The World Goes On

by László Krasznahorkai

  He was just a few meters past them and immediately wanted to stop, thinking I can’t leave them here, it was just that his legs refused to move for some reason, to do what he would have them do, and as the car rolled on he watched them through the mirror, the dead one lying half on its side, its internal organs spilled onto the pavement, its four legs stretched stiffly out all parallel, but he could only see the back of the puppy, fragile but ramrod straight, still sitting in the middle of the road as if it could afford to wait for hours, and he worried it too might be struck by a car, and I should stop, he said to himself, but kept rolling on, it being two minutes past nine as he found when he glanced at his watch, what to do, I’ll be late, he fretted, his foot already pressing on the gas, in two minutes I shall be in town, then one bend followed another and he was already past the winding part of the road and it had been two minutes past nine when he checked his watch, he pressed his foot harder down on the gas when for a moment he remembered the dog again, the way it was watching over its companion, but the image quickly passed and for the next minute he concentrated entirely on driving, picking up speed to just under sixty since there was no one else on the road except a slower vehicle ahead of him, a Skoda he decided as he approached, fretting because he had to slow down instead of overtaking it, the possibility of overtaking diminishing as he approached, but I won’t wait, he thought crossly, not behind this ancient Skoda, not for the bend, and because he knew the road well having driven it a thousand times and realizing there wouldn’t be a chance of overtaking the Skoda until they reached the sign for the town, he put his foot right down so as to pass it before the bend when suddenly the Skoda began to swing slowly towards the left just in front of him and everything happened almost at once, he glancing in his mirror and signaling that he was about to pass, pulling left on the steering wheel, entering the other lane and starting to overtake, when the other man, having failed to look in his mirror, also swung out left because he wanted to turn off or to turn right around, who knows what, and maybe his left indicator had just started blinking, but only at that moment, as he swung left, by which time it was too late of course and it was no use slamming on the brakes because the Skoda, being so slow, was now practically straddling the road, as if the image of it had frozen and he could neither avoid it nor brake, and in other words, there being no means of stopping it, he crashed into him.

  The onset of catastrophe is not signaled by the sense of falling through the dark to an accidental death: everything, including a catastrophe, has a moment-by-moment structure—a structure that is beyond measurement or comprehension, one that is maddeningly complex or must be conceived in quite another manner, in which the degree of complexity can be articulated only in terms of images that seem impossible to conjure—visible only if time has slowed down to the point that we see the world as indifferent owing to the available circumstances and having doomed preconditions that arrive at a perfect universal conclusion, if only because they are composed of individual intentions—because the moment is the result of unconscious choices, because a key doesn’t immediately fit into the ignition, because we do not start in third gear and move down to second but we start in second and move into third, rolling down the hill then turning onto a highway above the village, because the distance before us is like looking down a tunnel, because the greenery on the boughs still smells of morning dew, because of the death of a dog and someone’s badly executed maneuver when turning left, that is to say because of one choice or another, of more choices and still more choices ad infinitum, those maddening had-we-but-known choices impossible to conceptualize because the situation we find ourselves in is complicated, determined by something that is in the nature of neither God nor the devil, something whose ways are impenetrable to us and are doomed to remain so because chance is not simply a matter of choosing, but the result of that which might have happened anyway.

  THE BILL

  For Palma Vecchio, at Venice

  You sent for us and we knew what you wanted so we sent Lucretia and Flora, sent Leonora and Elena, followed by Cornelia, then Diana, and so it went on from January through to June, then from October through to December we sent Ophelia, sent Veronica, sent Adriana, sent Danaë, then Venus, and, little by little, every plump, sweet whore and courtesan on our books turned up at your place, the important thing, as for every male Venetian, being that their brows should be clear and high, that the shoulders be broad and round, the chest wide and deep, that the body should open out, the way it opens out under a deep-cut chemise, and that your eyes should be able to dive, as from a cliff, from the tempting face down to the fresh, sweet, desirable bosom, just as you described to Federico who brought us your order and who then described it to us in turn, saying yes, just as before, just as wide and deep as the valley, the valley of Val Seriana, where you yourself come from, Federico grinned, because, according to him, that was what you were really after, that valley in Bergamo where you were born, and he went on to tell us, and the others confirmed this, that nothing else concerned you, that you were not in the least interested in the dark secrets of the flesh, only in waves of blonde hair, sparkling eyes, and the slow opening of the lips, in other words in the head, and then in the prospect opening from the chin down and spreading below the broad round shoulders to the landscape of the scented body, not the rest, and that you were always asking them to slip the straps to below the shoulder because, you told them, you had, as you put it, to see the shoulder utterly bare but at the same time to see the lacy white edge of the chemise on its concave arc from shoulder to shoulder, that arc just above the painted nipples of the breasts, which reminded you of the horizon above your village in that deep valley, the valley of Seriana, though you didn’t make that perfectly clear to anybody at the time, that idea being something that occurred to Federico, and only after a while, though he didn’t articulate it either, and, in the end, it proved impossible to discover why it was that you painted so many not exactly fat but extraordinarily large women in your pictures, because you would not answer a single question about that, you were, in any case, known for your lack of patience, and when impatient, you would often expose their breasts entirely so they said, only to cover them up again most of the time, so they never really knew what you wanted, and some were scared of you because they’d heard all kinds of rumors and were ready for anything, their chief fear being that you, in your bottega, might demand something of them that they weren’t able to do; but, as they went on to say, you didn’t really want anything anyway, and, what is more, it often happened that you paid in advance, and, once you stopped painting for the day, you sent them away immediately without even a bunch of grapes, never allowing those enormous women to take you to bed, and they just had to stand there, or sit on a sofa, they had to stand or sit for hours on end without moving, it being just a matter of the hourly rate and the fear of what might happen, because you pretty soon got a reputation that the Bergamo man, as they called you, wasn’t in the least interested in fucking, and wouldn’t even touch, merely instructing the model in his quiet polite way how she should sit or stand, and then he’d just look, watching how she looked at him, and then, after an age of waiting, he would ask her to lower the left shoulder of her chemise a touch, or to ruffle up the folds of her dress a little more, or that she should uncover one breast, though he was always standing a good distance away, beyond touching distance, and, so the ladies would tell us, you’d be sitting in an armchair as the two servants led them outside back to the landing stage so they might return by the waiting mascareta and that you never actually came anywhere near them nor would allow them to touch you, unlike those, they giggled, who just wanted to stare while they themselves mounted some man; because you weren’t like that, the girls told us, that wasn’t why you hired them . . . you just looked at them and they had to stand there for hours (which was impossible), or sit, and of course, they were fully prepared, there being painters enough in Venice who paid for the visit of a whore or a cortegiana onesta, they’d s
tood or sat for every kind of artist, some having served you before, and some, from time to time, having even posed for the great Bellini, only to face the universal ridicule of seeing themselves depicted as the Mater Dolorosa, or Mary Magdalene or St. Catherine in S. Giovanni e Paolo or the Scuola di S. Marco, which provided everyone with a laugh and, boy, did they laugh! though in your case, Signor Bergamo or Seriana, whichever you prefer, when you’d finished with them people didn’t, for some reason, feel like laughing, and when one or the other of them told the others what it had been like with you after a couple of visits, they kept saying they had no idea what you were about, and, above all, they couldn’t understand why you turned them into such vast mountains of flesh, since, said Danaë, my shoulder is nowhere near as enormous as that, nor am I anywhere near as fat as that, said Flora pointing to her waist, and, to tell the truth, there was, after all, something incomprehensible about these disproportionate figures, because, despite the exaggerations, they remained lovely and attractive, and no one could understand how you did it, nor, more importantly, why, but then your whole art was so peculiar, everyone said, that it seemed it wasn’t exactly art you were aiming for but for something about the women or in them, which led to ever greater confusion because the filthy way you looked at them was quite intolerable, they said, so even the most experienced whore felt nervous and looked away, but then you’d snap at them and tell them to look you straight in the eye, though otherwise you treated them well enough, it was just that you never laid a finger on them, that being something they could never understand, the reason they were scared of you, never looking forward to visiting you, although you paid them well enough, giving even the lowest of them a few miserable escudo, and as for the freshest youngest whore or cortigiana onesta, you paid well over the usual for her, despite the fact that for all your fame, you’re far from the wealthiest of them and, they say, all those pictures you painted of Lucretia and Danaë and Flora and Elena are still stacked in your store, the religious paintings being the ones that sell, the ones in which Danaë becomes Mary, and Flora becomes St. Catherine, one under some tree with the baby in her arms in a pretty country scene, these all having been bought as we know, while those where you painted for some lecher wanting a picture of his whore, well, you couldn’t always convince the customer that what you gave him was exactly what he wanted because all your lovers remained stubbornly just Lucretia, or Danaë or Flora or Elena, so most of the paintings were still in the bottega, all stacked up on top of each other, because, despite having sold a few, you sometimes couldn’t hide your own dissatisfaction with them and went back to them time and again, which was why you occasionally sent word with Federico for the same woman, albeit in a different shape, and we could see why you’d want to do that because we’ve had a thousand, ten thousand, indeed a hundred thousand such requests in the carampane, and ever since you first moved to Venice it was obvious to us that it was always the same woman you wanted, and so we supplied you with Lucretia and Flora and Leonora and Elena and Cornelia and Diana from January through to June, and Ophelia and Veronica and Adriana and Danaë and finally Venus from October through to December, though all you wanted from January to June, and from October to December, was the same woman, and only after giving considerable thought to the question of why you painted our ladies as fat as you did did we at last cotton on to the secret of why these enormous women looked so devilishly beautiful on your canvases, or at least one of us cottoned on, meaning me, to the fact that what you wanted, beyond any doubt, was precisely the same thing each time: that’s to say, that valley in Seriana, you filthy reprobate, that is to say the valley between a whore’s shoulders and her breasts, that is, the valley where you were born which might perhaps remind you of your mother’s breasts, which is not to deny you are a handsome man with a fine figure, though the most attractive part of you is your face as everyone who has met you knows, because all the whores notice that and they would have done it for you for nothing but you didn’t want them, no, all you wanted was to stare at their chins, their necks and their chests, and they quickly got to hate you because they didn’t have the least idea what you wanted and we had to tell them to calm down and just go along if you asked for them, because they’d never make an easier escudo and, what is more, you’d dress them up in fine clothes as you dress everyone, which, by the way, makes us all the more suspicious that you really are searching for something, and, as the years passed, there came ever new Floras and Lucretias and Veronicas and Ophelias, and they were all different, but all the same to you, and they had to take their high-heeled shoes off as soon as they got to the door, in fact had to take off all the clothes they’d come in, because, you had them strip down to their knickers and you had your two servants give them a lacy chemise and anything else necessary, inevitably some gorgeous robe embroidered with gold thread, or a dress or, sometimes, just a blue or green velvet jacket, then you softly asked them to expose one breast, to pull the chemise down a little, and then gazed for hours at those soft, wide, round shoulders, the innocent-corrupt smiles on their faces, and it was as if you hadn’t even noticed the hot perspiration on the fresh skin of those naked breasts, took no notice at all of what they had to offer you, because you had no use for narrow waists, the milk-white belly, those ample hips and the delicate hair of the groin, you were uninterested in the way the lips, the knees, and thighs opened, the warm lap and those clouds of perfume that could drive men wild, and however one or the other tried words and looks and sighs, everything she knew of the thousand ways of seduction, it all left you cold, you just waved her away, told her to stop all that and that all you wanted her to do was to stay absolutely still, to sit quietly on the sofa and look at you, to keep her eyes on you and not look away, not even for a moment, and you insisted on this to the point that all of them—every single one from Lucretia through to Venus—was astonished at this idiotic and pointless game of you-look-at-me-I-look-at-you, because what after all are we, they complained, raising their voices, looking really angry, child-virgins from the lace factory? though we, of course, knew that what you needed wasn’t them, not as people, but what you could get at through them, and I, personally, always thought we should stop talking in terms of any specific model and concentrate on what lay behind her, some idea like the female figure being the serenissima, and the male, the carampane, though from all I have said so far it will have been clear to you for some time where I’m coming from, I mean this person is telling you what an unusual man you are, a man uninterested in women as such, more in what might be found by way of a woman, someone who is looking to perfect the most scandalously refined, devilish sensation, to whom, from that point of view, a woman is just a body, an idea one can understand and agree with because one may think we are nothing but body, end of story, though what you can tell from this body—if you catch it in the moment of desire, at the moment when the body is most alive and burning with desire—is just how deep and mysterious and irresistible the desire is that drives you to want—to demand—possession of the object for which you are willing to sacrifice everything, even though it’s nothing more than a small patch of skin, or a faint flush on that skin, or just a sad little smile, maybe the way she drops a shoulder, or bows her head, or slowly raises it, when a tiny blonde curl, a maddening strand of hair, accidentally falls across her temple and this strand promises something, you have no idea what, but whatever it is you are willing to give, to give your whole life for it, and maybe it is precisely because of this I feel convinced—and you too will become aware of this—that it isn’t the fact that they drive men crazy the way they peel off their clothes; oh no, quite the opposite, nor is it the way the breast pops out, or how the belly or the lap or the rump and the thighs appear, for any such appearance means the end of unfettered illusion, no, it’s the moment when the faint flickering candlelight reveals the animal in their eyes, because it is this look that drives all men crazy, crazy for that beautiful animal, that animal that is nothing but body, which is what people die for, for t
he moment—that splinter of time—when that animal appears, beautiful beyond comprehension—and that’s the light you sometimes catch in the eyes of Cornelia and Flora and Elena and Venus, while all the time being fully aware, since you’ve lived long enough, of the fact that it is just how Cornelia, Flora, Elena, and Venus happen to look today, that they are already old and wrinkly inside and out and that nothing interests them except filling their bellies and their purses, though most of the time both are empty, and so you call them again and again, and we keep sending them in ever new shapes, so off they go: Cornelia and Flora and Elena and Venus, and their eyes might do the trick and hit the perfect spot, because clearly that is what you yourself want and that’s why you forbid them to do anything that otherwise they would normally do, so you don’t let them take off their clothes and completely reveal their breasts and everything else they’ve got because you know that animal essence is a matter of deferred pleasure that exists only in the act of deferral, that the promise of the eyes is just a promise that something will happen later, maybe soon, or