If on a winter's night a traveler (26 page)

We were intent on these exercises when, rapidly, from the opening of the sliding door, Makiko's form appeared. Obviously the girl had remained in expectation of my pursuit and was now coming to see what obstacle had delayed me. She realized at once and vanished, but not so quickly as not to allow me time to notice that something in her dress had changed: she had replaced her tight sweater with a silk dressing gown which seemed made purposely to keep falling open, to become loosened by the internal pressure of what was flowering in her, to slide over her smooth skin at the first attack of that greed for contact which that smooth skin of hers could not fail, in fact, to arouse.

"Makiko!" I cried, because I wanted to explain to her (but really I would not have known where to begin) that the position in which she had surprised me with her mother was due only to a casual confluence of circumstances that had routed along detours a desire which was

unmistakably directed at her, Makiko. Desire that her silk robe, loosened or waiting to be loosened, now heightened and rewarded as in an explicit offer, so that with Makiko's apparition in my eyes and Madame Miyagi's contact on my skin I was about to be overcome by voluptuousness.

Madame Miyagi must have become clearly aware of this, for, grasping my back, she pulled me down with her on the mat and with rapid twitches of her whole person she slipped her moist and prehensile sex under mine, which without a false move was swallowed as if by a sucker, while her thin naked legs clutched my hips. She was of a sharp agility, Madame Miyagi: her feet in their white cotton socks crossed at my sacroiliac, holding me as if in a vise.

My appeal to Makiko had not gone unheard. Behind the paper panel of the sliding door there was the outline of the girl, kneeling on the mat, moving her head forward, and now from the doorway her face appeared, contracted in a breathless expression, her lips parted, her eyes widened, following her mother's and my starts with attraction and disgust. But she was not alone: beyond the corridor, in the opening of another door, a man's form was standing motionless. I have no idea how long Mr. Okeda had been there. He was staring hard, not at his wife and me but at his daughter watching us. In his cold pupil, in the firm twist of his lips, was reflected Madame Miyagi's orgasm reflected in her daughter's gaze.

He saw that I was seeing. He did not move. I realized at that moment that he would not interrupt me, nor would he drive me from the house, that he would never refer to this episode or to others that might take place and be repeated; I realized also that this connivance would give me no power over him, nor would it make my submission less burdensome. It was a secret that bound me to him but not him to me: I could reveal to no one what he was watching without admitting an indecorous complicity on my part.

What could I do now? I was destined to become more and more ensnared in a tangle of misunderstandings, because now Makiko considered me one of her mother's numerous lovers and Miyagi knew that I lived only for her daughter, and both would make me pay cruelly, whereas the gossip of the academic community, so quick to spread, nourished by the malice of my fellow students, ready to help also in this way their master's calculations, would throw a slanderous light on my frequent presence in the Okeda home, discrediting me in the eyes of the university professors on whom I most counted to change my situation.

Though tormented by these circumstances, I managed to concentrate and subdivide the generic sensation of my sex pressed by the sex of Madame Miyagi into the compartmented sensations of the individual points of me and of her, progressively subjected to pressure by my sliding movements and her convulsive contractions. This application especially helped me to prolong the state necessary to the observation itself, delaying the precipitation of the final crisis by evincing moments of insensitivity or partial sensitivity, which in their turn merely enhanced immeasurably the immediate return of voluptuous stimuli, distributed in an unpredictable fashion in space and time. "Makiko! Makiko!" I moaned in Madame Miyagi's ear, associating convulsively those instants of hypersensitivity with the image of her daughter and the range of sensations incomparably different which I imagined she could arouse in me. And to maintain control of my reactions I thought of the description I would make of them that same evening to Mr. Okeda: the shower of little ginkgo leaves is characterized by the fact that in each moment each leaf that is falling is found at a different altitude from the others, whereby the empty and insensitive space in which the visual sensations are situated can be subdivided into a succession of levels in each of which we find one little leaf twirling and one alone.

[9]

You fasten your seatbelt. The plane is landing. To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished. Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you? You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void, the anonymity of stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the passing crowd always different and always the same. You might as well stick with this other abstraction of travel, accomplished by the anonymous uniformity of typographical characters: here, too, it is the evocative power of the names that persuades you that you are flying over something and not nothingness. You realize that it takes considerable heedlessness to entrust yourself to unsure instruments, handled with approximation; or perhaps this demonstrates an invincible tendency to passivity, to regression, to infantile dependence. (But are you reflecting on the air journey or on reading? )

The plane is landing; you have not managed to finish the novel
On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
by Takakumi Ikoka. You continue reading as you come down the steps, sit in the bus that crosses the field, stand in the line at passport control and at customs. You are moving forward, holding the book open in front of your eyes, when someone slips it out of your hand, and as if at the rising of a curtain you see policemen arrayed before you, draped in leather cartridge belts, rattling with automatic weapons, gilded with eagles and epaulets.

"But my book..." you complain, extending with an infant's gesture an unarmed hand toward that authoritative barrier of glistening buttons and weapon muzzles. "Confiscated, sir. This book cannot enter Ataguitania. It's a banned book."

"But how can that be ... ? A book on autumn leaves ... ? What gives you the right... ?"

"It's on the list of books to be confiscated. These are our laws. Are you trying to teach us our job?" Rapidly, from one word to the next, from one syllable to the next, the tone shifts from dry to curt, from curt to intimidating, from intimidating to threatening.

"But I... I had almost finished...."

"Forget it," a voice behind you whispers. "Don't start anything, not with these guys. Don't worry about the book; I have a copy, too. We'll talk about it later...."

It is a woman traveler, looking self-assured, skinny in slacks, wearing big sunglasses, loaded with packages, who goes past the controls like someone accustomed to it all. Do you know her? Even if it seems to you that you do know her, act as if nothing has happened: certainly she doesn't want to be seen talking to you. She has signaled you to follow her: don't lose sight of her. Outside the airport she climbs into a taxi and motions you to take the taxi after hers. In the open countryside her taxi stops; she gets out with all her packages and climbs into yours. If it weren't for her very short hair and the huge eyeglasses, you would say she resembles Lotaria.

You venture to say, "But you're—"

"Corinna. Call me Corinna."

After rummaging in her bags, Corinna pulls out a book and gives it to you.

"But this isn't it," you say, seeing on the cover an unknown title and the name of an unknown author:
Around an empty grave
by Calixto Bandera. "The book they confiscated was by Ikoka!"

'That's what I've given you. In Ataguitania books can circulate only with fake dust jackets."

As the taxi moves at top speed through the dusty, smelly outskirts, you cannot resist the temptation to open the book and see whether Corinna has given you the real one. Fat chance. It is a book you are seeing for the first time, and it does not look the least bit like a Japanese novel: it begins with a man riding across a mesa among the agaves, and he sees some predatory birds, called
zopilotes,
flying overhead.

"If the dust jacket's a fake," you remark, "the text is a fake, too."

"What were you expecting?" Corinna says. "Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won't stop. We're in a country where everything that can be falsified has been falsified: paintings in museums, gold ingots, bus tickets. The counterrevolution and the revolution fight with salvos of falsification: the result is that nobody can be sure what is true and what is false, the political police simulate revolutionary actions and the revolutionaries disguise themselves as policemen."

"And who gains by it, in the end?"

"It's too soon to say. We have to see who can best exploit the falsifications, their own and those of the others: whether it's the police or our organization."

The taxi driver is pricking up his ears. You motion Corinna to restrain herself from making unwise remarks.

But she says, "Don't be afraid. This is a fake taxi. What really alarms me, though, is that there's another taxi following us."

"Fake or real?"

"Fake, certainly, but I don't know whether it belongs to the police or to us."

You peep back along the road. "But," you cry, "there's a third taxi following the second..."

"That could be our people checking the movements of

the police, but it could also be the police on the trail of our people...."

The second taxi passes you, stops; some armed men leap out and make you get out of your taxi. "Police! You're under arrest!" All three of you are handcuffed and forced into the second taxi: you, Corinna, and your driver.

Corinna, calm and smiling, greets the policemen: "I'm Gertrude. This is a friend. Take us to headquarters."

Are you gaping? Corinna-Gertrude whispers to you, in your language, "Don't be afraid. They're fake policemen: actually they are our men."

You have barely driven off again when the third taxi forces the second to stop. More armed men jump out of it, their faces hidden; they disarm the policemen, remove your and Corinna's handcuffs, handcuff the policemen, and fling all of you into their taxi.

Corinna-Gertrude seems indifferent. "Thanks, friends," she says. "I'm Ingrid, and this man is one of us. Are you taking us to the command post?"

"Shut up, you!" says one who seems the leader. "Don't try acting smart, you two! Now we have to blindfold you. You're our hostages."

You don't know what to think any more, also because Corinna-Gertrude-Ingrid has been taken away in the other taxi. When you are again allowed to use your limbs and your eyes, you find yourself in a police inspector's office or in a barracks. Noncoms in uniform photograph you, full-face and profile; they take your fingerprints. An officer calls, "Alfonsina!"

You see Gertrude-Ingrid-Corinna come in, also in uniform; she hands the officer a folder of documents to sign.

Meanwhile, you follow the routine from one desk to another: one policeman takes your documents into custody, another your money, a third your clothes, which are replaced with a prisoner's overalls.

"What sort of trap is this?" you manage to ask Ingrid-

Gertrude-Alfonsina, who has come over to you at a moment when your guards have their backs turned.

"Among the revolutionaries there are some counterrevolutionary infiltrators who have made us fall into a police ambush. But luckily there are also many revolutionaries who have infiltrated the police, and they have pretended to recognize me as a functionary of this command. As for you, they'll send you to a fake prison, or rather, to a real state prison that is, however, controlled not by them but by us."

You can't help thinking of Marana. Who, if not he, can have invented such a machination?

"I seem to recognize your chief's style," you say to Alfonsina.

"Who our chief is doesn't matter. He could also be a fake chief, pretending to work for the revolution for the sole purpose of favoring the counterrevolution, or one who works openly for the counterrevolution, convinced that doing so will open the way for the revolution."

"And you are collaborating with him?"

"My case is different. I'm an infiltrator, a real revolutionary infiltrated into the ranks of the false revolutionaries. But to avoid being discovered, I have to pretend to be a counterrevolutionary infiltrated among the true revolutionaries. And, in fact, I am, inasmuch as I take orders from the police; but not from the real ones, because I report to the revolutionaries infiltrated among the counterrevolutionary infiltrators."

"If I understand correctly, here everybody has infiltrated: in the police and in the revolution. But how can you tell one from the other?"

"With each person you have to discover who are the infiltrators that had him infiltrate. And even before that, you have to know who infiltrated the infiltrators."

"And you go on fighting to the last drop of blood, even knowing that nobody is what he says he is?"

"What's that got to do with it? Everybody has to do his part to the end."

"What is my part?"

"Stay calm and wait. Go on reading your book."

"Damn! I lost it when they liberated me, I mean, when they arrested me...."

"No matter. The place where you're going now is a model prison; it has a library stocked with all the latest books."

"What about the banned books?"

"Where should banned books be found if not in prison?"