Divided over the Subtleties

Over-the-full-table-kind story

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

“I don’t believe a word of your story,” you announced.

“Of course, it didn’t happen quite the way I told it, but I believe it really happened.” In that instance, I exactly knew what you thought and maybe what you would say, if given enough time: In your imagination. Regardless, I continued, “Worshipers are disarmed when faced by a woman, because they’re still in their mothers’ shadows. In every woman, they see a messenger from their mother and submit to her their mothers’ skirts spread over them like the sky.”

That last image pleased you so much that you repeated it several times in the direction of every man in the room as if to say, See what she came up with this time. “What you’re seeing overhead is not the sky but your mother’s enormous skirts! We’re all living under our mothers’ skirts!”

“What did you say?” your wife yelled out with incredible loudness, as if touched by a hot iron. Then she looked down at you and whispered almost in a loving way: “You were tottering. From the start, you had been drinking more than anyone else.”

“What did you say about his mother? What did you say?!” She fixed me with a daring stare.

“I wasn’t talking about his mother,” I said gently, but your spit was already on getting on your lips, enraged by her reaction, somehow protecting the right for it, and you leaned forward and let fly. But you were a little too drunk, and the gob landed on your wife’s large, old-fashioned collar. You took out a piece of a kitchen towel and wiped it off.

Spitting had made you feel deathly tired, temporarily, of course, so you fell back into your chair.

Your wife nodded at a younger girl to serve some more drinks. She served. Still a potent alcohol in her right hand. She unexpectedly said, “Listen, all of you, my friends. I’m quite an ordinary girl, I have nothing to offer apart from a drink, that doesn’t even belong to me, but I came here because I was sent by my love…”

Now you squeezed your wife’s hand very hard, in fear of what might come out.

”… so that you’ll know what real love is, so that you’ll…”

No! You wouldn’t even pay her to do it!

You cast a look of cold hatred at us all because if we weren’t here, she wouldn’t say what she just said. You went on: “You’re mistaken if you think this is just a funny story.”

The girl turned to your wife with a celestial look and said to her: “You shouldn’t hold it against me, because you’re good and I love you too, I love you both,’ and with her free hand, she took your wife by the hand.” She took her to another room, to a bathroom.

“If it were a scene from one of my funny stories, I’d have nothing against it,” I said. “But what you’ve just told us is something worse. It’s bad poetry.

“You’re just jealous!” Your wife shouted from the toilet or bathroom, wherever she was led.

“It’s never happened to you in your whole life, being alone in a room with two beautiful women who love you!” I said with all sincerity I could disclose.

“Do you know how beautiful my wife is in a red bathrobe, with her natural hair undone, on her own!?”

“No, I don’t. I’ve never seen her with nothing on…” I tried to return to where the thought originated, “her hair”.

My shadow laughed mockingly, and this time, yours decided to punish mine for this caustic comment: “You’re a great poet, we all know that, but why…?”

For a few moments, everyone was stunned, then your wife said to the girl, barely controlling herself: “Little Darling, you shouldn’t have said that. It’s the worst thing you could have said. It’s boorish.”

We all, lovers of harmony, pretended not to overhear it. Of course, we would not have gone on teasing anyone, hence we were unaware that the shadow of Voltaire was among us, provoking and now, laughingly, interrupting our dense silence:

“You both. It’s as plain as the noses on your faces that you’re both loaded with complexes,” and he started to analyse all our poetry, yours and mine, yours lacked both your happy natural charm (you corrected: character) and mine impassioned inspiration (but not motivation, I exclaimed, pouring myself generously a cup of coffee you brought from a distant hot land this summer). He even started to dissect each of our metaphors to show brilliantly that our inferiority complex was the direct source of our imagination and that it had taken root in a childhood marked by poverty and the oppressive influence of an authoritarian father.

Just then, you leaned over to me and said in a whisper that resounded throughout the room, to be heard by everyone, including your wife: “Come off it! What a bunch of nonsense. All of our trouble was that unnecessarily prolonged hyper-celibacy! And it’s long over now, so what now?”

Your wife returned from the private room alone, dressed in an elegant red dress. But still in slippers. I’ve never seen a woman raising her eyebrow so high, it nearly reached her hairline. Hers because of what she has heard, in this very room, and mine, as she was wearing red slippers perfectly matching her dress.

My husband kept quiet all the way, pouring himself red wine (the girl returned meanwhile from the restroom and discreetly removed empty bottles and brought full ones) and listening attentively to the conversation with its flying sparks. He couldn’t swivel his head fast enough to follow the giddy whirl and high eyebrows.

He looked at us all. “Well…”, he tried to decide which of the poets he liked most.

He quoted from Gabriel Okara, "they used to laugh with their hearts and laugh with their eyes; but now they only laugh with their teeth, while their ice-block-cold eyes search behind my shadow."

Did he see Voltaire, as we did, or not? I couldn’t figure it out.

He looked at his watch and noted it was time he returned home if he wanted to avoid ending up just like us.

Nonetheless, he could not tear himself away from the great companionship, and instead, he went to the toilet to catch a fresh breath, so to speak. Filled with grandiose thoughts as he stood in front of the white tiles, he decided to return to our orbit.

“You heard him. He’s not subtle. Did you hear me?” I asked him, checking for attention.

I said the word “subtle” as if it were in italics. Yes, there are words unlike all the others, those words whose particular meaning is known only to initiates. I didn’t know why I said the word “subtle” as if it were in italics, but I, who am among the initiates, know that we all once read Pascal’s pensée about subtle minds and geometrical minds, and ever since, somehow have divided the human race into two categories: those who are subtle, and all the others.

“You think you two are subtle, don’t you?” I said calmly enough not to appear aggressive.

Already buttoning his coat in the corridor, far too thin for the freezing temperature outside, he noticed that your wife, just as Countess Rostopchin had noted in her diary hundreds of years before, had very short legs. He felt grateful to be asked a serious question and wanted to give an equally serious answer.

“We’re not subtle at all.” My husband said.

Your wife stood still on her somehow even shorter legs now: “No, we are not subtle at all.” She repeated, looking into my husband’s eyes.

“But I’m proud! Do you understand? I’m proud!” The word “proud” was another that came, this time from his mouth, in italics, to indicate that only a fool could think his pride was like a girl’s in her beauty or a shoemaker’s in his shoes, for it was a singular kind of pride, a pride justified and noble.

“I’m proud to be among you”, and he returned to the living room, where Voltaire was delivering a panegyric to you. I then went into a frenzy. Planting myself at the edge of the table, which at once made me a head taller than the seated others, I said: “And now I’m going to show you what he is proud of! Now I’m going to tell you something, because I’m proud, too! There are only two poets in this room: Him (I pointed at you) and me.”

This time it was Voltaire who raised his voice: “I can say you’re poetically great, but you don’t have the right to say it.”

I was taken aback for a moment. Then I stammered, “Why don’t I have the right to say it? We are proud!”

My husband repeated several more times that he was proud to be among us.

Voltaire roared with even louder laughter, your wife went to wear high heels, and you roared at her for doing just that. She went anyway and returned in high heels, her toes slipping out in front, going in both directions.

You realised that the moment you were waiting for had arrived. You stood up like me now and looked around at us all: “You don’t understand her. A poet’s pride is not ordinary. Only the poet can know the value of what he writes. Others don’t understand it until much later, or they may never understand it. People are late. Success is late. So it’s the poet’s duty to stand proudly. If she weren’t, she would betray her own work.” By saying that, not only did you stand in my defence, but also in your own and of everyone else who was now standing tall. A moment before, we were all roaring, slipping around and drinking, but now, at a single stroke, we all agreed with the males in the room, because they were just as proud as us and were only ashamed to say so, not realising that when the word “proud” is properly enunciated, it stops being laughable and becomes witty and noble.

So we were grateful for being given such good advice, and one of us—probably the girl—even applauded.