Messi@ by Andrei Codrescu

Author:Andrei Codrescu
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504015288
Publisher: Open Road Media

The night Andrea had her tryout as Gala’s replacement, she mesmerized the land of Israel with the flourish of her arms and the intelligence of her small talk. She revealed the letters with such authority it seemed that she herself had made up the words, and each puzzle solved seemed to answer a mystery of profound importance.

The show’s producers had drafted Gala’s fashion adviser to dress her up. The designer found her difficult. Although she had practically the same shape as Gala, her posture was different, and she projected sadness and abandon where Gala had radiated warmth and brashness. She settled on a white, blue-trimmed sailor’s suit with a short skirt, out of which Andrea’s skinny legs shot out like a fawn’s. She looked all at once polished, schoolgirlish, and lost.

The viewing audience at Saint Hildegard’s was astonished to see the messy waif look so neat. But the larger viewing audience, which had nothing to compare her to, was seduced immediately. They perceived that the lost sailor, who had been introduced as “Andrea Isabel, Jewish Basque orphan newly arrived in Eretz Yisrael,” was an extraordinary creature indeed. She spoke nearly flawless Hebrew, with only the hint of an accent, but best of all, she projected a deep sadness coupled with sensuality. Her presence seemed to say: take my body and savor my mind. I don’t care. Use me anyway you please, but you will never know me. Such a message echoed deeply with the public of a country where millions of citizens had experienced unimaginable suffering. Many of them were old and saw in Andrea their younger selves, sprung physically intact somehow from hell. Her body was new, but her suffering was ancient.

The country nearly came to a standstill as people dropped everything they were doing to watch her dance across the small screen. In cafés and bars, convents and yeshivas, mosques and motels, viewers screamed the letters of the Hebrew alphabet as if seized by ancient spirits.

The puzzles had not been in themselves remarkable. The category PERSON solved as ELVIS. THING turned out to be THE FUTURE. The PART OF SPEECH puzzle was ACTIVE VERB. PHRASE, one of the more difficult puzzles, was IF I EVER FORGET JERUSALEM. The BOOK was Lord of the Flies, and MOVIE was The Ten Commandments. The puzzles had been easy to solve. The contestants, a pediatrician from Bathsheba, a grave digger from Eliat, and a bus driver between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, all knew the answers, but only the grave digger won money, because of his luck in spinning the wheel.

But such factual description does not do justice to Andrea’s performance. She herself became the focus of the words, as if all the categories—person, thing, and so on—were no more than emanations of her soul. A light appeared to come out of her, composed of all the words familiar to the viewers, but their familiarity vanished somehow, leaving huge craters of mystery within the sounds themselves.

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