Ravelstein was willing to lay it all out for me. Now why did he bother to tell me such things, this large Jewish man from Dayton, Ohio? Because it very urgently needed to be said. He was HIV-positive, he was dying of complications from it. Weakened, he became the host of an endless list of infections. Still he insisted on telling me over and over again what love was-the neediness, the awareness of incompleteness, the longing for wholeness, and how the pains of Eros were joined to the most ecstatic pleasures.
This is as good a moment as I will ever find to recall that, from my side, I was free to confess to Ravelstein what I couldn't tell anyone else, to describe my weaknesses, my corrupt shameful secrets, and the cover-ups that drain your strength. As often as not he thought my confessions were wildly funny. Funniest of all were the thought-murders. Perhaps I gave them a comic twist, unwittingly. Anyway, he thought they were uproarious and he said, "Did you ever read Dr. Theodore Reik, the famous Kraut psychoanalyst? He said a thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away."
That I was hard on myself, Ravelstein took, however, to be a favorable sign. Self-knowledge called for severity, and I was always willing to go to the mat with that protean monster, the self, so there was hope for me. But I would have liked to go further. My feeling was that you couldn't be known thoroughly unless you found a way to communicate certain "incommunicables"-your private meta physics. My way of approaching this was that before you were born you had never seen the life of this world. To grasp this mystery, the world, was the occult challenge. You came into a fully developed and articulated reality from nowhere, from nonbeing or primal oblivion. You had never seen life before. In the interval of light between the darkness in which you awaited first birth and then the darkness of death that would receive you, you must make what you could of reality, which was in a state of highly advanced development. I had waited for millennia to see this. Then when I had learned to walk-in the kitchen-I was sent down into the street to inspect it more closely. One of my first impressions was of the huge utility-pole timbers that lined the street. They were beaver-colored, soft and rotted. On their crosspieces or multiple arms they carried many wires or cables in an endless falling relay, soaring, falling again and soaring. On the fixed sag and flow of the cables the spar rows sat, flew off, came back to rest. Along the sidewalks, the faded bricks revealed their original red at sunset. You rarely saw an auto mobile in those days. What you saw were hansom cabs, ice wagons, beer drays, and the huge horses that pulled them. I knew people by their faces-red, white, wrinkled, spotted, or smooth; smiling or violent or furious-their eyes, mouths, noses, voices, feet, and gestures. How they bent down to amuse or question or tease or affectionately torment a small boy.
God appeared very early to me. His hair was parted down the middle. I understood that we were related because he had made Adam in his own image, breathed life into him. My eldest brother also combed his hair in the same style. Between the senior brother and me there was another brother. Senior to all of us was our sister. Anyway… this was the world. I had never seen it before. Its first gift was the gift of itself. Objects gathered you to themselves and held you by a magnetic imperative that was simply there. It was a privilege to be permitted to see-to see, touch, hear. This would not have been impossible to describe to Ravelstein. But he would have answered dismissively that Rousseau had already covered the same turf in his _Confessions__ or his _Reveries of a Solitary Walker__. I didn't feel like having these first epistemological impressions anticipated or dismissed. For seventy-odd years I had seen reality under these same signs. I had the feeling, too, that I had to wait for thousands of years to see, hear, smell, and touch these mysterious phenomena-to take my turn in life before disappearing again when my time was up. I might have said to Ravelstein, "It was my one turn to live." But he was too close to death to be spoken to in such terms and I had to surrender my wish to make myself fully known to him by describing my intimate metaphysics. Only a small number of special souls have ever found a way to receive such revelations.
Further childish penetrations of the external world: On Roy Street in Montreal a dray horse has fallen down on the icy pavement. The air is as dark as a gray coat-lining. A smaller animal might have found its feet, but this beast with its huge haunches could only work his hoofs in the air. The long-haired Percheron with startled eyes and staring veins will need a giant to save him, but on the corner a crowd of small men can only call out suggestions. They tell the cop he's lucky the horse fell on Roy Street, easier to write in his report than Lagauchettierre. Then there is a strange and endless procession of schoolgirls marching by twos in black uniform dresses. Their faces white enough to be tubercular. The nuns who oversee them keep their hands warm within their sleeves. The puddles in this dirt street are deep and carry a skim of ice.
In children this impression-real reality-is tolerated by adults. Up to a certain age nothing can be done about it. In well-to-do families it lasts longer, perhaps. But Ravelstein might have argued that there was a danger of self-indulgence in it. Either you continue to live in epiphanies or you shake them off and take up trades and tasks, you adopt rational principles and concern yourself with society, or politics. Then the sense of having come from "elsewhere" vanishes. In Platonic theory all you know is recollected from an earlier existence elsewhere. In my case, Ravelstein's opinion was that distinctiveness of observation had gone much further than it should and was being cultivated for its own strange sake. Mankind had first claim on our attention and I indulged my "personal meta physics" too much, he thought. His severity did me good. I didn't have it in me at my time of life to change, but it was an excellent thing, I thought, to have my faults and failings pointed out by someone who cared about me. I had no intention, however, of removing, by critical surgery, the metaphysical lenses I was born with.
This is one of the traps that a liberal society sets for us-it keeps us childish. Abe would probably have said, "It's up to you to make a choice. Either you continue to see as a child, or else."
So once again Ravelstein was recovering from still another sickness and learning for what seemed the tenth time how to sit up. Nikki learned to operate the triangle-lift, and when Ravelstein began to improve Rosamund and I followed Nikki as he guided the wheelchair. Ravelstein with his eyes half shut dropped his head to one side. With Nikki pushing he rolled through the large apartment-meant for happier, more normal souls. But this was his kingdom, with all its possessions.
Rosamund, with tears in her eyes, asked me whether he would ever be himself again.
"Can he fight off the Guillain-Barrй? I'd say the odds are on his side," I said. "Last year, he had the shingles-herpes something-or-other. He fought those shingles off. That one, he won."
"But how many times can you do that?"
"Everything is just as you left it," Nikki was saying to Ravelstein.
The carpets and hangings, Lalique fixtures, pictures, books, and compact discs. He had sold his collection of old phonograph records, a large and choice one, to keep pace with technological advances. He had CD catalogues arriving from London, Paris, Prague, and Moscow offering the latest Baroque recordings. The telephones of what Nikki and I called the "command post" were disconnected. Only the instrument in Nikki's bedroom was, as he said, "operational." In this city of millions there couldn't have been another apartment like this one-with priceless antique carpets everywhere and, on the kitchen sink, a hissing espresso machine of commercial size. But Ravelstein could no longer operate it. Over the mantelpiece Judith was still holding the head of Holofernes by the hair. His mouth open. Her eyes turned to heaven. The painter wanted you to think of Judith as the simple daughter of Zion, a natural chaste beauty, even though she has just cut off a fellow's head. What was Ravelstein's view of all this? There were very few indications in his private quarters of Ravelstein's sexual preferences. One had no reason, in any respect, to suspect him of irregularities of the commoner sort-the outlandish seductive behaviors of old-fashioned gay men. He couldn't bear the fluttering of effeminate men.