‘The best thing would be to give him that book Death by Vladimir Jankelevich. And in French, definitely. In the original. Then, before he gets used to death, he will get used to the French language. After that everything will be as smooth as milk ...’
That ‘smooth as milk’ isn’t some foreign expression and the father of our child generally uses it when he’s annoyed and when he means that everything is already going as it should and one should not blaspheme. And that matter of the book Death and Vladimir Jankelevich ... that’s a response to the fact that the mother of our child studied comparative literature and still has a huge list of books whose titles contain the word death. Jankelevich’s title is underlined in red. That means that the book is not translated into our language. It was written in French but, alas, after L’Eventail de Seville I never succeeded in learning more than a couple of hundred French words. Unfortunately, writers have not yet learned to write within such a restricted framework. That is why on my list Jankelevich’s book is still a precious point of unexpended expectation.
Luckily (or not!), The Seville Fan was long ago translated into our language. But, what does that alleviation in the process of accustoming a child to death mean in the face of the fact that you are approaching the page on which the main character dies, and at the same time you can feel the incomparable warmth of your own child against your body.
To be brief and truthful... I confess that this time I succumbed. I suddenly decided to change the ending of the book. Of the top of my head, without previous preparation! It took quite a lot of presence of mind (not something that is taught in comparative literature courses) to prevent the boy noticing the change in the tempo of my reading and the uncertainty in my voice which was more a consequence of my being unaccustomed to lying than to improvisation.
And so Pablo succeeded in not dying, which he was, after all, not accustomed to. Because, when I exhaled and put the closed book down, in its printed pages he was still dead. As I was pronouncing the sentences that were not in the book, it seemed to me that, for the first time in our reading sessions, our boy turned his eyes away from their fixed point. He glanced suspiciously at the book then at my face. A pedagogue would say that he was beginning to get used to the fact that parents tell lies. Or that they become accustomed to sentiment!
I exhaled again in a manner more suited to a person to whom an injustice was being done than one who was in some way sinful. For the first time I thought with understanding of Otilija T., red-haired, intelligent and imaginative, but with a trace of unhealthy fever in her eyes. Many years had passed since we first met. We had known each other for only a short time: we were together in our first year at university and for just half of the second. But still, I remember her more vividly than any other person in our joint photograph at the degree ceremony. If it is my place to judge, the fact that Otilija abandoned her studies of comparative literature was fatefully stimulated by an event that took place in our second year, during the January exams, in the office of a tall, grey-haired professor. He was someone who, during his lectures, had enjoyed listening to the sound of his own voice which was one suited to a theatrical stage. He always looked over our heads as though checking whether his voice was slipping too far away. He would pause and give a little cough, as though he were sitting on Greek Olympus at a time when the irascible gods lived there. And then he would start to speak theatrically again, but so as not to squander his precious voice.
There were five of us that day in his office. It was raining and a high, dead branch which the gardener had not managed to cut off during the spring pruning, kept knocking tediously against the window pane, buffeted by gusts of wind.
It was Otilija’s turn to answer. She was somehow especially different. ‘Like a snowflake on a summer’s day’, as that great Austrian writer whose books are an excellent weapon against shallow sentiment would say. Otilija was a special kind of snowflake. Ample, red-haired. But still, a snowflake on a summer’s day, a red snowflake on a summer’s day. She was unique. Simply a one-of. She was the unusual Otilija T. whom we had called Otikica from the first day. And she was just finishing her excellent answer. All at once the professor fell from his self-loving height into the shallows of a caustic intolerance. Later I realised that this happened to him when he felt that there was someone in front of him who might some day be able to stimulate far more scholarly fire than his cold voice and occasionally his barren pen had dispersed over the years.
The professor asked, just as that dry branch began beating against the glass again:
‘And what was it, young lady, that happened to Anna Karenina in the end? Could you tell us?’
We did not know then that this question contained, in concentrated form, all his sterility and ineptitude. But, even if we had known, we would not have been able to comfort Otilija T. that day. She suddenly became a little island that was hard to reach from the mainland. Her complexion and her hair united in colour. The source of that colour, however, was not her hair but an unhealthy fever in her eyes. Her hair was quite innocent, regardless of the opinions of theoreticians who make a connection between the colour of a woman’s hair and her character and temperament. Would my aunt, who used to recommend The Seville Fan to the readerly attention of a little fair-haired girl, have said:
‘ Oh, and little red-haired girls should read L’Eventail de Seville as well.’
No recommendation of any kind could reach Otilija T. She was a torch, and you cannot blow out a torch. In a voice that we did not recognise, with a verve displayed by unhappy characters who want to change the world, alone and isolated, she said:
‘She married Vronsky. If I were a writer, every book would have a happy end!’
She did not become a writer, even after this announcement. She soon transferred to a different course, situated in a building where dry branches did not knock against the window pane.
She did well in her new course and found a good job. Books continued to have the kind of ends they have. On the whole unhappy, if one asked Otilija T.
She was lucky enough to find a job. But, that was not yet the end. For a while I lost sight of her and then I heard that she had had a baby. Unlike Anna Karenina, whose child, although born out of wedlock, knew that it was blessed by the love and body of Vronsky, of Otilija T.’s child no one could say who the father was. And Otilija T. was silent. In itself, that matter of a child and its father need not be a prescription for an unhappy end. But somehow Otilija T., whom I chanced to encounter in the street pushing a large pram, struck me that way. Like an unfortunate heroine pushing her burden towards the last page of the book.
There, by Onofrio’s Fountain, I thought again of Otilija T. She would have been glad to receive a Greetings from the Adriatic postcard. Not because she had displayed a weakness for sunsets. Simply because the card contained an abundance of the red colour that Otilija T. had liked to choose for her clothes. The colour of her hair was a gift of nature, but it was not decisive in her choice of clothes. Women’s magazines maintain that red hair and a complexion like Otilija T.’s look nicer with the colours of water and moss ... Otilija T.’s choices were largely guided by that fever let loose in her eyes.
We did not, of course, buy the postcards. When we had moved some way from the Boy with Postcards, we were suddenly overcome by a desire for ice-cream.
‘The ones by Onofrio are best!’
That was spoken by our boy’s father. His mother nodded in agreement. The boy was chasing an exhausted pigeon round Orlando’s column. He had already forgotten Onofrio. When the father returned with three ice-creams, the mother