Adam in Eden

Chapter 29

I don’t know. Not knowing disturbs me. It’s even more disturbing not to know what I thought I knew. Why are my business associates wearing dark sunglasses? I’ve been clear on this issue: I am not going to lower myself to their level; I’m not going to ask them. If they want to put on little blind-man faces, that’s a reflection on them.

My family relations wear, if not sunglasses, then blinders, like the ones coachmen fit on their horses’ heads to block their peripheral vision, so they can trot straight ahead without being frightened, as though all were well with their world.

My relationship with L is looking ugly, pretty ugly.

Priscila is on cloud nine. She floats. She still talks nonsense, and now she looks more stunned than ever, as if her new situation had left her bedazzled. Before, her indifference to cause and effect was spontaneous — a part of her — but now it seems, paradoxically, tied to some reality that I try to understand as she walks up the stairs, arms raised, her robe trailing, while she proclaims, “I am the Queen of Spring,” then pauses on the landing to slap the new maid who is descending with a stack of clean towels.

On another day, I catch Góngora in the small living room, kneeling before Priscila, as if a dwarf like him would need to get down on bended knee to declare his love. Even standing, that measly little man seems to be kneeling.

He could have been saying anything, because she kept whispering, “Go on, tell me more. . Tell me more. .”

This idiotic request makes me think that Góngora and Priscila are still experiencing the first blush of love. Perhaps he’s still courting her, and while she lets herself be loved by him, they’ve yet to jump each other’s bones or into bed. But there is ample room for doubt: What about Priscila’s lies when she disappears for the afternoon? Does she sleep with Góngora, or do they drink milkshakes at Sanborns, a saintly couple like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in some of the movies I like to discuss with Abelardo?

Whatever their relation, Góngora straightens up when he hears my footsteps and, because he is no fool, he greets me politely. But Priscila, who is one, exclaims, “Oh, Mr. Góngora was only tying his shoe. Brazil, Brazilian, land of samba and. .”

I stare at Góngora’s shoes with a disdain that turns to admiration when I remember that he doesn’t wear cuban heels.

I greet him with a nod of the head and leave, thinking that, after all, I would be hard-pressed to give a flying fuck what Priscila and Góngora are up to. That’s their problem; I can’t think of a better punishment for both than to become each other’s lovers. I realize, with a disappointed sigh, that I have no interest in them.

What really has me upset is the situation with L.

We’ve never been as distant as we are now. My problems at my office (the mystery of the dark sunglasses) and at home (the transparent relationship of Góngora and Priscila) are minor.

L, however, has been my life. This is easily said but — at the risk of sounding redundant — nobody can prove or give meaning to the expression unless he lives that life. My relationship with L, interrupted by my ill-conceived remark the other day (“You have to understand, we need to take a break for a while.”), brings me back to earth, in the sense that, until now, I have always been the winner. Do my readers understand me? Everything has gone well for me, without my even wishing for it; whatever I do, things turn out in my favor.

You can call me King Midas or Rothschild or Trimalchio and even defame my profession (“The first thing we do,” said a real dick, “let’s kill all the lawyers”), but the truth is that I put effort into what I do, and I realize that my actions only succeed because of some unforeseen element in them, an element of chance, a fortune that favors me without my having to imagine it.

My good fortune is understood publicly, and that’s fine. What nobody but me knows is the source of my good luck. My good luck, the source of my good luck, has a name and a voice: L. Without L, everything else would fall apart. Or if everything existed, it wouldn’t be worth a pile of beans. I’m not saying anything that the reader doesn’t know. Each of us understands that there is a private value that affects the external value of things. Having money, professional success, friends, and all the good things in life is ultimately based on the existence of a fundamental loving relationship. Be it with one’s father or mother; with both; with one’s children; with one’s closest friends; with some teacher (Filopáter). Nothing grows without that seed. To love and to know that one is loved. To understand that, even if we lack everything and the world is falling apart, if we end up in the street, whatever happens, we have the ground from which to start over again. No man — and John Donne probably meant no person—is an island. We have to share our island with someone we love, or else we live alone. The Robinson Crusoes of this world don’t grow on trees; most of us rely on the basic affection of one person or two or five people. But as long as just one person loves us, we won’t perish completely.

I describe my relationship with L. I do so in a tone unheard of for me, almost confessional, the tone introduced by Job himself, who confesses before God and in doing so writes his autobiography, which turns life into fiction to better impress God as well as, incidentally, the mundane audience to which he claims he doesn’t aspire and to whom, however, he implicitly appeals: Listen to me, I am Job, the soul of pain and patience.

How to make a confession to the world? Shouting? Articulating? Imagining it? Letting others do the job?

I read Lucretius with Filopáter and learned that if God exists, he is not in the least interested in human beings. (Filopáter paid a high price for saying this, and for adding Plato’s heresy: that if God exists, we lose hope because the gods only favor humanity when it loses its mind).

A crazy god and a sinner, what a pair! “The soul is too small to contain itself,” says Saint Augustine. That is why it must create a chamber in the amplified expressive form called the confession, an unthinkable genre for the Greeks who preceded him and who sought the harmony of truth, not its willful distortion by a harried heart like mine. For that, Saint Augustine chooses memory, a bitter and uncertain memory, to recover — he says — what he has forgotten.

That is why I’m not a saint. I have chosen to have no memory, and it is high time that the reader learned this. I don’t want what I remember. I don’t remember what I want. Why? Perhaps because the purpose of all biographies, as Filopáter one day told me, is to appear to be something real rather than fictitious. The biography would be the work of reason, not feeling, a storm the biographer must leave behind.

Saint Augustine’s city is the City of God. It was Father Filopáter’s city. I live in the City of Man, where a policeman known as Adam Góngora kneels before my wife, Priscila Holguín, both of them trying to throw me off the trail on which I would only find out what I already know. The heart has its reasons, and reason ignores those reasons. The heart wants to break free of its prison, and Góngora lives in the prison of the most banal rationality, a real equivalent of the prisons of San Juan de Aragón and of Santa Catita, which contain the prisoners of a disciplinary neogongorism that doesn’t know that the heart has its own history and so can’t know that this personal history cannot be exhausted by biography, philosophy, or politics, because its purpose, as incredible and impossible as it seems, is nothing more and nothing less than to regain paradise.

Paradise Regained.

L’s love regained.

How do you like that?