A Brief Theory of Travel and the Desert Read online

  “Tell me, which of you two is the best kisser?”

  They stared at each other and started to sob faster than night falls in winter. Until that point they had managed to go for almost an hour without crying.

  “The woman I love reigns supreme when it comes to kisses, and each one is unlike all those that went before,” said the short, plucky one, looking at his brother with renewed contempt. The latter jumped up and tried to throw him a punch, but he was thwarted in the attempt by a bold move on Pavle’s part, which resulted in a bloody nose for the taller of the two. At that point, the stuck-up girl from the School of Fine Arts fainted on my carpet (as if instead of a drop of blood she had seen the image of her own death, now that she had fallen in love).

  The short, plucky brother, looking for all the world like a royal equerry, added after a studied dramatic pause (the stuck-up girl blinked again, fluttering her eyelashes with the nonchalant flapping of a butterfly’s wings) that the woman he loved above all others had Genoa green eyes (although somewhat envious, I was not familiar with the shade) and a crown of dark hair braided into a wreath. During the above-mentioned pause, we all sketched in our imagination the nude figure of the woman, fleshing out her exquisite attributes as his description progressed. Her long hair reached to her hips, which were firm and supple like those of a Classical Greek female figure. It was a promising start, and I was eager to hear more and forget about you for a while (naturally!). And yet, his story had the saddest of endings. It was an unhappy love story with the unhappiest of partings; the shabby, rustically painted building of a train station: a post-war Yugoslavian train station. That says it all . . . Imagine a waiting room with a checkered tile floor and worm-eaten wooden window frames beside the only door, which rattled in the icy March wind. And a sky which sometimes, and only after the war, turned a shocking pink, like the color of strawberry-f lavored chewing gum. The wind whistled and a beggar caught forty winks on one of the benches. The air was thick with the smell of cheap wine on his breath. I shan’t go on, because otherwise I’ll wax rhetorical—much to my professors’ delight. The switchman’s signal sounded and everyone got up to leave the waiting room. She said nothing as she walked toward the cramped railroad car. It was only when he looked at her through the window that the brother understood: not only did the woman not love him but she was already madly in love with another man. Made even more beautiful by her treachery and the announcement that the train was about to depart, she waved the silk handkerchief that she always had with her. She was traveling with three suitcases, each one heavier than the last, with the lightest of the three reserved exclusively for hats, gloves, and scarves. The train pulled out of the station, although where it was going the brother did not know. Incredible though it may seem, he didn’t know her destination. Like the song says, “And she’s always gone too long, / any time she goes away.” In a fit of impotence, he tore off his shirtsleeves, exactly as he later did in my living room in front of everybody assembled there. Pretending that the gap between my living room and the kitchen were the misty glass in the railcar window, he took five calculated steps back, thus revealing to all those present what his beloved, and even the stationmaster, had witnessed on the day of the farewell (the whole scene enveloped in the thick mist rising off the Sava!): a magnificent tattoo on his right bicep:

  I WILL LOVE YOU ETERNALLY, GISELLE

  This is as true as the fact that in his last will and testament Shakespeare bequeathed his second-best bed to his wife, plus—I hasten to add—the corresponding “furniture” or bedding. Now that I mention it, I remember the letters tattooed in mock oblivion green (Genoa green?), faded to the point of almost being erased from his arm as well as my imagination. Looking out the window as I write this, they (the letters and Giselle herself ) vanish in the wake of an ambulance that at this very moment crosses my mind as it passes along my street. I also notice that the sorrel in the garden seems to have grown to fill the empty spaces of the night. The ambulance is not coming for me, the blood that pulses in me and beats against my belly is not yet ready to see the light of day. The sound of ambulances is strange, I remember you saying that night of love (you had come into my story and my home for the second and last time). They wail mournfully through the streets of the city that we inhabit, but sound strangely familiar in foreign cities, telling of human tragedies, our own tragedies, with their metallic echo of other people’s misfortunes.

  Do you want to know how the story of the two brothers ends?

  Take from the story whatever moral you please. Add it to my days without you, read it metaphorically and sum up my life. After all, life is the product of other people’s dreams, and all we can do is make the best of it in the benevolent darkness.

  The love story of the tall, strong, blond brother was just beginning (not without a certain relish for paradox and far-fetched symmetry) in another, faraway Central European train station.

  The second brother proved to be a person with next to no imagination, who had absolutely nothing in common with the melancholy equerry, and it takes a greater effort of the imagination on my part to conjure him up. Moreover, he seemed to be ruled by his unattractive baldness, for baldness—like the color of a person’s eyes—defines character. His story was different from his brother’s. He wasn’t there to meet or say goodbye to a girlfriend. He was in low spirits, far from his native Novi Beograd, and hijacked by the asphyxiating machinery of time. He couldn’t bear any story—starting with that of his own life—that didn’t have a beginning or an end, although we would all be better off if we realized that we are always somewhere in the middle (of time, the hurricane, a story, or the queue at the grocery store). It was not only sadness, but also nostalgia that gripped him and led him to the station that day. Nostalgia for his twenty-two-year-old self, the age of absolute plenitude, when one’s hair grows more vigorously and love is resistant to the corrosion of boredom and habit. He was enjoying a day off work from the German ship that had signed him on as a stoker, so he headed for the station in the city where the ship had docked, searching for others as melancholy as himself. He was looking for someone who perhaps had just said farewell to a beloved wife, a deaf-mute orphan looking for a better life, or a newcomer to those parts who might be feeling overwhelmed by the gloomy, inhospitable atmosphere of that place of transit. Above all, he was looking for tears held back but about to break over the floodgates of eyelids reddened by memories. In the midst of all that sad weariness of life, the lips of a woman flooded the station platforms with light as she stepped off the train, illuminating the face of each and every passenger and disoriented passer-by, including that of the brother. And so, on that godforsaken railroad platform, began the love story between the saddest of stokers and that lady with an indefatigable capacity for love, but whose image eludes my exhausted memory tonight like fine sand slipping through one’s fingers. It is Wednesday, and for the first time I find myself dislocated from my story, but only for as long as it will take me to finish this letter; and then I shall never leave it again. The story of the two brothers will finish onboard a small dinghy (back home in their native Belgrade, on a once-more navigable Danube), sailing up the river with a woman who says she is leaving for somewhere in Germany, while promising to return. On this occasion it was the tall, strong brother whose brown eyes filled with tears, but he never saw her again.

  I felt sorry for the bald, deserted brother, as he stood there on the lonely loading dock; motionless beneath a chiaroscuro sky as he despairingly looked on at the ill-defined traces left by love in its permanent flight. It wasn’t a feeling of sadness that he harbored in his embittered heart. Imitating the mysterious behavior of the brave little equerry, he got up from his chair, spat out a grape pip he had been chewing, and angrily pulled his left sleeve up as far as his shoulder. The other brother was even more surprised than we were. I was sitting with my back to him, so I tried to look at his arm in the ref lection of the mirror in my living room, but that part o
f his body coincided with the hole in one of the corners of that magic looking glass. As there was no ref lection, I thought for a few seconds that he must be another reader who had slipped into the story to visit us.

  Then I remembered that you hadn’t come that Thursday. The illusion—like the mystery—lasted just a few seconds. Then the spell was broken and I read the second prosaic tattoo of the evening:

  YOU’LL PAY FOR THIS, GISELLE

  Several minutes passed between the revelation of the vengeful inscription and the tall brother returning to his seat, rolling down his shirtsleeve as he did so. The two brothers stared at one another, recognizing their single, shared misfortune (which was possibly that of having stumbled into this story). Inguerina changed the subject. Improbable though it might seem, at the end of the evening the two brothers joined in a resigned embrace, the most conventional ending you could imagine for a truly crazy story. Oddly enough, stories don’t always have surprises in store for us. Sometimes they are as dull as life outside fiction, although, generally speaking, everything is worse out there in your world. But, my dear reader, just tell me one thing. Are the concerts at that new club on Kralja Aleksandra Boulevard, the one next to the Technical College, as good out there as they are in my story? Poor Yautsin is dying to know the answer.

  I don’t know what else to say . . . Everybody knows I’m useless at goodbyes. Since that night, the meetings in this story of ours have continued to take place every week without anything eventful or worthy of comment taking place. Although we amuse ourselves, routine leads us—Thursday in, Thursday out—to some vague and imprecise full stop, like stories that end in an anticlimax (as a matter of fact, I prefer them to stories with an unexpected twist at the end). Hope also continues to fade, although not my infinite love for you, dear reader. I have given up hope that I’ll ever see you again . . . I can only hope that I continue to be visited at night by dreams like those I described at the beginning of this letter, here in this room of forgotten steps with its smell of old pipe tobacco. Your soul got locked away somewhere inside me, circulating in my blood, never sleeping, never still. I could cut out my own tongue to stop telling myself stories, but that would solve nothing. So now you have your letter, and the two brothers have their not very edifying story. I’m afraid poor Inguerina will have to go on waiting. Letters finish when they finish.

  ALIEN

  I had suggested several places where we might go for our first vacation as a married couple. I considered the possibility of spending a week on the island of Ischia, of which my only memory was the bitter taste of a fish soup I had eaten there. I also thought about a camping holiday in the Algarve, where I had spent one summer holiday with my aunt and uncle. I even called to inquire about the price of a double room in a B&B on the Frisian Islands, where a colleague in my department had stayed a few months earlier. On his return, he told me about the disquieting experience of seeing the immense curve of the Earth from a beach that stretched miles and miles when the tide was out. He described an eerie sfumato of the blue atmosphere fading into the austere darkness of outer space—a rather improbable image, but one which has stayed with me ever since. However, three months before the summer (around the time I was checking the rates of a Dutch B&B), Alien’s father moved to the island of I., where the hotel chain he worked for had transferred him after thirty years at the same hotel in Lloret de Mar. So we put our plans on hold for a year and Alien decided we should pay her father a visit, especially as our work at the university had prevented us from giving him a hand with the move. In any case, neither of us had ever been there. She took her holidays early and promised to be back in the office at the end of August, before the rest of her colleagues.

  Alien had already been in I. for one week when my plane touched down in the early hours of the morning after a delay to the flight. Amid threats and expressions of mutual commiseration, the passengers started releasing their seat belts without any apparent confidence in the obvious fact that they had landed. I noticed my oxygen mask on the floor, where somebody had trodden on it. I kicked it out of the way. With a mixture of embarrassment and guilt I noted that I still had the fingernail marks—a row of livid half-moons—that the woman in the seat on my right had made when she gripped my wrist. As the other passengers started to stand up, most of them yawning or sneezing because of the blast of cold air on the backs of our necks, I looked at the marks: in that dull, aseptic light their nature, shape, and even their color seemed different.

  After picking up my suitcase from the baggage reclaim, I walked quickly toward the exit. I immediately recognized Alien’s silhouette. She was with her father, who was leaning on the counter of a closed Avis office, talking on his cell phone. I kissed her and gave her father a hug. I noticed that one of his eyes was red, as if he had burst a tiny blood vessel, which accentuated his tired appearance. I looked behind me, and seeing that nobody else on my flight had come through yet, I finally relaxed.

  Alien’s father drove in silence while she and I stared out of our respective windows in the back of the car, holding hands and entwining our fingers like a couple of teenagers. I had prepared an explanation for the fingernail marks in case either of them noticed: I would say they were the result of the cramped seating arrangements on the plane. Alien didn’t notice anything, so I continued to stroke the palm of her hand, exploring with the tip of my index finger an irresistible indentation on her ring. I gave her a summary of my department’s endof-year meeting. Later, as I was recounting a rather distasteful incident that had taken place between two history professors, I heard her father cluck his disapproval.

  The road was unlit and Alien decided to engage her father in conversation so that he wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel. He turned up the volume on the radio, and the voice on the radio suddenly exclaimed, “There is no intimacy in a soulless world.” One after another, I saw the signs of towns and villages that Alien had told me about in the preceding days. She was keen to visit every spot on the island, even the most touristy and crowded areas. On her first day there, after she had unpacked and had breakfast with her father, we spoke on the phone. I was still marking exams, and I continued scribbling on the exam papers while we talked. She told me that her father wasn’t happy. He was dissatisfied with his new circumstances and he felt let down. “You’ve heard those stories about quiet, stoical loners whose lives are measured out in terms of biological processes such as sleeping, eating, drinking, or whatever?” said Alien. “Well, my father is one of them. But suddenly he’s . . . somebody interesting.” “How about you?” I asked. “Oh, I love it. I adore this hot weather.”

  Alien’s father’s house was a single-story building. Apart from the master bedroom where he slept, there was another bedroom piled high with the belongings of Alien’s sister, Inneke, who had decided to stay on in Aarhus, Denmark, where she had been studying on a yearlong Erasmus exchange from her university. She had told her father that she had a boyfriend there and was now trying to get an extension of her grant so that she could stay and move in with him. We left my suitcase in the bedroom and joined Alien’s father in the living room, where he was already dozing in his armchair. The whole place smelt of bleach, but it wasn’t unpleasant. The living room window looked onto the well-tended garden belonging to the residents of the condominium, from which we overheard snatches of languid conversations between the neighbors and the sound of several television sets. I wolfed down my tuna salad sandwich with mayo, and we said goodnight.

  Intermittently, I remembered the episode on the plane. Objectively and dispassionately speaking, it had been exciting. I looked at the marks on my wrist: they had morphed into mauve-colored ciphers.

  When we woke up the following morning, we very hurriedly made love (of sorts) in the diaphanous light that filtered through the blinds. After several days spent sunbathing and swimming in the sea of I., Alien’s body was warm and supple. The oppressive humidity plastered our hair against our foreheads. Just minutes befo
re, she had emerged from the bathroom and checked that her father was not at home. It was Sunday, his day off. Perhaps he had gone for a walk or to buy the newspaper. Or perhaps he had discreetly decided to leave us alone for a while. We giggled and I persuaded her not to phone her father; she wanted to know what time he would be back. Finally, she put a key in the lock of the street door and, wearing a long winter nightdress that belonged to her sister, she double-checked that there was nobody in the main bedroom.

  Afterwards, Alien insisted that we take turns to shower. I was in a good mood, basking in the novelty and relaxation of my surroundings. I pulled up the blinds, and a vivid shaft of yellow light fell onto Inneke’s desk. Completely naked, I went into the living room and, assuming a provocative pose draped over her father’s armchair, I pretended to watch television; she was not amused.

  While Alien was in the bathroom, I returned to the bedroom, put on a bathing suit and browsed Inneke’s shelves. Her books, her CDs, her photographs. One of them was of Alien, Inneke and myself a year earlier, on our wedding day. In another photo, her mother—who at the time had been living with the same man for several months—was skiing, grasping two fluorescent ski poles and smiling at the person taking the photograph. There were pictures of Inneke at the top of Machu Picchu with her arm round the neck of an orange-colored alpaca, and another in which she was wearing a voluminous sky blue scarf, leaning on the rails of one of those shabby ferryboats that go back and forth across the Bosphorus every day. As far as I was concerned, the arrangement was far from ideal. Even though Alien and I had been married for a year, we still had to spend our holidays at her father’s house like two kids, and not even Inneke was expected to do that anymore. Of the two sisters, Inneke was the one most like their father. She had a boyish, athletic frame, with an almost non-existent waist, and she tended to walk quickly with one hand in her pocket. She was just twenty-two. In a few months I would be twenty-eight. What did that gap of six years mean? (Until then, I had never really thought about it.) I had read most of the books on her shelf, although the last time I read a book with any real enthusiasm, I was her age. But I still listened to the same music. If anything, my taste in music now was even more entrenched. Back then I had imagined that by the time I reached my present age I would be listening to symphonies and going to chamber music concerts . . . that I would eventually conform. Why not, after all? In fact, the only difference between Inneke and myself was that she could still choose. It seemed that I had already made my choice.