Killing Commendatore: A novel (55 page)

“It is simple,” the Commendatore said. “My friends must slay me.”

“Slay you?” I said.

“Slay me, as in
Killing Commendatore
—let the painting be your model.”

“I should slay you with a sword—is that what you mean?”

“Precisely. As luck would have it, I happen to have a sword with me. It is the real thing—as I told my friends once before, if it cuts you, then you will bleed. It is not full-sized, but I am not full-sized either, so it should suffice.”

I stood at the foot of the bed facing the Commendatore. I wanted to say something but had no idea what it should be. So I just stood there, rooted to the spot. Tomohiko Amada was staring in the Commendatore's direction too, from where he lay stretched out on the bed. Whether he could make him out or not was another story. The Commendatore was able to choose who could see him, and who couldn't.

At last I pulled myself together enough to pose a question. “If I kill you with that sword, will I learn where Mariye Akikawa is?”

“Negative. Not exactly. First, my friends must dispose of me. Wipe me off the face of this earth. A chain of events will follow that could well lead my friends to the girl's location.”

I struggled to decipher what he meant.

“I'm not sure what sort of chain of events you're talking about, but can I be certain they will lead me in the direction you anticipate? Even if I kill you, there's no guarantee. In which case, yours would be a pointless death.”

The Commendatore raised one eyebrow and stared at me. Now he looked like Lee Marvin in
Point Blank
. Super cool. There wasn't the ghost of a chance that the Commendatore had seen
Point Blank,
of course.

“Affirmative! It is as my friends say. Maybe the chain of events will not flow so smoothly in reality. Maybe my hypothesis is based on mere supposition and conjecture. Just maybe, there are too many maybes. But there is no alternative. There is not the luxury of choice.”

“So if I kill you, will you be dead to
me
? Will you vanish from my sight forever?”

“Affirmative! As far as my friends are concerned, I shall be dead and gone. One of the countless deaths an Idea must undergo.”

“Isn't there a danger that the world itself will be altered when an Idea is killed?”

“How could it be otherwise?” the Commendatore said. Again, he raised one eyebrow, Lee Marvin–style. “What would be the meaning of a world that did
not
change when an Idea was extinguished? Can an Idea be so insignificant?”

“But you think I should still kill you, even though the world would be altered as a result.”

“My friends set me free. And now my friends must kill me. Should my friends fail in that task, the circle would remain open. And a circle once opened must then be closed. There are no other options.”

I looked at Tomohiko Amada, lying on the bed. His eyes seemed to be trained on the chair where the Commendatore was sitting.

“Can Mr. Amada see you?”

“It is about now that he should be seeing me,” the Commendatore said. “And hearing our voices too. A few moments hence, he will begin to grasp the import of our discourse. He is marshaling all his remaining strength to that end.”

“What do you think he was trying to convey in
Killing Commendatore
?”

“That is not for me to say. My friends should ask the artist,” the Commendatore said. “Since he is right before you.”

I sat back down in my chair and drew close to the man stretched out on the bed.

“Mr. Amada, I found the painting you stored in the attic. I am quite sure you meant to hide it. You would not have wrapped it so thoroughly had you planned to show it to anyone. But I unwrapped it. I know that may displease you, but my curiosity got the better of me. And once I discovered how superb
Killing Commendatore
was, I couldn't let it out of my sight. It is a great painting. One of your best, no question. At this moment, almost no one knows of its existence. Even Masahiko hasn't seen it yet. A thirteen-year-old girl named Mariye Akikawa has, though. And she went missing yesterday.”

The Commendatore raised his hand. “Please, let him rest. His brain is easily overtaxed—it cannot handle more than this at one time.”

I stopped talking and studied Tomohiko Amada's face. I couldn't tell how much had sunk in. His face was still expressionless. But when I looked more closely I could see a glitter in the depths of his eyes. Like the glint of a sharp penknife at the bottom of a deep spring.

I began talking again, this time with frequent pauses. “My question is, what was your purpose in painting that picture? Its subject matter, its structure, and its style are so different from your other works. It makes me think you were using it to communicate a very personal message. What is the painting's underlying meaning? Who is killing whom? Who is the Commendatore? Who is the murderer Don Giovanni? And who is that mysterious bearded fellow with the long face poking his head out of the ground in the lower left-hand corner?”

The Commendatore raised his hand again. I drew up short.

“Enough questions,” he said. “It will take a while for those to permeate.”

“Will he be able to answer? Does he have enough strength left?”

“No,” the Commendatore said, shaking his head. “I doubt my friends will obtain answers. He does not have the energy for that.”

“Then why did you have me ask?”

“What my friends imparted were not questions, but information. That my friends had found
Killing Commendatore
in the attic, that its existence was known to my friends. It is the first step. Everything begins from there.”

“Then what is the second step?”

“When my friends slay me, of course. It is the second step.”

“And is there a third step?”

“There should be, of course.”

“Then what is it?”

“Have you still not yet figured this out, my friends?”

“No, I haven't.”

“By reenacting the allegory contained within that painting, we shall lure Long Face into the open. Into this room. By dragging him out, my friends shall win back Mariye Akikawa.”

I was speechless. What world had I stepped into? There seemed no rhyme or reason to it.

“It is a hard thing, without question,” the Commendatore intoned. “Yet there is no alternative. Hence my friends must dispatch me now, without further ado.”

We waited for the information I had given Tomohiko Amada to complete its journey to his brain. That took some time. Meanwhile, I tried to put to rest some of my doubts by peppering the Commendatore with questions.

“Why,” I asked, “did Tomohiko Amada remain silent about what had happened in Vienna even after the war had ended? I mean, no one was standing in his way at that point.”

“The woman he loved was brutally executed by the Nazis,” the Commendatore answered. “Slowly tortured to death. Their comrades were slain in a similar fashion. In the end, their plot was a wretched failure. Only through the offices of the Japanese and German governments did he barely escape with his life. The experience savaged him. He had been arrested and detained by the Gestapo for two months. They subjected him to extreme torture. Their violence was unspeakable, but they took care not to kill him, nor to leave any physical scars. Yet their sadism left his nerves in tatters—and as a result, something within him was extinguished. Placed under the strictest orders, he bowed to the inevitable and remained silent. Then he was forcibly repatriated to Japan.”

“Not long before,” I said, “Tomohiko Amada's younger brother had taken his own life, probably because of the trauma of his own war experience. He had been part of the Nanjing Massacre, and committed suicide right after his discharge from the army. Correct?”

“Affirmative. Tomohiko Amada lost many loved ones in the whirlpool of those years. He himself was sorely damaged. As a result, his anger and grief put down deep roots. The hopeless, impotent realization that, no matter what he did, he could not stand against the torrent of history. As the sole survivor, he must also have felt an immense guilt. Hence he never spoke a word of what happened in Vienna, even after the gag was removed. It is as though he was unable to speak.”

I looked at Tomohiko Amada's face. But I could detect no reaction as yet. I couldn't tell if he heard us or not.

I spoke. “Then at some point—we don't know exactly when—he created
Killing Commendatore
. An allegorical painting that expressed all he could not say. He put everything into it. A brilliant tour de force.”

“He took that which he had been unable to accomplish in reality,” the Commendatore said, “and gave it another form. What we might call ‘camouflaged expression.' Not of what had in fact happened, but of
what should have happened
.”

“Nevertheless, he bundled the painting up tight and hid it in the attic, out of public view,” I said. “Although he had radically transformed the events, they were still too raw to reveal. Is that what you mean?”

“Precisely. It distills the pure essence of his living spirit. Then, one day, my friends happened upon it.”

“So are you saying all of this began when I brought the painting out into the light? Is that what you meant by ‘opening the circle'?”

The Commendatore said nothing, just extended his hands palms up.

Not long after, we noticed Tomohiko Amada's face turning pink. (The Commendatore and I had been watching him closely for any change.) At the same time, as if in response, the small, mysterious light that had been flickering deep in his eyes began to rise slowly to the surface. Like an ascending deep-sea diver gauging the effects of the water pressure on his body. The veil covering Amada's eyes also lifted, until, finally, both were wide open. The person lying before us was no longer a frail, desiccated old man on the verge of death. Instead, he was someone whose eyes brimmed with a determination to hang on to this world as long as he could.

“He is gathering his remaining strength,” the Commendatore said to me. “Recovering as much of his conscious mind as he is able. But the more he regains mentally, the greater the physical torment. His body has been secreting a special substance to blot out that pain. It is thanks to the existence of such a substance that people can die in peace, not in agony. When consciousness returns, so does the pain. Nevertheless, he is trying to recover as much as he can. This is a mission he must fulfill here and now, however great the suffering.”

As if to reinforce the Commendatore's words, Tomohiko Amada's face began to contort with agony. Age and infirmity had eaten away at his body until it was ready to shut down—he could feel that now. There was no way to avoid it. The end of his allotted time was fast approaching. It was painful to watch him suffer. Instead of calling him back, I might better have let him die a peaceful, painless death in a semiconscious haze.

“But he chose this way himself,” the Commendatore said, again reading my mind. “It is painful to witness, but beyond our control.”

“Won't Masahiko be returning soon?” I asked the Commendatore.

“Negative. Not for some time,” he said with a small shake of his head. “His call was work related, something important. He will be gone a considerable time.”

Tomohiko's eyes were wide open. They had been sunk within their wrinkled sockets, but now his eyeballs protruded like a person leaning out of a window. His breathing was deeper, and more ragged. It rasped as it passed in and out of his throat. And he was staring straight at the Commendatore. There was no doubt. The Commendatore was visible to him. Amazement was written in his face. He couldn't believe what was sitting in front of him. How could a figure produced by his imagination appear before him in reality?

“Negative, that is not the case,” the Commendatore said. “What he sees and what my friends see are completely different.”

“You mean you don't look the same way to him?”

“My friends, keep in mind that I am an Idea. My form changes depending on the person and the situation.”

“Then how do you look to Mr. Amada?”

“That is something even I do not know. I am like a mirror that reflects what is in a person's heart. Nothing more.”

“But you assumed this form for me on purpose, didn't you? Choosing to appear as the Commendatore?”

“To be precise, I did not choose this form. Cause and effect are hard to separate here. Because I took the form of the Commendatore, a sequence of events was set in motion. But at the same time, my form is the necessary consequence of that very sequence. It is hard to explain using the concept of time that governs the world you live in, my friends, but it might be summed up as:
All these events have been determined beforehand
.”

“If an Idea is a mirror, then is Tomohiko Amada now seeing what he wishes to see?”

“Negative! He is seeing what he
must
see,” the Commendatore corrected me. “It may be excruciating. Yet he must look. Now, at the end of his life.”

I examined Tomohiko Amada's face again. Mixed with the amazement, I could discern an intense loathing. And almost unendurable torment. The return to consciousness carried with it not only the agony of the flesh. It brought with it the agony of the soul.

“He is squeezing out every last ounce of strength to ascertain who I am. Despite the pain. He is striving to return to his twenties.”

Tomohiko Amada's face had turned a fiery red. Hot blood coursed through his veins. His thin, dry lips trembled, he gasped violently. His long, skeletal fingers clutched at the sheets.

“Stop dithering, my friends, and kill me now, while his mind is whole,” the Commendatore said. “The quicker, the better. He may not be able to hold himself together much longer.”