The Black Envelope

~ ~ ~

RINGING. SHE HAS NEITHER the strength nor the desire to pick up the receiver. She knows what will follow: a long silence. Recently she has been getting this mute call, more and more often, which she is careful not to decode.

The ringing comes back after a while. She jumps up from the chair, realizing that, in fact, it is the doorbell. This has happened to her before: yes, thoughts without thoughts, like a state of drowsiness; the one you keep calling without ever calling him now calls and does not call you. But it is a different sound, in fact, quite different.

She suddenly remembers that this afternoon she has invited around her old comrade in silence, Ianuli. Kir Ianuli, the friend with whom you can be silent for a few hours in difficult moments. Yes, she invited him round, fearing that she would not have the strength to be alone. The silent one, with his dark discretion. A good device: a substitute guest for a canceled celebration.

She looks through the peephole in the door. No, it’s not the one she is expecting. She opens the door wide.

“Wow, what a surprise this is!”

The elegant guest remains in the doorway, holding out a huge bunch of red roses.

“The card index never seems to lie. So, if I’m not disturbing you, I’ve just come to say happy birthday.”

“You’re not disturbing me at all. It’s just that I find it hard to cope with surprises. Come in, Doctor, come in.”

Dr. Marga goes in.

“I won’t stay long, don’t worry. I’m just passing: to give you my greeting. I don’t even know what I should be wishing you.”

“Maybe you do know. You know enough, too much. But even what you know wouldn’t help you. Wish that I’ll live in uninteresting times.”

Irina looks at him. The cloudy green of her eyes makes him feel nervous, as does her hoarse and parched voice.

“That Eastern poet, as you know, used to pray for that every day. That the one up above should protect him from interesting times. How right he was, how right.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t be able to take it. You’ll find it hard, believe me. As hard as our misery, which is actually too interesting. May I sit down?”

“Yes, of course, forgive me. Here in the armchair, right here. I’m sorry: I’m not dressed to receive guests.”

The doctor makes no comment. He sits in one of the two green armchairs flanking a little white table, opposite a matching sofa.

“Do you have guests, Irina?”

“I wouldn’t say so. I’m expecting a friend: he’s not a guest,” answers the hostess from the kitchen, where she is arranging the flowers in a vase.

“Oh. I don’t think of myself as a guest either, although I wouldn’t dare to claim the title of friend. Your friend—”

“No, I’m talking about someone else.” Irina hastens to interrupt his reverie. She comes back into the room with a tall, cylindrical copper vase. “I asked an old friend round to have a chat. He doesn’t know it’s my birthday. Just like that. So as not to be alone. He calms me. His silence, his discretion, his tiredness. And his hidden, pent-up fury. Unflinching, yes.”

She sits on the other armchair. She seems weighed down, unsure where to lead the discussion.

“He’s been through a lot. He came to this country around 1950, I think, when he was still very young — almost a child. He’d been fighting in the mountains in Greece, as a young Communist, having broken off relations with his family. It was a well-to-do family. The father, a famous academic, committed suicide when he heard that his son had become a firebrand, an extremist. Yes, he gave up his family, his vocation, his homeland, and left everything behind. Everything in the end. Himself, too, perhaps.”

“And now?”

“Withdrawn. Very withdrawn. He’s become a kind of ‘specialist’ in linguistic problems, the philosophy of language. The study of dialects, or speech defects: I don’t know exactly.”

“And isn’t he planning on going back? Greece is a free country nowadays. People live well there. A lot have returned in the last few years.”

“He has no reason to. He’s been through too much: he’d be a stranger now, with no links to the younger generation — or perhaps even the older one. He hasn’t even been back to claim his inheritance, although his wife seems to keep pestering him to do it. Sudden changes, regrets, inheritances — none of that has any attraction for him.”

“A rare case, I have to admit. These days—”

“Not only these days. But let’s drink a glass or two together! Not in celebration, because there’s no— Just for your visit. I trust you’re not here on medical business.”

“Certainly not. I just thought I’d give myself the pleasure of coming to see you, on a day when you can’t turn guests away.”

They walk out onto the terrace, Irina taking a bottle of red wine with her. They sit down in the large straw chairs. The doctor solemnly raises his glass and bows; the woman smiles and drinks in deeply.

Chit, chat: the conversation begins to slacken, then picks up again. They relax and joke like two old army comrades.

At eight o’clock the new guest appears. A sharply pointed face, thick long hair almost turned gray. He holds out a thin soft hand. He has a troubled look, probably because he didn’t expect there to be a third person.

Marga appears invigorated by the strange apparition.

“I hope I’m not being indiscreet. Ira told me a little about you.”

“Let’s make it clear that we’re not going to discuss politics!” Irina promptly breaks in. “Crowded buses, demagogic meetings, the Jabberer’s jabbering, lines for salami and mineral water and cotton for sanitary napkins? No, no politics of any kind!”

“No, I was thinking of something quite different. Of Hellas! Athens: that is, art, science, beauty, reason. And you chose the opposite. Faith, the critical, combative spirit — the side of Jerusalem! That’s what I wanted to say. It’s a contradiction, no?”

Ianuli warms the glass of red wine in the palm of his hand. Slender hands, long nails. An intermittent shudder of thin, sticklike arms.

“Of the Hebrews, then! Do you know that poem? By your great modern poet.”

All three rhythmically sip wine and munch biscuits.

“ ‘My most precious days are those when I drop my aesthetic studies,’ ” the doctor recites in a drawling voice. “Do you know the lines? ‘My most precious days are those when I drop my aesthetic studies. When I abandon the harsh beauty of Hellenism / with its sovereign attachment / to perfect and fleeting white limbs. And I become what I have always wanted to remain: son of the Hebrews, of the sacred Hebrews.’ A fantastic line, don’t you think? ‘Son of the Hebrews, of the sacred Hebrews.’ It’s by that Cavafy of yours.”

Marga looks at Irina, lost somewhere or other. Then he turns to Ianuli, who is also looking at Irina. His long thin hands move backward and forward, over knees crammed into the narrow tubes of cheap, worn trousers.

They exchange a brief look of complicity. Irina is pale, her eyes burning as if with fever.

“And what about the conclusion?” resumes the excited tenor. “ ‘But nothing of it remained at all. Hedonism and Alexandrian Art had in him a devoted child.’ What a magnificent ending! Like a cry of impotence, no? He was a great poet, that lonely man. Old and ill, exiled to the boiling mud of Alexandria.”

He remains lost in his thoughts for a few moments. Then he turns again to Ianuli, having decided to change tactics.

Ianuli does not flinch, but goes on quietly sipping from his glass.

“Nowadays people keep chasing from one place to another. For money, or adventure, or freedom. When the exile is abruptly removed from his natural surroundings and his mother tongue, he also suddenly becomes simpler. Reduced to the elements: food, housing, illness, sleep, love. He once strove for something else, something — um — something meta-phys-i-cal. But your exile is obviously of another kind. ‘For some a day comes when they have to say the great Yes or the great No.’ Do you remember? ‘I shall go to another country, on another sea.’ Remember? Do you remember Cavafy?”

Irina gives a frightened glance, now at the doctor, now at Ianuli.

Ianuli’s fixed, unwavering eyes. His dimmed expression, showing no reaction. And the garrulous doctor, always over the top.

“ ‘Nor will you find new places or other seas. / The city will follow as you circle and grow old in the same streets: / and under the same roof will your hair turn white. / Ever will you end up in this city. And as for leaving / have no hope / there is no ship and no highway for you. / As you have ruined your life in this corner / so have you laid waste the whole of the earth.’ ”

Irina stands up and looks at them both, without seeing either. In her dilated eyes is the fabled, odorous, magnificent spring of Alexandria. She goes onto the terrace, beneath the poisoned night sky, her eyes absorbed in Saturn and the Milky Way.

From time to time Goody-Goody’s tireless voice keeps coming back, displaying on that evening an unnatural logorrhea and insistence.

“When I was young I also bravely marched in all kinds of columns. But I felt exiled in the end. One had the right to participate in evil, but not in the struggle against evil — what do you think? My work swallowed me up. Concrete, democratic suffering. There’s no truer school.”

But the telephone is ringing. Irina is in her room in one jump, hurrying to pick up the receiver.

“Hello. Ah, it’s you! Thank you, thank you very much. No, it’s not exactly a surprise. You’re as thoughtful as ever. It’s very nice. Yes, it was a cruel winter. A real cull, you’re right. Unheated houses, I know, the schools, libraries, and cinemas as well. And how did your wife cope? You’re right: yes, of course. No, you didn’t disturb me. Yes, I’m with some friends. Ah, I haven’t heard that joke before. Yes, the Jabberer’s one quality is that he inspires good new jokes every day!” and Irina laughs merrily. When she hangs up she has a troubled, confused air. Afraid because of what she has said, or because she lifted the receiver too quickly, or because the expectation proved false, or because the wasted evening is treacherously dragging on and stifling her.

She turns around to explain. “Mr. Gafton! To wish me all the best. He’s very thoughtful: he remembers every year.”

“So you know Mauriciu! Marcel! Matei! I didn’t realize that,” the doctor mumbles, bending over to wipe his glasses but also taking care that his artificial left eye is not visible.

“We haven’t seen each other for a long time. When they kicked him out of that national newspaper, they sent the poor man to work on the Association’s paper. He was on his last legs, with only a little time to go before he retired. We made friends. He’s a delicate man. He helped me quite a lot.”

“You see, Mr. Ianuli,” the doctor bursts out again, “this Marcel-Mauriciu is the best illustration. Coming from a very poor family, he studied day and night. Oho, what didn’t he study! Serving the great cause! Honestly adding his bit to the great hotchpotch. What do you say? And that business with the changing of his name! As you know, you can’t be a journalist in this country with some alien-sounding name. He took the name of his wife — the tainted and even dangerous name of a well-known family of legionaries. That was how he showed his courage, I ask you! How he, the victim, showed that there had to be an end to vengeance. By taking the name of the butcher. The silly man paid more than it was worth. Substitutions and substitutes, Mr. Ianuli. Is that world too picturesque, too interesting? Too boring in the end? Irina, did you know that Tolea lived at the Gaftons’?”

Irina pours some more wine into her glass. She does not answer: there is no need.

The doctor again turns in his chair to face Ianuli.

“I remember Tolea as a young man. A real dazzler, believe me. Serious and unaffected. Intelligent, polite, studious. You couldn’t even tell when the change— Well, it would have been worth being patient with him. I’ve said it before: he needed patience. He paid for it in the end. It’ll be hard for him to recover. It really wasn’t worth the price: it’s no joke. No, it’s no joke this time. But what I wanted to say, what I actually wanted to ask — yes, you’ve become really interested in linguistics. In the language of seclusion. And suspicion? What about suspicion?”

Ianuli feels uncomfortable and remains silent. But this time he smiles, passing his hands very slowly through his hair. He hopes the doctor might resume his monologue and allow him to avoid answering.

And of course that is what happens. However, Marga seems increasingly tired of the role he has taken on. His sentences no longer gush out but are like a stammering in the darkness that spreads into every corner of the room. “I’m not young any longer. I’m skeptical of utopias: I know what they bring. But doesn’t the collapse of great dreams spell disaster? Isn’t suspicion worse? Are rapaciousness and bigotry and cynical egotism becoming more and more justified?” And after a while: “Yes, I’m interested in the psychology of seclusion: it’s my obsession, yes.” And again at some point: “Do you think there’s something to be said for the isolation and impotence in which we are caught? Don’t underdevelopment and apathy also have advantages, perhaps? Just think of all the comfortable habits! Siesta, family relations, reading, home-cooked food, domestic order, politely behaved children, friends. In the modern world there’s no time for all that, is there? Whereas we hostages. .”

But Dr. Marga is already gone. At a certain moment he stands up and disappears. The night is rapidly closing in. They suddenly feel more alone, more joined in complicity.

“Come out on the terrace”—and her rough voice seems to grow warmer.

Clear, untouchable sky. Smooth silence, ice packs, darkness over which the moon’s sharp sickle is sliding.

Irina brings the bottle and glasses from inside and puts them on the cement, between the straw chairs.

“I didn’t know today was your birthday”—and the shadow makes a bow and raises its glass. The sky is smoking — a long gray cloud. Irina also takes a short sip. The sky is smoking — the barbaric, gigantic smoke of the night cloud, like a body tensed up to seize the prey, to relieve its long wait.

“This spring! Irinia bursts out. “It’s rotted our bones, hasn’t it? Even the change of season frightens us. That’s why I called you. When you are waiting all the time, you improvise solutions. Forgive me. And I’m sorry about Marga as well. He was in a bad mood, not his natural self at all — pathetically going on like that.”

Ianuli bends forward to take his glass just as Irina is finally putting hers down, having pointlessly held it in her hand for so long. She looks at him closely, without seeing him — watching for imperceptible, delayed animation, his incapacity to assume the burden. She turns, ready to arouse him, provoke him, bring him back to life.

“Some time ago — a month or more, I don’t remember — Comrade Orest Popescu, the head of the Association, read us all a sensational news item from some paper or other — I can’t remember which one. It was a strange report, of the kind that’s not usually allowed in our press. A woman had been attacked in her own apartment. Roughed up for no apparent reason. It’s true she had a dog and some cats, but that was hardly a convincing pretext. The article gave off special vibes — a sort of menacing hum. Or maybe it was only an impression I had. We’re not used to reading things like that in the papers. I began to realize the article was causing quite a stir. Lots of people were talking about it.”

She speaks without pausing for breath, then gulps down the contents of her glass. Quickly, inattentively. Her deep voice seems to wipe out the hesitations: it requires an answer, a confirmation. She needs someone’s voice and words, immediately, to give instant confirmation that the words really do exist, that this evening exists, that the terrace and the silences and the wine are real: words, headache, sky, death, everything.

“Well, yes, the text of the article seemed to condemn the attack. But its way of expressing itself was suspicious. So tough and vulgar and — complicitous. There seemed to be a complicity with the events, a profound affinity, even though it had the air of condemning them. The relationship between event and report showed that the rejection was only apparent. In reality there was a kind of complicity with what it rejected — with what it played at rejecting and combating. Will the real fighters ever come back to life? To clean out the filthy underground?”

Irina nervously stands up and lights a cigarette. Resting against the wooden balustrade, she looks with irritation at the combatant of days gone by.

“Fear of this spring. Of this stunted, ugly world that has been stifling for so long, drowsing for so long, missing for so long. The long winter of expectation. And now the pagan, illicit joy! Defiance that lacks the courage to defy. Something cunning and simple, prostrate before the elements, without the courage to become simple and elemental again. I am afraid! This outrageous appetite, disorder in the realm of order.”

Translucent, Kir Ianuli, yellow and dark, with a narrow face beneath a head of graying hair. No, she doesn’t see him, and that is good. Nor would he want to see her sorrowful eyes, or her greedy hands cutting the air with their burning fever.

The inky sky, the whitish moving patches in which she recognizes the nocturnal beast. A dizziness: her limbs and claws and desires become longer, her hair blows about, she feels sucked into the burned air, into the toxins of a huge alien being. She shakes herself, opens closes her eyes. Her mouth fills with a sticky, copious lava. A ravenous mouth in which tongue and teeth keep growing and growing. She tenses up, shakes herself, goes back into the room. Her small hand is trembling, with a cheap, foul-smelling cigarette between her pearly fingers. She tries to speak, faster and faster, whispering, stammering. Words would be a salvation. If she can manage to articulate the words, everything will become calmer and quieter. Remnants of a sentence she once heard: who was it who said there comes a moment for Yes or No.

Kir Ianuli is silent. But he is here, one step away, and does not see her: how good that he doesn’t see her. He doesn’t see her eyes burning, straining to stop the flow of tears, the hysteria. She tries to pull herself together, although her trembling hands are eager to grasp, to squeeze, to release.

Weighed down in his impenetrable silence, the believer of old is still alive. Kir Ianuli is still alive, but he does not hear and does not see the signs of change here, just one step away.

“The season is a trap,” Irina manages to whisper. “An impatient time. People who are too patient, in an impatient time. Time impatient with those who are patient,” Irina blurts out.

The screen of the window grows dark and then bright again. A flame replaces the darkness: the phosphorescent face, splendid Circe, the scumbag! Lioness, tigress, and sow majestically roaming the city, constantly crushing dainty little bones of her naïve male attendants. She is none other than the impatient consort of the patient gentleman Ianuli, his invaluable mare! Randy Emilia, known as Mila, Mila Ianuli, Megawhore. The goddess of substitutions and substitutes, Superwhore of the great pagan season, seductive mockery — yes, that was actually what she had wanted to ask the speechless combatant exiled to the moon. How do you manage with the sublime and soiled Superwhore? But does not have the time: her hands and tears and whimpers start up simultaneously, and the man is there a step away. A joke — of which nothing remains but a tearful grin, an angelic smile, sluggish and solitary on the entranced face. Her spluttering hands in the darkness. Trembling.

When she pulls herself together, the man is again in the same place, opposite her. They do not look at each other but gaze at the dark crater of the coffee paste left at the bottom of the cup: a chimera.

“Is the season a trap? What if we were to reverse the terms? What do you think? So that it is not the season but people who no longer have patience?”

The air is cool and dark — that’s how she wants it to be. Her partner is somewhere close by, crouching and shrunken. He is asleep, or is just keeping his eyes shut. She does not disturb him. She just bows her tired head. This time, her waking mind rejects exaltation or nausea. It is nothing but rejection, the rejection that disguises her at last inside herself, like her ultimate mask that no longer accepts any disguise.

She looks up at the dark sky. The bells will find her ready, as required. The beginning of something new, the brink of a new age.

Alone — alone and in control.

At some point she sneaks into the house. On tiptoe, so as not to make any noise. She returns with a thick pink rug and wraps it around the absent man. He seems alive, although he does not stir or open his eyes. He does not move, but he isn’t dead. No, not yet. Irina remains on the terrace. The cool of morning gives her back to herself.

This is how she should be remembered, in this embrace of transition, beside a witness removed from the story.

Suddenly grown old, suddenly free. Revenge and joy: a sad triumph. Time is impatiently asking her for a sign. She is ready.