Eva and the Fury

It occurred to me while walking in the rain. While walking I thought of other times I had walked in the rain. I remembered two or three incidents. Then it occurred to me that I must have walked in the rain at least a thousand times; yet, I only remembered two or three. And so, among other things, it finally occurred to me that life is made of up moments, and that longevity didn’t make life longer because life is memory and the present doesn’t exist. 

This realization gave me such freedom of hand and mind that I could not hold back my pen, and I submitted. It began to unleash its fury. I don’t want you to question my diction because I choose my words very carefully. I take writing very seriously, and I want you to know that I take writing seriously so I repeat myself because you are human and thus forgetful, and so in repetition I fight forgetting, and fight memory’s fragility, and thus fight all that renders life short. But most of all I fight Nothing. 

You see, writing is the most concrete art form of them all. I’m sure you have heard those people who say they don’t understand literature, that they are more practical people. But they never would say this about scientists because scientists find things out, universal laws, and “the way things work” and “greatly improve human life.” 

Let’s analyze this scientist. He wears a white coat over his white skin, has glasses and long black greasy hair that gets in his face when he works, but he can’t get around to cutting it. He wants to know the effect of some particular chemicals on human interaction. Unfortunately, he can’t seem to convince the government of the necessity of using real humans for his experiments, so he settles for mice.

He takes some mice of different sizes, shapes and colors and puts them in a glass box so he can examine them. He introduces his chemical and observes. He concludes that his chemical is successful and he creates Adderall: a narcotic he will give to children to fight Attention Deficit Disorder. A whole nation becomes more concentrated and productive, and no signs of serious social side-effects emerge. His experiment is considered a concrete success. 

Now let’s introduce the writer. A black coat covers her black skin. She wears two brown eyes and two shoes with tiny black bows. She has thorny legs but seldom notices and when she does notice she is too busy to shave them at the moment but will do so when she gets the chance. The writer will take a handful of humans —the writer has the privilege to put any human at risk whenever desired— and transcribe them unto a page. As she writes, she sees their progress and interactions, and decides what emotions to introduce to change their behavior. She might inject one human with jealousy and see how it affects the other humans around him. She might give one mouse something, and another mouse nothing and observe.  When the experiment is done and the author has successfully enacted multiple interactions, then the experiment is analyzed by thousands of people, and they begin to understand more about themselves and the human condition. How is the scientist’s success any more concrete that the writer’s? 

This is fiction. Fiction is experimentation with humans to reach understanding. Instead of artificial drugs, the writer employs real emotions on his characters: love, sorrow, joy, resentment, curiosity, envy, and fury. The scientist uses nothing real. The scientist will use dextroamphetamine, racemic dextro, and maybe even some levo-amphetamine aspartate monohydrate. Does any of that sound real to you? 

The difference is the scientist created Adderall and altered the human experience against their will, while the author provided understanding and the freedom to act upon that understanding. The scientist provided slavery and the author provided freedom. The scientist created a mouse, and the writer created a human.

Where was I? You see what I mean by freedom of hand! Now can you understand my fury? I told you I choose my words carefully, and I told you I take writing seriously, so my digressions aren’t digressions because I choose them carefully. Freedom has always made man furious because it renders him culpable. I see a American woman behind bars on fire. She can’t stand the fact that she made that decision. Why was she allowed to be so rash? 

It was the fault of her memory and forgetting. She forgot some things and remembered others, and the combination was deadly. I remember her because I talked to her carefully and because I took her seriously. The last time I saw her was when: “You motherfucker, I’ll stab you if you take one more step!” 

She is a kind and gentle woman. Above all she is empathetic. She cannot stand to see people hurt. Her heart is tender, and, like barely cooked meat, it bleeds. At night she used to turn in bed with frantic calculation. When I would pretend not to notice she would sit up annoyed. It frightened her to not be noticed and when she was frightened, she became angry. I’d sit up to console her. 

“What’s wrong?” I’d ask.

“Nothing.” She’d respond and I’d sigh.

Even in the hostile silence, she must have felt comforted during those oppressive nights. Although she was miserable, I was miserable too, and we were both miserable together. 

There have been many poems written about the night. The night has always and will always bind human beings together. No one ever says things like they do at night. When you hear crying in the daytime, something inside you says it will be alright. Crying in the daytime means “I’ve had a hard day” or “something terrible has happened,” but there is always an explanation and whatever can be explained is OK. If something is explained, it immediately ceases to be horrible. Even the most heart-wrenching things are OK when explained. Did you know that sometimes Haitians feed their children cookies made of dirt? It’s because they’re starving. We know that they are starving and thus they eat dried mud to stop the pain in their insides. "OK,” we think. But what if you saw a man dressed in a suit in Manhattan sitting on a bench, stuffing handfuls of dirt into his mouth? How would you explain that? Wouldn’t that be horrible? That is what night is: a rich man stuffing dirt down his gullet.  

When you hear crying at night, the answer is invariably “nothing,” and it’s not necessarily that we are trying to hide our emotions, but that there is “nothing.” And Nothing can’t ever be explained because Nothing is completely foreign to us human beings, who are something. The closest we get to nothing is the night. And the stars don’t console us because they too are surrounded by Nothing, and are separated by Nothing and Nothing is what makes them shine so brightly, and only Something or the sun can blot out their silent screaming. But those nights with her in my arms in the darkness I couldn’t stop her from wailing.

“It’s just too much!” she would cry, rocking heavily in my arms. “Too much, too much too much too much.” My heart would sink deep into my chest.

“I know, sweetheart, I know.” 

I never knew, and she knew that I didn’t know, and when she would realize this she would stop wailing and freeze up. That stiffening was the most disconcerting of it all. It was always sudden. She would sit up in the night, stiff and hollow like a dead tree trunk, and there was silence. Those moments were inexplicable. And she never tried explaining either. All I’d ever know would was there was “too much” of something—or nothing.

Yet, she never showed signs of trepidation with regards to excess when we lived together. In our small apartment she thrived on it. Oh, the fury returns! There would never be too much ketchup on her food. There was never too much wine in her glass, and the water when we bathed together, it was never too hot for her, as it was for me. Her soda was never cold enough because Europe didn’t “believe in ice,” and she couldn’t stand Europe but loathed the States. When we ate together, she would cross her legs under her and sit on them, bouncing up and down and eating grilled cheese sandwiches, which she would dip in refrigerated ketchup. 

“Let’s go to South America,” she’d say.

“Eva, you can’t just say South America like that!”

“Ugh, you’re so difficult. Why do I always have to be specific? You know what I mean!”

“No, I don’t know what you mean. What if I said let’s move to North America?”

“Then I’d say no, I hate North America.”

“You like San Francisco.”

“Because there are so many Mexicans you’d might as well be in Mexico.”

“Mexico isn’t in South America”

“Central America, South America, what’s the difference?”

“It isn’t in Central America, either.”

But she would have stopped listening to me by then, daydreaming of dancing Tango in a vague Argentina or basking in the sun of an even vaguer Colombia. 

It’s not that we didn’t get along. It was just that for her, the vicissitudes of life weren’t vicissitudes at all. It never occurred to her that she was simply discontent because it wasn’t the right day to be content. At times she’d awake hung-over only to drink water instead of milk with her breakfast because there was none. On other occasions she didn’t smoke her brand of cigarettes like she wanted, or it was cold outside and her feet were numb. She was always unhappy. It had nothing to do with the unwashed dishes that were piling up, or her unshaved legs, or the dust that was accumulating on the books in the shelves of our tiny apartment in Madrid. You see, to her, it wasn’t these things that made her unhappy. To her, the untidiness, the nausea, the tap water and scrambled eggs, the dry cigarette smoke, her numb feet, and the unread novels were products of her unhappiness, not the source. She would’ve said it was her unhappiness that led to her nausea in the morning, but for me it was the drinking that led to her nausea. Whichever standpoint you take, at least it was explainable. It was just a matter of inverting the cause and the effect. It makes me furious, yet Sartre was on her side. But Sartre had nothing to do with it because he sat stale on our shelf acquiring dust.

 After she’d weep at night and stiffen, she would loosen up and fall back into slumber and I’d lay awake. Sartre was not a scientist; he created man, and dealt with man, not mice. He set us free; he condemned us to be free.  But when I’d gaze at her lying next to me, lifeless, I’d often condemn him and call him a scientist. It was his Nausea, his grandiose Nothing, that had set her “free,” but she didn’t deserve to be free. She didn’t deserve to be in the night and shine in pain like the stars above our apartment. Sure they were beautiful, they danced but they danced in Nothing, and Nothing was their creed, and Nothing defined them. But Eva wasn’t nothing, at least she wasn’t to me. It made me furious, and I write this with fury: Eva was something, someone, somebody and sometime, and there is nothing Nothing about her.

You see, to understand Eva you have to understand where she came from. I don’t mean that in a biographical sense, as in “she was born, she lived here, she learned this, and she did that,” but in a more authentic sense. I explained to you before that life isn’t composed of life but of moments and memory. I know everything about Eva because she told me everything she remembered about her past, and that is all that really matters. But I will only tell you some of what I remember of her remembrances because that is all that really matters to the story of Eva and my fury. 

Once, on a Sunday morning in Wisconsin, when Eva was not yet a teenager, her mother cooked her fried eggs. Eva said the yellow part didn’t pop, and her mother said that in life the yellow part doesn’t always pop. From then on she always scrambled her eggs so they would always be the same.

On another occasion she was fourteen, and she ran out of a birthday party crying because she discovered that the candles wouldn’t blow out and her friend was deceived.

I told you Eva was above all else empathetic and she couldn’t bear watching people suffer, that she was tender like raw meat. Eva could hate anything. She could hate when people stood with one arm on their hip, she could hate Diet Coke, the Pope, loud chewing, cherry Chapstick, gold earrings, pearls, Hemingway, blue cheese, haircuts, perfumes, smiles, trains, Europe, the States, children, peanut butter, monuments, the rain, sausages, and shyness, but she couldn’t hate people. She loved everyone, and it made me furious.

What does it mean to love everyone? It means you believe every opinion is valid, that every way of life is just, that there is no point of arguing, that there is no truth, that above all else there is Nothing. Only someone who believes in Nothing can love everyone. At parties, she would associate with anyone. Anyone was her friend and everyone was her friend. I recall her dancing.

She is completely submerged in the music as she dances. We are in Sol, the heart Madrid’s nightlife. She dances and dances for people to know that she is dancing for herself, not for them. She is glistening with sweat; her skin is radiant and she smiles and dances with men. I don’t dance so she comes to console me between songs and asks me to take her to the bar for more drinks. As she dances, I drink and pretend to love people and with enough drinks I begin to love people. People are loving me, and I’m loving them, and we laugh, and some of them go off to dance, while others stop dancing to come to chat with me. Then all the laughing and dancing and fun and love make me dizzy, and I stumble out of the club without a word. I wake up in the morning to Eva coming in smelling like other men. You can bet the next morning was one of her unhappy days. I remember.

And so life doesn’t exist outside of memory, and I remember that. But I also remember more things. I remember an instance she was unhappy at night. She looked out the window, stiff, while a long tube of ash grew out of her idle cigarette. I placed an ash tray right under it on the floor.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”   

(silence)

“Want to get drunk”

“Yes,” she smiled.

I produced two bottles of wine and took out the corks. I gave one to Eva and poured us both healthy glassfuls. We drank quickly and smoked her favorite brand of cigarettes. Soon Nothing became Something. She was smiling with purple lips on our couch and I sat on a chair in front of her brushing her hair. Then there was an “I love you,” and we drank some more. We talked of the past and of friends and good times, making love to our memories and the sound that poured into our glasses. We drank in large gulps and she seemed to blossom in front of me and we drank to continue that spring. I brought out a bottle of whiskey, while she put on music from the American 60s. We danced and drank together, purple-tongued and merry. Circling the couch in rhythm with the music, undressing, dancing, laughing and drinking, Something filled the void, and we drank to Something and remembering. The whiskey we mixed with more wine, feeding each other from the mouths of the bottles. Then we were naked, lying on the cold floor, our feet in opposite directions so because our faces had no need to meet each other. We were together. It was quiet.

“You know, Álvaro,” she spoke with the air of a Dionysian philosopher “you are the only one that can make me happy.”  I remember that, too. That was something.

 Happiness. Is that all we strive for? Eva solely sought happiness. I often told her that you couldn’t be happy if you were searching for it. I also told her that happiness shouldn’t be the goal in life. That happiness was selfish, and although it was nice, it was immoral to live exclusively for it. But happiness was Eva’s only refuge from Nothing. When she was unhappy, Nothing permeated everything around her. Europe was filled with people who never wanted to talk to one another. America was full of people who only wanted to talk about themselves. To her South America was happy, and I have a vague idea that for that reason she never went: for it to remain happy in her mind—scrambled. Once, I told her that Beckett warned not to confuse disenchantment with truth. She burnt up like a star in Nothing.

“You and your quotes!” she said. “Always hiding behind your fucking quotes! Don’t you have anything to say yourself? They’re just words, no matter how much you want them to be otherwise! All you’re doing is saying words! Why don’t you go fucking do something for a change instead of reading all the time. Books! Literature! Where has that ever gotten you? You call yourself a writer, but I never see you write a goddamn thing! All you can do is quote. Quote, quote, quote! You think any of the authors you’re reading quoted? No! They had a fucking mind of their own and even then they were full of shit! It doesn’t matter what they think, or what anyone else thinks! It just matters what you think! That’s all there is, only you!” 

I wish I didn’t remember that. But I don’t want to forget it either. Life is too short to forget. My fury seems to be leaving me, along with it my freedom of hand. Eva tends to do that, you know, she has a way of bringing Nothing up. Nothing concerns me, you see. I can’t conceive of anything more frightening than Nothing. I’m OK if Nothing is there to meet me after I die. Nothing doesn’t scare me outside of life. It’s when Nothing and Life come together that bothers me, and our small apartment in Madrid couldn’t seem to handle it. It was tired of being endowed with meaning and then being left meaningless, of gazing at the stars in the night, and of the stars fading with the sun. “The Sun Also Riseth”— that’s what I wanted to say to her then, but I didn’t feel like quoting anymore.

I think it’s time for a digression. I told you my digressions weren’t digressions, correct? I recall my first encounter with philosophy. As a child I was afraid of the dark. I’m still afraid of the dark. But when I was young in Málaga I used to sleep in the same bed as my brother so I’d feel safe. When I was getting too old for that, or too large for his single bed, I moved my bed into his room, but I remained frightened because I couldn’t feel him near me.

“How am I supposed to know you’re still here?” I asked.

“Well, first you have to recognize that I’m here even though you can’t see me. Then I have to recognize that you are here even though I can’t see you. Then, since we both agree that we are here together in the darkness, you can be sure that I’m really here.

“But what if you forget that I’m here? Then what?” I asked.

“I won’t forget.”

“But what if you do?”

“I won’t.”

That, I will always remember. He was afraid of answering the question and I’m glad he didn’t because I was too young for that sort of thing. But the truth is that when faced with darkness and the night, all that really counts is what we believe together. If I believed my brother was a monster, it wouldn’t matter if he believed I was me. He’d still be a monster. If he truly believed I wasn’t there, then he wouldn’t answer when I called on him. He would refuse to recognize my existence. If he wouldn’t respond to me in the dark, then I’d believe he wasn’t there, that he didn’t exist and possibly that even I didn’t exist. That was Nothing. And a certain shared Something was all I could take refuge in. 

Eva tried desperately to take Something away from me, and I tried desperately to take her out of Nothing, but Nothing came out of it, or maybe Something did. 

Once I held her hand as we walked through a door. I hesitated to go through, and I peeked inside before entering. It was a writer’s gala, and I was hoping to meet a publisher. 

“You’re so gay,” she said, letting go of my hand and walking through the door.

It was a good night and there were many good writers in the crowd. There was soft jazz playing and fine champagne, and I had a fair amount of interesting conversations. I even received two emails from publishers asking me to send them samples of my work. We got home at about two in the morning.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No, not really.”

“Want me to make you a sandwich?” There was a light, loving tone in her voice.

“No thanks, I’m feeling a little gay right now.”

She slammed the refrigerator door and went into our room. I remained in the kitchen under the florescent lights until I finished two cigarettes and a glass of red wine. Sitting up on the bed with her glasses on, she was till awake when I entered our bedroom. 

“I don’t think you’re gay,” she said, almost sighing.

“Yes, you do. And I’m fine with it.” I was undressing slowly.

“How can I think you’re gay if you’re sleeping with me?”

“Don’t be stupid. You know what you meant.”

“I’m not being stupid. You’re the one getting all worked up about one little comment.”

“You have an effeminate boyfriend. I’m not upset. It’s just the truth.”

“Just because I think your gay— which I don’t— doesn’t mean that you are gay.”

“Yes it does, you think I’m gay and I think I’m gay. So I’m gay.”

“God, why do you have to take everything I say so seriously? Why is everything I say the truth. I say a lot of shit that doesn’t make sense. Why do you care so much what I say? Be your own person for once for Christ’s sake!”

 I could tell it wouldn’t end well if I continued. So I didn’t say anything else. All there was left was silence and darkness. I told you I took her seriously.

You see, I loved Eva, and Eva loved me. But the difference is that Eva loved everyone, and I could have been anyone to her. It was coincidence that it was me and not some other man. And coincidence reeks of Nothing, so I reject it. To me it was destiny. Eva was Eva. No one else could be Eva, and Eva was Something.

When we drifted from each other, we would talk less and go out separately more often with different circles of friends. Sometimes I would stay home and she’d come back smelling like other men and I’d get drunk in the living room. Other nights, I’d come home, and she’d be smoking on the couch with a long spear of ash moments from falling on the rug. She was old enough to get her own ashtray, so I’d go to bed. 

One night I went to a bar with an old friend of mine. There were two pretty girls, and he asked me to play along. He left with the blonde, and I stayed talking to the pretty brunette for a while before the bar closed. I walked her home, and she asked me to come up. I said I couldn’t and she smiled and I went home.

I woke up to Eva crying at six in the morning. 

“What’s wrong, darling?”

“It’s—it’s that—” she was sobbing, “it’s—it’s you smell like perfume.”

“Ah, baby, come on, how do you think I feel when you come back smelling like semen for Christ’s sake?”

“So it’s true, you did. You did, didn’t you?”

“So what? So you can go around doing whoever the fuck you want, but if I come home once smelling like another girl, you freak out?”

She started wailing. I tried to put my arms around her to no avail. 

“I thought you were different!” she was a wreck, a screaming drunken wreck. “I thought you believed in something! I thought— I can’t believe you would do this to me!” She stormed out of the bedroom, and I followed her into the kitchen where I found her holding a knife in her hand.

“You motherfucker, I’ll stab you if you take one more step!”

I don’t remember what happened after that, so I don’t consider it a part of my life. All I remember is waking up in a hospital bed.

I felt like I had been reborn. Everything around me was white, and I couldn’t remember a thing. It was beautiful, you know, until I started remembering. Little by little I began putting the pieces together, and noticed a thick bandage wrapped around my upper arm with a red stain still seeping through it. I began to feel feverish and went into a slumber. My dreams were filled with Eva. I saw her behind bars, on fire like a star. I was furious when I awoke, absolutely furious. Why was she allowed to be so rash? Condemned to freedom and Nothing. The police came later. I said I wouldn’t press charges.

When I was finally allowed out of the hospital, I walked home in the rain. In the rain I thought about how many times I’d walked in the rain. It occurred to me that Eva did what she did because she forgot certain things and remembered others. She forgot who I was and that frightened her. She forgot about the time we hid under the table, and the time we made spaghetti that was so bad we threw it away. She forgot about the time we danced around the couch naked and lay on the floor together. She remembered only the nasty things.

 I thought these thoughts as I walked home in the rain and these were the thoughts that led me to fury, and it was the fury that led me to tell you the story of Eva. But the fury is gone now. And I’m worried about Nothing again and I’m worried about Eva, but I’m pretty sure this is Something, that the story of my fury and Eva is Something, and I hope you agree or else she wins. Nothing wins. I told you I took writing seriously didn’t I? It’s not Nothing is it? Is it?