The Hidden and the Obvious

Many a time I have caught myself unable to tell hidden signs from obvious ones.

The hidden ones — fine. Some people, with a finely developed sense of touch for a personality or for the atmosphere of a conversation, can do it. Others can’t. Insight is not given to everyone, and this, reluctantly, I have had to accept. I know perfectly well which team I landed on when it was being handed out... “Nothing to be done,” you tell yourself. “Some have the gift, and the rest of us fetch their balls...”. And besides, how much authority does the concealed actually have as something real? If it’s so very concealed, is it there at all, or does it merely pretend to be concealed, to hide the fact that nothing is hiding there, nothing whatsoever... If it hasn’t been spoken, shown, served up, sung, painted, written, filmed, packaged and arranged in the shop window, why should I of all people toil to discover it where it may not exist at all? Here I am tempted to believe that, as the saying goes, you won’t find a calf under the ox. I suppose you are already wondering whether I am that ox? I wouldn’t take offence. The main thing is not to be the missing calf.

But missing the obvious signs? Gestures and sentences? Expressions that ought to lead you in the clearest possible direction? That ought to drop you a hint, tread on your little toe, rub your nose in the fact that you’re not catching on...? Well, that’s another matter. Quite another. And still I don’t catch on. A scatterbrain. Or an absent-minded type, you’ll say. Nothing of the sort. I consciously try to follow them, to spot them, those blinking lights, those blaring sirens, and nothing. Like a tone-deaf teenager put in the school choir to make up the numbers. I can almost see the singing teacher waving his hand at me every few minutes: “You there. A little quieter, if you please!” And that is how I pass from one society event to another café and from one friendly gathering to another heart-to-heart. I strain and try hard to catch the spirit of the conversation. To find some way of feeling in step with the topic and in tune with the mood. Instead, however, I clumsily steer the conversation in an unexpected and unwanted direction with some example sprawled out in the wrong place, or with a story told completely out of the blue, without the slightest connection to the topic, so that the others need a few moments to pull themselves together and bring the conversation back to its former course, while I am left somewhat puzzled as to what exactly I meant by these absurd contributions of mine, there, where all I should have done was smile, since I can’t do anything else. But that’s nothing. I mean, that is nothing at all. The real drama-tragedy and farce-variety show begin when it comes to meeting face to face. A dialogue. Me with somebody else. Two people in conversation. And one of them is me. Horror. The end of the world. Universal grief. A road accident. I know it’s going to be a crash, but I’m a fighter. My palms don’t sweat with nerves. On the contrary. I boldly start discussing my interlocutor’s hairstyle (and only if it’s a woman or someone with hair...), our mutual acquaintances and the weather, our last meeting eleven months ago and the new baby of our mutual friends X and Y. And how big it’s grown already, because time flies without our noticing, and you notice it most of all by the growing children... See? Well, that’s because I know how to open. I’ve thought ahead and calculated as far as the ninth move of the game, beyond which the variations become so many that my grandmaster sociability secretly begins to pray, at best, for a draw. For a compromise handshake, acknowledging that the conversation was neither good nor bad, and that I may now, with pleasure and well-deservedly, head for my terrace, where I have left a book with a folded-down page and a half-drunk black coffee waiting for me as a reward for my Olympic efforts and even more Olympic results in that most ancient of sports — communication. I wonder what they call me most often behind my back. “Stiff” or “blockhead”? Or perhaps “gnarled weirdo”? “Kerbstone”? “Clumsy cuckoo”? Or are the comparisons not as flattering as I’d like to believe? And might even “doddering old idiot-lunatic” be a generous assumption? There, at last I have found something hidden from me, which, thanks to people’s good manners, I will never learn, but which I’d bet exists.