If on a winter's night a traveler (14 page)

And so, when we were about to begin our nighttime wanderings, with him all snappily dressed and sitting properly in the back of the convertible, and her sitting beside me up front, forced to stretch one arm back to hold him steady, as I was about to start the engine, suddenly she flings her left leg over the gearshift and puts it on top of my right leg. "Bernadette!" I cry. "What are you doing?" And she explains to me that when I burst into the room I interrupted her at a moment when she can't be interrupted; never mind whether with one of us or the other, she had to pick up at that same point and keep on till the end. Meanwhile with one hand she was holding the dead man and with the other she was unbuttoning me, all three of us crammed into that tiny car, in a public parking lot of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Wriggling her legs in contortions—harmonious ones, I must say—she sat astride my knees and almost smothered me in her bosom as in a landslide. Jojo meanwhile was falling on top of us, but she was careful to push him aside, her face only inches from the face of the dead man, who looked at her with the whites of his widened eyes. As for me, caught by surprise like this, with my physical reactions following their own course, obviously preferring to obey her than to follow my own terrified spirit, without even having to move, since she thought of everything—well, I realized then that what we were doing was a ceremony to which she attached a special meaning, there before the dead man's eyes, and I felt the soft, very tenacious grip closing and I couldn't escape her.

"You've got it wrong, girl," I would have liked to say to her. 'That dead man died because of another story, not yours, a story that hasn't ended yet." I would have liked to tell her that there was another woman between me and Jojo, in that story not yet ended, and if I keep skipping from one story to another it's because I keep circling around that story and escaping, as if it were the first day

of my escape, the minute I learned that she and Jojo had joined forces to ruin me. It's a story that sooner or later I'll also end up telling, but in the midst of all the others, not giving more importance to one than to another, not putting any special passion into it beyond the pleasure of narrating and remembering, because even remembering evil can be a pleasure when the evil is mixed I won't say with good, but with variety, the volatile, the changeable, in other words with what I can also call good, which is the pleasure of seeing things from a distance and narrating them as what is past.

"This will also be fun to tell when we're out of it," I said to Bernadette, getting into that elevator with Jojo in the plastic sack. Our plan was to drop him off the terrace of the top floor into a very narrow courtyard, where the next morning whoever found him would think of suicide or else a misstep during a robbery. And what if someone got into the elevator at one of the other floors and saw us with the sack? I would say the elevator had been called upstairs just as we were taking out the garbage. In fact it would soon be dawn.

"You can foresee all possible situations," Bernadette says. And how could I have managed otherwise, I would like to say to her, having to watch out for Jojo's mob for so many years, when he had his men in all the key cities of the big traffic? But I would have to explain to her the whole background of Jojo and that other woman, who never stopped demanding that I get him back the stuff that they said they lost through my fault, demanding I put around my neck again that chain of blackmail that still forces me to spend the night looking for a resting place for an old friend in a plastic sack.

With the Singhalese, too, I thought there was something behind the visit. "I don't handle crocodiles,
jeune homme,"
I said to him. "Try the zoo, I deal in other articles, I supply the shops downtown, private aquariums in people's apart-

ments, exotic fish, at the most turtles. They ask for iguanas now and then, but I don't stock them. Too delicate."

The boy—he must have been eighteen—stayed put; his mustache and eyelashes seemed like black feathers on his orange cheeks.

"Who sent you to me? Satisfy my curiosity," I asked him, because when Southeast Asia is involved, I am always distrustful, and I have my own good reasons.

"Mademoiselle Sibylle," he says.

"What does my daughter have to do with crocodiles?" I cry. It's true, she's been living on her own for some time now, but whenever I hear news of her I become uneasy. I don't know why, the thought of children has always inspired me with a kind of remorse.

And so I learn that in a boîte on Place Clichy, Sibylle does a number with alligators; at first the news made such a nasty impression on me that I didn't ask for further details. I knew she was working in nightclubs, but the idea that she exhibits herself in public with a crocodile seems to me the last thing a father could wish as the future of his only daughter; at least for a man like me, who had a Protestant upbringing.

"What's it called, this great nightclub?" I say, livid. "I'd like to go and have a look for myself."

He hands me a little cardboard advertisement, and I immediately feel cold sweat down my back, because that name, the Nouvelle Titania, looks familiar to me, all too familiar, even if these are memories from another part of the globe.

"And who runs it?" I ask. "Yes, the manager, the boss!"

"Ah, Madame Tatarescu, you mean...." And he lifts the zinc tub again, to take the litter away.

I was staring at that tangle of green scales, claws, tails, gaping mouths, and it was as if I had been clubbed on the skull, my ears transmitted nothing now but a grim buzz, a roar, the trumpet of the beyond, as soon as I had heard

the name of that woman from whose destroying influence I had managed to tear Sibylle, covering our traces across two oceans, constructing for the girl and me a calm, silent life. All in vain. Vlada had caught up with her daughter, and through Sibylle she again had me in her power, with the capacity only she possessed for rousing in me the fiercest aversion and the darkest attraction. Already she was sending me a message in which I could recognize her: that roiling of reptiles, to remind me that evil was the only vital element for her, that the world was a pit of crocodiles which I could not escape.

In the same way I looked, leaning from the terrace, down at the bottom of that leprous courtyard. The sky was already brightening, but down there the darkness was still thick, and I could barely make out the irregular stain that Jojo had become after hurtling through the void with the flaps of his jacket spread out like wings and after shattering all his bones with a boom like a firearm's.

The plastic sack had remained in my hand. We could leave it there, but Bernadette was afraid that if they found it, they would be able to reconstruct the way things had gone, so it was best to take it away and get rid of it.

On the ground floor, as we opened the elevator, there were three men with their hands in their pockets.

"Hello, Bernadette."

And she said, "Hello."

I didn't like the idea of her knowing them, especially since the way they dressed, though more up to date than Jojo's, betrayed, to my eyes, a certain family likeness.

"What are you carrying in that sack? Let's have a look," the biggest of the three says.

"See for yourself. It's empty," I say, calmly.

He sticks one hand into it. "What's this, then?" He takes out a black patent-leather shoe with a velvet saddle.

[6]

The pages of photocopying stop at this point, but for you the only thing that matters now is to continue your reading. Somewhere the complete volume must exist; you look around, seeking it with your gaze, but promptly lose heart; in this office books are considered raw material, spare parts, gears to be dismantled and reassembled. Now you understand Ludmilla's refusal to come with you; you are gripped by the fear of having also passed over to "the other side" and of having lost that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive, to which there is nothing to be added, from which there is nothing to be removed. But you are consoled by the faith Cavedagna continues to cherish in the possibility of innocent reading, even here.

Now the elderly editor reemerges from the glass partitions. Grab him by the sleeve, tell him you want to read the rest of
Looks down in the gathering shadow.

"Ah, heaven only knows where it's got to.... All the papers in the Marana business have vanished. His typescripts, the original texts, Cimbrian, Polish, French. He's vanished, everything's vanished, overnight."

"And you've heard no more from him?"

"No, he wrote.... We've received many letters.... Tales that don't make any sense ... I won't try to tell them to you, because I wouldn't know where to begin. I would have to spend hours reading through the entire correspondence."

"Could I have a look at it?"

Realizing you are determined to see the thing through, Cavedagna agrees to have them bring you the "Marana, Ermes" file from the archives.

"Do you have some free time? Good. Sit here and read. Then you can tell me what you think. Who knows? Maybe you'll be able to make some sense out of it."

In writing to Cavedagna, Marana always has some practical reason: to justify his delay in the delivery of the translations, to press for payment of the advances, to point out new foreign publications they shouldn't let slip through their fingers. But among these normal subjects of business correspondence appear hints of intrigues, plots, mysteries, and to explain these hints, or to explain why he is unwilling to say more, Marana in the end becomes embroiled in increasingly frenzied and garbled volubility.

The letters are addressed from places scattered over five continents, although they never seem to have been entrusted to the normal post, but, rather, to random messengers who mail them elsewhere, so the stamps on the envelopes do not correspond to the countries of provenance. The chronology is also uncertain: there are letters that refer to previous communications, which, however, prove to have been written later; there are letters that promise further explanations, which instead are found in pages dated a week earlier.

"Cerro Negro," the name—it would seem—of a remote village in South America, appears in the heading of the last letters; but exactly where it is, whether climbing up the Cordillera of the Andes or enshrouded in the forests of the Orinoco, cannot be comprehended from the contradictory glimpses of the landscape that are suggested. The letter you have before you looks like a normal business letter: but how on earth did a Cimmerian-language publishing firm end up down there? And how, if their editions are aimed at the limited market of Cimmerian emigrants in the two Americas, can they publish Cimmerian translations of
brand-new books
by the most celebrated international authors for which they have the
world rights
also in the authors' original languages? The fact remains that

Ermes Marana, who apparently has become their manager, offers Cavedagna an option on the new and eagerly awaited novel
In a network of lines that enlace
by the famous Irish writer Silas Flannery.

Another letter, again from Cerro Negro, is written, on the contrary, in a tone of inspired evocation: reporting—it seems—a local legend, it tells of an old Indian known as the Father of Stories, a man of immemorial age, blind and illiterate, who uninterruptedly tells stories that take place in countries and in times completely unknown to him. The phenomenon has brought expeditions of anthropologists and parapsychologists; it has been determined that many novels published by famous authors had been recited word for word by the wheezing voice of the Father of Stories several years before their appearance. The old Indian, according to some, is the universal source of narrative material, the primordial magma from which the individual manifestations of each writer develop; according to others, a seer who, thanks to his consumption of hallucinatory mushrooms, manages to establish communication with the inner world of the strongest visionary temperaments and pick up their psychic waves; according to still others he is the reincarnation of Homer, of the storyteller of the
Arabian Nights,
of the author of the Popol Vuh, as well as of Alexandre Dumas and James Joyce; but there are those who reply that Homer has no need of metempsychosis, since he never died and has continued through the millennia living and composing, the author, besides the couple of poems usually attributed to him, also of many of the most famous narratives known to man. Ermes Marana, putting a tape recorder to the mouth of the cave where the old man hides ...

But from a previous letter, this time headed New York, the origin of the unpublished works offered by Marana would seem to be something quite different:

"The headquarters of the OEPHLW, as you see from the letterhead, is in the old Wall Street district. Ever since the business world deserted these austere buildings, their ecclesiastical appearance, inspired by English banks, has become quite sinister. I press a buzzer. 'It's Ermes. I'm bringing you the beginning of the Flannery novel.' They have been waiting for me for some time, since I wired from Switzerland that I had managed to persuade that elderly author of thrillers to entrust to me the beginning of the novel he was unable to continue, assuring him that our computers would be capable of completing it easily, programmed as they are to develop all the elements of a text with perfect fidelity to the stylistic and conceptual models of the author."

The delivery of those pages to New York was not easy, if we are to believe what Marana writes from a capital in black Africa, giving his adventurous streak free rein:

"We went on, immersed, the plane in a curly cream of clouds, I in the reading of the unpublished work of Silas Flannery,
In a network of lines that enlace,
precious manuscript lusted after by the international publishing world, which I had daringly taken from the author. And suddenly the mouth of a sawed-off Tommy gun is placed on the bridge of my eyeglasses.