I sat with them for a while. Richardson was telling Linda why a certain small firm had gone bankrupt, and I soon lost interest and went out to the garden. Flowers were blooming on the terrace and our stray garden cat was lying asleep on his back. When I came out, he opened an eye, saw it was me, and closed it again. The cat knows I respect his independence, and so he just went on dozing, expelling from his body and fur the moisture from the rain that had just fallen in great quantity. The cat basked in the September sunshine, and since he knew me, he wasn't afraid of anything.
Sitting on his haunches on the grass in front of his house was a Chinese man, a well-known artist, and he looked at the glass-covered house with a sadly astonished expression on his face as if he were seeing it for the first time in his life.
If only Steven would sleep a while longer, I thought, it would be so nice for everybody. Mr. Richardson and Linda could continue calmly chatting on the second floor, and I'd be able to stay out here in the garden. And then I started philosophizing. I decided that the Chinese man and the cat were invisible to Steven Gatsby. He meddles in life too crudely, whereas if you want to see something in it, you have to enter very carefully so as not to frighten it away. In fact, I thought, it's as if Steven doesn't even exist, since the Chinese man on his haunches and the cat are invisible to him. Whereas I, a servant, am more useful to the world, for I see the Chinese man and the cat and am able to tell about them. Steven sees only his papers and feels only his body, and his function in the world is basically to set things in motion.
I remembered Stanislaw once taking offense because Steven and Nancy hadn't invited him to a restaurant with them, and saying bitterly to me, "Steven wants very much to be creative, but he can't be. He's insensitive, although he has a very good brain."
Stanislaw wasn't being fair then; it was his hurt feelings speaking. I didn't want to be unfair, and so I thought that if Gatsby didn't own this house, I would never have met Stanislaw or seen the Chinese man and the cat, and neither would the garden have existed for me, nor the cool East River, and my life would have been more boring and blacker, as black as coal.
Having already completely justified Gatsby and having decided that everyone has his place under the sun, I suddenly remembered that on the day the angry Stanislaw had called Gatsby insensitive, the bitch Nancy had tried to humiliate me by teaching Steven how to use a little silver bell to call me from the kitchen. Steven and Nancy, their two children, and the country neighbors in Connecticut had just finished with lunch and were all still sitting at the table in the dining room. They had taken it into their heads to light a fire in the fireplace, and Nancy, obviously not feeling like making a trip to the kitchen, had rung the little bell instead. The ringing of little bells had never been heard in our house before, but I understood and went into the dining room. When I entered, Nancy turned to Steven and said, "You see how easy it is!" and then asked me to make a fire.
"I'm embarrassed," Gatsby said, and he really was embarrassed, and I think even ashamed for Nancy, and after that episode the bell was never heard again.
As a result of that memory the world once again collapsed into two unequal and diametrically opposed camps — servants and masters. The almost stilled argument within me was revived. About what? The same old argument about who was more important to the world, Gatsby or me. I produce books, I thought, things of more or less «immortal» spiritual value. What does Gatsby do? He oversees the production of money. Or more accurately, he oversees the manufacture and sale of ever newer things that from my point of view aren't really needed by mankind — automobiles and computers. His expensive cars and computers, I think, undoubtedly serve the cause of enslaving man's body and spirit. Whereas my activity is directed towards the liberation of that body and spirit, towards the awakening of human consciousness. At least, the couple of books I've already written promote the awakening of doubt in people.
Gatsby, Linda, Richardson, and the others, their group on the second floor equipped with telephones, typewriters, Xerox machines, notebooks, teletypes, and file cabinets, are constructing a new supermodern dungeon for mankind, while I, sitting by myself on the fourth floor or bent over in the kitchen with a notebook, am cutting out an escape route to freedom.
We are enemies, it turns out — if not personal enemies, then unquestionably enemies in the social sense. And we laugh together sometimes, just as if everything were fine.
I sat in the doorway to the garden dressed in wide linen pants. My nose was burned by the sun, but my ass was cold; odd, isn't it? I love the freshness of life in autumn, the wind, the plants, the birds squalling something. The only thing that saddened me was that I was by myself, that there wasn't any being with me to whom I could say, "Look, listen to it, isn't it fine?" And then suddenly add, "You know, even though we're going to die, it's still fine, isn't it?" Nothing new here in essence, gentlemen, just feelings…
There was somebody to say it to. In proof of that, a blonde adolescent girl wearing heavy knit stockings — it had already turned colder — came out into the garden from Isabelle's old house and strode with a ballerina's silly gait to the swing. She lazily rocked buck and forth on it for a while, smiling thoughtfully and obviously unaware that anybody was watching her. Then noticing me, she immediately jumped down from the swing, walked over to the river and stood there for a while, and then quickly went back into her house. Why are people so afraid of each other? I wondered. It was merely my presence in the garden that had frightened her. Or not even in the garden, actually, since I was sitting in the doorway leading to our terrace. Whatever my gaze meant to her, she still ran away.
I went back inside too. Linda had gone, and Steven was awake; I could hear him filling his bathtub with water. I went upstairs to my room. The radio announced that the wind was increasing and that a hurricane was expected that night. Just in case, I closed the special storm windows in my room and went around the house, checking to see that all the windows were shut and closing the storm windows wherever we had them.
Steven went out. He always slams the front door so hard when he leaves that it's impossible not to notice. The energy seething within him bursts out and makes him slam the doors. The servant, however, took his place comfortably by the window, waiting for the storm, and started reading Che Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare. I wasn't really in the mood for it. Certainly we can dig tank traps, I thought, but it would be better if we had our own tanks. And the servant absent-mindedly concerned himself with less concrete details. As if summing up for the day my inner struggle with Gatsby, I thought with conviction:
There will always be oppressors and oppressed. And there will always be hope for the oppressed. And the inexhaustible light of a thousand suns of revolution will be obscured neither by the Jacobin Reign of Terror nor the Stalinist camps, for these are counterrevolution. Never! The proud revolution. The right to revolution is in every heart. Capitalism or socialism are human inventions, whereas revolution is a phenomenon of nature, like this approaching hurricane.