If on a winter's night a traveler (19 page)

"No, leave that one alone. It's the book I'm reading. And besides, it's not mine, I have to return it to Cavedagna. Pick another. Here, take this one.... It's almost the same...."

You have picked up a volume with a red band—latest best seller by silas FLANNERY—and this already explains the resemblance, since all of Flannery's novels are brought out in a specially designed series. But that isn't the only thing: the title that stands out on the dust jacket

is
In a network of lines that
... These are two copies of the same book! You weren't expecting this. "Why, this really is odd! I would never have thought that Ludmilla already had it...."

Irnerio holds up his hands. "This isn't Ludmilla's. I don't want to have anything to do with that stuff. I thought there weren't any more of them around."

"Why? Whose is it? What do you mean?"

Irnerio picks up the volume with two fingers, goes toward a little door, opens it, throws the book inside. You have followed him; you stick your head into a dark little storeroom; you see a table with a typewriter, a tape recorder, dictionaries, a voluminous file. From the file you take the sheet that acts as title page, you carry it to the light, you read: "Translation by Ermes Marana."

You are thunderstruck. Reading Marana's letters, you felt you were encountering Ludmilla at every turn.... Because you can't stop thinking of her: this is how you explained it, a proof of your being in love. Now, moving around Ludmilla's house, you come upon traces of Marana. Is it an obsession persecuting you? No, from the very beginning what you felt was a premonition that a relationship existed between them.... Jealousy, which has been a kind of game you played with yourself, now grips you relentlessly. And it isn't only jealousy: it is suspicion, distrust, the feeling that you cannot be sure of anything or anyone.... The pursuit of the interrupted book, which instilled in you a special excitement since you were conducting it together with the Other Reader, turns out to be the same thing as pursuing her, who eludes you in a proliferation of mysteries, deceits, disguises....

"But... what's Marana got to do with it?" you ask. "Does he live here?"

Irnerio shakes his head. "He was here. Now time has passed. He shouldn't come back here again. But by now

all his stories are so saturated with falsehood that anything said about him is false. He's succeeded in this, at least. The books he brought here look the same as the others on the outside, but I recognize them at once, at a distance. And when I think that there shouldn't be any more here, any more of his papers, except in that storeroom... But every now and then some trace of him pops up again. Sometimes I suspect he puts them here, he comes when nobody's around and keeps making his usual deals, secretly...."

"What deals?"

"I don't know.... Ludmilla says that whatever he touches, if it isn't false already, becomes false. All I know is that if I tried to make my works out of books that were his, they would turn out false: even if they looked the same as the ones I'm always making...."

"But why does Ludmilla keep his things in that storeroom? Is she waiting for him to come back?"

"When he was here, Ludmilla was unhappy.... She didn't read any more.... Then she ran away... She was the first to go off.... Then he went...."

The shadow is going away. You can breathe again. The past is closed. "What if he showed up again?"

"She'd leave once more...."

"For where?"

"Hmm... Switzerland... I don't know...."

"Is there another man in Switzerland?" Instinctively you have thought of the writer with the spyglass.

"You can call him another man, but it's an entirely different sort of story. The old thriller guy ..."

"Silas Flannery?"

"She said that when Marana convinces her that the difference between the true and the false is only a prejudice of ours, she feels the need to see someone who makes books the way a pumpkin vine makes pumpkins—that's how she put it...."

The door opens suddenly. Ludmilla enters, flings her coat onto a chair, her packages. "Ah, how marvelous! So many friends! Sorry I'm late!"

You are having tea, sitting with her. Irnerio should also be there, but his armchair is empty.

"He was there. Where has he gone?"

"Oh, he must have left. He comes and goes without saying anything."

"People come and go like that, in your house?"

"Why not? How did you get in?"

"I, and all the others!"

"What is this? A jealous scene?"

"What right would I have?"

"Do you think that the time will come when you could have the right? If so, it's best not even to begin."

"Begin what?"

You set the cup on the coffee table. You move from the armchair to the sofa, where she is sitting.

(To begin. You're one who said it, Ludmilla. But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest—for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both— must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story. )

You are in bed together, you two Readers. So the moment has come to address you in the second person plural, a very serious operation, because it is tantamount to considering the two of you a single subject. I'm speaking to you two, a fairly unrecognizable tangle under the rumpled sheet. Maybe afterward you will go your separate ways and the story will again have to shift gears painfully, to alternate between the feminine
tu
and the masculine; but now, since your bodies are trying to find, skin to skin, the adhesion most generous in sensations, to transmit and receive vibrations and waves, to compenetrate the fullnesses and the voids, since in mental activity you have also agreed on the maximum agreement, you can be addressed with an articulated speech that includes you both in a sole, two-headed person. First of all the field of action, or of existence, must be established for this double entity you form. Where is the reciprocal identification leading? What is the central theme that recurs in your variations and modulations? A tension concentrated on not losing anything of its own potential, on prolonging a state of reactivity, on exploiting the accumulation of the other's desire in order to multiply one's own charge? Or is it the most submissive abandonment, the exploration of the immensity of strokable and reciprocally stroking spaces, the dissolving of one's being in a lake whose surface is infinitely tactile? In both situations you certainly do not exist except in relation to each other, but, to make those situations possible, your respective egos have not so much to erase themselves as to occupy, without reserve, all the void of the mental space, invest in itself at the maximum interest or spend itself to the last penny. In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn't change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united
voi,
a second person plural, you are two
tu's,
more separate and circumscribed than before.

(This is already true now, when you are still occupied,

each with the other's presence, in an exclusive fashion. Imagine how it will be in a little while, when ghosts that do not meet will frequent your minds, accompanying the encounters of your bodies tested by habit.)

Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.

And you, too, O Reader, are meanwhile an object of reading: the Other Reader now is reviewing your body as if skimming the index, and at some moments she consults it as if gripped by sudden and specific curiosities, then she lingers, questioning it and waiting till a silent answer reaches her, as if every partial inspection interested her only in the light of a wider spatial reconnaissance. Now she dwells on negligible details, perhaps tiny stylistic faults, for example the prominent Adam's apple or your way of burying your head in the hollow of her shoulder, and she exploits them to establish a margin of detachment, critical reserve, or joking intimacy; now instead the accidentally discovered detail is excessively cherished— for example, the shape of your chin or a special nip you take at her shoulder—and from this start she gains impetus, covers (you cover together) pages and pages from

top to bottom without skipping a comma. Meanwhile, in the satisfaction you receive from her way of reading you, from the textual quotations of your physical objectivity, you begin to harbor a doubt: that she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to construct for herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you.

Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time?

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional model, perhaps four-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

Already, in the confused improvisation of the first encounter, the possible future of a cohabitation is read. Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, each reads in the other the unwritten story. Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn

on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set against it?

You speak to Ludmilla of the novel you were reading while you waited for her. "It's a book of the sort you like: it conveys a sense of uneasiness from the very first page...."

An interrogative flash passes in her gaze. A doubt seizes you; perhaps this phrase about uneasiness isn't something you heard her say, you read it somewhere.... Or perhaps Ludmilla has already stopped believing in anguish as a condition of truth.... Perhaps someone has demonstrated to her that anguish, too, is a mechanism, that there is nothing more easily falsified than the unconscious....

"I like books," she says, "where all the mysteries and the anguish pass through a precise and cold mind, without shadows, like the mind of a chessplayer."

"In any case, this is the story of a character who becomes nervous when he hears a telephone ring. One day he's out jogging...."

"Don't tell me any more. Let me read it."

"I didn't get much further myself. I'll bring it to you."

You get out of bed, you go hunt for it in the other room, where the precipitous turn in your relationship with Ludmilla interrupted the normal course of events.

You can't find it.

(You will find it again at an art show: the latest work of the sculptor Irnerio. The page whose corner you had folded down to mark your place is spread out on one of

the bases of a compact parallelepiped, glued, varnished with a transparent resin. A charred shadow, as of a flame that is released from inside the book, corrugates the surface of the page and opens there a succession of levels like a gnarled rind.)

"I can't find it, but no matter," you say to her. "I noticed you have another copy anyway. In fact, I thought you had already read it...."

Unknown to her, you've gone into the storeroom to find the Flannery book with the red band. "Here it is."

Ludmilla opens it. There's an inscription: "To Ludmilla ... Silas Flannery." "Yes, it's my copy...."

"Ah, you've met Flannery?" you exclaim, as if you knew nothing.

"Yes ... he gave me this book.... But I was sure it had been stolen from me, before I could read it...."

"Stolen by Irnerio?"

"Hmm..."

It's time for you to show your hand.

"It wasn't Irnerio, and you know it. Irnerio, when he saw it, threw it into that dark room, where you keep...."