“Communication can be established at various levels,” I start explaining; I approach her with movements surely a bit hasty, but the visual and tactile images whirling in my mind urge me to eliminate all separation and all delay.
Ludmilla struggles, frees herself. “Why, what are you doing, Mr. Flannery? That isn’t the point! You’re mistaken!”
True, I could have made my passes with a bit more style, but at this point it’s too late for amends: it’s all or nothing now. I continue chasing her around the desk, uttering sentences whose complete foolishness I recognize, such as, “Perhaps you think I’m too old, but on the contrary...”
“It’s all a misunderstanding, Mr. Flannery,” Ludmilla says, and stops, placing between us the bulk of Webster’s International Dictionary. “I could easily make love with you; you’re a nice, pleasant-looking gentleman. But this would have no relevance to the problem we were discussing.... It would have nothing to do with the author Silas Flannery whose novels I read.... As I was explaining to you, you are two separate persons, whose relationships cannot interact.... I have no doubt that you are concretely this person and not another, though I do find you very similar to many men I have known, but the one who interested me was the other, the Silas Flannery who exists in the works of Silas Flannery, independently of you, here....”
I wipe the sweat from my forehead. I sit down. Something in me has gone: perhaps the ego, perhaps the content of the ego. But wasn’t this what I wanted? Isn’t depersonalization what I was trying to achieve?
Perhaps Marana and Ludmilla came to tell me the same thing, but I do not know whether it is a liberation or a condemnation. Why have they come to see me particularly, at the moment when I feel most chained to myself, as in a prison?
The moment Ludmilla left I rushed to the spyglass to find solace in the sight of the woman in the deck chair. But she was not there. I began to wonder: what if she were the same one who came to see me? Perhaps it is always and only she who is at the source of all my problems. Perhaps there is a plot to keep me from writing, in which Ludmilla and her sister and the translator are all involved.
“The novels that attract me most,” Ludmilla said, “are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.”
I do not understand whether she has said this to explain what attracts her in my novels, or whether it is what she would like to find in my novels and does not.
The quality of perennial dissatisfaction seems to me characteristic of Ludmilla: it seems to me that her preferences change overnight and today reflect only her restlessness (but in coming back to see me, she seems to have forgotten everything that happened yesterday).
“With my spyglass I can observe a woman who is reading on a terrace in the valley,” I told her. “I wonder if the books she reads are calming or upsetting.”
“How does the woman seem to you? Calm or upset?”
“Calm.”
“Then she reads upsetting books.”
I told Ludmilla the strange ideas that come to me about my manuscripts: how they disappear, return, are no longer what they were before. She told me to be very careful: there is a plot of the apocryphers which has its ramifications everywhere. I asked her if the leader of the plot was her ex-friend.
“Conspiracies always escape from the hands of their leaders,” she answered, evasively.
Apocrypha (from the Greek apokryphos, hidden, secret): (1) originally referring to the “secret books” of religious sects; later to texts not recognized as canonical in those religions which have established a canon of revealed writings; (2) referring to texts falsely attributed to a period or to an author.
Thus the dictionaries. Perhaps my true vocation was that of author of apocrypha, in the several meanings of the term: because writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification.
I would like to find Ermes Marana again to propose we go into partnership and flood the world with apocrypha. But where is Marana now? Has he gone back to Japan? I try to make Ludmilla talk about him, hoping she will say something specific. According to her, for his activity the counterfeiter needs to hide in territories where novelists are numerous and productive, so he can camouflage his falsifications, mixing them with a flourishing production of genuine raw materials.
“So he’s gone back to Japan, then?” But Ludmilla seems unaware of any connection between Japan and that man. She places the secret base of the treacherous translator’s machinations in quite a different part of the globe. According to his latest messages, Ermes has covered his tracks somewhere near the Cordillera of the Andes. Ludmilla, in any case, is interested in only one thing: that he remain far away. She had taken refuge in these mountains to elude him; now that she is sure of not encountering him, she can go home.
“You mean you’re about to leave?” I ask her.
“Tomorrow morning,” she tells me.
The news gives me a great sadness. Suddenly I feel alone.
I have spoken again with the flying-saucer observers. This time it was they who came to see me, to check whether by chance I had written the book dictated by the extraterrestrials.
“No, but I know where this book can be found,” I said, approaching the spyglass. For some time I have had the idea that the interplanetary book could be the one the girl in the deck chair is reading.
On the familiar terrace the girl was not to be seen. Disappointed, I was shifting the spyglass around the valley when I saw, seated on a rocky ledge, a man in city clothes, intent on reading a book. The coincidence was so timely that it was not unwarranted to think of an extraterrestrial intervention.
“There’s the book you’re after,” I said to those youngsters, handing them the spyglass trained on the stranger.
One by one they put an eye to the lens, then exchanged some looks, thanked me, and went out.
I have received a visit from a Reader, who came to submit to me a problem that upsets him: he has found two copies of my book In a network of lines that et cetera, identical on the outside, but containing two different novels. One is the story of a professor who cannot bear to hear the telephone ring, the other is the story of a billionaire who collects kaleidoscopes. Unfortunately, he was unable to tell me much more, and he was unable to show me the volumes, because before he could finish them, both were stolen, the second less than a kilometer from here.
He was still distraught over this strange episode; he told me that before presenting himself at my home he wanted to make sure I was in, and at the same time he wanted to continue reading the book, in order to discuss it with me with complete self-confidence; so with the book in his hand he had sat down on a rocky ledge from which he could keep an eye on my chalet. At a certain point he found himself surrounded by a troop of lunatics who flung themselves on the book. Around this book his insane captors improvised a kind of ritual, one of them holding it up and the others contemplating it with profound devotion. Heedless of his protests, they then ran off into the wood, taking the volume with them.
“These valleys teem with odd characters,” I said to him, to calm him. “Don’t give that book any more thought, sir; you haven’t lost anything important: it was a fake, produced in Japan. To exploit illegally the success that my novels enjoy in the world, an unscrupulous Japanese firm disseminates books with my name on the cover which, however, are really plagiarisms from little-known Japanese authors of novels that, having had no success, were sent to be pulped. After much investigation, I have managed to unmask this fraud of which both I and the plagiarized authors are the victims.”
“Actually, I rather liked that novel I was reading,” the Reader confesses, “and I regret not having been able to follow the story to the end.”
“If that’s your only problem, I can tell
you the source: it is a Japanese novel, summarily adapted, with Western names given to true characters and places. The original is On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon by Takakumi Ikoka, an author, for that matter, who is more than worthy. I can give you an English translation, to compensate you for your loss.”
I picked up the volume, which was on my desk, and gave it to him, after sealing it in an envelope, so he would not be tempted to leaf through it and thus would not immediately realize it had nothing in common with In a network of lines that intersect or with any other novel of mine, apocryphal or genuine.
“I knew there were false Flannerys around,” the Reader said, “and I was already convinced that at least one of those two was a fake. But what can you tell me about the other?”
Perhaps it was unwise for me to go on informing this man of my problems. I tried to save the situation with a witticism: “The only books I recognize as mine are those I must still write.”
The Reader confined himself to a polite little smile, then turned grave again and said, “Mr. Flannery, I know who’s behind this business: it’s not the Japanese, it’s a certain Ermes Marana, who has started the whole thing from jealousy over a young woman whom you know, Ludmilla Vipiteno.”
“Why have you come to see me, then?” I replied. “Go to that gentleman and ask him how things stand.” I began to suspect that between the Reader and Ludmilla there was a bond, and this was enough to make my voice take on a hostile tone.
“I have no choice,” the Reader agreed. “I have, in fact, the opportunity to make a business trip to the area where he is, in South America, and I will take advantage of it to look for him.”
I was not interested in informing him that, to my knowledge, Ermes Marana works for the Japanese and the headquarters of his apocrypha is in Japan. For me the important thing was for this nuisance to go as far away as possible from Ludmilla: so I encouraged him to make his trip and to undertake the most careful search until he found the ghost translator.
The Reader is beset by mysterious coincidences. He told me that, for some time, and for the most disparate reasons, he has had to interrupt his reading of novels after a few pages.
“Perhaps they bore you,” I said, with my usual tendency toward pessimism.
“On the contrary, I am forced to stop reading just when they become most gripping. I can’t wait to resume, but when I think I am reopening the book I began, I find a completely different book before me...”
“Which instead is terribly boring,” I suggest.
“No, even more gripping. But I can’t manage to finish this one, either. And so on.”
“Your case gives me new hope,” I said to him. “With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times.”
I have pondered my last conversation with that Reader. Perhaps his reading is so intense that it consumes all the substance of the novel at the start, so nothing remains for the rest This happens to me in writing: for some time now, every novel I begin writing is exhausted shortly after the beginning, as if I had already said everything I have to say.
I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he can’t go beyond the beginning.... He returns to the bookshop to have the volume exchanged....
I could write it all in the second person: you, Reader ... I could also introduce a young lady, the Other Reader, and a counterfeiter-translator, and an old writer who keeps a diary like this diary....
But I wouldn’t want the young lady Reader, in escaping the Counterfeiter, to end up in the arms of the Reader. I will see to it that the Reader sets out on the trail of the Counterfeiter, hiding in some very distant country, so the Writer can remain alone with the young lady, the Other Reader.
To be sure, without a female character, the Reader’s journey would lose liveliness: he must encounter some other woman on his way. Perhaps the Other Reader could have a sister....
Actually, it seems the Reader really is about to leave. He will take with him On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon by Takakumi Ikoka, to read on his journey.
On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
The ginkgo leaves fell like fine rain from the boughs and dotted the lawn with yellow. I was walking with Mr. Okeda on the path of smooth stones. I said I would like to distinguish the sensation of each single ginkgo leaf from the sensation of all the others, but I was wondering if it would be possible. Mr. Okeda said it was possible. The premises from which I set out, and which Mr. Okeda considered well founded, were the following. If from the ginkgo tree a single little yellow leaf falls and rests on the lawn, the sensation felt in looking at it is that of a single yellow leaf. If two leaves descend from the tree, the eye follows the twirling of the two leaves as they move closer, then separate in the air, like two butterflies chasing each other, then glide finally to the grass, one here, one there. And so with three, with four, even with five; as the number of leaves spinning in the air increases further, the sensations corresponding to each of them are summed up, creating a general sensation like that of a silent rain, and—if the slightest breath of wind slows their descent—that of wings suspended in the air, and then that of a scattering of little luminous spots, when you lower your gaze to the lawn. Now, without losing anything of these pleasant general sensations, I would like to maintain distinct, not confusing it with the others, the individual image of each leaf from the moment it enters the visual field, and follow it in its aerial dance until it comes to rest on the blades of grass. Mr. Okeda’s approval encouraged me to persevere in this purpose. Perhaps—I added, contemplating the form of the ginkgo leaf, a little yellow fan with scalloped edges—I could succeed in keeping distinct in the sensation of every leaf the sensation of every lobe of the leaf. On this point Mr. Okeda would not commit himself; at other times in the past his silence had served me as a warning not to let myself go in hasty conjectures, skipping a series of stages not yet checked. Bearing this lesson in mind, I began to concentrate my attention on capturing the tiniest sensations at the moment of their delineation, when their clarity was not yet mingled with a sheaf of diffused impressions.
Makiko, the youngest Okeda daughter, came to serve the tea, with her self-possessed movements and her still slightly childish grace. As she bent over, I saw on her bare nape, below her gathered hair, a fine black down which seemed to continue along the line of her back. I was concentrated on looking at it when I felt on me Mr. Okeda’s motionless eye, examining me. Certainly he realized I was practicing on his daughter’s neck my ability to isolate sensations. I did not look away, both because the impression of that tender down on the pale skin had overpowered me imperiously, and because, though it would have been easy for Mr. Okeda to direct my attention elsewhere with some common remark, he had not done so. In any event, Makiko soon finished serving the tea and rose again. I stared at a mole she had above her lip, to the left, and that brought back to me something of the earlier sensation, but more faintly. Makiko at first looked at me, upset, then lowered her eyes.
In the afternoon there was a moment I shall not easily forget, though I realize how trivial it seems in the telling. We were strolling on the bank of the little northern lake, with Makiko and her mother, Madame Miyagi. Mr. Okeda was walking ahead by himself, leaning on a long cane of white maple. In the center of the lake, two fleshy flowers of an autumn-blooming water lily had opened, and Madame Miyagi expressed the wish to pick them, one for herself and one for her daughter. Madame Miyagi had her usual frowning and slightly weary expression, but with that hint of stem obstinacy which made me suspect that in the long story of her troubled relations with her husband, about which there was so much gossip, her role was not merely that of the victim; and in truth, between Mr. Okeda’s icy detachment and her own stubborn determination, I could not sa
y who finally got the better. As for Makiko, she always displayed the gay and carefree air with which certain children who grow up amid bitter family dissension defend themselves against their surroundings, and she had borne it within her, growing up, and now faced the world of outsiders with it as if taking refuge behind the shield of an unripened and elusive bliss.
Kneeling on a rock at the bank, I leaned out until I could grasp the nearest shoot of the floating water lily, and I tugged at it gently, careful not to break it, to make the whole plant float toward the shore. Madame Miyagi and her daughter also knelt and stretched their hands out toward the water, ready to grasp the flowers when they came within reach. The bank of the little lake was low and sloping; to lean forward without too much risk, the two women remained behind my back, stretching out their arms, mother on one side, daughter on the other. At a certain moment I felt a contact in a precise point, between arm and back, at the level of the first ribs; or, rather, two different contacts, to the left and to the right. On Miss Makiko’s side, it was a tense and almost throbbing tip, whereas on Madame Miyagi’s side, an insinuating, grazing pressure. I realized that, through a rare and sweet chance, I had been grazed at the same moment by the left nipple of the daughter and the right nipple of the mother, and that I must bend every effort not to lose that chance contact and to appreciate the two simultaneous sensations, distinguishing them and comparing their spells.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Page 19
