About Adele: shades of letters and syllables

A broken-up memoirT

This is not an imagined story, I mean a story that anybody would think of as a fiction. Though it is inspired from my life it is far from revealing the truth… By writing it I realized that the story would never get back as truthful as it was in reality.
One can write a limitless number of versions and never get to the bottom of it. The suffering and joyfulness inspired by it could be also distinct from a version to another.
The story took place in New York midtown, the South side if it, that was always called Chelsea.
Those times Chelsea looked like a depressing collection of gray buildings used as warehouses or garages. Once you got there the only thought you may had was to run out as fast as you could.
When I was little my dad would take me by hand and bring me to his office to play with his abacus. His office was located in a building that had a Greek sort of architecture with big stone pillars sustaining arches and nude caryatides that I always imagined resembling my mother. I’d play there until noon when my mom, which worked as a maid in a nearby hotel, would come to pick me up.
I would never forget the moldy smell of cigar smoke mix with dust from the hallway. My dad’s boss was a young man in his twenties, very well dressed and wearing a thin moustache. He would come to give some instructions to my dad in order to impress me.
I saw my dad standing rigid and embarrassed when his boss would come around. When his boss left he’d turn toward me and say: “That pig doesn’t know how much makes two plus two”. I would say in a hurry “Four!” My dad would laugh and say: “You see, you should be my boss”.
When I told mom this story she said that dad should not show disrespect for people that lead”. I told dad about mom’s comment. He said “Woman’s mentality”.
Those times my dad and mom were struggling to stay a notch above the poverty line. Our two bedroom apartment was very small. The living room was small but cozy. My dad bought from a street fare a chandelier that was mounted on the ceiling next to the kitchen and let hang low. When it was lit the living room looked like a million dollar place. I couldn’t take my eyes from its gemstones. Also dad bought a metallic bookcase, painted in green, in which he kept his accounting files.
One day somebody from IRS came and I saw my dad’s hands trembling while searching for some data that the IRS guy wanted. I don’t know what happened but for a couple of days mom was asking “Now what!” and dad was saying “Who knows!”
The building elevator had two doors, one that you could close with your hands; the other door would automatically go down. It was my impression that one had to be careful not to get his feet hit by it though the elevator gate that automatically closed, I remember, was on the outside.
We wouldn’t use the elevator too much because our apartment was at the ground level. The living room had a window facing the street. Most of the time, you couldn’t see the buildings across the street. There was always a merchandise truck stopped in front of the window. The funny thing at night was that you could hear whatever people talked when they passed by our window, sometimes conversations that I wouldn’t be allowed to repeat in front of my parents.
Two flights up, in the apartment 2E lived the superintendent family. Their daughter Adele was beautiful. I thought that the superintendent was like our principal in the school, taking care of the discipline in the building, otherwise I couldn’t explain where Adele’s arrogance was coming from.
When I got into the high school dad used to give me an allowance: a dollar per day. I used to save my dollars for a week with the thought that I needed money to invite Adele to go to a movie. It never happened. She grew taller than me very fast. One day she told me bluntly: “Your voice sounds like a baby voice. Invite me to go to a movie when you’ll grow up”.
I told her that one day I was going to marry her, which made her giggle unstoppably. Those times in my life I felt “inopportune”. Then mysteriously I grew up, my voice changed, my hair got thicker and changed the color from light blond to brown. I liked how my voice sounded when I coughed. Adele began to pay attention to me when we met accidentally.
One day, she was about to fall on the entrance stairs while turning her head to look in my direction. “No more interested to go with me to see a movie?” she asked. I didn’t answer. One of my colleagues, Warren, was bragging some other day that he kissed Adele and fondled her breasts. For me Adele was an impure girl.
I preferred to go and spend the afternoons on a vacant lot and play dice with my school mates. Sometimes I’d lose my whole allowance many times over.
The neighborhood around the vacant lot was gray and depressive. Such place was ideal for petty thieves and illicit street vendors that dealt with stolen stuff and drugs.
I was a well-behaved high school student that time. The school was boring, the sidewalk was dirty, the streets were dusty and the trucks carrying merchandise were ugly and smelling of cheap gas.
The teachers’ faces looked like crumpled. Nobody could sleep well because of the noise of trucks going back and forth and feeding the warehouses with stuff.
Mom used to wear cotton balls during night to help her sleep.
Lately I became part of a group of students that called themselves “Cats”. We were six of us. Whenever we got together during the class breaks it felt like the grim color of the neighborhood vanished. We got together out of boredom. I felt like being part of the group would make me change.
A treat of all of us was that we wanted to be bad boys. Another common trait was that we talked dirt. I was the one that talked the dirtiest language. I don’t know why. One of the fellow “cats” said that I tried to show off and get attention to myself, to be the center of attention. I doubt that. I think it was because I wanted to be accepted.
When we went out together I’d walk behind the group. “You want to be the center of attention but you walk always behind. Why?” The guy who said that aspired to be the master of opinions.
Then there was that short but solid boy, made out of iron; his name was Dorval; he was the one that was made to be a leader. He’d say: “We would have to go and raid that warehouse and get been cans and wrapping aluminum paper”. That’s when my change from an exemplarily good boy into a bad boy happened. It kind of hurt my pride that police could catch us one day and destroy my reputation.
Dorval would call every of our escapades “an action”. We all had flashlights and back bags. Once inside the warehouse we’d search for stuff we thought valued most, like bed sheets, tourism junk, Christmas decorations, figurines…
We had so much fun, some of it originating from fear. The weird and wonderful fact is that we didn’t need that stuff. We did it just to amuse ourselves. I mean most of the time the merchandise we stole was useless.
I tried to sell some of that weird stuff, like woman lingerie, to Adele. She was amazed when I told her that the merchandize was stolen. She was so shocked that I was a thief that she kept screaming and laughing. She even wanted to be part of our team.
Dorval didn’t want to hear about it: “Are you nuts. She is going to denounce us to police. Why did you sell stuff to her? Our agreement was to sell it at the flea market”. I felt very intimidated when Dorval scolded me. Next time when I met Adele I told her that my folks wouldn’t let me out after eight o’clock and that the thievery business is over.
Me and the “cats” had some good “sparkling” opportunities that summer. Since during summer streets are crowded with losers and drunkards we chose warehouses that didn’t have alarm systems or security guards. We’ll put masks on and do the job at midnight time. That time those places looked even gloomier than during day time.
You could sense the hazard of each proposal coming out Dorval’s head: we’ll pick the “Art and Crafts Utensils” building. The building was two blocks from the school. I thought that it was too risky; Dorval called me a chicken and insisted that it was as risky as any other warehouse.
In our group there was that very tall and slim guy named Stan. He’d curse all the time. Not as bad as I did though. He’d say that if he didn’t curse he felt vulnerable. He would sit at the table and say: “This fucking chair is too hard for my ass”. He was bony like a reed stem.
And also there was that brown skinny guy named Spike. He was six feet five inches tall and built like a wrestler. He would say that “misery is always at war with richness”. He’d always read paperback books and talk slowly like reading his words from cue cards. We’d climb up on his shoulders to reach high windows. You could hear him: “Climb up stupid!” and laugh in a slow cadence.
As we got into the Art and crafts building we found nothing of interest. There were canvases and frames and oil and acrylic colors. We got each of us a collection of oil colors and colored chalks. Stan called Dorval’s idea to pick that building “disgusting”. There was also a guard we had to avoid. He was sleeping sound in a booth affixed to the front of the building.
We stayed about half an hour inside trying to not make any noise and searching with flashlights for the goods. My late desire in life to paint must have originated from there, from that warehouse filled with the smell of oil paint and huge rolls of white canvases and frames.
People don’t realize that each of their age is as if they are boarding a train surrounded by a bunch of other people that travel in the same direction and that their fate is common to all those traveling on that train.
And then I was there too, a well “distinguished” cat, and also were there Kenny and Randal, all of us followers.
Dorval had a real instinct when he planned a job. He’d show us the building and also he’d draw a master plan before we got to do the job. He had to put off a couple of jobs that he thought were too dangerous, like the one with the hardware warehouse. Too much noise, he thought.
The best jobs we carried out were in winter. The streets were deserted and the warehouses were silent. One of those jobs was with the warehouse that held musical instruments. The weather outside was cruel. We felt so safe when we got inside, that we began banging like crazy on drums and cymbals. I got from there two violins and three piccolos and also small stuff like 2 bows and strings for violin. We found that it was difficult to sell them at a good price. Except for violins...
After that job the warehouse hired a guard, and covered the lower windows with barbed wire.
We failed one job when we heard police approaching the warehouse and we realized that the building had cameras installed on top of the lower windows. We barely escaped from being caught. “I am not God”, Dorval would excuse himself. We ran like rabbits that night.
My mom that always thought that I was doing my homework those nights saw me running into hiding. Mom got some idea that something strange was happening but said nothing. Dad was drunk that night and sleeping like a log.
I continued to be part of the “Cats” group until that day when Spike fell into a pit and broke both of his legs.
That’s exactly how it happened: Spike discovered a warehouse full of Christmas decorations and Christmas bags and wrapping paper. The building was surrounded by a wire fence. We got in the courtyard during evening hours and hid behind the building. There were still people and trucks coming in and out. We never knew if somebody wasn’t going to discover us there. We would play cards all the time to have an explanation for anybody that would discover us there and question what we were doing. Then the night fell and we felt safe.
When the doors of the warehouse got locked, we felt like we owned the whole place. Dorval discovered an air shaft next to the building. We used a flashlight to see how deep the whole was: it was about five feet deep. If Spike was right that the hole communicates underground with the building storage it would save us lots of work to break into it. I heard Spike saying: ”What’s the fuck, let’s try it”.
Spike offered immediately to jump in and check. He jumped and he fell twenty feet down, between cubes of cement and steel “spikes”. There was a grill of a vent there that tricked us to believe that the pit was not deep.
We had to call the ambulance and police. They came accompanied by a fire truck. The fire fighters used ropes and a flat chair to bring Spike up.
We told the police that we were playing cards and that Spike looked for a place to pee. Spike had his both legs broken under the knee and his right shoulder displaced. The police treated us in a friendly manner. Nobody had the faintest idea that we came there to burglarize the warehouse.
That was the end of our adventures. Spike’s shattered legs shattered also our group.
What I learned from that happening was that life goes on at a normal pace and seems that would never change until an accident breaks the routine and change it forever.
Dorval philosophical conclusion sounded even better: “A bit of chaos gets injected into the habitual order of things and interrupts its monotonous flow. You never know if such change is for the better of things or for the worse…”
That school year seemed to never end. Day after day, it was drizzling with no interruption or foreseeable end.
For a long time after the group breakup I felt useless. Then I had to adjust to the school discipline and prepare for college.
After I decided to prepare my SAT to go to college I didn’t see any of the “Cats” too much.
The doctor that treated Spike told us that he was going to have pain in his legs for life. Somehow we all felt guilty of what happened. His house was on the same street with mine. I couldn’t move his house further to diminish your feeling of guilt.
Whenever I have time to be melancholic I think in simple terms that in life we do bad things sometimes, though other times we do good things.
I never felt that I was part of reality, like 100% part of it. I was just moved by some need to socialize, to be part of it. I cannot summarize that part of my life and say that it was bad. It was that during those times I found myself, I mean “I found myself like”, I was belonging to the world.
Dorval would tell us how brave we were, how a manly “job” we were doing was. I never complained to him about anything. I was afraid that if I complained I would be thrown out. Whenever I “like” cursed Dorval he was very pleased. He didn’t curse though. I guess he was religious. He also liked jazz which I thought was peculiar for somebody that wouldn’t curse, especially since he was listening to Armstrong.
With each job we finished he looked like he got “high” though we never used drugs. At one point he wondered why we never got caught. He said that it was the sign that our future is safeguarded by some spiritual being, like a creature animated by God that protects good people.
That made-up connection that tied up our talk and feelings and acting together will never fade away.
“We just earned $120 bucks”, Dorval would say. “I’ll get $20 as the lieder. You’ll have to split $100 between you five”. We’d laugh. Ken, that wasn’t good at math, would ask for as much dough as Dorval got.
I could hardly wait for the next “action”. My inner voice told me to stop. Dorval would tell us that bad thieves (he called them chickens) could have seizures because of an emotional outburst; also that a thief with high blood pressure could die of a heart attack.
After Spike’s accident, Dorval would say that he warned him not to be impatient, that the art of stealing means reason and calculation.
How many times we have been successful? Maybe a dozen times... I learned what discipline, nerve control, patience and moderation was. One day when a teacher lectured us about responsibility and morals and honesty and gave us a thief as an example of lawless life I blushed so horribly. I thought that the blood was going to flow out of my ears.
Then I heard Dorval laughing. My shame immediately vanished. The teacher asked Dorval what was so funny. Dorval said that stealing is as honorable as making goods. “What a bank does if not stealing? What about a pawn shop? Maybe a flea market is the only place where one doesn’t get ripped-off. In a two ways transaction a side steals the other side” Dorval said.
“What don’t you come to teach in my place?” the teacher asked. In that argument I thought Dorval won.
I remember when the fire fighters brought Spike up with his legs swinging inertly from his knees down and screaming and shouting profanities and calling his mom and rotating his flashlight around like searching for something: “God, fucking pain…” I thought at that time that he wouldn’t want to be a Catholic anymore.
I had to tell mom what happened. When she heard that I used to burglarize warehouses she said that what I did was against “God dictums” and cried. She cried even more when she heard what happened to Spike. Then as if she momentarily forgot that she cried that I used to be a thief she told me that she understand why I was confused and that the only good effect of the experience would be that I got stronger out of it. She said that if I still want to gain strength I should try do some work outs or be part of the high school soccer team. “I was a devoted Catholic girl” she continued.” I never tripped over Bible principles until I met your dad”, she said.
Dad was very harsh when mom informed him of what I have done. He wanted an explanation. I couldn’t figure out what kind of explanation he wanted. “Perhaps you are kleptomaniac” he insisted.
Dad was humorless like any other accountant would be. He warned me that if such behavior would somehow reappear he’d be the first one to report me to the authorities. Then he went to my bedroom, searched my closets, gathered in a garbage bag what he thought was stolen goods, including my new shirt that mom bought from Conway, and threw the bag out, on the sidewalk. Then he went to the living room, emptied a half bottle of booze in his glass and began drinking hastily. I knew that once he got drunk anything would get back to normal and tomorrow everything would be forgotten.
That was the strange and beautiful way in which my folks handled any issue: once the issue got resolved in any manner neither mom or dad would ever mention it again.
After those days of pain and worries I had to withdraw from “that naughty kind of life” as mom would put it. Also I tried to build my life around “cultural establishments” in my neighborhood. There was a public library on 23rd street and a Pet store that housed aquariums with red and golden fishes. For some reason I would always stop to watch fishes before going to the library. Then I would stop to have a sneaky look at the Playboy new issue cover. Those girls looked unreal. One of the Playboy issues I bought one day had a centerfold with a woman totally naked. I used to peruse it in the bathroom. I felt my heart thumping. All of the naked women were blond. Their breasts were firm and the below of their bodies was heavenly shown and beautiful.
Mom found one day the magazine hidden in the laundry basket and showed it to my dad. When I came home dad was examining the copy. He winked at me laughing. I never saw that magazine again. Through the rest of the high school I tried to make new friends. Adele had a boyfriend. His name was Robert Mapplethorpe.
I made a friend from a lower class. His name was Thomas Winter, a Protestant boy that lived four blocks down the street. He was wealthy. His dad owned the house and had a BMW car with a registration plate that read “PRIVILEGE”. Thomas had a leather bag “Member Only” and gold framed glasses. I thought that it was nice that he had astigmatism and retinitis.
Through the summer we hanged out together in his place and play Scramble. He was better than I was. The friendship lasted until one day when he said that I was boring to him and that he cannot learn anything new from me. Mom said that he was a sick boy and that she saw his mom using coupons in the supermarket, a way of telling that they were not privileged people after all… Mom hated coupons…To save my hurt pride dad intervened: “Their car would end up in a junkyard like the penny stocks they owe would. His dad is risking his skin in speculations and his mom is a horny bitch”, he said.
There was nothing else to do but read and do homework. My English teacher took interest in my “English compositions” and encouraged me to write a short story every week and handle it to him. I got so much immersed into this pursuit that I completely stopped thinking about anything else but writing my little stories and also learning stuff for my graduation.
The teacher liked my short stories but complained of too much “orderliness”, of too much “Hemingway like journalism” and of lack of original or eccentric thinking that would make nowadays a story noticeable.
Yes! My English teacher was eccentric and unusual. He won the Penguin prize for short stories. After that he moved to Montana and I completely lost his trace. It happened before graduation. “Pay attention to the title and the name of the characters. Also think of life as a gallery of strange people living through strange events”, he told me when I saw him for the last time. “You’ll be a star”, that’s what he told me. .
After the high school I went to Princeton to study Physics. Adele went to the same college studying philosophy. We met several times and hanged out in the cafeteria. Before I graduated the college we got married. After I married Adele the super and his wife moved to live in Yorkshire. Adele moved to live with me in a new apartment on 26 Street. Chelsea changed into a fashionable neighborhood lately. She liked that.
As she matured she borrowed strangely some peasant features like lots of freckles on her neck and arms. After we married I began discovering things that she do that I consider not being proper like she used to eat a lot with her hands as if she wouldn’t know that the fork was ever invented. Her lips were always greasy. But she also washed her teeth twice a day and used toothpicks with amazing dexterity.
Her mom loved me: “For men Physics means a solid future”. She’d kiss me on the lips, “lots of drooling”, which was uncomfortable. As I started to practice Physics I realized that whatever was meant to be discovered was already done, exposed and bare, ascertained. There was nothing left hanging around undiscovered, not a single particle untouched and enduring.
Adele would calmly say: “If you don’t like Physics start doing something else!” “Like what?” I’d ask. “Like opening a bakery. You like to cook”. To Adele, life could be started from fresh.
After a while of disquieting talk she’d put makeup in the bathroom mirror and we’ll go out to the marketplace to buy duck eggs. We ate lamb steak with a fried duck egg on top sprinkled with tiny squares of parsley and fresh hoarse pepper and salt.
Adele’s opinions about politics were fairly simple: “The republicans are talking nice but as far as practical ideas their agenda is empty. The democrats, on the contrary, they have plenty of ideas that they didn’t know about but they don’t how to implement them”. Also she believed that America was always like that, getting reach by living through uncertainties.
My friend from the college – Thomas (he hated to be called Tom) – used to visit us every month or so, rarely accompanied by his wife that was snobbish and roughly rich. Nobody ever knew how rich she was including Thomas. He would opinionate: “Americans are born naïve; then by education they turn into honest people; once they get involved in politics, they forget everything they learned; if you give them an opportunity they become jackals. The survival of the best fit gets interpreted as the survival of the jerkiest, of the roughest animal”.
Robert was tricked to invest in a million dollars “option” deal and lost. He hated now stocks and options and whatever got tagged on them.
Adele used to listen to our talk and wrap it up by saying: “Talking about politics it’s like holding imaginary bulls by their imaginary horns… If you wonder what Spanish people get from their bull fight, you could figure out what talking about politics is: an imaginary bull fight. It is virtually predictable. Men use to carry those animated conversations to impress themselves or whoever happens to be around”.
Adele hated mannerism and formalities but she couldn’t quit her Brit inspired five o’clock cup of tea.
That’s what we all do. Then what else: we all wait to see our life pass by rushing, whistling, stepping up the gas, whooshing people away from our way, get paid on the stuff we do best, what we know would help us dashing ahead, and doing what we do better than others, not waiting for the other’s move… We cut out chunks of our lives and give them to others and ask for their life-piece in exchange…
My marriage with Adele started in the morning after the ceremony. She waked up and said suddenly: “I would have to ask you a favor, not to hurt my feelings ever”. And she continued: “Also to remember my birthday and our wedding anniversary. It’s enough if you remember those important dates. I hope I was clear about that. Also as long we’re married we have rules”. I interrupted her with a kiss though I didn’t have any idea what she wanted to say.
We were married only for three days when we had a car accident. Adele was driving. It was drizzling. A horrible day to drive… I let her drive because she wanted it so badly. We were only a dozen blocks from the house when a Chinese delivery man crossed the road just in front of our car. Adele tried to avoid running over his bicycle as she rammed our car into a light pole. The airbag malfunctioned. Adele hit her head so hard that she broke the windshield. I was also hurt also but lighter. I immediately wanted to go to the hospital. Adele wanted to go home. I let her go home. I summoned a police car and I took responsibility for the accident.
When I got home Adele was holding an ice pack at her forehead. The left side of her forehead was horribly swollen. At my insistence she agreed to go to the hospital. Men see their near future by waiting for the day in the hope that they could be luckier. Women know their far future when they hold their breath and begin crying”, Thomas used to say.
Whenever there was any animated discussion I looked at Adele with a kind of skepticism waiting to see if her cynicism would intervene to change the subject of the conversation towards some trivial matter like the increase in price of cantaloupe because of the flooding in Thailand.
“With the progress in the DNA usage they’d be able one day to create animated eggplants”, she said suddenly, and put an end to our “philosophical discussion”. Some people liked her approach, like Steve who told me openly that he has a crush for Adele. I couldn’t stand it. Like me some people refused to come and see us because of such blunt treatment.
What we really missed from such encounters was the social therapy that I looked for. I read in a psychology book that we could solve our psychotic misery by meeting as many different people as we could.
Very soon we lost all our and had to spend the whole of our leisure time together; I used to read on the couch my “sophisticated” books while Adele would pick up from the pile of trash literature another mystery book and read it giggling while eating bread with walnuts. Whenever I tried to convince her to go and see our old friends she’d say: “What for? You told me that people never change. That is they are still the same ass-hole we know about. We also, you a d me, will be the same from the moment of our birth until we die”.
She wasn’t completely right. One day she had one of those “slide” effects of her mind when she began mispronouncing words or use a word that sounded similar instead of another one like “misanthrope” for “prejudice” or “deceits” instead of “persist”. At the beginning I didn’t pay much attention to that and I found at times that she amused me. One day her parents came to see us. When I told them about Adele’s “illness” her mom told me that I was making it all up. “If you could spend more intimate time with her and go somewhere to rest you’ll see… Adele needs to sleep more. Women need more sleep because they have to deal with intimate things. She is not anymore a sixteen year old girl. And she cannot just go back and live in her past. When she lived with us she was a happy girl. She is that sensitive type of a woman that cannot easily digest Internet and Web stuff. When you see her sad you know that it’s time for you to intervene. Women are designed to use the man’s instincts to get happy”.
There was in Chelsea clinic, a doctor who’d call himself Dr. Freud. After examining Adele, he handed out to me his diagnostic by whispering it in my ear: “You wife is in the earlier stages of senility”. “But she is only 28 years old” I reply. “It could happen at any time to anybody. I presume that during the car accident she damaged her brain to a large extent. She must have damaged her brain’s circuitry”. He knew I was a physicist so he felt obliged to use a language I could understand.
For the rest of the night I was completely shut down. Adele sensed it. She kept asking me if I was ok. I told her that I had a headache. Yes, she shouldn’t have changed during her life time: something though would change her against her will. And it wasn’t like she didn’t have an idea what was happening to her.
Next day while we had breakfast she dared to say: “I saw you talking to Dr. Freud. It is serious, isn’t it? Do you think I didn’t notice…” From that day it was just a matter of getting prepared to face any eventualities and also to show Adele that she could trust me no matter what, that I would love her forever, as she liked to repeat, forever being her favorite word, and that I’ll take care of her forever.
I had a chest pain when I thought that her illness would put an end to our happiness, and that her dreary situation will just go on and change for the worse to the worst. What was the worst? I didn’t know at that time. I supposed the worst for somebody ill like her would be not make sense of what the word was? There is not just making mistakes while using words. Though that time I realized how important the words are for each of us to mimic reality. By not being able to express reality you lose the sense of which you are, what belongs to you, who are those things and people around you for? Using the right words you are free to act, to run, to carry goods and eat the right food.
Dr. Freud suggested that it would be a good idea to keep a journal in which I could ascribe every day evolution of Adele’s disease. Furtively I took a quick glance at Adele. She sensed it and as she turned towards me she winked. She looked so beautiful. She always looked beautiful when she lived in the unknown: she’d raise her eyebrows and like buff up her face.
She waved her hand in a secret way that we were the only ones to know what it meant. We were going to make love tonight. My life looked then like a complete mess. I thought in my egotistic way that I’d have to take advantage of her love and keep our happiness under control for as long as possible.
Dr. Freud prescribed for Adele some medicine, mostly vitamins and herbs like licorice, Echinacea, ginger, nettle leaves and Reishi mushrooms.
I summoned Adele’s folks and mine for an emergency meeting. Her mom told me straight to my face that Adele is my wife and that I should take care of her until she gets better. Her mom once again wouldn’t believe that Adele is ill. “She used to make absurd jokes all the time” she said. Her dad cot involved laughing: “This is not illness. She is wired. She was always like that”. Adele intervened in our conversation saying “A baboon is a boon and a donkey is a monkey”, which was not as funny as she thought. Her mom kept laughing like a nut while her dad sat at the other side of the table, uneasy. “I told you she is weird”. “I am not wired. I am just fooling around with Peter’s fears. I am ok. I am like anybody else. I need a little bit of sleep. That’s it. I have a problem with the immediate memory. If I go from the bathroom to the kitchen the short memory gets longer. I could then remember everything. Like yesterday, I forgot to wash my ears. I got to the kitchen and I remembered that I’d have to wash my ears. I still remembered to wash my ears when I got to the bathroom. It is clear to me that I am not ill”.
Then after we had dinner she asked her folks to go. Mom asked her if she was happy with me. “We’re ok” she said. “Whenever you are not around we quarrel a bit. If there is anybody that needs therapy this is Peter” she told her dad. “I am sorry” my dad said, “Peter asked us to come. If Peter wouldn’t ask us to be here we’d not have disturbed you”. “Why did Peter asked you to come over?”, Adele shouted, “Why you are such an ass?” she addressed me. “Adele” her dad shouted back, “Peter is afraid that you are seriously ill. It’s not something like a life threatening disease. You have to exercise your memory, from what I understand. To be careful with your brain… We’re going to pray, and also I’ll ask the priest to put you on the roll for the Sunday mass call…” Adele turned towards me like a storm: “You are a big ass, that’s what you are! Creeping behind my back! You are a worm! That’s what you are, an earthworm”. She left the house running.
Her folks and mine were sitting at the table humiliated and silent. “You’d have just to see if she is the way the doctor sees it. Maybe she just ate something like she got food poisoning… When toxins get into somebody’s body it takes a while until the body gets cleared. I suppose she could just intoxicated her body with too much grease, like duck grease that is hidden under the skin and gets immediately digested. You never know. She likes to eat duck skin and grease …”
08/24
Today, I began writing “Adele’s” journal. A very uncomfortable task! I have never kept any secret from Adele. To write a journal about her illness seemed so unfair and so dishonorable…. If she knew she would have called me “hog”. She preferred hog to pig. Today we went to see a play on Broadway. She asked me if during the play the action becomes real. I didn’t understand what she meant. She asked me again if during the play the happenings become reality, for a second or so. I said no, not even for a fraction of a second. Everything is theatrical, a fiction, not a reality, I insisted. She told me that I am exaggerating as usual. She was sure that during the play there is a moment or so when the happenings turn into reality.
08/25
There was nothing unusual to deserve an entry in Adele’s journal. Adele wanted to talk about future. She was very vivacious and full of “what happiness is”. She had her own definition of happiness that night as “touching and talking”. She wrote on a scrap of paper what she’d like me to comment upon. Like, she wrote, “we’d adopt a baby and we’d employ a maid to take care of her (she wanted a baby girl)” so that our life would get just a little bit demanding so that I could still write and she could read in peace. I couldn’t tell her that due to her symptoms such an idea was not suitable at that time. I got upset when I saw tears in her eyes. She grabbed my hand and asked me to swear that we’d plan carefully and adopt a baby girl by June next year. Then she lit all the four lamps in the bedroom and asked me if I’d like to dance as she began circling around alone and then suddenly stopped looking out the window: “I think our neighbors adopted a black boy. It became a trend lately, that sort of interracial embrace… I would like to adopt an Asian baby girl with green eyes…”
08/26
We went to the Plaza restaurant today. Adele liked the crowd. She said that the crowd today was not hostile. She complained about her sight in her left eye. We waited for about half an hour for our food. When we got it I was already drunk. I have to control this feeling that Adele is going to do something silly and embarrass me. Then I told to myself that she should count more in my eyes than anybody else around. I suspected every glance somebody will throw at Adele for having some hidden distressing significance. Despite my paranoia Adele was lovely, smiling all the time and displaying a serenity that reminded me of those good times when she was completely sane. I had the guts to tell to the waiter to change her dish. The meat was sprinkled with parmesan, which she hated. She thanked me for that, kissing my hand. Then she took unexpectedly a pen from her purse and underlined on a menu booklet all dishes that she’d never like to order. I smiled, pretending that I thought that what she was doing was funny. When the waiter came back with her food he didn’t make any comment. Then Adele signed her name on the menu booklet and wrote a comment: “Those underlined dishes should be eliminated from the menu or translated in German”. She ate her food diligently, though she complained that the bits of carrots were very hard: “I am sure that the carrots are made out of plastic collared by a very skillful painter”.

08/27
Today Adele complained about her knees getting numb and she told me that she remembered being a child and watching her mom “using cactus thorns to treat her arthritis by inserting them between bones. She called what she was doing Mexican acupuncture. She would cultivate cactuses on the window frame and feed them with sugar and aspirin to help them grow sharp and thin thorns like needles. She’d cut the thorns and let them dry in the sun until they became yellowish. Then she’d insert the thorns around the knee-pans and heat the feet in a wash basin filled with salted water. Then she’d say a prayer addressed to Saint Jude. After a while there was lots of hair growing on her knees. The healing was just temporary. After a while the pain would return with a revenge. She couldn’t climb up the stairs. When it rained she had to put more thorns around her knees”.
08/28
How long her mind would still stay around? I didn’t know. I had to enjoy every moment while being with her. I was concerned about those moments when she sat on the couch staring at the ceiling, motionless and voiceless. She complained today that she couldn’t see on the ceiling the two constellations she knew about, Ursa Minor and Ursa Major. “Could you see Canis Major?” I asked her unkindly. “I was kidding you. One cannot see constellations on a ceiling. You have to be outside and switch out the sun light to make the sky dark. Stars are getting shiny when they are projected on a dark background”.
08/29
This strange mix of ill people and doctors in which there are no options for the ill one but to follow the doctor’s order: doctors are not moved by people’s sickness or by their sensitivity to their sickness. Again, today I went with Adele for a checkup. The doctor spent a whole hour by testing Adel’s reflexes. She asked at a certain moment to be left alone with the doctor. When I got back into doctor’s office he asked me if it is true that Adele caught her hair in the fire escape staircase and that she couldn’t move for hours before I came to her rescue. I confirmed what Adele said. When we walked back home I asked Adele why she invented that story. She told me that she told that story to the doctor because I don’t let her express freely. I thought that whatever she said or did was not important as long as it didn’t show any regression of her mental abilities. When we got home she immediately undressed and sat on the couch staring with half closed eyes at me. She was so beautiful. That night turned out to be one of the happiest nights I ever remembered from my whole life. “I offered my body to you because I trusted you”, she said. I felt a little bit remorseful for my happiness. “Melancholy is the worst way to treat a fuck” she said. “Nobody should feel culpable of intimacy”. Her tone surprised me. That night she wrote a letter to her mom. She could have phoned her instead. Then she cooked lamb with mint and spring potato and hot pepper salad. She was in such a terrific mood. “Doctor told me that he never saw a belly so beautiful as mine” she said. “How come that the doctor saw your belly?” I asked. “What do you mean? When I asked you to leave me alone with the doctor I got undressed and I asked the doctor to touch my belly and see if I am going to have a baby!”
08/30
Adele wanted to see our old friends, which was unusual to me. We went to a restaurant in Brooklyn. Around the table I could see all my good friends, all of them married now and restrained, afraid of the cynicism that Adele used to display in the past. The get-together night went well and Adele behaved exemplarily. At a certain moment during dinner Adele talked about the stars wearing a “winter glare” and the birds having to struggle with the wind even in their sleep. People found her likable. It was her first decent attitude towards my friends. She told to Paul’s wife that her hair was worthy of a queen’s. “Along with your petite nose” she added. “What a shame that such astonishing beauties are concealed and never put on a public view”. My friends seem to be amused and also disconcerted. When we got home she said something strange, that Paul’s face looked exactly like Bill’s face, which wasn’t true at all. “I looked at them both. I would not distinguish which was which if there was not for their voice which was different. I wanted to measure their noses to prove to myself that they were identical. But I was afraid that you’d not allow me to do that. Also their eyes are exactly the same, positioned precisely on the top of their nose and at the same distance, which again I wanted to measure if you’d have consented…”
08/31
I went with Adele for another checkup. I had to talk to her at length to convince her to go. While I was talking to her she seemed to ignore me. She wouldn’t respond to any of my questions. I looked at her. She was sitting in front of me. Her eyes looked like emptied of sight. I even shouted to get her attention. Her mind was traveling to a place in the universe of silence, unknown to me. Sometimes she’d open her mouth so I could see her teeth. Her mouth smelled always good. I loved her teeth. I didn’t know that time that she was just months away from entering the stage of total silence as Dr. Freud warned me.

When I got home today the first thing I noticed was the clothes on the floor, some of them were mine, others Adele’s. A note from Adele was glued on the kitchen wall: “I discovered the journal you are writing about me. It is not fare. I gave you happiness and I let you use my body and I let you manipulate my mind to your advantage. And what you did to me? You imagined that I had some illness so that you could have a reason to send me away to some hospice and marry another woman. You know after all that I am not ill. I still love you though I think you are a creepy guy. I’m going to miss making coffee for you in the morning, skinning apples for dinner and watching first league English soccer games. You’d have to wash your toilet and the kitchen and learn not to let the water running and all the lights on. Yours, Fox-trot!” Then I discovered the journal under the sink. The written pages were ripped off. One page was left dangling. On it Adele’s wrote:

“This page was intentionally left blank”

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 02.01.2012

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