Moldy Strawberries Page 2

  The guy who’d left his spot by the window made like he was paying close attention to the music, and said that he really liked that bit with the organ and the violins, that it sounded like a medieval cavalryman. The guy in the red shirt understood he was trying to change the subject, and asked if by any chance he’d ever seen a medieval cavalryman. He said no, but with the organ and all those violins in the background, he pictured an armored warrior on a white horse, riding into the wind, all very Knights of the Round Table, the outline of a castle on top of a distant hill – and the warrior was medieval, he stressed, he was sure of that. He was going to keep describing this scene, he was thinking of adding some pine trees, twilight, maybe a crescent moon, perhaps even a lake, when the woman who’d been reading a book lowered her glasses again, which she’d raised up to her forehead when the guy in the red shirt came in, and read a passage from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death:

  Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness. Necessarily because the existential dualism makes an impossible situation, an excruciating dilemma. Mad because, as we shall see, everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness – agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same.

  When she finished reading and looked around the room with delight, the guy who’d left the window returned to his spot, and the guy in the red shirt remained still and slightly out of breath in the middle of the room, while the other one stared at the bare bone of a chicken thigh. He then said he didn’t really like thighs as much anymore, that he preferred the neck, at his house growing up everyone always fought, because he had three siblings and they all liked the thighs, except for Valéria, who found chickens disgusting; later, as a teenager, he preferred the breast, he spent five or six years eating nothing but the breast, and now he loved the neck. The others looked a little shocked hearing this, and he explained that the neck actually had many secret pleasures, exactly like that, very slowly, se-cret pleas-ures, and in that moment the record came to an end and his words echoed a bit provocatively in the silent air while he continued to stare at the dry bone.

  The guy in the red shirt took advantage of the silence to scream very loudly that Uranus was entering Scorpio. The others seemed disturbed, less so by the information and more by the noise, and said shh, that he should lower his voice, didn’t he remember what happened last time? He said the last time didn’t matter, that now Uranus was entering Scorpio. To-day, he said slowly, eyes shining. It had been there for some five years, he added, and the others asked at the same time, what-had-been-where? Uranus, the guy in the red shirt explained, in my eighth House, the House of Death, didn’t you know I could be dying right now? and he almost looked relieved, if it weren’t for all the restlessness. The others exchanged looks and the woman holding the book started to tell a very long and convoluted story about a boy who suffered from schizophrenia who’d started just like this, he took an interest in things like alchemy, astrology, chiromancy, numerology, things he’d read god-knows-where (he read a lot, and when he told a story, he never knew for certain where he’d first read it, sometimes he couldn’t even be sure if he’d lived it or read it). He ended up committed, she said, that’s how many schizoid processes go. He looked directly at her as she said schizoid processes, the other two seemed very impressed, it was hard to say if it was because they respected the woman and thought her very refined, or if it was simply because they wanted to scare the guy in the red shirt. At any rate, they were left with a silence full of sharp angles until one of them moved from his place by the window to turn the record over. And when the bubbles of sound started to burst in the middle of the room, they all looked relieved and almost happy again.

  Then the guy in the red shirt took out of his bag a book that looked like he’d bound it himself, and asked if anyone spoke French. One of them threw the chicken bone into the ashtray, as if to violently say that he didn’t, and he looked at the man by the window, who wasn’t by the window anymore but on the rug, browsing their record collection. He suddenly stopped and looked at the woman, who hesitated for a moment before saying that she spoke a little, and everyone seemed a bit disappointed. The guy in the red shirt quietly said that it was all right, and started to read from André Barbault’s Astrologie:

  La position de cet astre en secteur situe le lieu ou l’être dégage au maximum son individualité dans une voie de supersonnalisation, à la faveur d’un développement d’énergie ou d’une croissance exagerée qui est moins une abondance de force de vie qu’une tension particulière d’enérgie. Ici, l’être tend à affirmer une volonté lucide d’independence qui peut le conduire à une expression supérieure et originale de sa personalité. Dans la dissonance, son exigence conduit à l’insensibilité, à la dureté, à l’excessif, à l’extrémisme, au jusqu’au’boutisme, à l’aventure, aux bouleversements.

  He finished reading and slowly looked at the three of them, one by one, but only the woman smiled, saying that she didn’t know the word bouleversements. One of the men remembered that boulevard means street, and that therefore it must mean something related to a street, to walking in the streets a lot. They kept guessing, one of them looking for a dictionary, the guy in the red shirt looking from one to the other without saying anything. After all the books had been combed through and the dictionary was nowhere to be found and the other side of the record also came to an end, he read the passage again very slowly, emphasizing each syllable with a pronunciation the others admired, though they didn’t say anything:

  L’être tend à affirmer une volonté lucide d’independence qui peut le conduire à une expression supérieure et originale de sa personalité.

  Then he asked if the others understood it, and they said they did, it sounded very similar to Portuguese, lucide, for example, and originale, were incredibly easy. But they didn’t seem like they understood. His eyes shone again, he looked like he was about to cry when suddenly, unexpectedly, he jumped toward the window and yelled that he’d jump, that no one understood him, that nothing was worthwhile anymore, that he was so sick of everything he wouldn’t even bet his own shit on the future.

  The guy in the red shirt went as far as putting one leg over the windowsill, opening his arms, but the other two men grabbed him in time and took him to the bedroom, asking very gently what had just happened, repeating that he was too nervous, that everything was fine, just fine. The woman with the glasses held his hand and stroked his hair while he cried, one of the men said he’d go to the kitchen to make some mugwort or chamomile tea, the woman said that lemon balm was good for times like this, and the other said he’d put on that Indian music he liked so much, though everyone else hated it, except he’d have to turn the volume all the way up so they could hear it from the bedroom. The tea came soon after, hot and good, and they appeared with a joint as well, which they smoked together, one at a time, and things slowly became more harmonious and calm, until someone knocked on the door with such force it sounded more like kicking than knocking.

  It was the landlord, yelling at them to lower the volume and repeating those same unpleasant things. The woman with the glasses said she was very sorry, but unfortunately that night they couldn’t keep the volume down, it wasn’t a night like the others, it was very special, she was very sorry. She took off her glasses and asked if the landlord knew that Uranus was entering Scorpio.

  Back in the bedroom, the guy in the red shirt heard this and smiled a big smile before falling asleep with the others holding hands. Then he dreamt he was gently gliding over a golden and luminous surface as if on a pair of skates. He didn’t know if it was a ring of Saturn or a moon of Jupiter. Perhaps Titan.

  Passing through a Great Sorr
ow

  For Paula Dip

  (To be read to the soundtrack of Erik Satie)

  The first time the telephone rang, he didn’t move. He sat there on the old, yellow cushion, covered with faded shepherdesses holding flower wreaths. The colorful, flickering lights from the muted TV made the room quiver, pale under the morbid and luxurious burgundy glow of some old movie. When the phone rang again, he was trying to remember if the name of the slow, scratchy melody coming from the other room was “Pleasant Despair” or “For a Pleasant Despair.” Either way, he thought: despair. And pleasant.

  The light from the streetlamp filtered in through the lace of the curtains, bluish, mixing with the washed-out color of the film. Before the phone rang a third time, he decided to get up – to check the name of the piece, he told himself, then headed to the other room, through the narrow hallway where his pants brushed against the striated leaf of a plant, as they always did. I need to find a new place for it, he thought, as he always did. And before reaching for the phone on the bookcase, he bent down over the records scattered across the floor, between an overflowing ashtray and a ceramic mug, nearly empty except for some residue at the bottom that formed a green paste, moist and dense. “Désespoir Agréable,” he confirmed. Standing there, he grabbed the white sleeve and put it on the table while repeating in his head: either way, despair. And pleasant.

  “Lui?” The familiar voice. “Hello? Is that you, Lui?”

  “Here,” he said.

  “What are you up to?”

  He sat down. Then he stretched out his arm and stared at his own palm. The spots flaking off, uric acid, they’d told him, slowly eating away at the skin.

  “Hello? Can you hear me?”

  “Hey,” he said.

  “I asked what you were doing.”

  “What I’m doing? Nothing. Just listening to music, watching TV.” He relaxed his hand. “I was about to make some coffee. And go to sleep.”

  “Hello? Can you speak up?”

  “But I’m not sure I have any left.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, it’s not important. And you?”

  On the other end of the line, she sighed. There was a brief silence, and then a dry click and a sort of puffing. She must’ve lit a cigarette, he thought. He mechanically leaned to the left to reach the ashtray full of cigarette butts and pulled it closer to the phone.

  “What’s going on?” he asked slowly, looking around for a pack of cigarettes.

  “Listen. Don’t you feel like taking a little walk?”

  “I’m tired. Not really in the mood. And I have to get up early tomorrow.”

  “I’ll come pick you up. Then I’ll drop you off. We won’t be long at all. We could go to a bar, to a movie theater, to a…”

  “It’s after ten,” he said.

  Her voice got a bit shrill.

  “Then come to me. You don’t want that either, do you? I have this great vodka. The best. You’ll love it, haven’t even opened it yet. Only thing missing is the lime. Will you bring one?” Her voice was suddenly so shrill he had to hold the phone away from his ear. For a moment, he just listened to the distant melody of a piano, slow and scratchy. Through the glass-door panes, with the light shining out back, he could see the tops of the green plants in the garden, scattered yellow leaves on the ground. Unconsciously, he almost shivered in the chill air. Or from a kind of fear. He rubbed the dry palm of his left hand against his thigh. Her voice sounded normal again. “And what if I went over there?”

  His fingers brushed against the pack of cigarettes in his back pocket. He held the phone pressed between his shoulder and his face as he slowly pulled out the pack.

  “It’s just,” he said.

  “Lui?”

  He held one of the cigarettes between his teeth. He bit it, softly.

  “Hello? Lui? Are you there?”

  He lit the cigarette, holding the phone even tighter against his shoulder, and he almost dropped the receiver. He took a deep drag. Then grabbed the phone again and slowly relaxed his sore shoulder as he exhaled the smoke.

  “I was about to go to bed.”

  “What’s this music in the background?” she suddenly asked.

  He pulled the ashtray closer, then turned the record cover in his hands.

  “It’s called ‘For a Pleasant Despair,’ ” he lied. “Do you like it?”

  “I don’t know. It makes me a little sleepy. Who is it?”

  He tapped his cigarette on the rim of the ashtray three times, but no ashes fell off.

  “Some guy. A lunatic.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Erik Satie,” he said softly. She didn’t hear it.

  “Lui? Hello? Lui?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Am I pissing you off?” Again, he heard the brief silence, the dry click, the soft puffing. She must have lit another cigarette, he thought.

  “No,” he said.

  “Am I annoying you? Tell me. I know I am.”

  “It’s fine. I wasn’t really doing anything.”

  “I can’t sleep,” she said, faintly.

  “Are you already in bed?”

  “Yeah. Reading. Then I felt like talking to you.”

  He took a deep drag. While he exhaled the smoke, he bent down again to pick up the ceramic mug. He dragged his finger against the bottom then nibbled on the small leaves with his front teeth.

  “What were you reading?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Some article in a magazine. Something about monocultures and sprays.”

  “What?”

  “Huh?”

  “What was it about?”

  She coughed, then seemed to cheer up a bit.

  “Stuff like that. Ecologies. Apparently if you keep growing the same thing in the soil for many years, it’ll end up dying. The soil, not the thing, of course. Soy, for example. And eucalyptus too, it seems. It destroys the organic matter. Then slowly it all becomes desert. The soil is covered with isolated dots, empty. Deserted. Scattered all over the planet.

  The record stopped, but he didn’t move. After a moment, it started over again.

  “Like when you spill drops of ink on a piece of paper. They spread, more and more. They end up meeting each other, you know? The desert gets bigger. Each time bigger. Deserts never stop growing, did you know that?”

  “I did,” he said.

  “Horrible, isn’t it?”

  “And the sprays?”

  “What?”

  “The sprays. What’s wrong with the sprays?”

  “Oh, yeah. I saw it in the same magazine. It said that each time you spray deodorant – not just deodorant, anything, you know – it creates this thing. Oh, how can I say it? A hole, you know what I mean? A leak, a hole in the layer? What’s it called?”

  “The ozone layer,” he said.

  “Right, the ozone layer. The air we breathe, you know? The biosphere.”

  “It must look like a sieve by now, then,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It must look like a sieve,” he repeated slowly. “The layer. The biosphere. The ozone.”

  “Can you imagine, how horrible. Did you know that? Hello, Lui? Are you there?”

  “I am.”

  “I think I got kind of horrified,” she said. “And scared. Aren’t you scared, Lui?”

  “I’m tired.”

  On the other end of the line, she laughed. From the sound, he guessed that she laughed without really opening her mouth, just shaking her shoulders, shaking her head from side to side, a strand of hair falling over her eyes.

  “Am I keeping you?” she asked. “You always say I’m keeping you. Like you’re some property I saw and liked, a house. If I were a house I’d be one with a pool in the back. A huge garden. And air conditioning. What kind
of house would you like to be, Lui?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be a house.”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to be an apartment.”

  “All right, but what kind?”

  He sighed.

  “A studio. With no phone.”

  “What? Hello, Lui? Were you really not planning on doing anything?”

  “Tea. I was about to make myself some tea.”

  “Wasn’t it coffee? I thought you said you were going to make coffee.”

  “There’s no powder left.” He shook the ashtray full of cigarette butts. Some specks of ash fell out on the white cover of the record with the abstract drawing in the middle. Carefully, he collected them in a pile over the purple corner of the main picture. “No filters either. And I just remembered I have this amazing tea. It even came with a crazy list of uses and side effects. You want to see it? I left it in here.” He opened his black address book.

  “Tea doesn’t come with prescribing information,” she said. She sounded annoyed, like a child. “Prescribing information is for medication.”

  “It does, this tea does. Do you want to see?” Between two faded Polaroids, in the back cover, he found the yellow piece of paper folded in four.

  “Lui? You really don’t want to come over? You know…” She laughed again, and this time he imagined her with her mouth open wide, slowly running the tip of her tongue over her lips, chapped from all the smoking. “I think I was a bit shaken by that story with all the deserts, the holes. Lui, do you think the world is ending?”

  He unfolded the yellow piece of paper on the table, next to the two pictures. The dark wood of the table had some lighter spots. One of the pictures showed a woman who was almost beautiful, with her hair up and gold earrings shaped like tiny roses. The other was the face of a man wearing a black V-neck, his face resting on one hand, his dark eyes slightly misaligned.