The Gaze (20 page)

Whenever I put on B-C’s glasses, I went to the mirror to look at myself. There would be nothing different about me; my face was always the same face, my body the same body. I was carrying the illness I knew myself to be carrying; my obesity was like an amulet that had mistakenly been sewn to my skin when my form was being put together. Though in the past, quite a long time ago that is, there was a period, a phase of my childhood, when I wasn’t at all fat. But this wasn’t important right now. It didn’t help my present obesity one bit whether or not I remembered that I’d once been a thin child. The past is gone forever. But B-C didn’t think this way.

‘The past, the present, the future…we line them all up and draw a straight line. That’s why we believe that the past is gone and the future hasn’t arrived yet. And worst of all, we’re obliged to walk through time along this straight line we’ve already drawn. But perhaps he’s so drunk he can’t see as far as the end of his nose,’ said B-C, waving the scissors he was holding at the television.

He’d started again. He loved to talk about time. This was his favourite subject. While I just wanted to watch television calmly and quietly. I was watching a film with a large bowl of popcorn on my lap; it was one of those haunted house films. B-C, on the floor, on the carpet, was lost in a mass of daily newspapers and weekly magazines; he was drinking wine and cutting out pictures, articles and advertisements.

He was gathering material for the Dictionary of Gazes.

‘If only time never came to its senses. If somehow it wouldn’t succeed in walking a straight line. If it would only lurch, behave nonsensically, fall to pieces. And we would watch, and, condemning its actions, would never have to refer to it again.’

Whenever he started talking excitedly like this, he would wave his hands about wildly. As if every word he uttered was lacking something, and he would try to express what was missing with his hands that were too big for a dwarf.

‘Yes, if only time wouldn’t come to its senses. If it would make lots of mistakes…if it couldn’t succeed at any plan it had made beforehand…if it always realised its mistakes afterwards…when it was too late. If it couldn’t match its own speed. If it gave up and went backwards, in completely the opposite direction. First spending the future penny by penny. And then find its consolation in novelty. Then it would be the past’s turn. For the old that somehow couldn’t be made old. If it would vomit its selfishness, all of its knowledge. If the past’s order was turned upside down. If there was no order left at all…’

This was one of those moments when he didn’t stop talking. I think he didn’t really know what he was talking about, and just wanted to hear the sound of his own voice. In trying to make time drunk, he’d become drunk himself.

‘So what if it comes to its senses?’ I said, throwing a handful of popcorn into my mouth.

The film wasn’t that important. B-C’s enthusiasm was a match for my passion. I was prepared to ask any question at all just in order to see his enthusiasm. In fact perhaps I don’t listen to what he says, but rather watch how he tells it. I loved the way that, when he spoke, he was as excited as if he was solving the terrifying mystery of a cursed tombstone.

‘If it comes to its senses it will remember. What use will it be to remember? None. Remembering won’t be of any damned use except to cause pain.’

I shut up. At moments like this I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, and I couldn’t bring him back from wherever he’d gone. ‘Say whatever you have to say now or hold your peace forever,’ a voice deep within me would say. I would speak up right away in order not to miss the ‘now’. I would speak up, but still be unsure of what to say. I knew there was definitely something I had to say, but I couldn’t find what it was. Because I had remained quiet ‘now’, B-C would hold me to the part about holding my peace forever. He’d been talking nonstop. My fingers were blistered by his flaming lips. At times like this it went so far that it defied understanding; his thin little eyes turned into mysteries, and he never showed what he was feeling.

‘When you remember, you become frightened of solitude. Those people who remain in stagnant relationships from fear of loneliness, who give birth to children in order to refresh stale love, those are the people with the strongest memories.’

He was sitting in his rocking chair again, holding his purple-fringed blanket tightly, rocking back and forth and talking at the top of his voice. It seemed as if he’d already forgotten how the irritable next-door neighbour had come to complain about the noise we made and had threatened to make a complaint to our landlord. As soon as the women entered her house and carefully examined how messy it was, she couldn’t keep herself from making a comment to me. I didn’t want to have to see her again tonight. But B-C was having a talking fit again. And at times like this he somehow couldn’t moderate his voice. And anyone who heard his voice would have thought it came from an enormous man. He jumped down, came to my side, and took hold of my wrist.

‘The past doesn’t pass and go away. It doesn’t go anywhere. The past always flows into today. That’s why being able to forget forgetting is important,’ he said.

‘To forget is to clean the eyes. It definitely has to be done every spring. If we don’t forget we can’t live! If we don’t forget we can’t cause anything to live!’

‘I prefer to make my eyes an archive,’ I said shrugging my shoulders. He let go of my wrist and pulled back. Was there a mocking smile on his lips, or did it just seem so to me?

‘Is it you who’s saying this?’

Why wouldn’t I say this? What was wrong with my saying this? Instead of answering me, he went back to his rocking chair and squeezed his purple-fringed blanket. This sudden silence distressed me. When I’m distressed I become hungry.

I thought about getting up to pop more corn. I’d forgotten I was on a diet!

I was becoming increasingly anxious. I was anxious because I thought that everything B-C did and said had to do with the Dictionary of Gazes. Since he didn’t show me what he’d written, the Dictionary of Gazes was an enigma to me. And with every passing day this enigma distanced him further from me. I also suspected that all of those strange things were taken from the Dictionary of Gazes. As if his contact with me and with life itself was through the vehicle of, and by leave of, the Dictionary of Gazes. I didn’t like this.

On top of this, he’d started seeing everyone and everything as material. He said that stories resembled water, and that only in miracles did sweet water and salt water flow together without mixing. He asserted that because the Dictionary of Gazes was not a miracle, it could mix completely with everyone and everything. With a stick in his hand, he was constantly stirring up stories; putting the end at the beginning and the beginning in the middle. He cut up films, dreams, newspaper cuttings, encyclopaedia articles, put the pieces together, and used them as material for the Dictionary of Gazes.

I was anxious because once he used material, he never looked at it again.

The next day when I got back from the nursery B-C wasn’t at home. Lately he often went out without leaving word. On days like these, one of the neighbour-ladies would always open her door, either to put out the trash or to give me some food; and when they opened their doors they would always let me know when and how B-C had left. But not even the neighbour-ladies knew where he had gone or what he was doing.

I ate my supper alone. When I say supper, it was only grapefruit. I’m punishing myself today because yesterday I forgot I was on a diet. All day I’ve eaten nothing but grapefruit. As I piled up the grapefruit peels, I carefully examined my belly. I have to confess, I didn’t have one belly, I had three bellies. And not one of them had melted even the smallest bit.

I suppose if I wasn’t as fat as I am, I’d be able to keep better track of the weight I’ve lost. When something small becomes smaller it’s noticeable right away, but when something large become smaller the loss remains invisible. Just as I used to in the old days, I suffer pangs of hunger all day. Since I couldn’t fill my stomach, I suppose my eyes tried to fill themselves by watching all of the cooking programmes on television, and reading food articles in magazines, and gazing at bountiful displays in restaurant windows and at high calorie products in the supermarket, learning recipes from skilful cooks wherever I went, and since I was talking about food all day, when I finally did eat something it somehow didn’t fill me. Then I could put away at least thirty grapefruit in one sitting. The pile of grapefruit peels became as high as a mountain. It made me irritable to see them. Dieting made me an irritable person.

Eating that many grapefruits one after the other made me feel quite heavy. I curled up on the sofa. Not long afterwards, I heard the door open. B-C had come home. But I was so sleepy I couldn’t get up. My eyes were closing. I fell asleep looking at the mound of grapefruit peels.

‘Come on,’ I said to B-C as soon as he came in. He looked tired.

‘Come on what?’

‘Let’s go out tonight. It’s been a long time since we’ve gone out in disguise. We haven’t seen the mood of the people. Come on, let’s go see.’

This time we changed our appearance more quickly. Two hours later the two of us were unrecognisable. This evening I was a hardened, cold-blooded thief. B-C was my sidekick, an unemployed, shiftless adolescent who had gone to work for his elder brother. Just like the first sprouting of a moustache, he had no idea which way he was going. From the sparse hair on his face he looked like a chick that had had difficulty breaking out of its egg. B-C was confused. This evening he was an impatient, over-sensitive, ill-tempered and penniless young man. I wanted to take him into my arms, carry him on my back, spin him around, but mostly I wanted to throw him into the air. I wanted him to laugh and enjoy himself in the firmament, to ask why the sun oppressed sunflowers, to stroke the moon’s face, to memorise the locations of the stars, and for him to know, as he fell like a lump of metal, that I might not catch him. Perhaps I’d gone and left, out of boredom, or forgetfulness, or perhaps for no reason at all. I wanted him to fall with the malevolent thrill of ‘perhaps’. Not wafting down like a leaf, but with the speed of lead.

He’d put a dirty, wrinkled beret on his head. He’d put gel on his hair, and his earlobes, pink from the cold, stuck out from under his beret. He pattered after me with his hands in his pockets. His right kneecap was protruding through a hole in his greasy trousers. His face was dirty and small enough not to show the misgivings he was feeling, but the pursing of his sore-covered lips gave away his fear.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ I said. ‘You’ll be fine, little one.’