Selected Cronicas

THE OBEDIENT (II)

But since all of this was beyond their understanding, and they found so many things above their heads which, even if expressed in words, they would have failed to understand, all this began to look like irremediable life. A life to which they submitted in silence and with that somewhat wounded expression which is common amongst men of good will. It resembled that irremediable life for which God destined us. Or did He? Doubts began to creep in.

Life irremediable, but not concrete. In fact, it was an unattainable life of dreams. Sometimes, when they were speaking about someone who was eccentric, they would say, with the condescension one class shows towards another: ‘Ah, he takes life seriously, he leads the life of a poet.’ One could say, judging from the few words I heard the couple say, that they both led, leaving aside any extravagance, the life of a second-rate poet: a life which consisted only of dreams.

No, no, that is not true. It was not a life of dreams, for that would never have enriched them. But one of unreality. Although there were moments when suddenly, for one reason or another, they would plunge into reality. And then they had the impression of touching depths no one could hope to transcend.

As, for example, when the husband came back earlier than usual to find his wife was not at home. The husband felt as if a chain had been broken. Feeling put out, he sat down to read the newspaper in a silence so hushed that even a corpse at his side would have broken the spell. He sat there, pretending in all honesty to be completely wrapped up in his newspaper, his senses on the alert. This was the moment when he touched the bottom with startled feet. He could not remain for long like this without the risk of drowning, for touching the bottom was the same as having water above one’s head. These were the more concrete thoughts in his subconscious. Which caused him, levelheaded and sensible as he was, to extricate himself at once. He extricated himself at once, yet somehow reluctantly, for his wife’s absence held out such a promise of forbidden pleasure that he experienced what might be called disobedience. He extricated himself reluctantly but without discussion, conforming to what was expected of him. Who expected it of him? He could not be sure. He was no deserter, capable of betraying the trust of others. But if this were reality, there was no way he could live with it.

As for his wife, she touched on reality rather more frequently, for she had more leisure and fewer worries to contend with, such as colleagues at work, overcrowded buses, and all those administrative chores. She would sit down to do some mending, and little by little would find herself confronting reality. The mere act of sitting down to do some mending was intolerable while it lasted. The sudden way the dot falls neatly on the i, that sensation of being so much a part of existence, and everything being so clearly itself, was unbearable. But when the feeling passed, it was as if the wife had drunk from some possible future. Little by little, this woman’s future started to become something which she brought into the present, something contemplative and secret.

It was surprising how the two of them remained indifferent, for example, to politics, to the change of government, to developments in general, although, like everyone else, they too discussed these things from time to time. Truly, they were so reserved these two that, were anyone to tell them so to their face, they would have been surprised and flattered. It would never have occurred to them to think of themselves as being reserved. Perhaps they would have understood if someone had said to them: ‘You two are the very symbol of military and patriotic reserve.’ Some acquaintances said of them after the event: they were decent people. And there was nothing more to be said, for they were decent people.

There was nothing more to be said. They lacked the burden of any grave error, which is often precisely what one needs to open a safety exit. They had once taken something very seriously. They were obedient.

Not simply out of craven submission, but as in a sonnet. It was obedience out of their love for symmetry. For them, symmetry was the only possible art.

Strange that each of them should have reached the same conclusion that, alone, the one could live longer than the other. It would be a long road of rehabilitation and of useless effort, because from different angles many had reached the same conclusion.

The wife, under the continuous spell of fantasy, not only arrived at this bold conclusion, but found her life transformed into something broader and more disturbing, into something richer and even superstitious. Each thing became the cipher of something else, everything was symbolic and even vaguely spiritualistic, within the limits permitted by Roman Catholicism. Not only did she come to this rash conclusion but — provoked solely by the fact that she was a woman — she began to think some other man would save her. The idea was not all that absurd. She knew it was not. To be half-right confused her and plunged her into meditation.

Her husband, influenced by the anguished masculinity of his new environment, and by his own waning masculinity, which was timid but real, started to believe that endless love affairs would bring new life.

Dreamers, they began practising tolerance: it was heroic to be tolerant. They silenced any suspicions, disagreeing about the most convenient hour to dine and arguing freely, the one making a sacrifice for the other, because love is sacrifice. What love?

Until the day arrived when the woman was finally roused from her dream when she bit into an apple and felt one of her front teeth breaking. With the apple still in her hand, she examined herself closely in the bathroom mirror — and thus losing all perspective — she saw the pale face of a middle-aged woman with a broken tooth which made her look pathetic, and her own dark, mysterious eyes… At rock-bottom and the water already up to her neck, in her fifties, and with no message to leave behind. Instead of going to the dentist, she threw herself from her apartment window, a person for whom one could feel so grateful, so deeply grateful, because she was the pillar of our disobedience.

As for her husband, once the river-bed was dry and without any water in which he might drown, he walked over the bottom without looking at the ground, as nimbly as if he were using a cane. The river-bed had suddenly become dry. Bewildered, he walked over the river-bed with the false confidence of someone who is about to fall flat on his face at any moment.