A Breath of Life (11 page)

The novel I want to write would be “It’s Like Trying to Remember. And Not Being Able.”

“There’s a book inside all of us,” they say. And maybe that’s why I wanted to expel from me a book that I’d write if I had the talent, and also the perseverance.

I’m feeling like a mermaid out of water. On one half of me the scales are jewels shining in the sun of life. For I came out of the sea into life. And I wriggle my body atop a large rock combing my long salty hair. I don’t know why I wrote that, I think it’s so I won’t forget to take note of something.

I don’t write, for I’m lazy and fluttering. I want to live so much and I think that writing isn’t living. That it’s enough to feel. I can’t do anything for myself in this sense: I’ve already freed myself from my typewriter and demand to be left to my destiny.

AUTHOR: I don’t write because I want to, no. I write because I must. Otherwise what would I do with myself?

Everything I’m being or doing or thinking has a musical accompaniment. There are entire and consecutive days that are accompanied by a powerful and gloomy organ. When I’m being hard on myself the accompaniment is a quartet.

I almost don’t know what I feel, if in fact I feel at all. Whatever doesn’t exist comes to exist when it receives a name. I write to bring things into existence and to exist myself. Since I was a child I’ve been searching for the breath of the word that gives life to murmurings. The only reason I never became a real writer is because I get too lost between the lives and my life. And also because I need to put order in my life, in that chaos from which this grave and non-assimilable life is made. I can’t relate to my life.

Serious like a boy of 13. Serious like an open mouth singing. The annunciation.

How rude: making me wait.

Seeing is a miracle. How can you describe a pyramid? How can you describe a light turned on?

ANGELA: I’m so ashamed to write. Fortunately I don’t publish. When we speak to God we shouldn’t use words. The only way to make contact is by being alive and mute, like the needle of a wise and unconscious compass.

AUTHOR: They objectify me when they call me a writer. I never was a writer and never shall be. I refuse to have the role of scribe in the world.

I hate it when they tell me to write or expect me to write. I once received an anonymous letter spiritually offering me a musical recital as long as I kept writing. The result: I stopped completely. Who orders me around — only I know.

ANGELA: I don’t write complicated. It’s smooth like a gentle sea with waves spreading out white and frigid: agnus-dei.

But does anyone hear me? So I cry out: mama, and I am a daughter and I am a mother. And I have in me the virus of cruel violence and sweetest love. My children: I love you with my poor body and my rich soul. And I swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Entangled in terror. Amen.

In the performance of my obligations I put each thing in its proper place. That’s right: the performance of my obligations. To refer to the “discharge” of my obligations would suggest a brown and ugly wound on the leg of a beggar and we feel so guilty about the beggar’s wound and its filthy discharge and the beggar is us, the banished.

So delicate and trembling like picking up a station with the portable radio. Even new batteries sometimes refuse. And suddenly it comes in weak or too loud the blessed station I want, weightless as a mosquito. Has anyone ever talked about the dry and brief little noise that the match makes when the ember and orangish flame light up?

I’m waiting for the inspiration for me to live.

I like children so much, I’d love to publish a son named João!

AUTHOR: What this book is missing is a bang. A scandal. A prison. But there will be no prison, and the bang is an implosion.

Angela writes columns for the newspaper. Weekly columns, but she’s not satisfied. Columns are not literature, they’re subliterature. Other people might think they’re high quality but she considers them mediocre. What she would like is to write a novel but that’s impossible because she doesn’t have the stamina for it. Her short stories were rejected by the publishers, some of whom said that they were very far from reality. She’s going to try to write a story within the “reality” of others, but that would be debasing herself. She doesn’t know what to do. Meanwhile her current tapestry goes on: she weaves while her friends are talking. To occupy her hands, she weaves for hours and hours. In her first and only exhibition of tapestries. It seems she’s better at weaving than writing columns.

Book of Angela

ANGELA: “Ladies and gentlemen: I am afraid my subject is rather an exciting one and as I don’t like excitement, I shall approach it in a gentle, timid, roundabout way”

[MAX BEERBOHM]

“But I love excitement”

[ANGELA PRALINI]

“The only thing that interests me is whatever cannot be thought — whatever can be thought is too little for me”

[ANGELA PRALINI]

AUTHOR: I need to be careful. Angela already senses that she’s being driven by me. She must not detect my existence, almost as we can’t detect the existence of God.

Angela apparently wants to write a book studying things and objects and their aura. But I doubt she’s up to it. Her observations instead of being fashioned into a book arise casually from her way of speaking. Since she likes to write, I write hardly anything about her, I let her speak for herself.

ANGELA: I’d really like to describe still lifes. For example, the three tall and pot-bellied bottles on the marble table: bottles silent as if home alone. Nothing of what I see belongs to me in its essence. And the only use I make of them is to look.

AUTHOR: Needless to say Angela will never write the novel that she puts off every day. She doesn’t know that she lacks the capacity to deal with the making of a book. She’s inconsistent. All she can do is jot down random phrases. There’s only one area in which she, if she really were someone to go through with a vocation, could have some continuity: her interest in discovering the volatile aura of things.

ANGELA: Tomorrow I’ll start my novel of things.

AUTHOR: She won’t start anything. First of all because Angela never finishes what she starts. Second because her sparse notes for the book are all fragmentary and Angela doesn’t know how to bring together and build. She’ll never be a writer. That spares her the suffering of barrenness. She’s very wise to put herself on the margins of life and enjoy the simple irresponsible commentary. And she by not writing a book escapes what I feel when I finish a book: the poverty of soul, and a draining of the sources of energy. Could it be that anyone says that writing is the work of the lazy?

This book the pseudo-writer Angela is making will be called “Story of Things.” (Oneiric suggestions and incursions into the unconscious.)

Angela is someone who sees and studies things in order to use them for sculpture or because she likes sculpture. She’s such an autonomous character that she is interested in things that have nothing to do with me, the author. I observe her writing about objects. It’s a free-form study in which I take no part. Whereas for Angela things are personal for me the study of the thing is too abstract.

ANGELA: Writing — I tear things out of me in pieces the way a harpoon hooks into a whale and rips its flesh . . .

AUTHOR: . . . while I’d like to tear the flesh off words. For each word to be a dry bone under the sun. I am the Day. Only one thing connects me to Angela: we’re the human species.

ANGELA: I don’t even know how to start. I only know that I’m going to speak of the world of things. I swear that the thing has an aura.

AUTHOR: Everyone who learned to read and write has a certain desire to write. It’s legitimate: every being has something to say. But you need more than desire in order to write. Angela says, as thousands of people do (and they’re right): “my life is a real novel, if I wrote it down no one would believe me.” And it’s true. The life of every person is susceptible to a painful deepening and the life of every person is “unbelievable.” What should those people do? What Angela does: write with no strings attached. Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.

ANGELA: This is a compact book. I beg pardon and permission to pass. There’s still no explanation. But one day there will be. The music of this book is “Rhapsody for Clarinet and Orchestra” by Debussy. Trumpets by Darius Milhaud. It’s the sexual revelation of what exists. The Wedding March from Wagner’s
Lohengrin
. Georges Auric “The Speech of the General.” And now — now I’ll begin:

— What is nature but the mystery that surrounds everything? Each thing has its place. What the pyramids of Egypt tell us. From the height of such incomprehension, from the top of the pyramid, how many centuries, I contemplate thee, oh ignorance. And I know the secret of the sphinx. She did not devour me because I gave the right answer to her question. But I am an enigma for the sphinx and nevertheless I did not devour her. Decipher me, I said to the sphinx. And she fell mute. The pyramids are eternal. They will always be restored. Is the human soul a thing? Is it eternal? Between the hammer blows I hear the silence.

AUTHOR: Because Angela is such novelty and unusual I get scared. I’m scared in bedazzlement and fear in the face of her impromptu talk. Am I imitating her? or is she imitating me? I don’t know: but her way of writing reminds me ferociously of mine as a child can resemble the father. The ancestral fathers. I come from afar. I’m efficient, Angela isn’t. I give her some room to move around as though she were a mechanical toy and she sets to work clatteringly. I then remove the clatter oiling her screws and coils. But she doesn’t operate under my mechanistic approach: she only acts (through words) when I let her be.

ANGELA: I can’t look at an object too much or it sets me on fire. More mysterious than the soul is matter. More enigmatic than the thought, is the “thing.” The thing that is miraculously concrete in your hands. Furthermore, the thing is great proof of the spirit. A word is also a thing — a winged thing that I pluck from the air with my mouth when I speak. I make it concrete. The thing is the materialization of aerial energy. I am an object that time and energy gathered in space. The laws of physics govern my spirit and gather in a visible block my body of flesh.

Can paralysis transform a person into a thing? No, it can’t, because that thing thinks. I am urgently needing to be born. It’s really hurting me. But if I can’t get out of this situation, I’ll suffocate. I want to scream. I want to scream to the world: I am born!!!

And so I breathe. And so I have the freedom to write about the things of the world. Because it’s obvious that the thing is urgently begging for mercy since we abuse it. But if we’re in a mechanistic age, we also give our spiritual cry.

The object — the thing — always fascinated me and in a certain sense destroyed me. In my book
The Besieged City
I speak indirectly about the mystery of the thing. The thing is a specialized and immobilized animal. Years ago I also described an armoire. Then came the description of an age-old clock called Sveglia: an electronic clock that haunted me and would haunt any living person. Then it was the telephone’s turn. In “The Egg and the Hen” I speak of an industrial crane. It’s a timid approach of mine to subverting the living world and the threatening world of the dead.

No, life is not an operetta. It’s a tragic opera in which in a fantastic ballet are mingled eggs, clocks, telephones, ice skaters and the portrait of a stranger who died in 1920.

AUTHOR: Angela writes about objects as she would do needlework. A lacemaking woman.

ANGELA: The thing dominates me. But the dog that exists in me barks and there is an outburst of the fatal thing. There is a fatal aspect to my life. I accepted long ago the fearful destiny that is mine. Thank you. Thank you very much, my lord. I’m leaving: I’m going to what is mine. My heart is as cold as the small sound of ice in a glass of whiskey. One day I shall speak of ice. Out of nervousness I broke a glass. And the world exploded. And I broke a mirror. But I didn’t look at myself in it. I’m going to investigate things. I hope they won’t avenge themselves on me. Forgive me, thing, forgive my pitiful self. Ah what a sigh of the world.

AUTHOR: Angela fell in love with the sight of “things.” “Things” for her are an experience almost without the atmosphere of any thought or common expression. However, when she observes things, she acts with a tie that binds her to them. She’s not immune. She humanizes things. So she’s not honest in her intentions.

ANGELA: When I look, the thing comes to exist. I see the thing in the thing. Transmutation. I sculpt with my eyes anything I see. The thing itself is immaterial. What is called “thing” is the solid and visible condensation of a part of its aura. The aura of the thing is different from the aura of a person. The aura of the latter ebbs and flows, disappears and reappears, turns sweet or flies into a purple rage, explodes and implodes. While the aura of the thing is always the same as itself. The aura distinguishes things. And us too. And the animals that are given the name of a breed and a species. But my own aura trembles glittering when I see you.

AUTHOR: I wanted to write something wide and free. Not to describe Angela but to lodge myself temporarily within her way of being. Angela has but a meager thread of life. And she doesn’t insist that anything unusual should happen to her. But I want the intangible thing: the way she makes her way.