The History of Love (13 page)

The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of
The History of Love
. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called “The Age of Silence”:

The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.

During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for
I love you
or
I feel serious
. When a hand was used to shield one’s face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one’s lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for
Now I realize I was wrong to love you
. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they’d understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say,
Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you.
Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me.

Aside from one exception, almost no record exists of this first language. The exception, on which all knowledge of the subject is based, is a collection of seventy-nine fossil gestures, prints of human hands frozen in midsentence and housed in a small museum in Buenos Aires. One holds the gesture for
Sometimes when the rain
, another for
After all these years
, another for
Was I wrong to love you?
They were found in Morocco in 1903 by an Argentine doctor named Antonio Alberto de Biedma. He was hiking in the High Atlas Mountains when he discovered the cave where the seventy-nine gestures were pressed into the shale. He studied them for years without getting any closer to understanding, until one day, already suffering the fever of the dysentery that would kill him, he suddenly found himself able to decipher the meanings of the delicate motions of fists and fingers trapped in stone. Soon afterwards he was taken to a hospital in Fez, and as he lay dying his hands moved like birds forming a thousand gestures, dormant all those years.

If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms—if you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body—it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much
less
. It’s not that we’ve forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up: all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other’s bodies to make ourselves understood.

The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it.

The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of
The History of Love
. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window.

The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.

And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street.

That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name:
David Singer.

Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.

A JOY FOREVER

I
don’t know what I expected, but I expected something. My fingers shook whenever I went to unlock the mailbox. I went Monday. Nothing. I went Tuesday and Wednesday. There was nothing on Thursday, either. Two and a half weeks after I put my book in the mail, the telephone rang. I was sure it was my son. I’d been dozing in my chair, there was drool on my shoulder. I jumped to answer it.
HELLO?
But. It was only the teacher from the art class saying she was looking for people for a project she was doing at a gallery, and she thought of me, because of my quote unquote compelling presence
.
Naturally I was flattered. At any other time it would have been reason enough to splurge on spare ribs. And yet.
What kind of project?
I asked. She said all I had to do was sit naked on a metal stool in the middle of the room and then, if I felt like it, which she was hoping I would, dip my body into a vat of kosher cow’s blood and roll on the large white sheets of paper provided.

I may be a fool but I’m not desperate. There’s only so far I’m willing to go, so I thanked her very much for the offer but said I was going to have to turn it down since I was already scheduled to sit on my thumb and rotate in accordance with the movements of the earth around the sun. She was disappointed. But she seemed to understand. She said if I wanted to come in and see the drawings the class had done of me I could come to the show they were putting up in a month. I wrote down the date and hung up the phone.

I’d been in the apartment all day. It was already getting dark, so I decided to go out for a walk. I’m an old man. But I can still get around. I hoofed it past Zafi’s Luncheonette and the Original Mr. Man Barber and Kossar’s Bialys where sometimes I’ll go for a hot bagel on a Saturday night. They didn’t used to make bagels. Why should they? If it’s called Bialys, then it’s bialys. And yet.

I kept walking. I went into the drugstore and knocked over a display of KY jelly. But. My heart wasn’t in it. When I passed the Center, there was a big banner that said DUDU FISHER THIS SUNDAY NIGHT BUY TICKETS NOW Why not? I thought. I don’t go in for the stuff myself, but Bruno loves Dudu Fisher. I went in and bought two tickets.

I didn’t have any destination in mind. It started to get dark but I persevered. When I saw a Starbucks I went in and bought a coffee because I felt like a coffee, not because I wanted anyone to notice me. Normally I would have made a big production,
Give me a Grande Vente, I mean a Tall Grande, Give me a Chai Super Vente Grande, or do I want a
Short Frappe
? and then, for punctuation, I would’ve had a small mishap at the milk station. Not this time. I poured the milk like a normal person, a citizen of the world, and sat down in an easy chair across from a man reading the newspaper. I wrapped my hands around the coffee. The warmth felt good. The next table over there was a girl with blue hair leaning over a notebook and chewing on a ballpoint pen, and at the table next to her was a little boy in a soccer uniform sitting with his mother who told him,
The plural of elf is elves.
A wave of happiness came over me. It felt giddy to be part of it all. To be drinking a cup of coffee like a normal person. I wanted to shout out:
The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

There was a pay phone by the restrooms. I felt in my pocket for a quarter and dialed Bruno’s number. It rang nine times. The girl with blue hair passed me on the way to the bathroom. I smiled at her. Amazing! She smiled back. On the tenth ring he picked up.

Bruno?

Yes?

Isn’t it good to be alive?

No thank you, I don’t want to buy anything.

I’m not trying to sell you anything! It’s Leo. Listen. I was sitting here drinking a coffee in Starbucks and suddenly it hit me.

Who hit you?

Ach, listen! It hit me how good it is to be alive.
Alive!
And I wanted to tell you. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m saying life is a thing of beauty, Bruno. A thing of beauty and a joy forever.

There was a pause.

Sure, whatever you say Leo. Life is a beauty.

And a joy forever,
I said.

All right,
Bruno said.
And a joy.

I waited.

Forever.

I was about to hang up when Bruno said,
Leo?

Yes?

Did you mean human
life?

I worked on my coffee for half an hour, making the most of it. The girl closed her notebook and got up to leave. The man neared the end of his newspaper. I read the headlines. I was a small part of something larger than myself. Yes,
human life
. Human! Life! Then the man turned the page and my heart stopped.

It was a photo of Isaac. I’d never seen it before. I collect all his clippings, if there was a fan club I’d be the president. For twenty years I’ve subscribed to the magazine where occasionally he publishes. I thought I’d seen every photo of him. I’ve studied them all a thousand times. And yet. This one was new to me. He was standing in front of a window. His chin was down, head tilted to the side. He might have been thinking. But his eyes were looking up, as if someone had called his name right before the shutter clicked. I wanted to call out to him. It was only a newspaper, but I wanted to holler it at the top of my lungs.
Isaac! Here I am! Can you hear me, my little Isaac?
I wanted him to turn his eyes to me just as he had to whomever had just shaken him from his thoughts. But. He couldn’t. Because the headline said, ISAAC MORITZ, NOVELIST, DEAD AT 60.