A Book of Memories (86 page)

Trusting in Melchior and Thea's mutual attraction, especially in Thea's subtle forcefulness, I figured that if I wanted to hasten the disintegration of their relationship that would enable Melchior to forget his senseless escape plan, which for me was rather unpleasant, since I could not morally support it, then I ought to stay as neutral as a catalyst involved in a chemical process that, having no valence of its own, can never be part of the new compound and falls away.

Needless to say, my scheme violated their privacy, in a sense was a sort of emotional crime, but since it seemed workable
—its feasibility was clear to all of us at our very first meeting—I went on with my schemes and plots, assuaging my guilty conscience by telling myself that it was they who wanted it, I was only helping them; success would prove that I wanted only what was good for them; this was my way of saying to myself that I wanted not only to remain honest but to win.

Of course I couldn't be sure the plan would work, and I had to keep going back, all too frequently, to our first meeting, and review every moment, every tiny detail of that evening; and the more often I replayed it in my mind, the more it seemed that in the cold, distant space of the stage, in the bodies of singers moved by the music streaming from the orchestra pit, a wild, emotional chaos arose that was closely analogous to the one overwhelming us as we sat in the plush box.

Without formulating a single thought, then, the events sensed with my shoulders, seen with my eyes, and heard with my ears, occurred in duplicate, becoming their own metaphors, and they affected me in a way I can describe as nothing less than an emotional earthquake; later I could not escape the memory of this profound effect, even if I hadn't intended to exploit it for my own purposes; today I'd say that the smooth, hard ground of my emotions, packed firm in the thirty years of my life, moved under my feet, the magma of instincts was jolted, edifices erected with the stones of mastery and knowledge and self-protecting morality began to crumble during the heartbreaking overture; entire streets of allegedly omnipotent experience suddenly shifted, and almost as if to prove that emotions also had material substance, in the throes of struggling with contradictory emotions arising from a familiar unfamiliarity, I began to sweat so profusely I might as well have been chopping wood, yet I was sitting motionless; as often happens, I pretended I was being carried away by the music, but that did not help either, for like any obvious lie, it made my body, used to self-discipline and self-denial, swim in sweat.

It would seem that by the age of thirty one achieves a certain deceptive security; it was this security that began to fall apart that evening; but the moment before the collapse, all my edifices held their original forms, although not at their usual places; nothing remained at its original location, and therefore these forms, symbolizing their own emptiness, were unaware of the tectonic forces they were now exposed to; my feelings and thoughts were in their old, cracked forms, squeezed between old borders, wandering on worn paths, and simultaneously were the empty symbols of these very forms; in this landslide I was given a moment of grace: in a single bright flash before the moment of collapse I caught a glimpse of life's, or my own life's, most elementary principles.

No, I did not take leave of my senses, not then and not now as I grope for a string of metaphors to help me approach my feelings at that moment; I sensed quite clearly that what for me was a real prison, the prison of my senses and ideas, for the Frenchman on my left was merely a stage set smelling of greasepaint; after all, the only thing that was going on was that in that stage prison uncouth Jacquino was pursuing charming Marcellina, who had no use for his bumbling masculine charms because she pined for Fidelio, and this apparently kind and gentle young man
—who was really a woman in disguise, working hard to free her beloved husband, Florestan, languishing in an underground dungeon—without too much thought, though with rueful sadness, Fidelio put up with Marcellina's misplaced affection so as to attain her politically and personally commendable goal, thus perpetrating the most outrageous or hilarious fraud of all: pretending to be a boy while she was a girl, which of course proves nothing except that the end justifies the means, since everybody loved or would love to love somebody else, but somehow managed to find their true loves, so we could suspend our moral considerations; in the meantime, my shoulder could not and did not want to break free of feeling the shoulder of the man on my right, whose indecent proximity surprised, humiliated, and frightened me no less than his turning away did, offending my vanity; and though I knew that this turning away was temporary, a transparent love ploy, and that he was using Thea as shamelessly as Fidelio in her male disguise was using charming Marcellina's not altogether pristine sentiments, for she should have noticed that that was no man in those clothes! Melchior, with his convenient bisexual approach, exploited and turned to his own advantage what in all this ambiguity was quite real, Thea's real feelings; by withdrawing attention from me, he was actually calling attention to our closeness, which he could do convincingly only by really turning away, by displaying real or potentially real feelings for Thea, giving her what he took from me; and this was just what was happening onstage, where Fidelio had to become a real man, a perfect prison guard, and pretend to seduce Marcellina, in order to be able to free her true love from captivity.

I felt, then, that Melchior was showing Thea something surprising and genuine in himself that had been hidden even from himself, and because I sensed his emotional turmoil, his boyish helplessness, I felt what Thea must have felt, and as she responded to his advances the only way one could in such circumstances, with sighs, altered breathing, glances, I felt that what was going on between them was something of complete mutuality.

In my intricate jealousy I didn't want Melchior, feared him, found his closeness intrusive, or, I should say, I didn't want only him, for I felt that my own desire, mediated by his body, was taking me toward Thea; it would be fair to say that I yielded to Melchior's approach to the extent that it allowed me to approach Thea.

This went on for the entire length of the performance: the closer Thea got to Melchior, the closer I got to her and the more and more palpably I felt his physical presence; I kept feeling I should put my hand on his knee, which surprised me, since as far as I knew it had never in my adult life occurred to me that I could put my hand on a man's knee and have the gesture suggest anything other than harmless friendship, yet I had this almost uncontrollable urge to touch him, and thought of this not only as a seductive gesture, a single gesture with a double purpose, to let him know that his advances were being returned, but also, at the moment more important, as a move with which to draw him away from Thea so that I could regain her for myself.

If then and there I'd thought of anything at all, I'd have thought of my adolescence; of course a great many thoughts crossed my mind, but not that; even if I hadn't thought of my own younger years, I might have reflected in general on the experiences accumulated during adolescence, which one hastens to forget, after one's harrowing initiation into adulthood with its fierce pains and hard-won pleasures.

I should have recalled that in the dreadful needs of adolescence the only way to escape the paralyzing and frustrating sensual urges; gropings, ignorance, is to choose the communally prepared, sanctioned, and delimiting forms of sexual behavior that, though not coinciding with our own preferences
—by definition, predefined practices limit our personal freedom and at that age we find them excessive, burdensome, and morally unacceptable—help us within limits to find an optimal middle ground, ways of loving that enable us, by keeping to accepted sexual roles, to fulfill ourselves in another individual who also is undergoing similar crises in self-control; in return for the loss of our real needs and wants, we offer each other the almost personal, almost physical intensity of a passable sex life, and not even the gulf that opens up moments after physical fulfillment, not even the terrible void of impersonality seems unbridgeable, for the most impersonal union may produce something very personal and organic—a child, and there's nothing more real, organic, or complete than that; a child for us, we say to ourselves, out of the two of us, like and unlike us, to compensate us for all our barrenness until now, a child is duty and care, a source of sadness and joy and concern, all of it real, tangible, instead of motiveless anxiety it brings us purpose and meaning.

A shipwrecked person whose feet desperately seek something solid to keep him afloat will grab at anything, anyone, the first available object, and if it buoys him up he won't let go, he'll swim with it, and after a time he'll see he has nothing else! just this? and the object will grimly concur, yes, just this, nothing else! and the implacable impulse of self-preservation, joined of course by rationalization and mystification, will have him believe that the object that drifted his way by chance was really his, it chose him and he chose it, and by the time the sheer force of unrelenting waves casts him onto the shore of mature adulthood, his faith and gratitude will have made him worship what was accidental and adore fortuity, but can his rescue from destruction be really accidental?

Built on shaky emotional ground, the edifices of my sexuality, assiduously maintained for ten years and thought to be sound, were about to crumble; it seemed as if in all my previous love affairs I had merely yielded to the all-powerful instinct of survival, falling back repeatedly and ungratifyingly on pleasures I could always coax out of my body in lieu of one real gesture that might not even be a gesture; I could not grasp the meaning of my exertions, which was why I always had to grab something with my hands and hover over the depths with it, but once the ground had slipped out from under me, I could not regain my footing; that's why I could never really be consoled by physical pleasure, hence the constant, agonizing search for and pursuit of other, restlessly searching human bodies! and I wasn't shocked that through the body of the man sitting next to me I desired Thea, or that in Thea he sought me out, and that in her I found my way back to him, so that both of us were bound to hover over her; we were all trying to establish a relationship for two, but any way we looked at it, there were three of us; and if there were three, there could have been four or five; no, this sort of entanglement was no more surprising than a familiar image ready to become memory except we cannot locate its time and place of origin within ourselves; what did surprise me was that behind our entanglement I seemed to discover, in pure form, the sensual, physical embodiment of the elemental desire squirming around within me, and instead of paying attention to the action onstage, I was concentrating on this! small, sheathed in a bluish membrane, throbbing moistly with a life of its own, quite apart from them and even from me; it was as if I were seeing the bodily home of the pure life force which, regardless of modern theories, is neither male nor female: it has no sex, for its sole function is to allow free communication between human beings.

That evening I was given back some of the old freedom I thought I had lost, freedom of the heart, freedom of feeling, though today I'd say, and not without bitterness, that it was in vain to have regained that freedom, in vain to have all that sensitive perception and observation, because it was in understanding and assessing them that I proved myself a complaisantly foolish child of my times: I had a vague, elusive, but appropriate notion of the state of affairs, but I believed it to be a true discovery and wanted immediately to make it actual, to establish an intellectual position with emotional means, and further, I wanted practical results, success, to influence, run, control things, as though I were a high official of some ministry of love, making decisions based on information provided by available data; the conditioning of ten years spent in sexual manipulation came back to haunt me: I'd trust only what was palpably real, disregard everything that could not be reified and therefore physically enjoyed; in the name of reason I'd shut out of the sphere of reality anything that could not be fully comprehended, distancing myself from everything that could be perceived and validated only by the senses, which made up my personal, subjective reality; yet the opposite was also true: for the sake of my personal reality, I had to deny the existence of a larger, impersonal reality; and though my guilty conscience and a sense of my own unreality tried to tell me I was making a fatal mistake, I did not believe them.

I felt it necessary to relate all this before resuming my narrative and returning to our afternoon walk so I'd have a chance to set the intellectual and mental context in which to see two people interact, two people each of whom was not above using the other as a means to achieve specific ends, though their walk bound them together: to be metaphorical about it, they were walking along the same path that others had taken before them.

What was the point of honorable intentions, of the pursuit of neutrality, if continually, with every step we took, we sank into each other's emotional mire, and if that could not be separated from the living substance of our bodies; we may have confined ourselves to speaking in allusions, with intimations
—never touching, at most falling into long silences—but even our words developed meanings that referred only to the two of us, leading us where we wanted to go, drawing out of us precisely what we honestly and not unreasonably wanted to achieve.

That's more or less how things were then; such were the emotional conditions in which we were moving out there in nature, as she began walking in front of me on the well-worn path toward the distant woods, and I, still surprised and pleased, was mulling over her quiet, bitter, terse confession, believing that her real aim was not to remind me of the true purpose and nature of our friendship
—just at the point where our relationship turned too intimate and threatened to be impossible for both of us—but to draw me closer to her, take me into the deepest, most secret sphere of her life.