If on a winter's night a traveler (29 page)

I pull myself together as best I can. "Why, Dona Jazmina? What do you mean? Who did my father do it with? With you?"

"Lout! Go to the servants! Out of our sight! With the servant women, like your father! Go back to your mother! Go on!"

"Who is my mother?"

"Anacleta Higueras, even if she doesn't want to admit it, since Faustino died."

* * *

The houses of Oquedal at night huddle against the earth, as if they felt pressing on them the weight of the moon, low and shrouded in unhealthy mists.

"What is this song they sing about my father, Anacleta?" I ask the woman standing motionless in a doorway like a statue in a niche of a church, "It mentions a dead man, a grave...."

Anacleta takes down the lantern. Together we cross the cornfields.

"In this field your father and Faustino Higueras had a quarrel," Anacleta explains, "and decided that the two of them were one too many for this world, and they dug a grave together. Once they had decided they had to fight to the death, it was as if the hatred between them were spent: and they worked in harmony, digging the ditch. Then they stood there, one on one side of the ditch, one on the other, each grasping a knife in his right hand, with the left wrapped in his poncho. And one of them, in turn, would leap over the grave and attack the other with blows of the knife, and the other would defend himself with the poncho and try to make his enemy fall into the grave. They fought like that till dawn, and no dust rose any more from the ground around the grave because it was so soaked with blood. All the Indians of Oquedal formed a circle around the empty grave and around the two young men, gasping and blood-stained, and they all were silent and motionless so as not to disturb the judgment of God, on whom the entire fate of them all depended, not just that of Faustino Higueras and Nacho Zamora."

"But... I am Nacho Zamora...."

"Your father, too, at that time was called Nacho."

"And who won, Anacleta?"

"How can you ask me that, boy? Zamora: no one can judge the ways of the Lord. Faustino was buried in this same earth. But for your father it was a bitter victory, since that same night he left and was never seen again at Oquedal."

"What are you telling me, Anacleta? This grave is empty!"

"In the days that followed, the Indians of the villages near and far came in procession to the grave of Faustino Higueras. They were setting off for the revolution, and they would ask me for relics to carry in a gold box at the head of their regiments in battle: a lock of hair, a scrap of the poncho, a clot of blood from a wound. But Faustino was not there, his grave was empty. From that day on many legends have been born: some say they have seen him at night running over the mountain on his coal-black horse, keeping watch over the sleeping Indians; some say he will not be seen again until the day when the Indians go down to the plain, and he will be riding at the head of the columns...."

Then it was Faustino! I saw him!—I want to say, but I am too overwhelmed to utter a word.

The Indians have silently approached with their torches and now form a circle around the open grave.

From their midst a young man with a thick neck comes forward, a tattered straw hat on his head. His features are similar to those of many here in Oquedal—I mean the slant of the eyes, the line of the nose, the curve of the lips that all resemble mine.

"What gave you the right, Nacho Zamora, to lay your hands on my sister?" he says, and a blade gleams in his right hand. His poncho is wrapped around his left forearm and one end of it trails to the ground.

A sound comes from the mouths of the Indians, which is not a murmur but rather a truncated sigh.

"Who are you?"

"I am Faustino Higueras. Defend yourself."

I stand beyond the grave, I wrap my poncho around my left arm, I grasp my knife.

[10]

You are taking tea with Arkadian Porphyrich, one of the most intellectually refined people in Ircania, who deservedly occupies the position of Director General of the State Police Archives. He is the person you have been ordered to contact first, the moment you arrive in Ircania on the mission assigned you by the Ataguitanian High Command. He has received you in the hospitable rooms of his office library, "the most complete and up-to-date in Ircania," as he told you at once, "where confiscated books are classified, catalogued, microfilmed, and preserved, whether they are printed works or mimeographed or typewritten or manuscript."

When the Ataguitanian authorities, who were holding you prisoner, promised you liberation provided you would agree to carry out a mission in a distant country ("official mission with secret aspects as well as secret mission with official aspects"), your first reaction was to refuse. Your scant inclination for government assignments, your lack of vocation for the profession of secret agent, and the obscure and tortuous way in which the duties you would have to fulfill were outlined, were sufficient reasons to make you prefer your cell in the model prison to the incognito of a journey in the boreal tundras of Ircania. But the thought that if you remained in their hands you could expect the worst, your curiosity about this assignment "which we believe may interest you, as a reader," the calculation that you could pretend to become involved and then foil their plan, persuaded you to accept.

Director General Arkadian Porphyrich, who seems perfectly aware of your situation, even its psychological aspects, speaks to you in an encouraging and didactic tone. "The first thing we must never lose sight of is this: the police are the great unifying power in a world other-

wise doomed to fall apart. It is natural that the police forces of different and even opposing regimes should recognize common interests on which to collaborate. In the field of the circulation of books...."

"Will they achieve a uniformity in censorship methods among the various regimes?" "Not uniformity. They will create a system in which the methods support and balance one another in turn...."

The Director General invites you to examine the planisphere hanging on the wall. The varied color scheme indicates: the countries where all books are systematically confiscated; the countries where only books published or approved by the State may circulate; the countries where existing censorship is crude, approximate, and unpredictable; the countries where the censorship is subtle, informed, sensitive to implications and allusions, managed by meticulous and sly intellectuals; the countries where there are two networks of dissemination: one legal and one clandestine; the countries where there is no censorship because there are no books, but there are many potential readers; the countries where there are no books and nobody

complains about their absence; the countries, finally, in which every day books are produced for all tastes and all ideas, amid general indifference. "Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do," Arkadian Porphyrich says. "What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains

an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks. To be sure, repression must also allow an occasional breathing space, must close an eye every now and then, alternate indulgence with abuse, with a certain unpredictability in its caprices; otherwise, if nothing more remains to be repressed, the whole system rusts and wears down. Let's be frank: every regime, even the most authoritarian, survives in a situation of unstable equilibrium, whereby it needs to justify constantly the existence of its repressive apparatus, therefore of something to repress. The wish to write things that irk the established authorities is one of the elements necessary to maintain this equilibrium. Therefore, by a secret treaty with the countries whose social regime is opposed to ours, we have created a common organization, with which you have intelligently agreed to collaborate, to export the books banned here and import the books banned there."

"This would seem to imply that the books banned here are allowed there, and vice versa...."

"Not on your life. The books banned here are super-banned there, and the books banned there are ultra-banned here. But from exporting to the adversary regime one's own banned books and from importing theirs, each regime derives at least two important advantages: it encourages the opponents of the hostile regime and it establishes a useful exchange of experience between the police services."

"The assignment I have been given," you hasten to explain, "is limited to contacts with officials of the Ircanian police, because it is only through your channels that the opponents' writings can come into our hands." (I am careful not to tell him that the objectives of my mission also include direct relations with the clandestine network of the opposition, and, as the situations require, I can favor one side against the other or vice versa. )

"Our archive is at your disposal," the Director General says. "I could show you some very rare manuscripts, the original drafts of works that reached the public only after having been sifted by four or five censorship committees and cut each time, modified, watered down, and finally published in a mutilated, edulcorated version, unrecognizable. For true reading one must come here, my dear sir."

"And do you read?"

"Do I read outside of my professional duties, you mean? Yes, I would say that every book, every document, every piece of evidence in this archive I read twice, two entirely different readings. The first, in haste, summarily, to know in which file I must keep the microfilm, under what heading it must be catalogued. Then, in the evening (I spend my evenings here, after the official office hours: the place is calm, relaxing, as you see), I stretch out on this sofa, I insert the film of some rare work in the reading machine, some secret dossier, and I enjoy the luxury of savoring it for my exclusive pleasure."

Arkadian Porphyrich crosses his legs in their boots, runs one finger between his neck and the collar of his uniform laden with decorations. He adds: "I don't know if you believe in the Spirit, sir. I believe in it. I believe in the dialogue that the Spirit conducts uninterruptedly with itself. And I feel that this dialogue is fulfilled as my gaze examines these forbidden pages. The Police is also Spirit, the State that I serve, the Censorship, like the texts on which our authority is exercised. The breath of the Spirit does not require a great audience to reveal itself; it flourishes in the shadow, in the obscure relationship perpetuated between the secrecy of the conspirators and the secrecy of the Police. To make it live, my reading, disinterested but always alert to every licit and illicit implication, is enough, in the glow of this lamp, in this great building with its deserted offices, the moment I can un-

button the tunic of my official's uniform and let myself be visited by the ghosts of the forbidden, which during daylight hours I must inflexibly keep at a distance....."

You have to admit that the Director General's words give you a feeling of comfort. If this man continues to harbor a desire and a curiosity for reading, it means that in the written paper in circulation there is still something not fabricated or manipulated by the omnipotent bureaucracies, that outside these offices an outside still exists....

"And what about the apocrypha conspiracy?" you ask, in a voice that tries to be coldly professional. "Are you informed about it?"

"Certainly. I have received a number of reports on the question. For a certain time we deceived ourselves, convinced we could keep everything under control. The secret services of the major powers went to great trouble to take over this organization, which seemed to have ramifications everywhere.... But the brains of the conspiracy, the Cagliostro of counterfeits, always eluded us.... Not that he was unknown to us: we had all his data in our files, he had long since been identified as an interfering swindler, a translator; but the true reasons for his activity remained obscure. He seemed to have no further relations with the various sects into which the conspiracy he had founded became divided, and yet he still exercised an indirect influence on their intrigues.... And when we managed to get our hands on him, we realized it was not easy to bend him to our will.... His driving motive was not money, or power, or ambition. It seems he did everything for a woman, to win her back, or perhaps only to get even, to win a bet with her. It was that woman we had to understand if we wanted to succeed in following the moves of our Cagliostro. But we have not been able to discover who she is. It is only through a deductive process that I have managed to learn many things about her, things I could not communicate in any official report: our direc-

tive bodies are not capable of grasping certain subtleties....

"For this woman," Arkadian Porphyrich continues, seeing how intently you are drinking in his words, "reading means stripping herself of every purpose, every foregone conclusion, to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the conventions of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say. As for him, he wanted, on the contrary, to show her that behind the written page is the void: the world exists only as artifice, pretense, misunderstanding, falsehood. If this were all, we could easily give him the means to prove what he wanted; by we, I mean colleagues in the various countries and the various regimes, since there were many of us offering him our collaboration. And he didn't refuse it. On the contrary... But we could not manage to grasp whether he was joining in our game, or we were acting as pawns in his.... And what if it were simply a question of a madman? Only I could figure out his secret: I had him kidnapped by our agents, brought here, kept for a week in our solitary-confinement cells; then I interrogated him personally. His trouble was not madness, perhaps only desperation; the bet with the woman had long been lost; she was the winner, it was her always curious, always insatiable reading that managed to uncover truths hidden in the most barefaced fake, and falsity with no attenuating circumstances in words claiming to be the most truthful. What could our illusionist do? Rather than sever the last thread that tied him to her, he went on sowing confusion among titles, authors' names, pseudonyms, languages, translations, editions, jackets, title pages, chapters, beginnings, ends, so that she would be forced to recognize those signs of his presence, his greeting without hope