Excerpt
Landscape with Dog
by Ersi Sotiropoulos
from FreestyleThere’s no such thing as experience. We never learn. The body knows nothing. Like a deaf man who covers his ears, baffled by inexplicable sounds, like a blind man stretching out a hand in the dark, his eyes burning in the briny light of a reflection that he suspects exists…
“Each of us is a blind man at a window,” I said.
“Shut up and eat,” Vera said, laughing.
It was Sunday and we were having pot roast and potatoes with rosemary. I liked it a lot but wanted something more. The problem with Vera and me was always our mismatched senses of time. My wife likes to wake up in the middle of the night and start talking. I prefer to talk while we’re eating. Food inspires my philosophical disposition, or perhaps it’s the other way around.
You know what Giacometti used to say?” I asked, my mouth full.
“The roast seems a little salty to me… what do you think?” she replied.
She got up to clear the table and I got up to help. I really wanted to tell her what Giacometti had said, because I’d been thinking about it, and I knew if I waited until that night I would forget it. I was on the lookout for the right moment to get her attention and start a conversation.
“So, Giacometti used to say…” I began.
“Look at that, we’re almost out of dish detergent,” she said. Her voice was colorless, with just a slight shade of disappointment.
Anyone else in my position would get angry, but not me. I knew my wife well enough to be sure that her mood was neither ironic nor caustic. Vera liked to think of herself as a practical person and she always prioritized things in a certain way. You could even see it in the way she washed the dishes. First she soaped the glasses, then rinsed them with the water running full force, scrubbing insistently at the inside of the glass with her index finger until she could hear the glass squeak, and then set them to dry on the metal drying rack. Next she washed the plates, then the silverware, and finally the pots and pans. Vera believes she’s a systematic person, I thought and smiled to myself as she handed me the frying pan. I took a clean towel, dried the pan carefully and put it in its place, and Vera again stretched out her arm without looking at me and gave me the roasting pan. “Careful, it’s dripping,” she murmured. She glanced around, still looking dissatisfied. She grabbed the sponge and started to scrub the sink while I wiped off the counters. Then the phone rang.
“Are you going to get it?” Vera asked as she shook her hands dry and ran into the hall to answer the phone.
I looked at the dishes glistening on the drying rack. Two plates, two glasses, two forks, two knives: everything in pairs, nothing superfluous. The afternoon sun that slanted through the window gave them a rosy glow and, standing there, I felt a shiver of tenderness. Then I noticed that the cupboard over the sink was open and that everything inside was in disarray, open boxes of rice, spilled coffee, empty bottles of olive oil, and an old strainer. I’d have to clean that up sooner or later. Throw out the useless things, and put the things worth keeping in order. Though for me, I thought, order is a form of disorder. Take a face, for instance. Everyone says the face is the mirror of the soul. Is there anything more harmonious than a beautiful face? At the same time, though, is there anything more terrifying than a face? Anything more monstrous and unnatural? What Giacometti had said was right—though I actually couldn’t remember anymore if he had said it or written it. Did it really matter? Let’s just say that Giacometti was setting out to draw a face. If he started with the chin, he would worry that he might never reach the nose. The longer he sketched the face, the harder he tried to offer a faithful representation of it, the more it resembled a skull. The only thing left was the gaze. So what he ended up drawing was a skull with a gaze. It made my blood freeze just thinking about it.