Timor Et Minae

If you ever doubt, I told myself in a grave voice, a voice of fearful certainty that reached me through my pounding heart and nerves, if you ever doubt that this sadness, this overwhelming pain that is nowhere to be seen, this solar, clear, and brilliant melancholy, that is so far from the crushing, the sharp, the deep, the dark imaginary one, is something very big, something very great and empty, if you ever forget, I said to myself, balancing myself over the idea that I was trying to conceive like a pendulum, trying to prove to myself that I can find a footing in the middle ground and constantly dizzy in the attempt, if you ever forget that the weight of this world is not limited to this place, if you ever forget that wherever dwells a human soul, the too visible, the too radiant cloak of sadness is stretched, if you ever forget that it is an ever expanding cloak, if you ever forget and are weak enough to disbelieve that once drawn out, the sadness, like infinite squares of toilet paper, cannot be sucked back in and it rolls away, up and down and all the waters of the deep cannot dampen the giant waste, if you ever forget that the first men invented this when they invented the wheel, that they kindled it when they struck the first fire, if you are weak enough to disbelieve that the spirit of divinity that permeates everything is nothing else than this sadness and clear pain and immaculate melancholy, if you ever doubt that every depression is just the reflected surface, if you ever forget that darkness and dreams are nothing else but lies that we tell ourselves, if you are weak enough to disbelieve that the nightmares and the depths are in fact nothing else but constant clarity and a dry, even surface; remember that this thing, remember that this building is everywhere, remember that these concrete walls and these electric fences, those barbed wires and those high bartizans, that mercilessly brown sea and that mercilessly white desert, those dogs and those armed men are in fact everywhere. Show me a place, I prayed to the gods within me, show me a place without prisons, show me a land where the thought of punishment was never born, discover to my worn-out soul, O Lords! discover to me a place without diced periods, an older continent where men are content to believe that the flow of sadness can never be corrected or canalized, discover to me the simple truth, the steppes of reality, with neither past nor future, where people have finally understood that they live only in the present, that they live and go on living and cannot die and that dying is impossible, and that once dead you cannot know that you are dead and that you cannot triumph and kill the sadness by your theoretical disappearance and that the certainty of your living is an eternity in itself, and that you can never see the darkness and that this is the ultimate truth and the only truth and the real torture.   

I’ve been shaking away all these thoughts and endeavoring to gather myself and collect my dispersing leaves into one active frame in order to get on with my brief visit, but once in the line and once inside the prison I was so tired of converting my disgust into dread that my soul clung to my ribs like a soaking shirt, and I bore myself with so rigid an uprightness of conduct that I failed to understand the questions of the sentry, I finally managed to give him my papers, I signed my name and left a red left index on the register. They frisked me and checked my bag three times, with each post sneering at my French books. They finally gave me a ticket. I could hear my spirit fighting against the absolute normalcy of the place and trying to find a dark corner, a flickering taper or any dungeon-like impression in that ordinary, square space, with doors a bit thicker, windows a bit higher, fatter cockroaches, timid flies and blinking neon lights, whitewashed walls and a floor cut and dappled like a bad painting. The floor dragged the outside world inside, we walk on the same floor, and if we walk on the same floor it means that the outside is the same as the inside, the inside the same as the outside, and thus the prison becomes an allegory, an obstinate image in a world that has so allegorical a mind it renders the smallest attempt of fastening something real quite ridiculous, so we go on and build these playthings, we build square rooms and lock our irregular fringes in there and we feed them our allegorical food until they become as malleable as modeling clay.  

The visiting area was big and relatively clean, chairs and tables were arranged in rows like a school canteen, there was such a deep stench of bleach and detergents and spirit of salt and soap. I went to the table with the number assigned to me and put the bundle of books down, a number of second-hand novels that would probably induce my friend out of his situation. Looking at the pile I realized how much all of them related to a prison of some sort, I brought to a prisoner a pile of spiritual cells, how could I be so reckless and so self-centered? I thought of myself instead of thinking of my friend, I brought him books that I loved, I brought him books that I would bring myself if I thought I was escaping into prison, books that must be concurrent with his sick understanding, books that I despised the way I despised him, books that would avenge my long and arduous journey to the prison by the time of his term’s expiration, books that would avenge my envy and my disgust at his recollection and all my hate for this only friend of mine and all my love for this second version of me, books and stories that would torture his wounded soul long after his going out into the world of the living again, books and stories that would break his already crestfallen heart in the middle of the night and in the middle of the day, books that he would helplessly raise against his assailants, his guards and his fellow prisoners, stories that will prove a poor shade against boredom and hunger and the common urine and the common defecation, novels that can never be wedged between a man’s soul and a man’s skin, novels so layered with ink and useless ideas and so frail of body that even to wipe an ass withal is useless, thousands of yellow sickly sheets that cannot make one decent rope to dangle from, books that will reveal to him my disgust disguised in charity as love, my love disguised in darkness as disgust. What face would he make I wonder, when he sees the sketch I drew from Mantegna’s dying Christ on the last page of The Idiot? Would he recognize himself in it? Would he guess my duplicity and perverseness and mercilessness and realize that I drew it in fact from my memory of him? Would he guess the meanness of my septentrional distortion? Would he recognize that the sketch is in fact my own portrait while being at the same time a weeping parody of Mantegna’s dying Christ? Would he recognize all my hate from the intense pencil lines? Would he recognize the extent of my emotional foreshortening? Will his face also be writhing, will he drool and stink the whole valley and keep gazing heavenward like the Prince? Will his entrails be calcined like the country priest in Bernanos? Will his remaining time be enough for him to learn and to suffer even more? Can his feeble mind and pure soul keep track of all the tortures and all the villainy of The hundred and twenty days of Sodom? I’m hoping that he’ll delight over them in secret, just like myself, and lick the very ink out of the pages, maybe his will is not past radical transmutation, maybe he’ll rise and sniff away blood and semen out of the book. I should have brought him René and Attala and James Fenimore Cooper to make him feel more acutely his imprisonment, I should’ve brought him Vie de Rancé and Angelus Silesius and the Lyra Apostolica and Gerard Manley Hopkins, I should’ve brought him Le Génie du christianisme and Novalis and Paul Claudel, because no imagination is so ethereal as to rise above the concentrated allegory of every prison on earth.

The room became full, people cried and hugged their relatives, someone came to my table and took the empty chair of my friend, I didn’t say anything, I looked at him approvingly and relished the fact that I didn’t have to face that empty chair. The lesson I learned from the horror tales of Cosmas and Damian, twin Arab surgeons and saints, the lesson I learned also from Henry and Thomas Vaughan, is that the reality of the present double is much more disturbing than the romantic image of a lurking doppelganger in the dark.

I took my small edition of Horace from the inside pocket of my jacket, it opened on the same spot where I closed it hours earlier in the share taxi, a guy by my left was talking all the time in the taxi, he talked so much and so loudly that I began to devise some hidden meaning with my imperfect Latin, I studied with my fingers the curious binding of the book, my Horace was tightly knit and bound in a thick hide. I imagined myself flaying the loud guy by my left, I imagined myself holding a beautiful knife, a big hunting knife, and removing meticulously brown and yellow and pale patches of skin from my own cackling Marsyas, I imagined myself removing his rugged scalp and his ugly beard with tar boiled at the mouth of the Etna. As I was tanning his skin and drying it on a rock by the sea under a red moon, a splinter from a boiled egg he was crunching cut these words:

Timor et minae

Scandunt eodem quo dominus, neque

Decedit aerata triremi, et

Post equitem sedet atra cura.

 

He laughed and patted me on the back and tucked a second egg under his beard and resumed his crunching and talking, he even offered me one, but I made a disapproving sign with a hand still wet with his blood and howling and closed the book. It opened on the same spot where I closed it hours earlier, the verses absorbed the spit but the splinter was still shipwrecked inside, I closed the book in disgust once more and put it on top of the pile, my friend who may marvel at the mystery of how a piece of Sulphur, more potent than dark anxiety, destroyed the bronze-beaked galley, would not be disgusted, and he must have seen uglier things than a bearded Salafist talking and eating and spitting eggs all over an ode of Horace. It’s not only my neighbor, it’s the sin of every egg eating person in the world, how can anyone commit the aesthetical crime, or at least the logical crime of eating eggs without feeling the slightest remorse? How can anyone fry an aborted yolk unconcernedly, hastening in seconds the natural becoming of a fetus? Maybe we relish the compression of eternity into few allegorical bites, maybe the egg came first, maybe I should forget my neighbor and stop thinking altogether.          

I didn’t know that visitors were allowed to bring food to the prison, the homely odor of food reminded me of the strange coziness of the prisons that we read about in novels but can’t quite separate from our own modern ones, no matter how hard I tried to put Fabrice del Dongo in the exact room and setting granted by Stendhal’s roving and nostalgic fancy, the picturesque Farnese Tower, I couldn’t prevent him from being kept in my own room instead of the Farnese tower, he was tied to my own bed, closing the book every so often to gaze at the abstract torture of the white ceiling, unable even to resent the occasional cries of the passers-by, unable to resent the silence or to produce out of hate anything else than an empty gurgling of the throat and to plunge again, in vain again, into the romantic cell. I imagined him looking out of my own window, looking into the nothingness of the street, trying to look harder beyond the soul of every crawling creature and slouching sinfulness, trying hardly to devise a crack of dewy meaning in the arenaceous air, looking hopelessly at the oriental sky, immensely oppressive and oppressively immense at the same time, looking hopelessly outside the bars of the window at the roads, tarred by the hands of the government around the confused rows of concrete houses, apartment buildings unconcernedly exposing the hollowness of their gaping balconies, looking very hopelessly into the eye of the sun as it was casting screaming rays to solidify the dripping layers of paint and diapers and yesterday’s sheets of violent duties, looking angrily at the sun as it prevented the city from fulfilling its crumbling promises. Fabrizio didn’t hear Clelia singing hymns at the rosy dawn, he didn’t see the Italian Alps, there was no Lake Como outside my window, there’s only a silvery reverberation of a salty waste in the distance, it joins the bleached redness of the sky in the afternoon to pour over my frame the stifling curves of ugliness, and brings in the evening, just when the timorous darkness advances in fairy steps, swarms of noisy bugs to choke the mysteries of the night.

The women were emptying their bags, I heard behind me the rattling of a tea kettle poured into a cup, the slow slurp of the red spirit followed by the distinct munching of something spongy. Sfenj, I whispered to myself, they must be eating sfenj, it sounds like the name of a Nordic divinity, but the name is in heart and form the most eastern object, more eastern than a squat toilet, easterner than the dunes and the howling silence of the desert, easterner even than a camel, that sad aberration in contentment with eternity, sfenj, deep fried dough with a rind lumpier than a Hindu temple and of so unctuous a soul as to anoint all the kings of Mesopotamia, sFENJ, a slight hissing immediately engrossed with sand and brimstone and oil, warping up into yellow clearness. I kept repeating the name: sfenj, sfenj, sfenj, sfenj, as if to conjure up the most distant memory, the sunny afternoon of my birth into the ugly world of remembrance, I munched the word and munched and munched and swallowed the word from the hands of destiny, sour and sweet and all dyed in henna. The door closed shut behind me that afternoon, I walked, frail and shadowless under the sun, bearing a huge wooden slab on my back, I couldn’t keep walking though in the manner of the Christian pilgrim because of a reed pen stuck inside my belt and the spilling of an inkpot containing the essence of burned wool in my pocket, I put the slab over my head, the ancient qalam in my right hand and the inkpot in my left, that’s how I avoided the sun, but an abstraction would hang over me ever since, Now I must slay my younger self as a walking allegory, I must put the slab in my left hand, the inkpot on my head, and the qalam in my right… I have to put the slab in my right hand, the qalam over my head and the inkpot in my left… I must keep playing the variations patiently in my mind because I cannot create the simple solution, namely, to put the slab under my feet, to let the reed pen absorb the spit of the wool, and to paint the sun darkly.

I don’t know how I got there, inside the temple yard, I probably followed the strange sounds, rising as I walked like the empty promises of thunder in the desert, they came from a small cube of concrete, the kid that I was peeped inside and saw rows of wooden slabs, planted on the floor like grave stones, small hands were groping them on the sides or reaching to the top, I pushed my way against the funereal waves of recitation, I stumbled with my virginal slab over the screaming ones and saw small heads rocking back and forth, back and forth, to the right and to the left, to the right and to the left, I found an opening in the farthest corner and sat down. The master was sitting by a wooden altar, he waved his hand for me to come, he had a broad dark face, which opened into a smile as pure as date syrup, he dipped the reed pen in the pot and traced long shapes and dots on the slab, he bade me repeat after him a few words, then told me to sit and memorize them, I don’t know what the kid felt exactly in that confusion, but I feel now that we were unlocking the hidden secrets of the universe, our little cube of concrete in the temple yard, our giant slabs and reed pens and burned wool and frantic melodies made the world turn around, they changed the seasons, brought forth the vegetation, they squeezed the very clouds in heaven, they brushed off the mountain tops and probed the depth of the seas, they were sounds far greater than the world itself.         

In the middle of the room there was a golden head so unlike the others, he sang his slab in a mellifluous voice, I dipped the funnel in the pot, the snout sipped the dark essence of wool and I drew the head on the other side of the slab. The voices subsided when two girls came, they too had fair locks that their kerchiefs could hardly veil, looking at them, I felt very sad all of a sudden, one held a huge kettle and a cup, the other a sedge-woven plate of sfenjes, I wanted to cry and get away and looked into the blue opening of the door, but the sisters caught my attention again, they sauntered with nimble strides and gave each of us a bite of the pastry and a drop of the red tea, yes, I realize now that it was our own unique Eucharistic repast, after which we crowded around the master and recited our slabs, most of us got them by heart, he traced a curved line with a piece of chalk over the recited side and we went into the yard to wash them in a manger full of water, not without splashing ourselves first, me and the golden haired kid soaked our heads in the water and laughed so hard that we became friends.

He surpassed me in the religious school, but I was better in the secular one, gleaning every prize for math and composition, but I could never forgive him the daily spectacle of his sisters, whom I never saw again, how could he walk in the middle of so much beauty? Why did he not die of sadness at the sight of brazen locks being dried after a bath? They lived in a small apartment, he talked to them and played with them, they fought and reconciled and raced each other to the toilet, he saw them eat and sleep and wake up, he saw their underwear drying up on the red evening ropes, he was so very close to so much beauty, I tried to be envious as I grew up, but all I felt was a supreme depression, a melancholy that crippled me then, but which I long for now. Now, even the heavenliest Bach composition is too leaky for my false tears.

When we were on the verge of teenagerhood, just as the adult cleaves the child like a molar an innocent gum, we quarreled over trifles that looked big, or that were really big but appear now mere trifles, I wrote a poem insulting him and his recent lack of religion and decency, I bemoaned his apostasy in thundering little farts, I read it to him, rolled my right pinky around my tongue and extracted a ponderous gob of envy, it dropped on the ground between us with a bang, we had to fight. Something compelled everyone to stand behind me and encourage me to beat him up, I, the delicate, pale, bespectacled kid against him, my friend, already a man of the world, who had abandoned the religious school in a fit of revolt and made himself forget its basic rules, who learned so many tricks of the streets, who smoked and swore unabashedly, who tore off a knee cap out of his jeans and made two naked lines on his left eyebrow. They should have been his people, but they became mine, I could’ve ordered another classmate, someone bigger and older to crush his bones, but I wanted to teach him something, I began to develop a hypocritical, didactic soul, I was frightened too, as if I was about to harm myself, after school we went to an infamous valley behind some crooked barns, where weaker boys were being done to and undone according to our local mythology, we threw punches in the air, but mine were as numerous as the beating of my heart and I knocked him down, I put my knees above his chest and took his head between my palms, his eyes were so moist and beseeching, I bashed the head against a stone until I felt his blood trickling between my fingers, I felt so much joy as I stood up and went home whistling my verses, completely mindless of the hails of the other kids. We reconciled a week later over something cooked by his sisters, I didn’t even check his wound, he read my poem himself and laughed.   

I went my way and he went his, many years later I heard that he was held in a prison for participating in a vast protestation movement. I never participated in that movement, affecting Baudelaire’s gesture of “crosse un peu plus fort, municipal de mon cœur,” whenever I saw policemen hitting a rebellious kid. Now that I had exhausted my curiosity everywhere, I must take hold of the only humane flicker in my past. Here I am, in prison, waiting for him to not show up, waiting for him not to relate another brave reason for his incarceration, hoping that he became light enough to hang from the low ceiling of his cell, hoping that his present becoming is something other than a figment of my ruminant imagination, hoping that even in his real death he’ll prove me wrong and present to me something other than the spectacle of my distorted self.