A Dream of Horses & Other Stories Page 3

  At that time in my life, I lived in the basement of a house located in a quiet neighbourhood just across the main avenue from the public gardens. Three stories high, the structure confessed a slight Moorish influence, particularly in the curved balconies that were in turn enhanced by the black wrought-iron balustrades supported on curling balusters. The windows were large and minimalistic in design. By noon the cream-coloured façade took on a flushed look, but its lines became sharper still. In front of the house was a small, well-tended garden, bounded by a five-feet-high hedge.

  Beneath this colossal mass of stone was a room crowded with a green-striped camelback sofa, two wicker chairs, a writing desk, a low square table, a bed with stout, tiny wheels underneath, a dark wood armoire with a long mirror affixed to its door, and a chest of drawers of the same dark wood as the armoire. In two of the corners were lanterns attached to iron stands which, when switched on, filled the room with a soft golden light. Four long shelves that jutted out of a wall held all my books. There was hot water in the bathroom, and a bathtub in which you could go to sleep without straining your neck. The glass windows were square and wide, stretching from the ceiling to a third of the room’s height, letting in a lot of light. In the night you could see the stars, and on some nights even the moon. How distant it all seems, now coming to haunt me like a fluid dream!

  To this room I had come just a few months after finishing my studies, coming with very little besides clothes and books. A week or two later I started work at a firm of solicitors, select in its clientele and practice, priding itself in advising banks and lending institutions to sell stocks, bonds, and other fancy hybrids of big and small companies in trading exchanges inside and outside the country. The firm was a boutique practice, whatever that means, though it almost always means that you come into money, but not without its dark side – the work filled dark nights. Only when you took a taxi late at night, how you enjoyed the wind making a mess of your hair.

  Some months later, I went to visit a friend in London, and together we travelled to France, Paris, and then down to the Mediterranean coast, where the cool breeze mingles with a brightness that dazzles everything under it, and you see the expanse of water that separates you from that land where the sun covers everything in a silvery haze, neglected, rich and poor at once, its deep forests with animals jumping in them, its never-ending wastes, its broad muddy rivers, its blood-red sunsets, its brown, rugged mountains with open mouths laced with snow, and its people that seem to grow from the very earth like a shrub or a root – nowhere else did nature reveal itself so free of hesitancy as in Africa. I itched to cross the sea and walk on that old land, what if only to graze the tip of Morocco or the quays of Alexandria. Such a romantic notion! What will my convalescent imagination not conjure up! But it doesn’t take long to find one’s burden again (these words have come to trouble me; I have taken to the habit of turning them over and over in my head. They aren’t mine for sure. To whom then do they belong? A poet? A philosopher? A longshoreman? It comes to the same thing): my leave was at an end, and I had to get back to do what I didn’t like much. Before returning, however, I spent a quiet day in Paris walking around the city, where, in one of its gardens, perhaps Tuileries, I saw with amazement how an old man, holding the slender stem of a yellow chrysanthemum between his teeth (images, so many images!), fed several sparrows from his outstretched hands, breadcrumbs between the thumb and the index finger, sparrows perched on his arms and shoulders and all around him. In that moment of revealed beauty, there rose up in me the feeling that something was about to happen, that my life was about to slip through a magic chute.

  Then I found myself at Montmartre, outside the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, breathing deep in the wind that rose suddenly, as if at my bidding, having risen from the forests outside Paris, or perhaps from further down, from the sea itself, or coming down at a terrible speed from the mountains in the north, or even from a neglected, frozen arm of the Ganges, or it was the air from another time that had somehow picked up the current of life after having remained dormant for centuries, for even that is possible: I took in the whole of Paris, first the light haze trailing over the city, which in no time had become a whirlwind taking everything with it, from the river, the earth, and the trees, to those colossal structures of stones and columns, all the iron of the Eiffel, the very flesh and thoughts of its constituent beings, but which once inside, instantly turned to all vapours, rising in spirals to no fixed destination, moving for months, for years maybe, until I could wrestle with it no more, this demon that it had become, so sly and rebellious, and spewed it all out on the page, where it would take form once more, inch by inch, as one word crept under the shadow of another, a city that repeated itself endlessly in forever-new patterns. And then I opened my eyes and Paris lay beneath me unaware of my presence.

  How many months I worked at the firm upon my return? Seven, perhaps eight. Finally I was free to do as I pleased. If I lived sparingly, my savings could last two years. Why, I was not the first one to do so. Joyce had done it for his art so shamelessly – all artists do so, in their own brave or shameless ways. Countless noble examples were there. I will do it as well. And I will beat them all at it. They make me smile, these last words. The pride of youth! And yet it is not incorrect to say that all great art begins in a thought of vanity.

  On that autumn day, walking to the bookshop in the neighbourhood, I could hear the wind go about its business in the eucalyptuses with a dry crackling sound. Crows perched on telephone poles and the wires linking them, clutching countless conversations in their claws which escaped through their claws all the same as the crows stood still and the world spun beneath them and they with it.

  I was there in no time. The market at that hour always appeared deserted – hardly a market it was, beginning and ending with a grocery store; between these: a store that sold antique furniture, the local branch of a bank, a small bakery, a post office, a large showroom with black mannequins in windows dressed in white lacy fabrics, empty on most days, a shop selling sports equipment, two or three stores with their shutters always down, and finally that beautiful book shop with a ceiling made up entirely of mirrors and a floor that pleasantly creaked under your step.

  Across from the market sat on a low stool the florist who at that moment was busy sprinkling water over the flowers with measured jerks of his arm, water that he collected in the hollow of his hand, with fingers curled in the traditional style, from a half-broken pail. The owner of the newsstand followed his movements closely for want of a better distraction while cracking peanuts by pressing them between his thumb and forefinger and removing the contents to his mouth with an absent habitual air.

  Bending away from the world and its impressions, I sauntered towards the bookstore, towards the distant and elemental worlds of books, worlds that language alone can forge. Nearby some children were playing hopscotch, clapping and hooting and making a racket. Watching them at their game, a vague uneasiness came over me, as if dark sinister events were lurking round the corner, ready to pounce on me like a pack of burglars. My head full of such thoughts I entered the store, where I did not instantly notice the girl who came to mean so much to me for so little a time. Oh, Sevica, only if…

  My thumb aches. No, my hand and arm too. It is getting cold. The mountains are collecting shadows for the night to spread them about. I must rest for the day. How easily I tire. How difficult it seems to move your pen to shape words, sentences, stories. It has become a labour, a mere physical activity. And yet I have not written, no, scribbled, more than a handful of lines. So much the better to roll words and sentences in your memory, where they float calmly and because they are formless always retain some element of truth.

  *

  In the autumn of that year you first made his acquaintance, and by spring he was gone, taken away, removed to higher, lighter climes, for his situation, as was plainly evident, had deteriorated. What all can a cycle of seasons contain! But before that period of strange and s
pectacular happenings, the years are banked with fog, so distant it seems: your return from Moscow during the summer, and the harsh winter earlier, harsher still for your mother’s soul hadn’t yet taken your leave, lingering over the frozen river and coming to wait on you in those long white nights. You had finished college, and were awaiting your father’s change of term at the Foreign Office so you could be homebound with him and your sister. You wept in your sleep and sleep-walked through the days, at times simply standing by the window and contemplating for hours the blue-and green-striped bulbous domes of the cathedral. You read and you played the piano, something for which you didn’t have much talent, but even to your dazed, suffering mind, Tchaikovsky now sounded more like Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Debussy clearer echoes of their selves, and with each bar, each piece, her soul hovered a little higher until one day at last it flew off. Soon the Moskva began to flow, the sky cleared, trees turned green and birds shook their feathers in them. You took to walking along the river and almost always ended at a bench in the Alexander Garden, behind you the yellow and ochre wall of the Kremlin rising steeply like a precipice.

  Eventually you came home, pulling autumn along. The wind picked up and the earth breathed again putting a spring in your step. Cottony clouds cantered away in the sky and dry leaves purred in empty drains. You resumed your walks and in the public gardens across the main avenue, in the silence within and without, rose up the myriad voices of the season. With each day you played better, a lightness pervaded your touch that suggested the soul’s flight.

  Early one evening you were at the bookstore to select a gift for your father’s birthday. Maybe this slight gesture will break the spell of silence and suffering over him and unite the three of you in your loss. How happy you were to locate Stendhal’s Armance, one of his favourites, a copy of which you had misplaced some years ago. It saddened you now to recall how he hadn’t even noticed its loss, for time had made him a different man. Perhaps the book will bring back the totemic power of literature in his life, and perhaps he will embrace you – isn’t that what you ever wanted? How much of the child was still there in you?

  The bell-chime announced a visitor. And you looked up and you saw him. His gaze did glide over you, but you knew he had not seen. You were straight in his line of vision and he had not seen. You looked down and you looked up again. There was something in those eyes: a wandering sadness that at last has found a place to settle down. You could see that. Of course, it wasn’t just this as you know now; even then his mind had been struggling against the evil lure of its own terrible designs.

  But the next moment he was smiling, his gaze fixed on you, no, not on you, on something near you. It was the Stendhal you had carelessly left on the counter while thumbing through another book. At first you wanted to claim it from his cheerful stare; yet you stood unmoving. Something in you wanted to prolong the happy state in that stranger.

  This was not to be, for now he finally saw you and at once a curtain of boredom fell on his eyes. Awhile he moved to the pull of books, picking one or another, glancing through them, lingering on them and, more than once, you thought, contemplating a book’s price longer than necessary. At last, a book in hand, he withdrew to the shop’s inner courtyard. You paid and collected the Stendhal and drifted towards the door, a part of you not wanting to leave. Thrusting the glass-door into the world you stepped out and, instantly, from the eucalyptus across the road, its leaves a pale green in the evening light, several crows sticking to it like on an impressionist canvas cawed a few times in chorus. This was all the motivation you needed. Falling back gladly into the shop, you coolly walked over to the courtyard to confront the fellow.

  He sat on the only bench, lost in the movement of clouds, bulbous and full of light in this moment, unaware of your approaching step. Indifferently yet expertly, he was spreading tobacco on a piece of fine paper, his fingers busy curling it around into a cigarette. He appeared a little dazed, like a sailor on a leave of absence, slightly unsure on land, of its deceits and mercies. A novel of John Hawkes lay neglected at his side, concealing under it a classic. Now he saw you, and his smile was at once shy and inviting, feeding your confidence. He removed the books to the other side and you sat down beside him.

  He offered that apology for a cigarette to you, but you shook your head, saying, no-thank you. So he put the cigarette to his lip, lit it with a match and puffed at it a few times, blowing out smoke like the spouts of a whale. For sometime he didn’t take any note of you, and you thought, what an incredible thing to do, sitting here, watching the fellow lost to daydreams. Then all at once he turned and, with an openness that both surprised and eased you, inquired if you’d walk with him to the nearby bakery for a coffee.

  There, sitting round a table with a plastic top, taking sips from the paper cups, you finally got talking: that, as things had come to pass, he cared only for books and you were beginning to feel a certain touch for music. He nodded like he had always known this, though he knew nothing then. Extracting the tobacco pouch from a pocket in his denims, he waited. So on you went about music, about the Moscow summer (to which he sighed, ah, Moscow!) and, for no reason whatever, you opened to him the anguish of your mother’s demise. He sat very still, rolling yet another of his cigarettes, until your thoughts started to spin a little, in time alighting on him, expectancy shinning in your eyes. He saw it this time, quite clearly, and vaguely at first he spoke of Armance, that in this city it was rare to find a girl reading Stendhal, that it was in fact the book in your hand which made it easy for him to talk to you (didn’t you approach him first?), that he was at present reading Chinese poetry (he spoke something about Li-Po’s poems), that you were the girl of his dreams if you could play the cello or the violin as well, and, if so, it would follow that life itself was a dream or a web of dreams. Laughter gurgled in his throat, yet it was you who gave it an outlet; the poor chap had forgotten how to. You said you didn’t play either of the two but only the piano, and although you didn’t play it all that well you would be happy for him to judge that day after the morrow.

  He came punctually at six-thirty. The bell pealed through the corridor and you knew it was him. You saw him from the window upstairs, wearing a blue-striped shirt, freshly laundered and creased in places due to negligent ironing, and slate-grey trousers, hands behind his back, hair slightly wet from the shower. You opened the door and ushered him in. He tiptoed into the living room where you suddenly turned to look at him. He smiled and his hand now held a gift for you: a book of poems by Ingeborg Bachmann. You had never read any poetry by her and you told him as much. He said her poems were beautiful and a flicker of longing crossed his eyes. Observing him it occurred to you that he was going to lose in the end, it was written all over him, that the world would defeat him simply with its indifference, and he would fall, poor soul, thinking himself a silent hero, of his noble sacrifice, whereas in truth it would come to nothing. How foolish this was, all of it, all the silly emotions one gradually amassed against a universe which, in its empyrean wisdom, remained forever silent. And you wanted there and then to hold him to yourself, to tell him that you would play to him, listen to him, even love him if need be, anything to make the sinking easier or less painful. Wasn’t that all one could do for another? Unable to free yourself from such thoughts, you suddenly took a step closer and embraced him. His arms closed about you; his touch on your skin was icy, and a tremor of unease passed over you, for his blood was freezing inside him.

  He thought he could spare the courtesies now that you were friends and, pointing to the bar, asked for some whiskey. You removed your father’s decanter from the shelf and poured a measure of it in a glass. Ice? Two cubes. You handed him the glass and walking over to the piano, said to yourself, quick, quick, gulp it down old boy, let it warm you, and for goodness’ sake let it take away that bluish hue from under your eyes. But he simply stood against the wall at the far end, stirring the ice cubes in his glass with a finger. Oh, how cold, you thought, how very cold! An
d knowing not how to help began with a little-known piece by Scarlatti.