Peter’s voice is taut with sarcasm. “Every woman adores a fascist, is that it?” He’s quoting an impeccable source. “Or a fanatic. You fell for the tritest cliché in the book, kiddo.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I hate myself,” she says breezily.
“That’s not my point,” he says, very carefully. He has forgotten himself briefly; and she is, in the midst of everything else, touched to realize how difficult this is for him. “I mean, surely the person you should hate is him.”
“Oh, I hate him too,” she says, her voice darkening with all the accumulated feeling of the past weeks.
“The thing about fanatics,” Peter says, changing tack, “is that they have charisma. Like psychotics, or sociopaths. I’ve seen it when I was doing cases. They have no scruples, that’s what makes them irresistible. They can charm you like a snake with their ruthlessness. You just got drawn by one of those fuckers. It’s probably your … St. Teresa tendencies. You got yourself hypnotized.”
“Yes,” she says, almost humbly. “You’re probably right. Though he was not a psychotic, no, that’s not the right word …”
“I don’t care what the right word is,” Peter cuts in. “But I don’t see why you should be punishing yourself like this,” he presses on. “Why you should turn into some penitent anchorite. It’s … irrational. Wouldn’t stand up in court. I mean, you’re not the guilty party.”
“No, not guilty,” she agrees. “But I am culpable.” Again, she feels almost a sense of relief to have found the right word, the word that seems to apply to the case; to have pronounced the right sentence on herself.
“Please,” Peter says impatiently. “Don’t be so … histrionic. You haven’t done anything
wrong
.”
“Well then, what have I done?” she asks, resignedly. Maybe he’ll define it for her.
“You haven’t exercised your best judgment in regard to this … Chechen gentleman. This … jerk. You’ve been … oh you know,
not very smart. I’ll give you that.”
“Thanks,” she says.
They fall silent for a while. “Have you contacted the government?” he finally asks. “We do have a government, they have to be good for something.”
“What could they do about this?” she says. “Anyway, isn’t it up to the Spaniards—”
“Well, if you won’t, I’ll call somebody,” he cuts in decisively. “At least you need to know what you are required to do. I mean, by law. You’ve been involved in a crime. You probably have to file a report.” He’s speaking in his professional tone, and she can tell it’s out of the need to take charge, to feel he can do something effective in this situation, which has rendered them all strangely ineffectual.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” she says. She wants time, more time, to deal with her illness. To lick her wounds in private. To sort things out in that place where laws don’t count, which is untouchable by regulations. Where she’ll know things she cannot yet tell even herself.
“Isabel,” he says quietly, recalling her to him, to their intimacy. “I’m worried about you. This is … not good. Why don’t you come home? Or why don’t I come to wherever you are and bring you back.”
She tries to figure out how to explain. “Because … I couldn’t face it,” she finally says. “Not yet. Because everything makes me ill. It doesn’t matter where I am. But I can’t bear … oh, at the moment, I can’t bear much.”
They stay silent for a while, and she imagines him in his leather chair, his graying hair falling over his forehead, his cup of coffee at hand.
“How are you, anyway?” she asks, feeling a surge of warmth at the thought of those details.
“Fine,” he says flatly, refusing the inquiry. He is angry again,
and she’s almost glad of it, glad he isn’t being too determinedly self-restrained, too willfully kind. She hears his breathing over the phone. “I think I may contact the government anyway,” he states drily. “Without giving your name. Just to inform myself. Since you don’t seem to be interested.”
“You have the right to be angry at me,” she says.
“I sure do,” he says. “I have the right to be furious. But somehow that doesn’t help.”
His tone has turned wry, and she smiles at his implicit allusion to their old conversations. Reasonableness, in this case, doesn’t seem to be the issue.
“I’m worried about you,” he then repeats.
“Don’t be,” she says. “I haven’t gone … mad, you know. I just need to … think some things out.”
“Well, OK then,” he says. “Just let me know when you’re ready—”
“I will,” she interjects quickly. “I will.”
In Between
She packs her bags and gets on a flight to Los Angeles. She needs to find another kind of away. She reads the
Journal
on the long flight; she finds it is one of the few things which gets past her hypersensitive nerves, her bruised alert system.
September 3, 1982
I am left to my own devices, to my days and hours. My moments and my eternities. Left with nothing but time, my old antagonist, and the exertions through which I try to defeat it.
My experiments with time: in childhood, to make time stop. First, to stop the sound of my parents’ quarrels. Then, as I sat in the basement, so the bombs wouldn’t fall. Then, to stop the sound of my parents’ silence. Their horrible, pickled silence. Mater and Pater. Heaven knows what they had done or seen.
Later, to arrest time in meditation, to hold it in its pure motionless state. To expand moments till they were as large as stillness.
September 4, 1982
Today, a few bars for the flute, the most elegiac of instruments. I wanted a melody that would be like Orpheus’ song after he emerged from the underworld. A flute line, simple and direct, that would sing of what he had seen.
I am haunted by that Day, and all the Events which were my beginning. And by all I have failed, since then, to become. In my solitude, I do not know which is the deeper regret. I no longer know what I am atoning for, and whether the penance is also the sin.
Los Angeles
She rents an apartment in another tower block, sparsely furnished and luxuriously spartan, with a big picture window and a spectacular view of the ocean. She might as well be in Marseilles, except for the enlarged scale of what she beholds, and the highway visible from her bedroom window, with its never-ending stream of silent cars, dully glinting in the day, a
glow of firefly lights in the night. The serpentine movement never stops, cannot stop; and the ceaselessness itself is filled with menace. It cannot stop. Something here is out of control. Once a day, she drifts through the Elysian aisles of the gigantic supermarket, extracting a few fresh things from among the supersize boxes and bottles. Fields of forgetfulness, she thinks, as she looks at the other drifters, with their blank faces, picking jars and cans from the shelves with surly apathy. Lethargy, the great evener, reducing everyone to desultory indifference. The awful phosphorescent lighting reinforces the dull hostile glare which a very large white woman directs at her, or rather at her cart, which apparently seems to be in the way. And if anything bothers you, the look prophylactically declares, then you can just shove it.
In the street, the snake of cars has snarled, and is writhing in agitation, horns honking, people emerging from their cars and slamming doors behind them, their postures pugilistic or limply, childishly fed up. In the snake’s front, two men are pointing at a car and shouting at each other; as she is crossing, one of them grabs the other and is about to start hitting out. “Stop it!” she says, in an exhalation of rage; and there must be some authority in her voice, because they actually do stop and stare at her as she continues to cross. She has learned something about violence, apparently.
In the late afternoon, she walks along the beach, listening to the undertow of the water, the thud and suction of the waves blending with the ceaseless surf of the traffic, the setting of the pollution-dimmed sun, the never-ending tides. Apocalypse is in everything, in the late afternoons. On the news, hills bubble and slide with mud, and forests burn. People stand in front of their flattened houses, the habitual hostility of their bodies turned strangely passive, as if the forces they had witnessed had quieted them down, shocked them into a kind of calm.
Nothing, nothing enchants her. The breezes from the ocean do not make her think that it’s nice weather. The glorious views of the coastline bring her the chill of
nature morte
. I have fallen into acedia, she thinks, the greatest sin … Such a quaint idea, sin, and yet there it is again, and the sensation to go with it in her gut, or is it her psyche, or even soul, as if she’s been violated, or involved in a violation … Violation of what? Of whatever it was that made the world seem desirable, that gave it a horizon and made her want to move beyond it, made her
want
. In the Elysian supermarket, the whirr of air conditioning is like a loud insect drone, and she changes her mind about getting the food and walks along the sidewalk of the vacuous street, among the clapboard houses and the burger joints. She feels a solitude that is absolute, solitude made more gaping by the vast spaces which can be intuited just beyond the clusters of makeshift buildings, by the graceless clumsy movements of the passersby, as if they were unused to being out of their cars, by the lethargic postures which declare they don’t care, that nobody cares. They seem as disposable, as provisional, as the warehouses and tacky transient businesses lying low along the sunny, mean street. Nobody cares, she thinks, nobody cared for; and the thought punctures her with such cold hopelessness that she feels as if she has understood another layer of hell.
She rents a car with no particular goal, and drives on to a highway and into the wavering smog. There are those who want to undo, she thinks, and those who want to be undone. As Kolya wanted to be undone, as Wolfe worked toward his own undoing. The great, the only, question is why not commit suicide. Who said that? Somebody did. In the slowly moving car next to her, a woman in a bright yellow jacket is pushing a child angrily back into its seat. Dolce & Gabbana, she thinks, the yellow jacket. On the news, a senator from somewhere talks in a toneless voice about the need to
improve farm subsidies in his state. The vacuity of vast empty spaces. Nothing but this endlessly reiterative motion, the metallic glint of cars inching forward through the poisoned air. Somewhere, she now knows, soldiers are waking up in their barracks; somewhere, clusters of men are bending over local maps and putting together simple mechanisms which will explode. Somewhere, someone is keening because they have lost everything which was their life. Is that the only beyond there is. Violence and suffering, suffering and violence. My hate is my love, she hears Anzor saying, and sees his dark inward-turned eyes. I love my hate, she continues in his voice, I cling to it as I cling to my ancestors’ memory, to my integrity, my faith. If we’re not willing to die for something, she hears him say, then we do not really live. If we’re not willing to kill, she adds for him. For she now grasps the implications. The old rites of sacrifice draw us on. Yes, she thinks, I begin to understand. Because what alternative is there to pointless motion? What other terminus to our condition, our utterly limited repertory? If you do not transcend yourself … Enclosed in her metallic capsule, she feels the anxiety of pointless movement, a metaphysical claustrophobia. She is just one creature, horribly arrested in the car, in concreteness, in the moment. In her mind and skull. Her very own black box. Nothing beyond, nothing to pitch herself toward. A downpour, sudden and cataclysmic, beats against the windshield. She gropes toward an exit from the highway, and half blindly drives back to her apartment, where she turns on the news and, afterward, luxuriates in her hate, her seemingly limitless rage.
September 6, 1982
My experiments with time, continued: to freeze Time into solid state, into white expanses of ice. Thomas Mann knew. His Faustus knew, with his icy visions and his inhuman System. I have studied Faust’s dark purposes and have seen his ghastly ends. I have seen the consequences of hubris, and they are as ugly as mass death. I want to sweep the decks clean, in one pure, encompassing sound. No more grandeur! No more pomp! Distill, reduce, compress. No folderol! Only what is true should remain. Only what is pure, without pomp or dross. The condensed dark-light kernel.
September 7, 1982
Falling into State X. Pure darkness, pure dread. Whereof one cannot speak. Wherein one cannot speak. The chaos of nothingness, which is also a current of pure energy. Pure, electric, pre-animate. I seem to be touching on a stratum at which life and death meet. I think the Chinese call it qi.
Only music. Or silence. Or music which gives full brief to silence.
Apocalypse is in everything; it’s in her breakfast, in the silent elevator, the gilded lobby, the streets outside. She goes down to the beach, hoping for some peace, but the Apocalypse follows her there. It doesn’t let her go as she lies down on the towel she has brought with her, and closes her eyes against the sun. There’s no relief from it, now that she has seen the skin of the world peeled back, and the mayhem within. Sidewalks crumple from the heat; forests burn. Maybe that’s as it should be, she thinks, it’s all been going on too long. Let it be cleared away, let the decks be swept clean.
One afternoon, as she walks back from the supermarket, she feels that a large man walking behind her is adjusting his movements too closely to hers, and she begins to run in a suffusion of
panic. He doesn’t run after her, but that night, she plunges into nightmares of being lost. She doesn’t know which city she’s in, she’s lost her passport, she has somehow given away her home, she’s late for the plane and once she’s in it, it will crash … In her turbulent dream state, she feels an acute longing for Lena, and then an acute anger. See, she says to her mother, what has happened to your daughter. See how lost and adrift I am. How can I understand the world I live in when you’ve never taken me by the hand and explained? When you’ve abandoned me, so that no one can ever make it safe.