City

by Alessandro Baricco

  “Look, no one’s said anything to me . . .”

  “It’s the way you talk to someone when he’s going to die.”

  “. . .”

  “. . .”

  “. . .”

  “It was only an example, Gould.”

  “. . .”

  “Come on, Gould, it was only an example . . . Gould, look at me.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It was only an example.”

  “OK.”

  Gould stopped and looked back. There were the two furrows dug by his feet through the leaves, like long, even stripes, vanishing into the distance. You could imagine that someone would come along, perhaps hours later, and walk with his feet in the two lanes, slowly, having fun keeping his feet in the lanes. Gould jumped to one side and moved on, walking carefully, trying not to leave tracks. He looked back at the two stripes that had been suddenly interrupted. The Adventures of the Invisible Man, he thought.

  “There’s the bus, Gould. Shall we take it?”

  “Yes.”

  It went to the end of the avenue and then turned, going up the hill, skirting the park, and passing the animal hospital. It was a red bus. Eventually, it arrived at the school.

  “Hey, it’s nice,” said Shatzy.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s really nice, I’d never have imagined it.”

  “You can’t tell from here, but it keeps on going back. There are all the playing fields, and then it goes on, for a long way.”

  “Lovely.”

  They stood there next to each other, looking. Boys were going in and out, and there was a big lawn in front of the steps, with paths and a couple of enormous, slightly twisted trees.

  “You know the field behind the house, where they play soccer?” said Gould.

  “Yes.”

  “Those are the same boys, the ones who play soccer.”

  “Yes.”

  “The odd thing is that even when there’s no ball around they play. Every so often you see them kicking in the air, or pretending to dribble. Maybe they’ll make a header, but there’s no ball, they’re just jogging a little while they wait for the coach to get there, or for the game to begin. Sometimes they’re not even dressed to play—they’ve got their schoolbags, they have their coats on—but still they’ll make a pass to the midfielder, or they’ll be dribbling a chair, stuff like that.”

  “. . .”

  “. . .”

  “. . .”

  “For me it’s the same.”

  “. . .”

  “School, I mean, for me it’s just like that.”

  “. . .”

  “Even if there’s no book, no professor, no school, nothing, I . . . it’s the same thing . . . I never stop my . . . I never stop. You see?”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s something I like. I never stop thinking about it.”

  “Funny.”

  “You see?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Nobel Prize has nothing to do with it, you see?”

  The thing is, they weren’t even looking at each other; they were still standing there, eyes wandering over the school, the lawn, the trees, and everything else.

  “I wasn’t serious, Gould.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course not. I was talking just to talk, you shouldn’t listen to me, I’m the last person you should listen to on the subject of school. Believe me.”

  “OK.”

  “All in all, school’s not my strong point.”

  “. . .”

  “Excuse me, Gould.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m glad you like it.”

  “What?”

  “Here.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s nice here.”

  “But you’ll come home, later, OK?”

  “Of course I’m coming home.”

  “Do it: come home.”

  “Yes.”

  “OK.”

  Then they looked at each other. At first, they didn’t. They sort of looked. Gould had on a wool cap, slightly askew, so that one ear was covered and the other wasn’t. Looking at him, you would have had to have very sharp eyes to see that he was a genius. Shatzy pulled his hat down over the uncovered ear. Bye, she said. Gould went through the gate and started out along the central path, across the big lawn. He didn’t look back. He seemed very small, in the middle of that whole school; Shatzy thought that she had never, in her whole life, seen anything smaller than that boy with his schoolbag, as he went along the path, becoming smaller and smaller with each step. She thought it was scandalous to allow a child to be so alone, and that at the very least he should have had a band of hussars behind him, or something of the sort, to escort him along the path and into his classes, a couple of dozen hussars, maybe more. But like this it was terrible.

  “It’s terrible,” she said to two boys who were coming out, with books under their arms and comic-book shoes.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Everything’s wrong.”

  “Oh?”

  The boys sneered.

  “Do you know someone called Gould?”

  “Gould?”

  “Yes, Gould.”

  “The kid?”

  They sneered.

  “Yes, the kid.”

  “Of course we know him.”

  “What is there to sneer at?”

  “Mr. Nobel, who doesn’t know him?”

  “What is there to sneer at?”

  “Hey, cool it, sister.”

  “So, do you know him or not?”

  “Yes, we know him.”

  “Are you friends of his?”

  “Who, us?”

  “You.”

  They sneered.

  “He’s not friends with anyone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s not friends with anyone, that’s what it means.”

  “Doesn’t he go to school with you?”

  “He lives there, at school.”

  “So?”

  “So nothing.”

  “He goes to class like everyone else, doesn’t he?”

  “What’s it to you? What are you, some kind of a journalist?”

  “I’m not a journalist.”

  “She’s his mama.”

  They snorted.

  “I am not his mama. He has a mother.”

  “And who is she, Marie Curie?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Hey sister, cool it.”

  “Cool it yourself.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Hey.”

  “Leave her alone. She’s nuts.”

  “What the fuck . . .”

  “Come on, forget it . . .”

  “She’s nuts.”

  “Let’s go, come on.”

  They weren’t sneering any more.

  “YOU WON’T BE SO SMART WHEN THE HUSSARS ARRIVE,” Shatzy shouted after them.

  “Just listen to her.”

  “Forget it, come on.”

  “THEY’LL HANG YOU, AND PEOPLE LIKE YOU, BY THE BALLS, AND THEN THEY’LL USE YOU FOR TARGET PRACTICE.”

  “She’s nuts.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  Shatzy turned back towards the school. They’ll hang you by the balls, she murmured softly. Then she blew her nose. It was very cold. She looked at the big lawn and the twisted trees. She had seen trees like that before, but she couldn’t remember where. In front of some museum, perhaps. It was very cold. She took out her gloves and put them on. Damn it all, she thought. She looked at the time. There were boys coming out and boys going in. The school was white. The lawn was turning yellow. Damn it all, she thought.

  Then she began to run.

  She turned onto the path and ran all the way to the steps, took the steps two at a time, and went into the school. She proceeded to the end of a long corridor, took the stairs to the second
floor, went into a kind of cafeteria and out the other side, went down one floor, opened all the doors she could find, ended up outside the school again, crossed a playing field and a garden, entered a three-story yellow building, climbed the stairs, looked in a library and the bathrooms, stuck her head into offices, took an elevator, followed an arrow that said “Grabenhauer Foundation,” turned back, went along a green-painted corridor, opened the first door, looked inside the classroom, and saw a man standing behind a lectern and nobody at the desks but one boy, sitting in the third row, with a can of Coke in his hand.

  “Shatzy.”

  “Hi, Gould.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Nothing, I just wanted to see if everything was going OK.”

  “Everything’s OK.”

  “All in order?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. How do you get out of here?”

  “Go downstairs and follow the arrows.”

  “The arrows.”

  “Yes.”

  “OK.”

  “See you.”

  “See you.”

  Gould and the professor remained in the classroom.

  “That’s my new governess,” said Gould. “Her name is Shatzy Shell.”

  “Cute,” observed the professor, who, to stick to the facts, was called Martens. Then he resumed the lecture, which, to stick to the facts, was his Lecture No. 14.

  And in effect this appears to be the heart of that singular experience, although obscure and for the most part impenetrable, Prof. Martens asserted in Lecture No. 14. Take the example of a passer-by who, methodically synchronizing his action to a prior plan, determined that morning, sets off with a precise goal, taking a well-defined and unambiguous route along a city street. And suppose that he suddenly happens to come upon the negligible presence, on the pavement, of a black spike heel, unforeseen and, at the same time, unforeseeable.

  And suppose he stands there as if bewitched.

  He alone—pay attention—and not the thousand other human beings who, in an analogous situation of mind and body, also saw the black spike heel but carefully and automatically relegated it to the useful marginal area of peculiar objects essentially not suitable for penetrating the system of attention, in accordance with the pragmatic setting of the aforementioned system. While our man, instead, having been suddenly subjected to a blinding epiphany, stops walking, spiritually and otherwise, because he has been irremediably taken out of himself by an image that resounds like an ineluctable call, a song that seemingly echoes into infinity.

  It’s strange, Prof. Martens asserted in Lecture No. 14.

  When, in the swarm of material that perception is charged with handing over from experience to us, one detail, and only that one, slips out of the magma, and, evading all checkpoints, actually strikes the surface of our automatic non-attention. Generally there is no reason for such instants to occur, and yet they do, suddenly kindling in us an unusual emotion. They are like a promise. Like the gleam of a promise.

  They promise worlds.

  One might say—Prof. Martens asserted in Lecture No. 14—that certain epiphanies consisting of objects that have escaped the equalizing insignificance of the real are tiny peepholes through which we are allowed to intuit—perhaps reach—the fullness of worlds. Worlds. In the meaninglessness of a spike heel lost on the street light percolates, the light of woman, of a world—Prof. Martens asserted in Lecture No. 14—so that one must ask oneself, in the end, if just that / perhaps that is the single portal to the authenticity of worlds there is in no woman all the woman that there is in a spike heel lost on the street / right there, within reach of your hand something that resembles / something that is the kernel of the vast collective experience and history sheltered under the name of woman / we could say its iridescent truth / more precisely, that which in the real world corresponds to what on our perceptual horizon occurs as the emotion and sensation catalogued under the linguistic expression woman there is in no woman all the woman that there is in a spike heel lost on the street: and if this is true, authenticity must be a subterranean metropolis, discernible in the gleam of tiny peepholes announcing it, glowing objects cut into the armored surface of the real, blazes that are annunciation and shortcut, beacon and portal, angels—Prof. Martens asserted in his Lecture No. 14. Adding: don’t even mention to me Proust’s madeleine. Settled there, in that obscenely homey, bourgeois, tearoom image / the burn of true peepholes is neutralized, they are reduced to phenomena, insignificant in themselves, of involuntary and—who knows why, since it’s involuntary—revelatory memory / lying on the doctor’s couch we have sold off the epiphanic flashes from the underground like depressing regurgitations from the personal and individual subconscious / we have consigned them to a soothing remedy, as if they were kidney stones, to be expelled, pissed away in a pee of memories, memories / memory / diuresis of the soul / unpardonable cowardice / as if—Prof. Martens asserted in his lecture No. 14, leaving the lectern and going over to Gould— as if the man who stands bewitched by the spike heel, a black spike heel, were at that moment himself: and had his own biography, and his own memory. This is the lie. The eyes that see the flashes are unique terminals for the world. They are combinations of things that have happened, objective constellations of possibilities meeting in a single moment in the same place. There is nothing subjective. Every flash is an instance of objectivity. It is the authentic that disfigures the real think of it, what wonderful eyes, capable of being real and that’s all, eyes without history afterwards, only afterwards, then it’s history listen to me, afterwards, only afterwards, then it’s story the ambition to render that flash eternal converts it to a story, as far as it can think of the mind that can do it how much lightness, and strength, to hold a flash suspended for the time necessary to see it melt into a story that would be to coin stories, that is what one should know how to do, listening as long as necessary, waiting for the clearing hidden in the piercing glare, greeting the step and the measures, the breath, the pace, walking its paths, breathing its tempos, until you have, in hand, in the voice, that instant opening up into a place, and softened in the curved line of a story, to the straight line of a story sharpened can you imagine a more beautiful gesture? Prof. Martens asserted in Lecture No. 14. Professor Martens was Gould’s instructor in quantum mechanics. He had a passion for bicycles, though he fell off frequently, because of ear lesions that hadn’t healed properly. One of his ancestors had fought in the battle of Charlottenburg, and he had the evidence. He said.

  7

  Another good scene was the menu scene. In the saloon. Not the menu. The scene. It took place in the saloon.

  Where a whole great confusion of things was dancing around—voices, noises, colors—but don’t forget, said Shatzy, the stink. That’s important. Keep in mind the stink. Sweat, alcohol, horses, rotten teeth, pee and aftershave. Got that? She wouldn’t continue until you swore you had that firmly in your mind.

  In the beginning it was all between Carver, the guy who worked in the saloon, and the stranger, the one who’d been at the Dolphin sisters’. Whenever Carver talked, he dried glasses. No one had ever seen him wash one.

  “Are you the stranger?”

  “What’s that, a new brand of whiskey?”

  “It’s a question.”

  “I’ve heard some more original.”

  “We keep the good ones over here, for the customers with money.”

  The stranger places a gold piece on the bar and says:

  “Let’s see.”

  “Whiskey, señor?”

  “Double.”

  Shatzy said that there was still some stuff left to record, but essentially it was almost perfect. The dialogue, she meant.

  “Do you folks always shoot people who show up in town?”

  “Dolphin sisters, eh?”

  “Two ladies. Twins.”

  “That’s them.”

  “Nice pair.”

  “Never seen anyone use a rifle like them,”
Carver says, and starts drying another glass.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You haven’t heard the story of the jack of hearts yet?”

  “No.”

  “They’re famous, on account of that story. It goes like this. They stand forty paces away from you, you throw a deck of cards in the air, they shoot, you pick the cards up off the ground, and when you’re done you find you’ve got fifty-one normal cards and one with two holes in the middle.”

  “The jack of hearts.”

  “Right.”

  “Jack of hearts every time?”

  “They like that card. There must be something behind it.”

  “And when can you catch this number?”

  “You can’t. The last time was two years ago and a fellow got killed. End of the run.”

  “The two of them did him in?”

  “He was a guy who came from somewhere else, a fool. He had heard the story of the jack of hearts and didn’t believe it; he said those old maids couldn’t hit a playing card if you rolled it up and stuck it in the gun barrel. For days he went around saying that, it made him laugh like a lunatic, that business of rolling up the card and so forth. Finally the Dolphin sisters decided they’d had enough. It wasn’t so much the business about the card, it was the stuff about the old maids that made them furious, everyone here knows it’s best to avoid the subject, and instead that jerk couldn’t shut up, the old maids this, the old maids that. It made them crazy. Another whiskey?”

  “First the story.”

  “Finally, he bet a thousand dollars that they couldn’t do it. He seemed very sure of himself. They showed up, with their guns. The whole town turned out to watch. The fool laughed, totally cool, counted out the forty paces, took the pack of cards, and threw them up in the air. He was stretched out on the ground while the cards were still in the air, falling like dead leaves: two shots straight to the heart. Dead. The Dolphin sisters turned and, without a word, went home.”

  “Bingo.”