The Book
I
I SIMPLY call it the Book, without qualifications or epithets, and there is in this abstinence and restraint a helpless sigh, silent capitulation in the face of the immeasurableness of the transcendent — for no word, no allusion can glisten, scent the air, or drift with that shudder of terror, any inkling of that thing without a name, the very first taste of which, on the tip of the tongue, exceeds our capacity for rapture. For what can the pathos of adjectives or the haughtiness of epithets avail against that measureless thing, that magnificence beyond reckoning? The reader, in any case, the true reader on whom this novel relies, will surely understand — when I look deep into his eyes and shine there, with that same radiance. And in that short but forceful look, in a fleeting grip of the hand, he will apprehend, accept, anticipate — he will close his eyes in rapture at that profound recognition. For, indeed, under the table that separates us, do we not all secretly hold one another by the hand?
The Book... Somewhere at the dawn of childhood, the first daybreak of life, the horizon shone with its gentle light. It lay in its full glory on Father’s desk, while Father, quietly engrossed in it, patiently rubbed with his licked finger its ridge of decals, until the white paper began to mist, to blur, to loom with blissful anticipation, and shreds of tissue-paper suddenly peeled away to disclose a peacock-eye and mascaraed rim — and my swooning gaze fell into a virgin dawn of godly colours, into wonderful dampness of the purest azures.
Oh, that peeling away, that invasion of splendour. Oh, blissful spring. Oh, Father...
Sometimes Father would rise from the Book and leave the room. And I was left with it, all alone, and a wind moved through its pages — and visions arose.
And as the wind silently turned those pages over, blowing the colours and figures away, a shudder ran through the columns of its text, releasing flocks of swallows and skylarks from among the letters. It rose into the air, scattering page after page, and gently suffused the landscape, which it sated with its hues. At times it slept, and the wind quietly blew it around like a cabbage rose, opened its leaves, sheet after sheet, one eyelid under another, all of them blind, velvety and lulled to sleep, each concealing, deep within, an azure pupil, its peacock core, a screeching nest of humming-birds.
That was very long ago. Mother had not yet joined us. I spent the days alone with Father in our room, as great as the world in those days.
Prismatic crystals dangling from the lamp filled the room with scattered colours; a rainbow was dispersed over all the corners; and, as the lamp turned on its chains, the whole room meandered in fragments of the rainbow, as if the spheres of the seven planets, spinning around, were each passing the other by. I liked to stand between Father’s legs, clasping them at either side like columns. Sometimes, he wrote letters. I sat on his desk and observed with rapture his flourished signature, convoluted and swirling, like the trills of a coloratura soprano. Smiles budded in the wallpaper; eyes hatched out; somersaults turned. From a long straw, Father blew soap bubbles into the rainbow-hued space to amuse me. They bounced off the walls and burst, leaving their colours hanging in the air.
Then Mother arrived, and that bright, early idyll ended. Seduced by Mother’s caresses, I forgot about Father; my life trundled along a new, different track, without holidays, without wonders, and I might have forgotten forever all about the Book, were it not for that night and that dream.
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