Killing Commendatore

by Haruki Murakami

When the wind blew, these cloud fragments, like some wandering spirits from the past, drifted uncertainly along the surface of the mountains, as if in search of lost memories.

There was one thing, though, that she wasn’t looking for. And that was intimacy.

Look deep enough into any person and you will find something shining within.

Just to make sure I got it all, I summarized what she’d just said. When I don’t know what to say I have a habit of summarizing. (A habit that, obviously, can be really irritating.)

The silence was too quiet, the music too noisy. Though silence was preferable, a little. The only thing that reached me was the scrape of the worn-out wipers, the endless hiss of the tires on the wet pavement.

As I gazed at my reflection I wondered, Where am I headed? Before that, though, the question was Where have I come to? Where is this place? No, before that even I needed to ask, Who the hell am I?

It was sad to say goodbye to the Peugeot, but I had to leave it behind. It felt like the car had died in my stead.

The room was perfectly still. The silence lent a faint weight to the air. As though I were sitting alone, at the bottom of the sea.

You can have all the desire and ache inside you want, but what you really need is a concrete starting point.

Somehow I had to get time on my side once again.

I sat there in the reading room at the library and carefully examined his works for a long time. So what was it that was lacking from his work? I couldn’t pinpoint it. But if I had to give an opinion, I’d say they were paintings that weren’t really necessary. The kind of paintings that, if they disappeared somewhere forever, wouldn’t put anybody out.

Isolation from others was a leitmotif that ran through his entire life.

From a distance, most things look beautiful.

He was merely a nameless commendatore appearing in the opera with the sole function of being stabbed to death by Don Giovanni in the opening of the opera. And in the end he transformed into an ominous statue that appeared to Don Giovanni and took him down to hell.

As you might imagine, painting a portrait requires the ability to accurately grasp the special features of a person’s face. But that’s not all. If it were, you’d end up with a caricature. To paint a vibrant portrait you need the skill to discover what lies at the core of the person’s face. A face is like reading a palm. More than the features you’re born with, a face is gradually formed over the passage of time, through all the experiences a person goes through, and no two faces are alike.

He smiled, the lines at his eyes deepening. A very clean, open smile. But that can’t be all, I thought. There was something hidden inside him. A secret locked away in a small box and buried deep down in the ground. Buried a long time ago, with soft green grass now growing above it. And the only person in the world who knew the location of the box was Menshiki. I couldn’t help but sense, deep within his smile, a solitude that comes from a certain sort of secret.

Admittedly, though, not a bad feeling, to take a random peek into the lives of people I hardly knew. Brushing past the lives of people I would never have anything to do with. Their lives felt right before me, yet also far away.

“Then why don’t we commence the drudgery?”

Der Rosenkavalier?”

But one thing I did know was that I needed to do something in order to hold on to an accurate record of my memory. Leave it alone, and it would disappear somewhere. No matter how vivid a memory, the power of time was stronger. I knew this instinctively.

But once aware of it, in the deep silence of the middle of the night, with the moonlight so unnaturally bright, that unidentified sound irretrievably ate its way into my awareness.

He feared that above all. He wasn’t afraid of loving someone. What he feared was growing to hate someone.

I knew the painting was incomplete. There was a wild outburst to it, a type of violence that had propelled me forward. A wildness I had not seen in some time. But something was still missing, a core element to control and quell that raw throng, an idea to bring emotion under control. But I needed more time to discover that. That torrent of color had to rest. That would be a job for tomorrow and beyond, when I could return to it under a fresh, bright light. The passage of the right amount of time would show me what was needed. I had to wait for it, like waiting patiently for the phone to ring. And in order to wait that patiently, I had to put my faith in time. I had to believe that time was on my side.

Curiosity didn’t just kill the cat.”

Silence descended as I chose my words, the kind of silence that makes you hear the passing of time.

In the silence of the woods it felt like I could hear the passage of time, of life passing by. One person leaves, another appears. A thought flits away and another takes its place. One image bids farewell and another one appears on the scene. As the days piled up, I wore out, too, and was remade. Nothing stayed still. And time was lost. Behind me, time became dead grains of sand, which one after another gave way and vanished. I just sat there in front of the hole, listening to the sound of time dying.

What is important is not creating something out of nothing. What my friends need to do is discover the right thing from what is already there.”

The morning is not my time. Darkness is my friend. A vacuum is my breath.

Instead of a stable truth, I choose unstable possibilities.

The two of us were motivated not by what we had got hold of, or were trying to get, but by what we’d lost, what we did not now have.

“There are plenty of things in history that are best left in the shadows. Accurate knowledge does not improve people’s lives. The objective does not necessarily surpass the subjective, you know. Reality does not necessarily extinguish fantasy.”

“There is very little I can explain to my friends about Tomohiko Amada’s Killing Commendatore. That is because it is, in essence, allegory and metaphor. Allegories and metaphors are not something you should explain in words. You just grasp them and accept them.”

Think things over very carefully before you answer. Your answer will be the same no matter how much you think it over, but it is still best to think it over very carefully.”

In place of maintaining a lifelong silence, though, he’d left the painting Killing Commendatore. He’d entrusted that painting with the truth he was forbidden to ever speak about, and his feelings about what had occurred.

However we thrash about, we are all thrown in one direction or another by our natural talent, or lack of it. That’s a basic truth we all have to learn to live with.

That light expressed naked yearning when projected outside. Focused inward, it strove for completion. These two sides were equally strong, and at perpetual war with each other.

As if he had a quarrel with how the second hand was moving.

The pit was thinking too, I could tell. It was alive—I could feel it breathing. My thoughts and those of the pit were like trees grown together: our roots joined in the dark, our sap intermingled. In this condition, self and other blended like the paints on my palette, their borders ever more indistinct.

Only by taking his own life was my uncle able to recover his humanity.”

People can forget what they should remember, and remember what by all rights and purposes they should forget. Especially when death approaches.

But then again, my friends, all is caveat emptor in this universe.” “What?” “The Latin for ‘buyer beware.’

“I still have a hard time imagining it,” I said. “It may sound foolish for a man in his mid-thirties to say this, but I feel as if my life is just beginning.”

So graphic an occurrence must have consequences—it couldn’t end like any other dream. I felt that strongly. It had to be connected to something. To have some sort of impact on the present.

There are channels through which reality can become unreal. Or unreality can enter the realm of the real. If we desire it that strongly. Deep in our heart. But that didn’t mean that we were free. It might demonstrate quite the opposite.

It’s easy to get soft when life is comfortable.”

The workings of the human heart are impossible to predict. Especially when sex is involved.

“Sometimes I think I’m empty,” he confessed. The smile still lingered on his lips. “Empty?” “Hollow inside. I know it sounds arrogant, but I’ve always operated on the assumption that I was a lot brighter and more capable than other people. More perceptive and discerning, with greater powers of judgment. Physically stronger, too. I figured I could succeed at whatever I turned my mind to. And I did. Put my hands on whatever I wanted to possess. Being locked up in Tokyo prison was a clear setback, of course, but I considered that an exception to the rule. When I was young, I saw no limits to what I could achieve. I thought I could attain a state close to perfection. Climb and climb until I reached a height where I could gaze down on everyone else. But when I passed fifty, I looked at myself in the mirror and discovered nothing but emptiness. A zero. What T. S. Eliot called a ‘straw man.’” I couldn’t think of anything to say. “My whole life may have been a mistake up till now,” Menshiki went on. “I feel that way sometimes. That I took a wrong turn somewhere. That nothing I’ve done has any real meaning. That’s why I told you I often find myself envying you.” “Envying what, for example?” “You have the strength to wish for what you cannot have. While I have only wished for those things I can possess.”

Maybe the chain of events will not flow so smoothly in reality. Maybe my hypothesis is based on mere supposition and conjecture. Just maybe, there are too many maybes.

“That’s a simile, not a metaphor,” I pointed out.

It should be obvious, but the best metaphors make the best poems.