If on a winter's night a traveler (20 page)

"Who gave you permission to go rummaging around?"

"Irnerio says that somebody who used to steal your books comes back secretly now to replace them with false books...."

"Irenerio doesn't know anything."

"I do: Cavedagna gave me Marana's letters to read."

"Everything Ermes says is always a trick."

"There's one thing that's true: that man continues to think of you, to see you in all his ravings, he's obsessed by the image of you reading."

"It's what he was never able to bear."

Little by little you will manage to understand something more about the origins of the translator's machina-

tions: the secret spring that set them in motion was his jealousy of the invisible rival who came constantly between him and Ludmilla, the silent voice that speaks to her through books, this ghost with a thousand faces and faceless, all the more elusive since for Ludmilla authors are never incarnated in individuals of flesh and blood, they exist for her only in published pages, the living and the dead both are there always ready to communicate with her, to amaze her, and Ludmilla is always ready to follow them, in the fickle, carefree relations one can have with incorporeal persons. How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words? Always, since his taste and talent impelled him in that direction, but more than ever since his relationship with Ludmilla became critical, Ermes Marana dreamed of a literature made entirely of apocrypha, of false attributions, of imitations and counterfeits and pastiches. If this idea had succeeded in imposing itself, if a systematic uncertainty as to the identity of the writer had kept the reader from abandoning himself with trust—trust not so much in what was being told him as in the silent narrating voice—perhaps externally the edifice of literature would not have changed at all, but beneath, in the foundations, where the relationship between reader and text is established, something would have changed forever. Then Ermes Marana would no longer have felt himself abandoned by Ludmilla absorbed in her reading: between the book and her there would always be insinuated the shadow of mystification, and he, identifying himself with every mystification, would have affirmed his presence.

Your eye falls on the beginning of the book. "But this

isn't the book I was reading.... Same title, same cover, everything the same... But it's another book! One of the two is a fake."

"Of course it's a fake," Ludmilla says, in a low voice.

"Are you saying it's a fake because it passed through Marana's hands? But the book I was reading was also one he had sent to Cavedagna! Can they both be fake?"

"There's only one person who can tell us the truth: the author."

"You can ask him, since you're a friend of his..."

"I was."

"Was it to him that you went, when you ran away from Marana?"

"You know everything!" she says, with an ironic tone that gets on your nerves more than anything else.

Reader, you have made up your mind: you will go to see the writer. Meanwhile, turning your back on Ludmilla, you have begun reading the new book contained inside the same cover.

(Same up to a point. The band latest best seller by silas flannery covers the last word of the title. You would only have to raise it to realize that this novel is not entitled
In a network of lines that enlace
like the other one; it is called
In a network of lines that intersect.)

In a network of lines that intersect

Speculate, reflect: every thinking activity implies mirrors for me. According to Plotinus, the soul is a mirror that creates material things reflecting the ideas of the higher reason. Maybe this is why I need mirrors to think: I cannot concentrate except in the presence of reflected images, as if my soul needed a model to imitate every time it wanted to employ its speculative capacity. (The adjective here assumes all its meanings: I am at once a man who thinks and a businessman, and a collector of optical instruments as well. )

The moment I put my eye to a kaleidoscope, I feel that my mind, as the heterogeneous fragments of colors and lines assemble to compose regular figures, immediately discovers the procedure to be followed: even if it is only the peremptory and ephemeral revelation of a rigorous construction that comes to pieces at the slightest tap of a fingernail on the side of the tube, to be replaced by another, in which the same elements converge in a dissimilar pattern.

Ever since I realized, when still an adolescent, that the

contemplation of the enameled gardens jumbled at the bottom of a well of mirrors stirred my aptitude for practical decisions and bold prognostications, I have been collecting kaleidoscopes. The history of this relatively recent object (the kaleidoscope was patented in 1817 by the Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster, author of a
Treatise on New Philosophical Instruments,
among other works) confined my collection within narrow chronological boundaries. But it was not long before I extended my investigations to a far more illustrious and inspiring antiquarian field: the catoptric instruments of the seventeenth century, little theaters of various design where a figure is seen multiplied by the variation of the angles between the mirrors. My aim is to reconstruct the museum assembled by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, author of
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae
(1646) and inventor of the "polydyptic theater," in which about sixty little mirrors lining the inside of a large box transform a bough into a forest, a lead soldier into an army, a booklet into a library.

The businessmen to whom, before meetings, I show the collection glance with superficial curiosity at these bizarre apparatuses. They don't know that I have built my financial empire on the very principle of kaleidoscopes and catoptric instruments, multiplying, as if in a play of mirrors, companies without capital, enlarging credit, making disastrous deficits vanish in the dead corners of illusory perspectives. My secret, the secret of my uninterrupted financial victories in a period that has witnessed so many crises and market crashes and bankruptcies, has always been this: that I never thought directly of money, business, profits, but only of the angles of refraction established among shining surfaces variously inclined.

It is my image that I want to multiply, but not out of narcissism or megalomania, as could all too easily be believed: on the contrary, I want to conceal, in the midst of

so many illusory ghosts of myself, the true me, who makes them move. For this reason, if I were not afraid of being misunderstood, I would have nothing against reconstructing, in my house, the room completely lined with mirrors according to Kircher's design, in which I would see myself walking on the ceiling, head down, as if I were flying upward from the depths of the floor.

These pages I am writing should also transmit a cold luminosity, as in a mirrored tube, where a finite number of figures are broken up and turned upside down and multiplied. If my figure sets out in all directions and is doubled at every corner, it is to discourage those who want to pursue me. I am a man with many enemies, whom I must constantly elude. When they think they have overtaken me, they will strike only a glass surface on which one of the many reflections of my ubiquitous presence appears and vanishes. I am also a man who pursues his numerous enemies, looming over them and advancing in invincible phalanxes and blocking their path whichever way they turn. In a catoptric world enemies can equally believe that they are surrounding me from every side, but I alone know the arrangement of the mirrors and can put myself out of their reach, while they end up jostling and seizing one another.

I would like my story to express all this through details of financial operations, sudden dramatic shifts at board meetings, telephone calls from brokers in panic, and then also bits of the map of the city, insurance policies, Lorna's mouth when that sentence escaped her, Elfrida's gaze as if pondering some inexorable calculation of hers, one image superimposed on the other, the grid of the map of the city dotted with
x's
and arrows, motorcycles zooming off and vanishing into the corners of the mirror, motorcycles converging on
my Mercedes.

Ever since it became clear to me that my kidnapping would be the exploit most desired not only by the various

bands of specialist crooks but also by my leading colleagues and rivals in the world of high finance, I have realized that only by multiplying myself, multiplying my person, my presence, my exits from the house, and my returns, in short the opportunities for an ambush, could I make my falling into enemy hands more improbable. So I then ordered five Mercedes sedans exactly like mine, which enter and leave the armored gate of my villa at all hours, escorted by the motorcyclists of my bodyguard, and bearing inside a shadow, bundled up, dressed in black, who could be me or an ordinary stand-in. The companies of which I am president consist of initials with nothing behind them and some headquarters in interchangeable empty rooms; therefore my business meetings can be held at constantly varying addresses which for greater safety I order changed at the last minute each time. More delicate problems stem from my extramarital relationship with a twenty-nine-year-old divorcée, Lorna by name, to whom I devote two and sometimes three weekly sessions of two and three-quarters hours. To protect Lorna the only thing to do was to make it impossible to locate her, and the system to which I have resorted is that of parading a multiplicity of simultaneous amorous encounters, so that it is impossible to understand which are my counterfeit mistresses and which is the real one. Every day both I and my doubles visit, on constantly changing schedules, pied-à-terres scattered all over the city and inhabited by attractive women. This network of false mistresses allows me to conceal my true meetings with Lorna also from my wife, Elfrida, to whom I have presented this extravaganza as a security measure. As for Elfrida, my advice that she give maximum publicity to her movements in order to foil possible criminal plans has not found her prepared to listen to me. Elfrida tends to hide, just as she avoids the mirrors in my collection, as if she feared her image would be shattered by them and

destroyed: an attitude whose deeper motives escape me and which vexes me not a little.

I would like all the details that I am writing down to concur in creating the impression of a high-precision mechanism, but at the same time of a succession of dazzles that reflect something that remains out of eyeshot. For this reason I must not neglect to insert every so often, at the points where the plot becomes thickest, some quotation from an ancient text: for example, a passage from the
De Magia Naturale
of Giovanni Battista della Porta, where he says that the magician—that is, the "minister of Nature"—must know "the reasons that the sight is deceived, the images that are produced under water, and in mirrors made in various forms, which at times dispel images from the mirrors, suspended in the air, and he must know how things done at a distance may be clearly seen."

I soon realized that the uncertainty created by the coming and going of identical automobiles would not suffice to avert the danger of criminal traps: I then thought to apply the multiplying power of catoptric mechanisms to the bandits themselves, organizing false ambushes and false kidnappings of some counterfeit of myself, followed by fake releases after the payment of fake ransoms. For these I had to assume the task of setting up a parallel criminal organization, making more and more intimate contacts with the underworld. I thus came to have at my disposal considerable information on various kidnappings in the works, being thus able to act in time, both to protect myself and to exploit the misfortunes of my business adversaries.

At this point the story could mention that among the virtues of mirrors that the ancient books discuss there is also that of revealing distant and hidden things. The Arab geographers of the Middle Ages, in their descriptions of the harbor of Alexandria, recall the column that stood on

the island of Pharos, surmounted by a steel mirror in which, from an immense distance, the ships proceeding off Cyprus and Constantinople and all the lands of the Romans can be seen. Concentrating the rays, curved mirrors can catch an image of the whole. "God Himself, who cannot be seen either by the body or by the soul," Porphyry writes, "allows himself to be contemplated in a mirror." Together with the centrifugal radiation that projects my image along all the dimensions of space, I would like these pages also to render the opposite movement, through which I receive from the mirrors images that direct sight cannot embrace. From mirror to mirror— this is what I happen to dream of—the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image to infinity and reflect its essence in a single image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine.

This and nothing else must have been the power of the magic mirrors that are so often mentioned in treatises of the occult sciences and in anathemas of the Inquisitors: to force the God of Darkness to display himself and to join his image with the one the mirror reflects. I had to extend my collection into another field: dealers and auction houses all over the whole world have been alerted to hold for me the extremely rare examples of those Renaissance mirrors which, through their form or through tradition, can be classified as magic.

It was a difficult game, in which every mistake could cost dearly. My first wrong move was persuading my rivals to join me in founding an insurance company against kidnappings. Sure of my network of information in the underworld, I thought I could retain control over every eventuality. I soon learned that my associates main-