An Authentic Act
by John McGroarty
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: A cold-hearted Russian émigré in Barcelona needs to make a redeeming gesture.
_____________________________________________________________________
1
I could just hear their muffled voices through my earphones. One in front of me and one to my side. They were babbling in their Moscow accent about the stations we passed through. About the meaning of the words. I eyed them surreptitiously. I wondered if they knew. That I was one of them. One was a sallow blonde, gaunt and sickly to the eye. The other was meatier, in a leather biker jacket. Her legs netted black and chunky. I wondered if they were prostitutes escaped from some brothel on the Costa. Or molls for Dmitri or Ivan. Even I had adopted the stereotypes. The rampant outrageous clichés about my countrymen. Demonizing. The great propaganda game once more. The meaty one was looking slant-eyed at my book. Rilke. Luckily in English language. Sublime in any. The part about the derelict house. The part that Heidegger was big on. Poetry as the elementary emergence into words, of existence as being in the world. The train stopped in the tunnel. I thought about my escape. My escape from Petersburg. Not from Petersburg to be exact, no. From the Black Sea. An off season week by the water in a freezing cold town. Our Riviera. Down at the supermarket in the middle of nothing for victuals. I had gone off to look for a couple of bottles of wine in the mega-superstore liquor section. On the way back, two bottles of mid-price Beaujolais in hand, I turned past a finger-smudged mirrored column and stopped. I could see my wife and the sister and the brother and the partners and the kids pushing two trolleys down the central aisle. We had made it in the new Russia. Had supped brew from the new wealth cauldron. I slipped behind the pillar and observed and thought things I had never thought before. Cast off the spell of destiny. Things I had never dared to think. That they were a different species from me. That they had anvil torsos and little upside down metal triangles for heads. That their minds clunked metallic. Iron people. An iron law in their hearts. That the world was theirs and now there wasn’t even hope. That I was unhappy. The sister, Inga, wielded her daughter in her podgy arms, a little baby anvil in red face and diapers, like the first prize in some absurd genetic mechanics competition. Klara would want hers soon. Already fattening up for the ordeal. Cluck, cluck, cluck. I could hear it even now. The clucking. The struggle from nothing to life in my bedroom. The brother with his cuneate head and two brats and his inverted pyramidal frame mounted on two short peg legs. I couldn’t face another night listening to him blubbing on about heavy metal and his ridiculous habit of punning everything and sitting on his arse while everybody else did all the work. This was worse than Christmas. I preferred the old days when it was looked down on. Not approved. When there were no holy days. I am an old communist. A believer. That’s why I couldn’t stomach it. I felt a deep, icy-eyed, unforgiving disgust for the wedge people, my Klara included. Maybe it was my new job. All the travelling. Up in the clouds and down in strange lands speaking strange tongues. I was good at that, strange tongues. Or all the literature. You become an observer. That’s when the ice gets in your eye. That’s when the heart burns and the unholy satire slips out of its little box and rises up in your brain. When you want more. But you don’t know what you want more of just that you can never go back. I dumped the bottles on a shelf of tins of grotesque gammon joints and stinking canned steak offal pies that would clog your veins and fog your right reason. I moved out of the store and into the car park. There were two rented cars. I got in one and shot off. Just like that. An authentic act. It was black dark and misty finger cold. In your eyes and down the nape of your neck. I wasn’t sure what direction I was going in. I tried to find a sign for Sochi. Get on a plane. I would get home, pack, get my passport and go to London, or Prague, or Madrid or Paris, or Berlin, or New Delhi or Anywhere. We were free now to wander the world. They would never find me. They never did, though sometimes I think of Klara and her dark mane and her blue rimmed heron eyes. On the stairs at the underground exit a man has fallen. He is lying on his side with blood oozing from his head and onto the filthy ground. A crowd is round him. I think about stopping but he has enough help. He is a tourist, a florid Dutchman, his little wheeled case propped between him and the wall. I move up the stairs. I think that maybe they will need my languages. My gift of tongues. Be authentic. Stop. Go back. No, sneak past. I move up the stairs. Dark and immense like a Russian novel, Klara. But I didn’t love her. Not like Nuria, my little Spanish Catalan. Literature has no boundaries. Writers have no countries. We spoke about that in my seminar today. About that and about the death of Ivan Ilyich. The Real cutting into the inauthentic. Jorge was good on that. Like an avenging angel, he said. Clever young boy. The most perfect of stories it is, he said. Of course, I know that literature does have a country, only one country: Russia. All else is imitation and petty blundering. I think about Nabokov’s list and Klara’s eyes. How he could disapprove of Dostoevsky, the supreme writer. The last truly authentic one. I am home. Nuria is still at work. Tomorrow Boris and Marianne are coming. I will talk with Boris about Rilke. About our inauthentic times. We will drink a lot of wine. Now I am happy. I lie down. I sleep.
2
When I wake Nuria is home and speaking on the phone. I slept tragic. I awake comic. My ears prick up. She sounds distraught. She is speaking far off in a distant place. The girls on the Metro had forced my mind to wander through the market in Saint Petersburg in my dream, in and out of the stalls, down to the river side. Along Nevsky. Nuria’s voice rises, quivers, falls devastated. Then the phone is thumped down on the table and she marches into the bedroom nearly taking the door off its hinges. Her eyes are brimming over with tears. Her breathing is laboured. Face shrimp-red. Thor is dead, she says. She says it like it was the last act in some Wagnerian opera. While I had been indolent Thor was breathing its last. I am still in a half dream world and struggle to register fully the import. When I do manage to uncloud, I see immediately that it is deadly serious news. News of the worst kind. Friday night ruining. That’s how serious it is.
“What about Cleopatra?” I ask, sitting up. A slight tic in my face gives me away.
Nuria sniffs loudly and begins to whimper.
“Cleopatra is one of the cats, idiota!” she finally expectorates. “That’s your problem, Felix, you never take any interest in anything except your Russian books. My mother has three cats, Vale? Todo lo que tiene en el mundo, get it? Cleopatra, Ra and Nut. Not that you care. And she has…. tenía…. dos caniches, poodles, Thor and Hector. And,” she wells up again, “Thor is now dead, muerto. Esmyert! You are not nice, and you do not want to be.”
I am unsure how to react. It is almost merienda time and we had planned to go down to the Ateneo and look out onto the sea and contemplate the vastness of the world.
“Lo siento, Nurishka, de verdad.” I reach out and put a hand on her shoulder. Pull on her bra strap playfully.
“Don’t Nurishka me, Felix, it’s not even Russian.”
I take another tack. “He was very old, the poodle, and I liked it; he was very, what is the word, virile, always mounting your leg, even at the end, it’s the other one that annoys me, the one that goes YAK YAK YAK all the time, he makes me crazy, crazy as coot, and you know I’ve always liked your mother, that story about the turkey on the motorway and the copperman on the moped cracks me up. Boris likes it too. He split sides snortling when I told him, asked me if he could put it in a story.”
I hand Nuria a hankie.
“You’re not nice, Felix, not a nice person, not a good person, you think other people are a game, you are ….. that thing you and Boris speak about, sí, inauthentic, falso, sí, falso, eso es lo que eres.”
I don’t know what to say or what to do. A dead poodle threatens my seeming existential happiness. This is really some twisted comic existence. I try to control my absurd monster. The beast that reifies all. That turns the whole planet to burlesque. The firmament to pastiche. I get up and give Nurishka a hug. At first she resists, falso, falso, falso, she murmurs, but then gives in. We go out for a walk and speak no more of dead poodles. Or cats with Egyptian mythical nomenclature. To cheer her up I tell her about a daft story that Boris has written for Sputnik magazine. It is about a university professor with acute neurosis. It is in highly comical loony style of Boris. The story starts with the professor stuck in a lift. There is the usual awkward silence and then the professor looks down and realizes that he has gone out in his pyjama bottoms and slippers and then chokes on a throat lozenge to distract attention. It’s Boris’s mad Cossack peasant fear of death on every corner. I embellish it and make it funnier than it really is, doing crazy accents and voices, and Nurishka laughs. We are friends again. I am happy. We stop at a terrace for a beer on the way home. As we turn into her street I think I see her mother slip wraithlike into our building with the other yak yak poodle under her arm. My eyes pop and my ears ring in warning. Sure enough she’s sitting there in a blue safari suit when we open the door watching Sálvame Deluxe on Telecinco with a tragic look on her face. We close the door. Mama? Mama? The TV is deafening. YAK YAK goes the poodle when it sees me. Mama is crying. I say nothing and go into the back room to read Rilke. I think that she should be home with the cats in case something else bad happens. They must be really nervous with death in the house. Animals are supersensitive. Boris would understand that. It’s impossible to concentrate on Rilke’s aristocratic descriptions and otherworldly musings what with the yak yak and the mourning wails and Sálvame Deluxe blaring. There is a Spanish quillo who was abandoned by his mother at birth on the telly meeting up with his family; they’re all weeping and gnashing teeth and stamping hysterically around the studio. The whole country is bawling and caterwauling through Friday night. I think I am going to go crazy off my head and slip out with book in my coat pocket. It’s only seven forty-five. I can have an hour in the peace of the library. I leave them to organize the wake for Thor. The library is packed and I find it difficult to find a seat. Finally I sit down between an old guy reading goggle-eyed the smutty parts in El Jueves and a big fat woman with a red rash down one side of her face and her squat nose in Cincuenta Sombras de Grey. I feel like I am in the first ten minutes of some strange German porno film. At last I manage to get into my book. Rilke is trying to make friends with Eric and explaining about his grandmother. I think about Sister Wedge and her iron little baby. Sooner than expected the music comes on and I know I must go. On the way home I see my upstairs neighbour up ahead. José Antonio has a Philippine wife twenty years younger than him and wears branded sunglasses even on rainy days and in the supermarket. Poor desperate chiquilla I always think when I see her. I meet him sometimes on the stairs and marvel at his sexual magnetism. He caught me staring one time. I was afraid for a couple of days afterwards as Josep told me that one time at a neighbours’ meeting when he didn’t want to pay to fix an old pipe he pulled out a gun and the pipe remained broke. Before her he had a blonde Latvian who panted like an old boiler on summer nights with José Antonio between her thighs. I avoided her and spoke in Catalan if our paths crossed. And before la rusa there was Pili. I think Pili was the real love of his life but she left suddenly in the middle of the night screaming that he was a sick pervert and that God sees everything. I must tell Boris about him. He can put him in one of his madcap stories. He would be perfect for The Sexual Life of a Submarine, one Boris hasn’t finished about some durak who only gets turned on by submarine sounds. When I arrive home things are really quiet. No trash TV, no yak yak, no sobbing. Just Vangelis playing softly. Then Nurishka emerges. And starts. Where did you go, why did you leave like that, my mother was really offended, you are not a nice person, not a human being, her poodle is dead, you didn’t even look at her, didn’t offer condolence, first the divorce, then Rocky, now Thor, you are not nice. My head is swimming. I left to give you space I say. Nurishka goes into the bedroom and closes the door tight. Suddenly I feel guilty. It is true. I am a feelingless monster. Nurishka is not Klara. She’s different. I can’t just leave this time. Children are the flowers of life, we say, the mother-in-law is a man eating plant, a cactus of death. I feel even more guilty at this thought. I am not human. No empathy. This is not authenticity. The ice in your eye. It’s easy to break out but much more difficult to get back in. I think again about Rilke. This time about the panther in the cage. A thousand bars. The world is the smallest of circles. I sit down on the sofa. I close my eyes. I am not happy now.
3
I sit in the silence I was looking for, reading. Rilke is praising women. The seamstresses and the lovers and the forgotten and the lonely. The silk workers who surely must have gone to heaven. All women. And I feel bad. There is silence from the room where Nurishka lies. After another hour on the sofa thinking about the ice in my eye, and about Klara and about Nurishka, and about authenticity I come to a decision. I go down into the car and drive to the mother-in-law´s house. I am an old communist but sometimes I think God exists and gives you chances. Sends you trials and tests to mould and sculpt you into something better than you are. When I press the buzzer I can hear the mad yak yak almost overwhelming the sane order of God’s trial planet. I hesitate and remember my cat allergy but finally announce my presence and go up the stairs. When she opens the door the smell of cats is overpowering and the air is fur thick and my eyes start to itch and a palpitating welt comes out on my neck but still I push on. I say how sorry I am about Thor, that I didn’t get a chance before, that she left too soon. My eyes are now streaming and I am sneezing at a rate of four sneezes a minute. It’s causing my lumbago to stir. But I am happy. I feel that I am growing. I try not to look at all the kitsch Egyptology on the mantelpiece. The chipped Cleopatra busts. The plastic pyramids. No absurd monster to spoil things. I try not to think about Boris. From the far wall, a huge blow up of Ramses the Great looks down on me. He seems to be shaking his crook at me. Tempting me. The cats are lined up on the sofa observing. The mother-in-law starts to cry again and passes me a hankie. She has forgotten about my allergy and thinks I am crying for the poodle. Devastated for the poodle. She starts to tell me the whole life story of Thor ever since she bought him after finally kicking out her control freak husband. Her whole life of suffering. Sacrificed to the conformity of her age. She was one who didn’t get away. It was an act of rebellion. The poodle. A way of asserting her personhood. My eyes are so sulphurous that I think I will be blind soon. I rush out onto the terrace and breathe in fresh cat-free air. Wipe my eyes. The mother-in-law is now telling me about the time the dog was run over. About the details of all the visits to the vet. Yak yak yak, goes the other one. I have an idea. Inmaculada Concepción, I begin. Conchi, she says. But this is like a funeral, I say. Still, Conchi. We have both stopped crying. She crying. I streaming. I knew you were a good person, Felix, she says. I’m sorry if I was angry. I have an idea, I say. In Russia when a pet dies we always bury some object belonging to it. Like an offering to the Gods. To set things right in the universe again. I’m always telling people about invented traditions in Russia. It was Boris’s idea. I look around and my bleeding eyes fall on a little pink cuddly toy dog with ribbons. Conchi follows my gaze. That’s Thor’s girlfriend, she says. I am lost for words. My left eye starts to water again. Perfecto, I say. I see in the corner a balloon in a heart shape. It says Vota a PSC with an optimistic smiley face. We go down to my car. I have the balloon in one hand and Thor’s girlfriend under my other arm. We drive up into the hills of Collserola. It is really dignified, like a funeral cortege. I tell myself I won’t let Boris put this in a daft story (well, I might). This is higher. Half comedy. Half tragedy. I look in the glove compartment for CDs and put on Carmina Burana at full blast. Oh Fortuna!! You can never break the spell! We drive on. Conchi is sniffling but seemly. I finally pull over. We walk into the woods, into the dark shadows of the white pines. I dig a little hole and Conchi places Thor’s girlfriend softly but solemnly into the land. I cover her over and we pray. Pray for all the poodles that have gone before and those that will go hereafter. I try not to but my mind turns to the yak yak one. Conchi smiles and takes my hand. We walk back to the car. We stop. I let the balloon go and it floats off up into the blue sky. I think about Klara and the wedge family. I’m sorry for all that. About Nurishka. About Boris and his mad tales. I wonder if the balloon will make it to Russia. Maybe I should have written a message. I feel it has taken some of the ice from my eye up into the stratosphere with it. Maybe I will be able to get back in. Maybe for all its absurdity, I have finally committed a truly authentic act.
Swearwords: None.
Description: A cold-hearted Russian émigré in Barcelona needs to make a redeeming gesture.
_____________________________________________________________________
1
I could just hear their muffled voices through my earphones. One in front of me and one to my side. They were babbling in their Moscow accent about the stations we passed through. About the meaning of the words. I eyed them surreptitiously. I wondered if they knew. That I was one of them. One was a sallow blonde, gaunt and sickly to the eye. The other was meatier, in a leather biker jacket. Her legs netted black and chunky. I wondered if they were prostitutes escaped from some brothel on the Costa. Or molls for Dmitri or Ivan. Even I had adopted the stereotypes. The rampant outrageous clichés about my countrymen. Demonizing. The great propaganda game once more. The meaty one was looking slant-eyed at my book. Rilke. Luckily in English language. Sublime in any. The part about the derelict house. The part that Heidegger was big on. Poetry as the elementary emergence into words, of existence as being in the world. The train stopped in the tunnel. I thought about my escape. My escape from Petersburg. Not from Petersburg to be exact, no. From the Black Sea. An off season week by the water in a freezing cold town. Our Riviera. Down at the supermarket in the middle of nothing for victuals. I had gone off to look for a couple of bottles of wine in the mega-superstore liquor section. On the way back, two bottles of mid-price Beaujolais in hand, I turned past a finger-smudged mirrored column and stopped. I could see my wife and the sister and the brother and the partners and the kids pushing two trolleys down the central aisle. We had made it in the new Russia. Had supped brew from the new wealth cauldron. I slipped behind the pillar and observed and thought things I had never thought before. Cast off the spell of destiny. Things I had never dared to think. That they were a different species from me. That they had anvil torsos and little upside down metal triangles for heads. That their minds clunked metallic. Iron people. An iron law in their hearts. That the world was theirs and now there wasn’t even hope. That I was unhappy. The sister, Inga, wielded her daughter in her podgy arms, a little baby anvil in red face and diapers, like the first prize in some absurd genetic mechanics competition. Klara would want hers soon. Already fattening up for the ordeal. Cluck, cluck, cluck. I could hear it even now. The clucking. The struggle from nothing to life in my bedroom. The brother with his cuneate head and two brats and his inverted pyramidal frame mounted on two short peg legs. I couldn’t face another night listening to him blubbing on about heavy metal and his ridiculous habit of punning everything and sitting on his arse while everybody else did all the work. This was worse than Christmas. I preferred the old days when it was looked down on. Not approved. When there were no holy days. I am an old communist. A believer. That’s why I couldn’t stomach it. I felt a deep, icy-eyed, unforgiving disgust for the wedge people, my Klara included. Maybe it was my new job. All the travelling. Up in the clouds and down in strange lands speaking strange tongues. I was good at that, strange tongues. Or all the literature. You become an observer. That’s when the ice gets in your eye. That’s when the heart burns and the unholy satire slips out of its little box and rises up in your brain. When you want more. But you don’t know what you want more of just that you can never go back. I dumped the bottles on a shelf of tins of grotesque gammon joints and stinking canned steak offal pies that would clog your veins and fog your right reason. I moved out of the store and into the car park. There were two rented cars. I got in one and shot off. Just like that. An authentic act. It was black dark and misty finger cold. In your eyes and down the nape of your neck. I wasn’t sure what direction I was going in. I tried to find a sign for Sochi. Get on a plane. I would get home, pack, get my passport and go to London, or Prague, or Madrid or Paris, or Berlin, or New Delhi or Anywhere. We were free now to wander the world. They would never find me. They never did, though sometimes I think of Klara and her dark mane and her blue rimmed heron eyes. On the stairs at the underground exit a man has fallen. He is lying on his side with blood oozing from his head and onto the filthy ground. A crowd is round him. I think about stopping but he has enough help. He is a tourist, a florid Dutchman, his little wheeled case propped between him and the wall. I move up the stairs. I think that maybe they will need my languages. My gift of tongues. Be authentic. Stop. Go back. No, sneak past. I move up the stairs. Dark and immense like a Russian novel, Klara. But I didn’t love her. Not like Nuria, my little Spanish Catalan. Literature has no boundaries. Writers have no countries. We spoke about that in my seminar today. About that and about the death of Ivan Ilyich. The Real cutting into the inauthentic. Jorge was good on that. Like an avenging angel, he said. Clever young boy. The most perfect of stories it is, he said. Of course, I know that literature does have a country, only one country: Russia. All else is imitation and petty blundering. I think about Nabokov’s list and Klara’s eyes. How he could disapprove of Dostoevsky, the supreme writer. The last truly authentic one. I am home. Nuria is still at work. Tomorrow Boris and Marianne are coming. I will talk with Boris about Rilke. About our inauthentic times. We will drink a lot of wine. Now I am happy. I lie down. I sleep.
2
When I wake Nuria is home and speaking on the phone. I slept tragic. I awake comic. My ears prick up. She sounds distraught. She is speaking far off in a distant place. The girls on the Metro had forced my mind to wander through the market in Saint Petersburg in my dream, in and out of the stalls, down to the river side. Along Nevsky. Nuria’s voice rises, quivers, falls devastated. Then the phone is thumped down on the table and she marches into the bedroom nearly taking the door off its hinges. Her eyes are brimming over with tears. Her breathing is laboured. Face shrimp-red. Thor is dead, she says. She says it like it was the last act in some Wagnerian opera. While I had been indolent Thor was breathing its last. I am still in a half dream world and struggle to register fully the import. When I do manage to uncloud, I see immediately that it is deadly serious news. News of the worst kind. Friday night ruining. That’s how serious it is.
“What about Cleopatra?” I ask, sitting up. A slight tic in my face gives me away.
Nuria sniffs loudly and begins to whimper.
“Cleopatra is one of the cats, idiota!” she finally expectorates. “That’s your problem, Felix, you never take any interest in anything except your Russian books. My mother has three cats, Vale? Todo lo que tiene en el mundo, get it? Cleopatra, Ra and Nut. Not that you care. And she has…. tenía…. dos caniches, poodles, Thor and Hector. And,” she wells up again, “Thor is now dead, muerto. Esmyert! You are not nice, and you do not want to be.”
I am unsure how to react. It is almost merienda time and we had planned to go down to the Ateneo and look out onto the sea and contemplate the vastness of the world.
“Lo siento, Nurishka, de verdad.” I reach out and put a hand on her shoulder. Pull on her bra strap playfully.
“Don’t Nurishka me, Felix, it’s not even Russian.”
I take another tack. “He was very old, the poodle, and I liked it; he was very, what is the word, virile, always mounting your leg, even at the end, it’s the other one that annoys me, the one that goes YAK YAK YAK all the time, he makes me crazy, crazy as coot, and you know I’ve always liked your mother, that story about the turkey on the motorway and the copperman on the moped cracks me up. Boris likes it too. He split sides snortling when I told him, asked me if he could put it in a story.”
I hand Nuria a hankie.
“You’re not nice, Felix, not a nice person, not a good person, you think other people are a game, you are ….. that thing you and Boris speak about, sí, inauthentic, falso, sí, falso, eso es lo que eres.”
I don’t know what to say or what to do. A dead poodle threatens my seeming existential happiness. This is really some twisted comic existence. I try to control my absurd monster. The beast that reifies all. That turns the whole planet to burlesque. The firmament to pastiche. I get up and give Nurishka a hug. At first she resists, falso, falso, falso, she murmurs, but then gives in. We go out for a walk and speak no more of dead poodles. Or cats with Egyptian mythical nomenclature. To cheer her up I tell her about a daft story that Boris has written for Sputnik magazine. It is about a university professor with acute neurosis. It is in highly comical loony style of Boris. The story starts with the professor stuck in a lift. There is the usual awkward silence and then the professor looks down and realizes that he has gone out in his pyjama bottoms and slippers and then chokes on a throat lozenge to distract attention. It’s Boris’s mad Cossack peasant fear of death on every corner. I embellish it and make it funnier than it really is, doing crazy accents and voices, and Nurishka laughs. We are friends again. I am happy. We stop at a terrace for a beer on the way home. As we turn into her street I think I see her mother slip wraithlike into our building with the other yak yak poodle under her arm. My eyes pop and my ears ring in warning. Sure enough she’s sitting there in a blue safari suit when we open the door watching Sálvame Deluxe on Telecinco with a tragic look on her face. We close the door. Mama? Mama? The TV is deafening. YAK YAK goes the poodle when it sees me. Mama is crying. I say nothing and go into the back room to read Rilke. I think that she should be home with the cats in case something else bad happens. They must be really nervous with death in the house. Animals are supersensitive. Boris would understand that. It’s impossible to concentrate on Rilke’s aristocratic descriptions and otherworldly musings what with the yak yak and the mourning wails and Sálvame Deluxe blaring. There is a Spanish quillo who was abandoned by his mother at birth on the telly meeting up with his family; they’re all weeping and gnashing teeth and stamping hysterically around the studio. The whole country is bawling and caterwauling through Friday night. I think I am going to go crazy off my head and slip out with book in my coat pocket. It’s only seven forty-five. I can have an hour in the peace of the library. I leave them to organize the wake for Thor. The library is packed and I find it difficult to find a seat. Finally I sit down between an old guy reading goggle-eyed the smutty parts in El Jueves and a big fat woman with a red rash down one side of her face and her squat nose in Cincuenta Sombras de Grey. I feel like I am in the first ten minutes of some strange German porno film. At last I manage to get into my book. Rilke is trying to make friends with Eric and explaining about his grandmother. I think about Sister Wedge and her iron little baby. Sooner than expected the music comes on and I know I must go. On the way home I see my upstairs neighbour up ahead. José Antonio has a Philippine wife twenty years younger than him and wears branded sunglasses even on rainy days and in the supermarket. Poor desperate chiquilla I always think when I see her. I meet him sometimes on the stairs and marvel at his sexual magnetism. He caught me staring one time. I was afraid for a couple of days afterwards as Josep told me that one time at a neighbours’ meeting when he didn’t want to pay to fix an old pipe he pulled out a gun and the pipe remained broke. Before her he had a blonde Latvian who panted like an old boiler on summer nights with José Antonio between her thighs. I avoided her and spoke in Catalan if our paths crossed. And before la rusa there was Pili. I think Pili was the real love of his life but she left suddenly in the middle of the night screaming that he was a sick pervert and that God sees everything. I must tell Boris about him. He can put him in one of his madcap stories. He would be perfect for The Sexual Life of a Submarine, one Boris hasn’t finished about some durak who only gets turned on by submarine sounds. When I arrive home things are really quiet. No trash TV, no yak yak, no sobbing. Just Vangelis playing softly. Then Nurishka emerges. And starts. Where did you go, why did you leave like that, my mother was really offended, you are not a nice person, not a human being, her poodle is dead, you didn’t even look at her, didn’t offer condolence, first the divorce, then Rocky, now Thor, you are not nice. My head is swimming. I left to give you space I say. Nurishka goes into the bedroom and closes the door tight. Suddenly I feel guilty. It is true. I am a feelingless monster. Nurishka is not Klara. She’s different. I can’t just leave this time. Children are the flowers of life, we say, the mother-in-law is a man eating plant, a cactus of death. I feel even more guilty at this thought. I am not human. No empathy. This is not authenticity. The ice in your eye. It’s easy to break out but much more difficult to get back in. I think again about Rilke. This time about the panther in the cage. A thousand bars. The world is the smallest of circles. I sit down on the sofa. I close my eyes. I am not happy now.
3
I sit in the silence I was looking for, reading. Rilke is praising women. The seamstresses and the lovers and the forgotten and the lonely. The silk workers who surely must have gone to heaven. All women. And I feel bad. There is silence from the room where Nurishka lies. After another hour on the sofa thinking about the ice in my eye, and about Klara and about Nurishka, and about authenticity I come to a decision. I go down into the car and drive to the mother-in-law´s house. I am an old communist but sometimes I think God exists and gives you chances. Sends you trials and tests to mould and sculpt you into something better than you are. When I press the buzzer I can hear the mad yak yak almost overwhelming the sane order of God’s trial planet. I hesitate and remember my cat allergy but finally announce my presence and go up the stairs. When she opens the door the smell of cats is overpowering and the air is fur thick and my eyes start to itch and a palpitating welt comes out on my neck but still I push on. I say how sorry I am about Thor, that I didn’t get a chance before, that she left too soon. My eyes are now streaming and I am sneezing at a rate of four sneezes a minute. It’s causing my lumbago to stir. But I am happy. I feel that I am growing. I try not to look at all the kitsch Egyptology on the mantelpiece. The chipped Cleopatra busts. The plastic pyramids. No absurd monster to spoil things. I try not to think about Boris. From the far wall, a huge blow up of Ramses the Great looks down on me. He seems to be shaking his crook at me. Tempting me. The cats are lined up on the sofa observing. The mother-in-law starts to cry again and passes me a hankie. She has forgotten about my allergy and thinks I am crying for the poodle. Devastated for the poodle. She starts to tell me the whole life story of Thor ever since she bought him after finally kicking out her control freak husband. Her whole life of suffering. Sacrificed to the conformity of her age. She was one who didn’t get away. It was an act of rebellion. The poodle. A way of asserting her personhood. My eyes are so sulphurous that I think I will be blind soon. I rush out onto the terrace and breathe in fresh cat-free air. Wipe my eyes. The mother-in-law is now telling me about the time the dog was run over. About the details of all the visits to the vet. Yak yak yak, goes the other one. I have an idea. Inmaculada Concepción, I begin. Conchi, she says. But this is like a funeral, I say. Still, Conchi. We have both stopped crying. She crying. I streaming. I knew you were a good person, Felix, she says. I’m sorry if I was angry. I have an idea, I say. In Russia when a pet dies we always bury some object belonging to it. Like an offering to the Gods. To set things right in the universe again. I’m always telling people about invented traditions in Russia. It was Boris’s idea. I look around and my bleeding eyes fall on a little pink cuddly toy dog with ribbons. Conchi follows my gaze. That’s Thor’s girlfriend, she says. I am lost for words. My left eye starts to water again. Perfecto, I say. I see in the corner a balloon in a heart shape. It says Vota a PSC with an optimistic smiley face. We go down to my car. I have the balloon in one hand and Thor’s girlfriend under my other arm. We drive up into the hills of Collserola. It is really dignified, like a funeral cortege. I tell myself I won’t let Boris put this in a daft story (well, I might). This is higher. Half comedy. Half tragedy. I look in the glove compartment for CDs and put on Carmina Burana at full blast. Oh Fortuna!! You can never break the spell! We drive on. Conchi is sniffling but seemly. I finally pull over. We walk into the woods, into the dark shadows of the white pines. I dig a little hole and Conchi places Thor’s girlfriend softly but solemnly into the land. I cover her over and we pray. Pray for all the poodles that have gone before and those that will go hereafter. I try not to but my mind turns to the yak yak one. Conchi smiles and takes my hand. We walk back to the car. We stop. I let the balloon go and it floats off up into the blue sky. I think about Klara and the wedge family. I’m sorry for all that. About Nurishka. About Boris and his mad tales. I wonder if the balloon will make it to Russia. Maybe I should have written a message. I feel it has taken some of the ice from my eye up into the stratosphere with it. Maybe I will be able to get back in. Maybe for all its absurdity, I have finally committed a truly authentic act.
About the Author
John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His long short story Rainbow, his novel The Tower and his short fiction collection Everywhere are McStorytellers publications.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.