Cut Throat Dog (24 page)

No, says Shakespeare. My sins don’t bother me. Like all the tellers of perfect tall tales, Mohammed was very well acquainted with human nature. He knew that it was nature that made men fear death, and nature that made him
submissive and in need of love, protection and security. This fear is what makes people crowd together and create societies. Have you ever asked yourself what society is based on?

Common interests? guesses Yadanuga.

No, my friend, says Shakespeare. Society is based on imitation. Human socialization is a process which is entirely based on the act of imitation. That’s why the lives of people who live in societies is an imitation of life. And that’s why they love stories which are an imitation of an imitation of life so much. The natural fear of death drives people to run away from life to the imitation of life. Because only he who lives can die—anyone who isn’t alive can’t die. And therefore, anyone who devotes his whole life to the imitation of life, and avoids living life as it is in the original before any imitation, is ostensibly protected from death.

What exactly do you call the imitation of life? Yadanuga demands a clarification, and Shakespeare clarifies:

All socialized human behavior. Everything that you do in the framework of a community, tribe, nation, religion, army, state, system.

Tell me one thing, if any, that you did outside those frameworks, demands Yadanuga.

I want to escape from any imitation that precedes the original, declares Shakespeare, and immediately regrets the declaration, and adds: I aspire to the performance of an act that is pure action, an act that can’t be made into a story.

What I’m hearing from you now contradicts everything I knew about you, states Yadanuga.

What you’re hearing from me now contradicts everything I myself knew about me before I opened my mouth to answer your question about who I am, admits Shakespeare, and the truth is that I’m not committed to everything I just said. If we go on talking I may say things that will contradict what I said up to now, and in another minute or two
I may do things that will have no connection to what I am about to say.

In other words: what was is nothing, and what will be is also nothing, Yadanuga begins to develop an idea, and Shakespeare hastens to complete it:

And this union of the nothing that was and the nothing that will be permits you to do anything at all in the present.

That can lead to crime or madness, warns Yadanuga.

Precisely the opposite, says Shakespeare. Crime is always an imitation. There is no original crime. After the first murder, every murder is only an imitation of it and of all the others that will come after it. Every rape is an imitation of all the rapes that preceded it, and every theft is an imitation of the thefts that came before it. The very urge to commit a crime comes from the aspiration to imitate a previous personal example. Take the suicide bombers. Every suicide imitates the ones who preceded him in every particular. He wears the same clothes, binds his head in exactly the same green band, and parrots the words and sentences that scores of suicides have already recited before him. The suicide bomber is entirely an imitation of an imitation, and he himself serves as a role-model for children and youths who aspire to imitate his act. Crime is perhaps the most striking example of an act which is all imitation without anything original about it, and therefore it’s no wonder that this act is so connected to the Sura of the Cow: If you are righteous, you must aspire to pass quickly to the next world. Because of its imitative nature, crime has a past and a future. On no account can it be born of the union of the nothing with the nothing. Only the unique union of the nothing with the nothing can give birth to an act that will not be an imitation or a duplication of any other act, and therefore it will also be an act with no meaning, an act that is all invention, all imagination, all body.

And it’s an act like this that you’re going to perform now? Yadanuga presses him.

Perhaps, says Shakespeare. The truth is that I don’t know yet what I’m going to do now. I could get up this minute and travel to a place where I’ve never been, and which is nothing to me. Like for instance Oregon, or New Mexico, and meet someone there who may be Adonis and may not be Adonis, and clarify something with him quietly, or get into a confrontation with him because of a girl he calls Winnie, and who calls herself Melissa, or Timberlake, and some judge once called her Pipa, and I don’t owe her anything, and I don’t feel anything for her, and I don’t have any urge or need to do anything for her, and at the same time I might kill or be killed for her.

You know what, Shakespeare, confesses Yadanuga, sometimes it seems to me that you make things up and exaggerate wildly, or else you’re simply a compulsive liar.

You know what, Yadanuga, declares Shakespeare, if I lie I only do it in order to assert one indisputable truth, which is that it’s impossible to determine what the truth is.

You want me to believe you that your story with this Melissa isn’t a love story, but a story about nothing, but I’m telling you that it’s a love story.

What’s a love story? asks Shakespeare.

It’s a story about what happens between two people who love each other, says Timberlake as she leans forward over the table, on the terrace of a seafood restaurant on the banks of the Indian River. In the river dolphins frolic, leaping in silver sinusoidal arcs against the background of the sunset and the evening enveloping the coconut palms on the east
coast of the Buena Vista Park, and her tongue, which has licked so much, very delicately licks the salt from the corners of his eyes, and her tearful eyes laugh at him:

So they call you Shakespeare, your executioner friends?

Yes, he laughs, and sometimes even Bill.

Tell me the truth, Bill, she says and wraps his hand in her fingers, why do you do it? I don’t understand anything anymore. You rescue me from Tony’s claws. You risk your life for me. Because he won’t accept it, he’ll try to murder you to get me back in his control. And now you give me a Christmas holiday like nothing I’ve ever had in my fucking life before. You take me to Palm Beach to spend New Year’s Eve at Breakers Hotel, and you do the most wonderful thing for me, which I can’t even believe is happening: you don’t try to fuck me. I lie in bed next to you at night and I feel your big warm body responding when I touch you.

If you didn’t let me touch you, I would understand that I was involved with someone so in love with himself that he can’t stand anybody else touching him. I already had a hunk like that once. He was a model for underpants and swim-wear, and he was also one of a group of men who did a striptease act for audiences of hysterical women. He paid me good money. He would take off his clothes and walk round the room naked, like you, but unlike you, he would open all the closet doors with mirrors, and set them at an angle that allowed him to see himself in all of them at once, and he would contemplate his perfect body, and make me look at him too and tell him how gorgeous he was and how I was dying to fuck him. It was all an act of course, because all that magnificent body with its flat stomach and its big prick gave rise in me to nothing but boredom. He would stand in front of the mirror and talk about himself, look what beautiful hands I have, and I would have to repeat after him like a parrot: What beautiful hands you have. Look what an
adorable bum I have. Your bum is really adorable. And so it would go on, sometimes for half an hour, and we would go into minute details, about his neck and his lips and his nipples and his prick, I repeated whatever he said like a broken record, until he came just from talking about how gorgeous he was. And when he came he would stand in front of the mirror with his hands spread out at his sides, without touching himself, like Jesus Christ, and he only needed me as a witness. And sometimes, when I tried to touch him, just out of curiosity, he would lose his temper and yell at me not to dare to come near him. I’ve already seen more than a few ugly things in my short life, but believe me that I’ve never seen anything so pathetic as that underwear model with his love for his perfect body.

Why am I telling you this? Because you let me touch you, and I can feel that it gives you pleasure. You can’t hide it from me. I can see what happens to your body. And you can feel too that at these moments I’m
ready
to fuck you, sometimes it even seems to me for a moment that I
almost want
to do it with you. We could have done it easily. But you don’t do it with me. Maybe you’re waiting for
me
to do it to you? For me to rape you? I could have done it a few times already. Everything was ready. All I had to do was sit on top of you and slide you into me. But I don’t want to do anything to you that you don’t want, just as you apparently don’t want to do anything to me that I don’t want, and it’s the first time in my fucked up life that somebody considers my wishes. Every time I stroked you and got it up, I said to myself: In a second he’ll grab hold of you and open your legs and fuck you, but you’re made of stuff I’ve never come across before.

Okay, I’m not pretty, I know. But you’re not exactly gorgeous either. You say so yourself. But sometimes it seems to me that from the two not beautiful people we are,
something far more beautiful could emerge than what comes out of all kinds of beautiful people. And perhaps what’s happening between us is precisely that beautiful thing?

You simply give me rest. The most wonderful rest I’ve ever had in my life. But why do you do all this for me? I don’t dare to think that you love me. I lie next to you naked. I stroke you. And I feel good. I feel so good. You’ve taught me something. For the first time in my life I’m restraining myself. And it’s so good. It’s so wonderful to feel it and not to do anything with it. Just to lie there, body touching body, and not to do anything. How long can we go on like this, before we do it? All you have to do is take me in your strong hands and lift me up, and my legs will open of their own accord, and you’ll only have to lower me gently and put me on top of you. Why don’t you do it to me? How do you succeed in restraining yourself? Is it a sign that you don’t love me? Or perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I don’t know what love is at all. There is such a thing as love, isn’t there?

What is love? What happens to us when we’re in bed, is that love? When you lie naked on your back, quiet as the Indian River, with a dolphin smile, and I fawn on you and splash in your dolphin river and chatter like a myna bird. Do you love me? If you love me you hide it from me very well. In any case, up to now you’ve never said it to me, I love you. And I actually like that. Because in the fucking world where I’ve been living up to now, that’s the first thing that every fucking guy says to every fucking woman when he wants to fuck her without paying the price. After they’ve paid they don’t say anything anymore. They get dressed and go.

Maybe you’re a saint? No. You’re not. You’re an executioner. And I’m not going only by what you told me about yourself. I’m talking about what I can feel in you. You’re not the saintly type, not at all. You’re totally down to earth,
a man of flesh and blood, and I’ll bet a lot of sperm as well. Sometimes I feel like doing it to you just to prove that what I feel is true. One day, or one night, I’ll do it. I’ll give you a hard-on like you’ve never had before, you know by now that I can do it, and neither of us will be able to restrain ourselves any longer and we’ll fall on each other and fuck and fuck and fuck. Sometimes I’m dying to do it to you. Because you’re destroying the picture of the world I built up over years of suffering. Shakespeare! If you love me, don’t hide it from me. Please. You can tell me that you love me. If you tell me now that you love me, I’ll believe that you’re saying it differently from all the men I’ve come across up to now. You’re the first one that I’ll believe. And if you don’t love me, tell me that you don’t love me, and I’ll accept it without being hurt. I promise. But if you don’t love me, why are you doing all this for me? What kind of a person are you? What’s going on between us? What kind of a story is it?

It’s a story about nothing, he says and lets the astringent bitterness of the whiskey turn little by little into a kind of smoky sweetness in his mouth.

There’s no such thing as a story about nothing, protests Yadanuga.

And what do you call the world? asks Shakespeare.

The world is a story about nothing? says Yadanuga, concerned for his friend.

Go on, tell me what it’s about, this story of a universe that expands and contracts, and pulsates and stretches, and twists and turns and coils around itself like a rope, and unravels, and comes apart, and expands again towards infinity,
and is compressed again and collapses into itself, until it turns into a black hole which vomits itself with all the planets that explode and turn into floating dust in the interstellar space—what is this tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, if not a story about nothing?

I’ll tell you what, says Yadanuga as if in a sudden flash of illumination, you, with your story about nothing, have succeeded in evading the question I asked you again: Who are you, Shakespeare, what kind of a person have you become, to abandon me to the mercy of Mona and her lust for revenge.

You’re avoiding the question that I asked you, says Shakespeare. You’re avoiding the question of whether the whole story of our
life
isn’t a story about nothing.

The story of
our
life is a story about nothing? Yadanuga demands indignantly. Tell me, Shakespeare, do you hear what you’re saying?

Shakespeare hears. He hears too everything left unsaid in Yadanuga’s question. He hears the stress on the word ‘our’, while he himself, in the question he posed in the same words, put the emphasis on the word ‘life’. He knows that Yadanuga is thinking now about the Alsatian and about Jonas. The body of one of them they had been obliged to abandon to the water of a river in India. The body of the other they had buried in the sands of the Libyan desert, before setting out on the dangerous trek to the collection point on the coast, dressed as nomads of one of the tribes in the vast ocean of sand. Presumably Yadanuga was thinking now that the Alsatian, even though he had never said so explicitly, lived his life in the shadow of the fact that his parents had been forced to flee Alsace with the invasion of the German army, and had spent the entire war in hiding in an apartment in St. Denis, which had been put at their disposal by the mother of an engineer who worked before the war
with the father of Daniel Altwasser in the Ministry in charge of roads and bridges, until they fell victim to informants, and before they were expelled to Drancy towards the end of the war, managed to entrust their one-year-old child to the mother of this engineer, a devout Catholic, who brought him up as a Jew, and took care to tell him everything she had heard about his parents from her son, who was active in the Resistance, and was caught by the Gestapo and tortured and executed. And when the Alsatian volunteered for the unit after the murder of the athletes at the Munich Olympics, he was closing a circle.