The Invention of Solitude (21 page)

The Book of Memory. Book Eight.

By the time of his third birthday, A.’s son’s taste in literature had begun to expand from simple, heavily illustrated baby books to more sophisticated children’s books. The illustration was still a source of great pleasure, but it was no longer crucial. The story itself had become enough to hold his attention, and when A. came to a page with no picture at all, he would be moved to see the little boy looking intently ahead, at nothing, at the emptiness of the air, at the blank wall, imagining what the words were telling him. “It’s fun to imagine that we can’t see,” he told his father once, as they were walking down the street. Another time, the boy went into the bathroom, closed the door, and did not come out. A. asked through the closed door: “What are you doing in there?” “I’m thinking,” the boy said. “I have to be alone to think.”

Little by little, they both began to gravitate toward one book. The story of Pinocchio. First in the Disney version, and then,
soon after, in the original version, with text by Collodi and illustrations by Mussino. The little boy never tired of hearing the chapter about the storm at sea, which tells of how Pinocchio finds Gepetto in the belly of the Terrible Shark.

“Oh, Father, dear Father! Have I found you at last? Now I shall never, never leave you again!”

Gepetto explains: “The sea was rough and the whitecaps overturned the boat. Then a Terrible Shark came up out of the sea and, as soon as he saw me in the water, swam quickly toward me, put out his tongue, and swallowed me as easily as if I had been a chocolate peppermint.”

“And how long have you been shut away in here?”

“From that day to this, two long weary years—two years, my Pinocchio …”

“And how have you lived? Where did you find the candle? And the matches to light it with—where did you get them?”

“In the storm which swamped my boat, a large ship also suffered the same fate. The sailors were all saved, but the ship went right down to the bottom of the sea, and the same Terrible Shark that swallowed me, swallowed most of it…. To my own good luck, that ship was loaded with meat, preserved foods, crackers, bread, bottles of wine, raisins, cheese, coffee, sugar, wax candles, and boxes of matches. With all these blessings, I have been able to live on for two whole years, but now I am at the very last crumbs. Today there is nothing left in the cupboard, and this candle you see here is the last one I have.”

“And then?”

“And then, my dear, we’ll find ourselves in darkness.”

For A. and his son, so often separated from each other during the past year, there was something deeply satisfying in this passage of reunion. In effect, Pinocchio and Gepetto are separated throughout the entire book. Gepetto is given the mysterious piece of talking wood by the carpenter, Master Cherry, in the second chapter. In the third chapter the old man sculpts the Marionette. Even before Pinocchio is finished, his pranks and mischief begin. “I deserve it,” says Gepetto to himself. “I should have thought of this before I made him. Now it’s too late.” At this point, like any newborn baby, Pinocchio is pure
will, libidinous need without consciousness. Very rapidly, over the next few pages, Gepetto teaches his son to walk, the Marionette experiences hunger and accidentally burns his feet off—which his father rebuilds for him. The next day Gepetto sells his coat to buy Pinocchio an A-B-C book for school (“Pinocchio understood … and, unable to restrain his tears, he jumped on his father’s neck and kissed him over and over”), and then, for more than two hundred pages, they do not see each other again. The rest of the book tells the story of Pinocchio’s search for his father—and Gepetto’s search for his son. At some point, Pinocchio realizes that he wants to become a real boy. But it also becomes clear that this will not happen until he is reunited with his father. Adventures, misadventures, detours, new resolves, struggles, happenstance, progress, setbacks, and through it all, the gradual dawning of conscience. The superiority of the Collodi original to the Disney adaptation lies in its reluctance to make the inner motivations of the story explicit. They remain intact, in a pre-conscious, dream-like form, whereas in Disney these things are expressed—which sentimentalizes them, and therefore trivializes them. In Disney, Gepetto prays for a son; in Collodi, he simply makes him. The physical act of shaping the puppet (from a piece of wood that talks, that is
alive
, which mirrors Michaelangelo’s notion of sculpture: the figure is already there in the material; the artist merely hews away at the excess matter until the true form is revealed, implying that Pinocchio’s being precedes his body: his task throughout the book is to find it, in other words to find himself, which means that this is a story of becoming rather than of birth), this act of shaping the puppet is enough to convey the idea of the prayer, and surely it is more powerful for remaining silent. Likewise with Pinocchio’s efforts to attain real boyhood. In Disney, he is commanded by the Blue Fairy to be “brave, truthful, and unselfish,” as though there were an easy formula for taking hold of the self. In Collodi, there are no directives. Pinocchio simply blunders about, simply lives, and little by little comes to an awareness of what he can become. The only improvement Disney makes on the story, and this is perhaps arguable, comes at the end, in the episode of the escape from
the Terrible Shark (Monstro the Whale). In Collodi, the Shark’s mouth is open (he suffers from asthma and heart disease), and to organize the escape Pinocchio needs no more than courage. “Then, my dear Father, there is no time to lose. We must escape.”

“Escape! How?”

“We can run out of the Shark’s mouth and dive into the sea.”

“You speak well, but I cannot swim, my dear Pinocchio.”

“Why should that matter? You can climb on my shoulders and I, who am a fine swimmer, will carry you safely to shore.”

“Dreams, my boy!” answered Gepetto, shaking his head and smiling sadly. “Do you think it possible for a Marionette, a yard high, to have the strength to carry me on his shoulders and swim?”

“Try it and see! And in any case, if it is written that we must die, we shall at least die together.” Not adding another word, Pinocchio took the candle in his hand and going ahead to light the way, he said to his father: “Follow me and have no fear.”

In Disney, however, Pinocchio needs resourcefulness as well. The whale’s mouth is shut, and when it opens, it is only to let water in, not out. Pinocchio cleverly decides to build a fire inside the whale—which induces Monstro to sneeze, thereby launching the puppet and his father into the sea. But more is lost with this flourish than gained. For the crucial image of the story is eliminated: Pinocchio swimming through the desolate water, nearly sinking under the weight of Gepetto’s body, making his way through the gray-blue night (page 296 of the American edition), with the moon shining above them, a benign smile on its face, and the huge open mouth of the shark behind them. The father on his son’s back: the image evoked here is so clearly that of Aeneas bearing Anchises on his back from the ruins of Troy that each time A. reads the story aloud to his son, he cannot help seeing (for it is not thinking, really, so quickly do these things happen in his mind) certain clusters of other images, spinning outward from the core of his preoccupations: Cassandra, for example, predicting the ruin of Troy, and thereafter loss, as in the wanderings of Aeneas that precede the founding of Rome, and in that wandering the image of another
wandering: the Jews in the desert, which, in its turn, yields further clusters of images: “Next year in Jerusalem,” and with it the photograph in the Jewish Encyclopedia of his relative, who bore the name of his son.

A. has watched his son’s face carefully during these readings of
Pinocchio.
He has concluded that it is the image of Pinocchio saving Gepetto (swimming away with the old man on his back) that gives the story meaning for him. A boy of three is indeed very little. A wisp of puniness against the bulk of his father, he dreams of acquiring inordinate powers to conquer the paltry reality of himself. He is still too young to understand that one day he will be as big as his father, and even when it is explained to him very carefully, the facts are still open to gross misinterpretations: “And some day I’ll be the same tall as you, and you’ll be the same little as me.” The fascination with comic book super-heroes is perhaps understandable from this point of view. It is the dream of being big, of becoming an adult. “What does Superman do?” “He saves people.” For this act of saving is in effect what a father does: he saves his little boy from harm. And for the little boy to see Pinocchio, that same foolish puppet who has stumbled his way from one misfortune to the next, who has wanted to be “good” and could not help being “bad,” for this same incompetent little marionette, who is not even a real boy, to become a figure of redemption, the very being who saves his father from the grip of death, is a sublime moment of revelation. The son saves the father. This must be fully imagined from the perspective of the little boy. And this, in the mind of the father who was once a little boy, a son, that is, to his own father, must be fully imagined.
Puer aeternus.
The son saves the father.

Further commentary on the nature of chance.

He does not want to neglect to mention that two years after meeting S. in Paris, he happened to meet S.’s younger son on a subsequent visit—through channels and circumstances that had nothing to do with S. himself. This young man, P., who was precisely the same age as A., was working his way to a position of considerable power with an important French film producer. A. himself would later work for this same producer, doing a
variety of odd jobs for him in 1971 and 1972 (translating, ghost writing), but none of that is essential. What matters is that by the mid to late seventies, P. had managed to achieve the status of co-producer, and along with the son of the French producer put together the movie
Superman
, which had cost so many millions of dollars, A. read, that it had been described as the most expensive work of art in the history of the Western world.

Early in the summer of 1980, shortly after his son turned three, A. and the boy spent a week together in the country, in a house owned by friends who were off on vacation. A. noticed in the newspaper that
Superman
was playing in a local theater and decided to take the boy, on the off-chance that he would be able to sit through it. For the first half of the film, the boy was calm, working his way through a bin of popcorn, whispering his questions as A. had instructed him to do, and taking the business of exploding planets, rocket ships, and outer space without much fuss. But then something happened. Superman began to fly, and all at once the boy lost his composure. His mouth dropped open, he stood up in his seat, spilled his popcorn, pointed at the screen, and began to shout: “Look! Look! He’s flying!” For the rest of the film, he was beside himself, his face taut with fear and fascination, rattling off questions to his father, trying to absorb what he had seen, marveling, trying to absorb it again, marveling. Toward the end, it became a little too much for him. “Too much booming,” he said. His father asked him if he wanted to leave, and he said yes. A. picked him up and carried him out of the theater—into a violent hail storm. As they ran toward the car, the boy said (bouncing up and down in A.’s arms), “We’re having quite an adventure tonight, aren’t we?”

For the rest of the summer, Superman was his passion, his obsession, the unifying purpose of his life. He refused to wear any shirt except the blue one with the S on the front. His mother sewed a cape together for him, and each time he went outside, he insisted on wearing it, charging down the streets with his arms in front of him, as if flying, stopping only to announce to each passerby under the age of ten: “I’m Superman!” A. was amused by all this, since he could remember these same
things from his own childhood. It was not this obsession that struck him; nor even, finally, the coincidence of knowing the men who had made the film that led to this obsession. Rather, it was this. Each time he saw his son pretending to be Superman, he could not help thinking of his friend S., as if even the S on his son’s T-shirt were not a reference to Superman but to his friend. And he wondered at this trick his mind continued to play on him, this constant turning of one thing into another thing, as if behind each real thing there were a shadow thing, as alive in his mind as the thing before his eyes, and in the end he was at a loss to say which of these things he was actually seeing. And therefore it happened, often it happened, that his life no longer seemed to dwell in the present.

The Book of Memory. Book Nine.

For most of his adult life, he has earned his living by translating the books of other writers. He sits at his desk reading the book in French and then picks up his pen and writes the same book in English. It is both the same book and not the same book, and the strangeness of this activity has never failed to impress him. Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months, if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude. A man sits alone in a room and writes. Whether the book speaks of loneliness or companionship, it is necessarily a product of solitude. A. sits down in his own room to translate another man’s book, and it is as though he were entering that man’s solitude and making it his own. But surely that is impossible. For once a solitude has been breached, once a solitude has been taken on by another, it is no longer solitude, but a kind of companionship. Even though there is only one man in the room, there are two. A. imagines himself as a kind of ghost of that other man, who is both there and not there, and whose book is both the same and not the same as the one he is translating. Therefore, he tells himself, it is possible to be alone and not alone at the same moment.

A word becomes another word, a thing becomes another
thing. In this way, he tells himself, it works in the same way that memory does. He imagines an immense Babel inside him. There is a text, and it translates itself into an infinite number of languages. Sentences spill out of him at the speed of thought, and each word comes from a different language, a thousand tongues that clamor inside him at once, the din of it echoing through a maze of rooms, corridors, and stairways, hundreds of stories high. He repeats. In the space of memory, everything is both itself and something else. And then it dawns on him that everything he is trying to record in The Book of Memory, everything he has written so far, is no more than the translation of a moment or two of his life—those moments he lived through on Christmas Eve, 1979, in his room at 6 Varick Street.