PART FOUR — opening

The Box of Monkeys.

In any normal person's house, there is a box of monkeys. You gather all sorts of things into it. Every one of them keeps some future usefulness — or, perhaps, a clear uselessness, plain as the time of day. Only, every owner of a box of monkeys, meaning all of us, but absolutely every one of us, is often afraid to open it.

Felix loved me.

I let time run over me in the hope that things would sift themselves out, that events would take on a clear effigy. It was hard for me to understand what I needed it for.

That year, 1986, I decreed that each of the years to come would be welcomed as it deserved. We would wait for them, each one in turn, always alone and in each other's arms, just as we did then, on the first night of our pact, when the wool mattress my mother had made for our double bed in the bedroom, laid out on the floor, took up the whole of our living room. The yellow of my sunflower field on the wall, the green fan of the fern, our books — always easy to find, since all our stories rested on them, the poetry ones above all — the glasses and the simple, elegant crystal candlestick, the half-light and our music were enough to make a true palace, outside of time. We talked. We could never finish talking, and we held each other. Fully. The night we saw in the year 1986 was one of our long nights.

Yes. All my true meetings with Felix were outside of time.

The mornings, in our universe on the seventh floor watched over calmly by the Parâng, began to brim with sap again. Felix would wake with the first glimmers of morning. Morning rose from behind the mountain's crest, at first like a fine mantle, drawn by the smell of coffee. Felix would rest his cup on the windowsill and share his coffee with the Parâng and with Erika. The keys clinked delicately and the paper took in his words, his thoughts, the games of his mind. Though the bedroom was not close by, I could smell the coffee and hear Felix chattering away with Erika. Often, for a few seconds, I would surface from sleep — just enough, though, to sink back deep into it, reassured that all was well.

It was winter. I didn't like pulling myself out of sleep, didn't like that I had to leave the house through snow blackened with soot and the harsh frost, to haunt the grounds of the mines with their smell of coal, the mud, the heavy sounds of machinery, the crushing labour piled on people's shoulders. You could see it. The miners had no faces as long as they wore the helmet on their heads, the carbide lamp and the gas mask at their belts, and their faces covered with black dust mixed with sweat. Only after they came out of the bathhouse did they have the faces of ordinary men, and their faces then bore the weight of an old age that seemed to have come too soon.

Felix would wake me by luring me with the aroma of the coffee. I would get up and float, still practically in the arms of sleep, to my armchair — so sacredly mine that I would lift even the most important guests right out of it.

"Let me read to you," Felix would say.

And he would start reading to me, not in the least concerned that my eyes were still shut. It was wonderful. He was mine, completely, mine through and through.

The month of March found us in the same harmony. I kept wondering when he would grow bored. But he had no time for that — he was fiercely writing the story of Erika and himself. He helped her set hers down on paper, and she received his with circumspection, but, without a doubt, with all her devotion. The "communication" between them was filtered through the propositions and demonstrations of Baruch Spinoza's Ethics. He seemed happy, seemed to have forgotten the stage, the theatre. I knew it wasn't so, and so did he, but the typewriter had become a kind of avowed mistress to him and received all the respect she was due. I would grumble now and then, but not too much, and not too fiercely. I was far too glad that so many months had passed — nearly half a year — and Felix was holding out so well. He, who could never sit still! You couldn't hold him in place even if you put him in chains.

My bond with Felix was always hard, tense. I've probably said so before. He transferred to me all his anguish, all his unfulfilled longings, all his inner tensions, but also all the joy and exuberance with which he lived each moment. He handed me all of it to manage for him. Empathy, some would say. But it was something else. My role was to pave, with calm and certainty, the runways he launched himself from, and to keep them viable and solid so that he would have somewhere to come back to, to meet himself again, whenever he needed. My role was to be his point of reference. He told me so, and repeated it.