up someone. The “someones” simply gathered around her and she gave them directions like a switchman at a railway junction.