If on a winter's night a traveler (27 page)

(You have come all the way to Ataguitania to hunt a counterfeiter of novels, and you find yourself prisoner of a system in which every aspect of life is counterfeit, a fake. Or, rather: you were determined to venture into forests, prairies, mesas, Cordilleras on the trail of the explorer Marana, lost certainly while seeking the source of the oceanic novel, but you bang your head against the bars of the prison society which stretches all over the planet, confining adventure within its mean corridors, always the same.... Is this still your story, Reader? The itinerary you have followed for love of Ludmilla has carried you so far from her that you have lost sight of her: if she no longer is leading you, you can only entrust yourself to her diametric mirror image, Lotaria....

But can it truly be Lotaria? "I don't know who you've got it in for. You mention names I don't know," she answers you every time you try to refer to past episodes. Can it be the rule of the underground that imposes it on her? To tell the truth, you are not at all sure of the identification.... Can she be a false Corinna or a false Lotaria? The only thing you know for sure is that her function in your story is similar to Lotaria's, so the name that fits her is Lotaria, and you would not be able to call her anything else.

"Do you mean to deny you have a sister?"

"I have a sister, but I don't see what that has to do with anything."

"A sister who loves novels with characters whose psychology is upsetting and complicated?"

"My sister always says she loves novels where you feel an elemental strength, primordial, telluric. That's exactly what she says: telluric")

"You made a complaint to the prison library, on account of a defective volume," says the high official seated behind a high desk.

You heave a sigh of relief. Ever since a guard came to your cell to summon you, and made you follow corridors, go down stairs, walk through underground passages, climb more stairs, cross antechambers and offices, your apprehension has made you shudder, has given you flashes of fever. Instead, they simply wanted to process your complaint about
Around an empty grave
by Calixto Bandera! In the place of your anxiety, you feel reawaken in you the dismay that seized you when you saw in your hand an unglued binding that held together a few tattered, worn quires.

"Of course I complained!" you answer. "You boast so much, you people, about your model library in your model prison, and then when a person goes and asks for a book that has a proper card in the catalogue, he finds a handful of torn pages! Now I ask you how you can think of re-educating prisoners with systems like that!"

The man at the desk slowly takes off his eyeglasses. He shakes his head with a sad look. "I won't go into the details of your complaint. That's not my job. Our office, though it has close contacts both with prisons and with libraries, deals with broader problems. We sent for you, knowing you are a reader of novels, because we need advice. The forces of order—army, police, magistrature—

have always had difficulty judging whether a novel should be banned or allowed: lack of time for extensive reading, uncertainty of aesthetic and philosophical criteria on which to base the opinion.. .. No, don't fear that we want to force you to assist us in our censorship work. Modern technology will soon put us in a position to perform those tasks with rapidity and efficiency. We have machines capable of reading, analyzing, judging any written text. But it is precisely the reliability of the instruments on which we must run some checks. In our files you are listed as a reader of the sort corresponding to the average, and we see that you have read, at least in part,
Around an empty grave
by Calixto Bandera. We feel it would be opportune to compare your impressions of your reading with the results of a reading machine."

He has you taken into the machine room. "Allow me to introduce our programmer, Sheila."

Before you, in a white smock buttoned up to the neck, you see Corinna-Gertrude-Alfonsina, who is tending a battery of smooth metallic appliances, like dishwashers. "These are the memory units that have stored the whole text of
Around an empty grave.
The terminal is a printing apparatus that, as you see, can reproduce the novel word for word from the beginning to the end," the officer says. A long sheet unrolls from a kind of typewriter which, with machine-gun speed, is covering it with cold capital letters.

"Now, then, if you'll allow me, I'll take advantage of this opportunity to collect the chapters I still haven't read," you say, grazing with a shy caress the dense river of writing in which you recognize the prose that has kept you company in your prisoner's hours.

"Help yourself," the officer says. "I'll leave you with Sheila, who will insert the program we want."

Reader, you have found again the book you were seeking; now you can pick up the broken thread; the smile returns to your lips. But do you imagine it can go on in

this way, this story? No, not that of the novel! Yours! How long are you going to let yourself be dragged passively by the plot? You had flung yourself into the action, filled with adventurous impulses: and then? Your function was quickly reduced to that of one who records situations decided by others, who submits to whims, finds himself involved in events that elude his control. Then what use is your role as protagonist to you? If you continue lending yourself to this game, it means that you, too, are an accomplice of the general mystification.

You grab the girl by the wrist. "Enough of these disguises, Lotaria! How long are you going to continue letting yourself be exploited by a police regime?"

This time Sheila-Ingrid-Corinna cannot conceal a certain uneasiness. She frees her wrist from your grasp. "I don't understand who you're accusing, I don't know anything about your stories. I follow a very clear strategy. The counterpower must infiltrate the mechanisms of power in order to overthrow it."

"And then reproduce it, identically! It's no use your camouflaging yourself, Lotaria! If you unbutton one uniform, there's always another uniform underneath!"

Sheila looks at you with an air of challenge. "Unbutton ... ? Just you try...."

Now that you have decided to fight, you can't draw back. With a frantic hand you unbutton the white smock of Sheila the programmer and you discover the police uniform of Alfonsina; you rip Alfonsina's gold buttons away and you find Corinna's anorak; you pull the zipper of Corinna and you see the chevrons of Ingrid....

It is she herself who tears off the clothes that remain on her. A pair of breasts appear, firm, melon-shaped, a slightly concave stomach, the full hips of a
fausse maigre,
a proud pubes, two long and solid thighs.

"And this? Is this a uniform?" Sheila exclaims.

You have remained upset. "No, this, no..." you murmur.

"Yes, it is!" Sheila cries. "The body is a uniform! The body is armed militia! The body is violent action! The body claims power! The body's at war! The body declares itself subject! The body is an end and not a means! The body signifies! Communicates! Shouts! Protests! Subverts!"

With this, Sheila-Alfonsina-Gertrude has thrown herself on you, torn off your prisoner's trousers; your naked limbs mingle under the closets of electronic memories.

Reader, what are you doing? Aren't you going to resist? Aren't you going to escape? Ah, you are participating.... Ah, you fling yourself into it, too.... You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters? Like this, without any preparation..? Wasn't your story with Ludmilla enough to give the plot the warmth and grace of a love story? What need do you have to go also with her sister (or with somebody you identify with her sister), with this Lotaria-Corinna-Sheila, who, when you think about it, you've never even liked.... It's natural for you to want to get even, after you have followed events of pages and pages with passive resignation, but does this seem the right way to you? Or are you trying to say that even in this situation you find yourself involved, despite yourself? You know very well that this girl always acts with her head, what she thinks in theory she does in practice, to the ultimate consequences.... It was an ideological demonstration she wanted to give you, nothing else.... Why, this time, do you allow yourself to be convinced immediately by her arguments? Watch out, Reader; here everything is different from what it seems, everything is two-faced....

The flash of a bulb and the repeated click of a camera devour the whiteness of your convulsed, superimposed nudity.

"Once again, Captain Alexandra, I catch you naked in a prisoner's arms!" the invisible photographer reprimands.

"These snapshots will enrich your personal dossier...." And the voice drifts off, with a sneer.

Alfonsina-Sheila-Alexandra pulls herself up, covers herself, gives a bored look. "They never leave me in peace a moment," she huffs. "Working at the same time for two secret services fighting between themselves has this drawback: both of them constantly try to blackmail you."

You start to get up, too, and you find you are wrapped in the rolls of the printout: the beginning of the novel is unfurling on the ground like a cat that wants to play. Now it is the stories you live that break off at the climactic moment: perhaps now you will be allowed to follow the novels you read all the way to the end....

Alexandra-Sheila-Corinna, absorbed, has started pressing keys again, She has resumed her diligent manner, the kind of girl who puts her whole soul into everything she does. "There's something not working," she murmurs. "By now all of it should have come out.... What's wrong with it?"

You had already realized she's having a slightly nervous day today, Gertrude-Alfonsina; at a certain point she must have pressed the wrong key. The order of the words in the text of Calixto Bandera, preserved in the electronic memory to be brought again to light at any moment, has been erased in an instant demagnetization of the circuits. The multicolored wires now grind out the dust of dissolved words: the the the, of of of of, from from from from, that that that that, in columns according to their respective frequency. The book has been crumbled, dissolved, can no longer be recomposed, like a sand dune blown away by the wind.

Around an empty grave

When the vultures rise it's a sign the night is about to end, my father had told me. And I could hear the heavy wings flapping in the dark sky, and I could see their shadow obscure the green stars. It was a toilsome flight, which did not immediately break free of the earth, of the shadows of the bushes, as if only in flight did the feathers become convinced they were feathers and not prickly leaves. When the captors had flown off, the stars reappeared, gray, and the sky green. It was dawn, and I was riding along the deserted roads in the direction of the village of Oquedal.

"Nacho," my father had said, "as soon as I die, take my horse, my carbine, food for three days, and follow the dry bed of the stream above San Ireneo, until you see the smoke rising from the terraces of Oquedal."

"Why Oquedal?" I asked him. "Who is at Oquedal? Who should I look for?"

My father's voice became more and more faint and slow, his face more and more purple. "I must reveal to you a secret I have kept for many years.... It is a long story...."

In those words my father was spending the last breath of his mortal agony, and I, knowing his tendency to digress, to lard all his talk with divagations, glosses, parentheses, and flashbacks, was afraid he would never arrive at communicating the essential thing to me. "Hurry, Father, tell me the name of the person I am to ask for on arriving at Oquedal...."

"Your mother ... Your mother, whom you do not know, lives at Oquedal.... Your mother, who has not seen you since you were in swaddling clothes..."

I had known that before dying he would talk to me about my mother. He owed it to me, after having made me live through my childhood and adolescence without knowing what she looked like or what name she had, the woman who had borne me, or why he had torn me from that breast when I was still sucking its milk, to drag me after him in his vagabond, fugitive life. "Who is my mother? Tell me her name!" About my mother he had told me many stories, at the time when I had not yet tired of asking about her, but they were stories, inventions, and each contradicted the others: at one time she was a poor beggar, at another a foreign lady traveling in a red automobile, once a cloistered nun, and once a circus rider; in one story she died giving birth to me, in another she was lost in an earthquake. And so the day came when I decided I would ask no more questions and would wait until he spoke to me of her. I had just turned sixteen when my father was stricken with yellow fever.

"Let me tell it from the beginning," he said, gasping. "When you have got to Oquedal, and have said: I am Nacho, son of Don Anastasio Zamora, you will have to hear many things about me, untrue stories, lies, calumny. I want you to know...."

"The name! My mother's name! Quickly!"

"Now. The moment has come for you to know...."

No, that moment did not come. After having rambled in

vain prefaces, my father's speech was lost in a death rattle and was extinguished forever. The young man who was now riding in the darkness along the steep roads above San Ireneo was still ignorant of the origins with which he was about to be reunited.

I had taken the road that flanks the deep chasm, high above the dry stream. The dawn, which remained suspended over the jagged edges of the forest, seemed to open to me not a new day but a day that came before all the other days, new in the sense of the time when days were still new, like the first day when men understood what a day was.

And as the day grew bright enough for me to see the other side of the chasm, I realized that a road ran along there, too, and a man on horseback was proceeding parallel to me, in the same direction, with a long-barreled army rifle hanging over one shoulder.

"Hey!" I shouted. "How far are we from Oquedal?"

He didn't even turn around; or, rather, worse than that: for an instant my voice made him move his head (otherwise I might have believed he was deaf) but he immediately returned his gaze to the road before him and went on riding without deigning me an answer or a sign of greeting.