The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [56]
The games became stranger. Rules were invented, broken and abridged, a fight started now and then, the game going on around it. I kept waiting for a player to be stricken, a heart attack, a convulsive collapse. The spectators rarely cheered or moaned. It began to feel like nowhere, men moving in the dreamy distance, linesmen sharing a cigarette. We walked across the bridge, watched the game, walked back across the bridge.
I thought about soccer in history, the inspiration for wars, truces, rampaging mobs. The game was a global passion, spherical ball, grass or turf, entire nations in spasms of elation or lament. But what kind of sport is it that disallows the use of players’ hands, except for the goalkeeper? Hands are essential human tools, the things that grasp and hold, that make, take, carry, create. If soccer were an American invention, wouldn’t some European intellectual maintain that our historically puritanical nature has compelled us to invent a game structured on anti-masturbatory principles?
This is one of the things I think about that I never had to think about before.
The notable thing about Norman Bloch, my bunkmate, was not the art that used to hang on his walls. What impressed me was the crime he’d committed. This was itself a kind of art, conceptual in nature, radical in scale, a deed so casual and yet so transgressive that Norman, here a year, would be spending six more years in the camp, the bunk, the clinic, the meal lines, in the squalling noise of the hand dryers in the toilets.
Norman did not pay taxes. He did not file quarterly reports or annual returns and he did not request extensions. He did not backdate documents, establish trusts or foundations, open secret accounts or utilize the ready mechanisms of offshore jurisdictions. He was not a political or religious protester. He was not a nihilist, rejecting all values and institutions. He was completely transparent. He just didn’t pay. It was a kind of lethargy, he said, the way people avoid doing the dishes or making the bed.
I brightened at that. Doing the dishes, making the bed. He said he didn’t know exactly how long it was since he’d last paid taxes. When I asked about his financial advisers, his business associates, he shrugged, or so I imagined. I was in the top bunk, he was in the bottom, two men in pajamas, passing the time.
“Those girls. Pretty amazing,” he said. “And the news, especially the bad news.”
“You like the bad news.”
“We all like the bad news. Even the girls like the bad news.”
I thought of telling him that they were my daughters. No one here knew this and it was better that way. I didn’t want the men in the dorm looking at me, talking to me, spreading the word throughout the camp. I was learning how to disappear. It suited me, it was my natural state, day by day, to be phantasmal again.
Best not to speak of the girls.
Then I spoke of them, quietly, in six or seven words. There was a long pause. He had a round face, Norman, with a squat nose, his bushy hair going gray.
“You never said this, Jerry.”
“Just between us.”
“You never say anything.”
“Just to you. No one else. It’s true,” I said. “Kate and Laurie. I sit and watch them and it’s hard to understand how any of this happened. What are they doing there, what am I doing here? Their mother writes the reports. She didn’t tell me this but I know it’s her. She’s masterminding the whole thing.”
“What’s she like, their mother?”
“We’re legally separated.”
“What’s she like?” he said.
“Fairly smart, like in a cutting-edge way. Sneaky sort of pretty. You have to pay attention to see it.”
“You still love her? I don’t think I ever loved my wife. Not in the original meaning of the word.”
I didn’t ask what he meant by that.
“Did your wife love you?”
“She loved my walls,” he said.
“I love my kids.”
“You