About Adele: shades of letters and syllables, Peter Jalesh [great book club books .TXT] 📗

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.