The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (34 page)

“They consider you an enemy. Failures are dangerous, as I was saying, and vengeful, be careful that you don’t…”

Saint Augustin didn’t get to keep prattling on. Peter had disappeared, his voice had disappeared, the phantom had moved his tricks into the void.

The phantom, however, still sends riddles, suggestions, traps.

Left alone, Saint Augustin recapitulates. Could the basketball-star-turned-reader actually never have heard of the Borges story? Hard to believe. Lu might have told him stories about the attic of suspects where the suspect fable was read. She might also have reminded him about the evening when Palade debated Borges’ parallel worlds. Or even if Lu, discreet and dignified as she always was, avoided the past, Ga
par would have found out about the story from
Palade. Inevitably. They had talked so much about Dima, and Borges should have been an unavoidable reference; Dima and Palade had published exegeses about the blind man from Buenos Aires.

When he was speaking about the nights with Palade, however, Ga
par had never mentioned Borges! Not a single allusion, not a whisper, nothing! He doesn’t even appear in the review about Dima’s memoirs. Was he already preparing the game with the masks and quotations back then? Animated for a short time by the Dima dilemma and Palade’s strangeness, was he already putting into motion future amusement? A death threat! Let’s be serious, criminals don’t need quotations from esoteric books.

Angels don’t write books.
And what exactly is that, wise guy? They don’t write books, so then, neither do they write death threats borrowed from books. Gora had found the aphorism in the draft of the meeting between Patrick and Peter and was once again amazed by the buffoon’s conclusions.

And from where to where … a basketball star raised in the house of the Communist David Ga
par and in the Communist schools of the Red era, and now so many sophisticated Talmudic speculations about a postcard with excerpts from the
New York Times?

Professor Gora wasn’t convinced that Peter hadn’t just gotten bored of the New World and tried to regenerate his own irresponsibility. He’d announced from the start that he’d moved his game with death to foreign soil, and now he was staging his nocturne of threat.

He’d wasted time with this ridiculous farce, he had half a mind to call the police himself, to inform them that a good friend, a recent refugee from the East, has found his life in danger here, in the Country of All Liberties.

An obligatory paragraph in the obituary on which he was working at that very moment.

Life after death is nothing but a poor obituary, Gora says. Futility after futility has its scribes, professionals, intermediaries, clients,
giant archives, and giant advertising agencies. Every story with a beginning and end is an obituary.

Because of the short time between the notification of a death and the next publication deadline, many press agencies have obituaries ready for the right moment.

The last validation of passing from the world can’t be brief and formal. The truth consists of fantasy and of potentialities, reality isn’t confined to facts, but also to hypotheses and enigmas, unfulfilled chances, expired within the unique that has itself expired.

He’d consulted editing guides for obituaries, from the
Know How
series, which gives instruction about gardening, marriage, electrical installation, diabetic diets, sexual appetites, and winter sports, as well as the inevitable funeral end. The last great event: copulation with the Nymphomaniac.

An obituary can be basic, with publically known facts about the life of the deceased, but also a very personal look at life, with details that probe the uniqueness of the loved, or of the detested, as the case may be. The obituary has evolved from a summary note of farewell to a multilayered and durable memorial. It can by a dynamic and illustrated biographical history. One can consult the National Archive of Obituaries. Millions and millions of examples can be found in
The Daily Book of Obituaries,
military and athletic anthologies, obituaries of heroes and impostors, refugees and adventurers, exiles, animators, courtesans, panderers, politicians, bankers, clowns and nuns and magicians and madmen. Modest and villainous and eccentric lives.

The obituary isn’t just a simple farewell note but the memorial addressed to posterity. The history of a life with everything that life contains and didn’t get a chance to contain. Unfulfillment can’t be ignored, what you wanted but didn’t get a chance to do or to be, the failures that never got second chances. Something apart from a recapitulation of the calendar, apart from the daily chaos.

He’d listened many times to the famous band
Obituary,
which had launched the death metal genre in Florida at the end of the eighties, he’d bought the album
Cause of Death,
made notes on the
subsequent records,
The End Complete, World Demise, Set in Stone,
and
Buried Alive.

“Do you know what Peter told me when I asked him about Eva?”

Lu had stopped, they were on the sidewalk in front of Gara de Nord, the central station in Bucharest, after dropping the high schooler Peter Ga
par at the train heading to the north of the country.

“Eva is obsessed with him, not with her husband. The son isn’t too pleased, but he doesn’t protest, doesn’t pay attention, he only thinks about basketball. Eva told me about his visit to the cemetery in Sapinfa, the merry cemetery.”

Gora had no idea that such a cemetery even existed.

“The Merry Cemetery in Sapinta, near Maramure
. The tombstones have colored, comical stories drawn onto them. Death isn’t comical, Eva said. I asked Peter about his mother. He said that David forbade any mention of the theme of death after Eva said at some point that from the concentration camp they came not home but to a cemetery.”

In recent years, a new journalistic genre has developed: the obituary as entertainment.

What is anything, if not
entertainment?

Publicity, attraction, distraction. The merchandise has to be attractive: the book and the carrots and the shoes. Otherwise no one buys it and it rots and disappears. I buy, therefore, I exist, I sell myself to buy. If I don’t sell, I have no value. The obituary is evidence that I existed! If it’s not interesting, then I didn’t exist. I don’t exist because I didn’t exist.

It’s a new industry, a cavalcade of performers and healers, bachelors, spies, acrobats, sports stars, movie stars, jazz stars, eccentrics and killers and bureaucrats. Anecdotal, discursive products of a cynical frankness, touching and, of course, amusing.

De mortuis nil nisi bene
doesn’t apply anymore.

Amusement, the lack of prejudices and restrictions, infantiliza-tion. What’s wrong with that, Professor? What’s wrong with it, the professor was asking himself.

Gora was smiling, tired, dreaming, fondling the blue gloves, on top of the folder, which he hesitated to open.

Thin, loose pants made of green satin. A sleeveless, transparent shirt. Sandals with a single strap, on a bare foot. Lu, pale Anda-lusian. Intense gaze, intense expectation. She’s thrown off her sandals, pants, small underwear, no bigger than a rusted leaf. Full breasts, hot belly, long arms and long legs, electrified. The supreme moment, supreme youth. Open the bottle, pour into the glasses. The clinking of old crystal. On the table, raspberries, cherries, wine. She is here and faraway, in the green of the great trees.

Dressed in a light, linen blouse of red, yellow, and white, she was meticulously cleaning the vegetables. Then she washed the fish and the fruit. She was wearing thin rubber gloves, like a surgeon. White, yellow, red. She cut the vegetables scrupulously, piece by piece. She was celebrating the silken morning, the alert ecstasy of the human fully alive. She breathed in the physical and metaphysical day, she loved concrete things and the sacredness they contained. Concentration and sensuality.

Old aphrodisiacs. Gora was watching the wood and glancing, now and then, at the screen that delivered the disasters of the day. After a while, he let himself fall back into the chair, covered his eyes with his palms, eager for relaxation.

The thin, loose pants, the linen transparent blouse. The sandals, the bare foot. You wake up, stupefied by wrinkled, old skin. The dried body, skin like parchment, white hair, like snow and like the pall of the dead. Long, quick tongue, long, livid, dried hands, long, dried legs: a skeleton with a lugubrious sound, swept away at the first touch: a heap of dust.

She threw off her sandals, her pants, her small, thin underwear, no bigger than a rusted leaf. Dried breasts, the skin of her belly purplish, old thighs, the burnt lips of her sex under the puff of white, curly hair. She takes your palm in her narrow, long, wrinkled palm. She folds it into a fist, which she pushes into her center, moaning. Her eyelashes tremble, just like her voice. A short cry, like an owl.

He opens the green bottle and pours into the glass. The clink of the past. The raspberries, the cherries, the wine. She places the cherry on the lips of the dying man. She pushes it delicately into his mouth. Deeper and deeper. Bitter, old fingers.

“What was your youth like,” she asks. “You started late, didn’t you?”