Our Kings

Why not luxuriant foliage or the sobriety of the plains? Why the mountain? On the peninsula, then, there is a man. A man sitting on a two-seater settee. The world is alien to him. Although suddenly he speaks. And for a second it seems like an interaction, an emerging, a showing his blowhole to the seagulls as he takes a breath. But no: it is only the foam of an underwater dialogue that remains out of reach. The detachment of an asteroid that is already orbiting a smaller planet. The hypothesis is confirmed: he is surrounded by other words. And there was a war.

On the other hand, there is a woman, but she has left. She tends towards melodrama, works as a cashier at a corner store three blocks from the beach. She is, at this particular moment, the sole breadwinner in this household. She was grasping a young man, one who would become a Sherpa in Nepal, by the arm. Asking if she could ask him a favour: a big favour, she said. Now she’s gone.

There is a third element, too, that ought not to be underestimated. There is a baby. A few months old, this infant. He can’t talk, can’t walk, his autonomy is insignificant. For him to die, it is enough to do nothing. He’ll die on his own. Now he’s sleeping, but it is feasible to assume that from time to time he is awake.

The first five or six minutes, the stillness was perfect and deceiving. The old Sherpa, the wallpaper man, the baby: no one broke the statutory pact with Medusa. One in the folding chair, another on the settee, and the third in his crib. Each of them petrified by the absent gaze of the lady gorgon who was already pedalling in the direction of the corner store, towards the centre of the peninsula. Without Rabbit in the house, each of them assumed quietism as his doctrine; the exclusive contemplation of the divinity, and everything else, consequently, reduced to nothing.

But that seclusion and asceticism didn’t last long. There are weaknesses, everyone knows that. The old Sherpa changed his position – a leg that wants to cross, a foot that frees itself from the pressure of its flip-flop – and the rest became movement. Medusa replaced by Pandora. The baby awake, clamouring in his half-tongue for his mother, bottles were heated up, colourful toys (luminous toys!) were thrown onto the floor, there was snack time for infants and burping and there were nappies, and songs, indifference was attempted, and then a more servile submission, there was a slight white vomit, there was jumpiness, fatigue, impotence, and, at the least expected moment, a nap that was finally taken back up again in the crib…

And that was just the half of what happened in the three hours and twenty-two minutes that the old Sherpa was in charge of Rabbit’s house.

There was also a dialogue. Half of a dialogue. Or less than that: people spoke. Even less: things were said. Rabbit’s husband, for example, said a number of them. But it was impossible to know who he was speaking to. The old Sherpa also said his piece. And it was impossible to determine if anyone was listening to him or if his voice stayed floating in a space of sterile significations. But there was some exchange, and some things were said, yes.

First was the wallpaper man. He said:

‘We had kings; nobody cared for them.’

The old Sherpa took an interest. From the other extreme of the room, he asked out loud:

‘What kings?’

And he broadened the set of questions without saying a word: Why did no one care for them? Whence such generalised repudiation? The man on the settee didn’t answer. Eight minutes passed. The Sherpa gave up. He was dealing with the baby on the dining room table; he had laid him on top of the tablecloth and was rocking him to sleep. Three more minutes passed. Rabbit’s husband spoke again:

‘They didn’t either.’

And that was it. The old Sherpa made another attempt.

‘Didn’t what?’

The Sherpa and his curiosity: didn’t what? Didn’t care for anybody? Didn’t put much effort in? What? Were they cruel, were they ruthless? There was, of course, no answer.

A wardrobe was painted yellow, a blanket had a print with a merry-go-round. The baby was just about to fall asleep. Or so it seemed. The Sherpa had left him in the crib, in his room. He was feeling fairly proud of his work as a nanny. For a beginner, he had acquitted himself of this situation with quite a bit of dignity. His index finger had been captured by the infant’s hand, eyes closed, wheezing. The old Sherpa sang him a lullaby. A folk song, in reality. But he was whispering it and had thereby transmuted it into a medieval lullaby. When he came to the chorus, he enjambed the words that started with y: yakety-yak, yearning, youngster... It was a relaxing ruse. He was interrupted by a voice in the distance: coming from the sitting room. The intonation was interrogative. The words had escaped him. He poked his head out. He apologised.

‘I didn’t quite hear you.’

‘What were our kings like?’

The question was clear. Less definitive was the addressee. The man on the two-seater settee was still staring at the wall. The Sherpa wondered if it made sense to respond. He decided to do it with a question.

‘Our kings?’

‘Every family that lost a child was compensated with a recently weaned puppy.’

From the crib, the baby started crying.

Why the mountain? And the plateau with its arid rubble? What about the Atlantic Forest, exuberant and salt-sprayed? Later, an hour and forty minutes after Rabbit’s departure, the baby was sleeping again. The man, with his elbows resting on his thighs, his unfathomable gaze on the wall, said:

‘I don’t know of anyone who’s seen them.’

The old Sherpa didn’t answer. Nevertheless, the man on the settee had more questions:

‘And where did they live? There was no castle. How old were they? Were our kings children?’

The young old Sherpa yawned.

There was another period of silence. The baby was still sleeping, the wallpaper man kept quiet. The old Sherpa was distracted. He imagined the house of those two deaf old women to whom he could turn in case of domestic crisis. He imagined them twins. And insufferable. He constructed a house thrumming with senile complaints that, out of saturation, wound up a placid murmur. The overlapping of voices became harmonious, the howls of two hearing-impaired women in the mnemic twilight of their generation. They were sweet, in the end, the voices of those two women reproaching one another for the most horrendous things that happened in their childhood: no longer the breaking of a toy or parental favouritism, no longer a hateful habit or a belligerent attitude, but rather hair pulled out by the roots, little mutilations, the evisceration of pets. The old Sherpa would have liked to take refuge in the warmth of those two inseparable sisters, halves of the same ripe fruit, pretty putrid by this time, in fact, suitable for serving as a nest for worms, nursery for the children of flies.

He thought all that, or he imagined it, the old Sherpa, and meanwhile the sun had already started its descent towards the west and the yellowish light provided a crepuscular quality to Rabbit’s sitting room… The man spoke from his settee:

‘Did our kings care for us?’

The old Sherpa tried to think of a response. Or an expansion of the question: Did kings have desires? When it came to kings, were we dealing with an eroticised State? But he said nothing; very quietly, the man completed his penultimate question:

‘Were they interested in us?’

The Sherpa decided that he would not try to further converse with the wallpaper man. But, a little bit out of guilt and a little in the interest of comfort, he sat down beside him. The settee was now full. It felt cosy, soft. Sunset was an agonising phenomenon. Its pastel hues induced a kind of lethargy. The promise of night time encumbered his eyelids. The Sherpa leaned his head against the back of the settee. He closed his eyes. He wanted to return to his musings about the deaf twins who moved in felt slippers through the corridors of the neighbouring house. He wound up thinking about Rabbit. Did he dream of her? No, it couldn’t be said that he was totally asleep. At moments he was captain of orienting the course of the images in his frontal lobe. From time to time, his reverie had an autonomy.

The stage was the corner store. Behind the bakery aisle, she was waiting for him. Agitated, clandestine, excited by the potential appearance of an inopportune witness among the bags of pita bread. In the fantasy, the Sherpa acted ever so slightly discourteous at first. As though the whole situation were of no interest to him. This permitted him to be distant and at the same time dominating. A word settled in centre stage: clemency. A word evidently wrongly used. There was no clemency of any kind in this plot. There was nothing to forgive. But that word was sufficient to accelerate the progress of the sequence. There was another word that loitered around the construction of the scene: magnanimous. The old Sherpa enjoyed feeling clement and magnanimous. He pictured Rabbit small, scared, desiring. He, meanwhile, couldn’t care less. It was all the same to him: turn on his heel and head out the door of the supermarket or rip apart Rabbit’s thighs with her hipbones. It was all the same to him. But he was magnanimous. That was why he approached Rabbit’s body in this fantasy: he standing, she (it wasn’t very clear why) sitting on the floor, with her knees drawn in against her chest. And that was as far as he got. Up to proximity. He didn’t care about the rest. For this reason, it was she who, from the floor, launched the sexual kinesis of getting up a little, getting on her knees and going straight for genitalia, unfastening belts and zippers with lightning speed between moans of anxiety. He did nothing. Observing from above, like someone who condescends almost tenderly to fulfil the desire of others. Like someone who lets his kids play a little bit more under the stormy skies, despite the fact that they are not allowed to. Like someone who clemently allows them to have a little more fun before ordering them to go inside the house at once, drying them off with a towel and subjecting them to the most brutal of physical punishments.

He was woken by the voice of the wallpaper man:

‘Our kings… Did we figure, even if just for a moment, in their thoughts?’

That was what he said. And then he slowly listed to the right. A ship tilted by the impact of a torpedo. A boat with hulls flooded by the slow flow of the sea into its bowels. Until he was resting his head on the Sherpa’s lap. And there he fell asleep.

That’s how Rabbit found them. The baby in his crib, in the white unconsciousness of neonatal sleep. Her husband – he, too: closed eyes, slow breathing – with his head on the Sherpa’s left thigh. The blind dog wagging his tail, striking it against the legs of the dining table. The old Sherpa himself, staring absently at the wallpaper. It was night: the lights were off.

Without speaking, almost without making any noise at all, she deposited her backpack on the table. She checked in on the baby first. She came back to the sitting room. She knelt so that her head was next to the Sherpa’s knees and stroked her husband’s hair. She said something into his ear. The man on the settee sat up without sudden movements. It would have been hard to say if he was embarrassed, confused, or oblivious to everything. Darkness. She took his hand and led him into the bedroom. He let himself be guided, docile, an out-of-order automaton. A being of thermoplastic polymers shuffling his feet over a planet of overwhelming gravity. The Stations of the Cross for a foam rubber messiah.

When Rabbit returned, she tried to show gratitude. She sat down on the settee in conversational spirit. Whispering, but with a predisposition for eloquence. The continuity of her actions struck the Sherpa as blatant and atrocious. They would chat, they would eat a regional cheese, they would open a bottle of wine, the polar ice caps would melt, adultery would be perpetrated. Right there: on the settee, furtively, facing the wallpaper.

On the other side of the wall, the son and the father of the son. Sleeping, not even disturbed. What if one of them woke up? Would one or the other of them, father or son, comprehend the semiotics of the sounds that would reach him from the sitting room? The touch, the rhythm, the held-back breath? And the signs come morning? Would the father, or the father’s son, decode the slight disorder, the uneven sagging of the cushions, the infinitesimal spillage of the glass of wine on the coffee table? And the blind dog? What sign might his hypertrophied sense of smell perceive by nature and by adaptation?

The Sherpa wanted to leave right away. He stood and adjusted his flip-flops. He was leaving. In a straight line: as he left when the women who looked or who held his gaze would pass. Who passed and laid waste. He wanted to leave quickly. He heard Rabbit saying things to him. First next to the settee, then beside the dining table. Finally, under the doorframe. Mostly they were words of gratitude, a lukewarm offer to let him spend the night there, a mention of unpayable debts, generosity, the virtues of the Samaritans. But all was foggy in the old Sherpa’s ears: he was already encircled by nimbostratus clouds, replete with water in search of condensation. A violent rain that never starts to fall. ‘The sky is clear, tomorrow is going to be a nice day to go to the beach,’ Rabbit said, or gave to understand, or perhaps only wished.

The Sherpa ignored the weather forecast and said goodbye. He started walking. At an absurd velocity: race walking, as they call it at the Olympics. He was surprised by how easy it was to locate the route back to the centre of the peninsula. He remembered the newly weaned puppies. He wondered when, but especially how, Rabbit’s baby was conceived. He didn’t know what to think. He felt uncomfortable, out of place. He noticed something bulging in his pocket. He put his hand inside. Three postcards: Stonehenge, Teotihuacán, the Himalayas.

The next day, he cut his holiday short.