If on a winter's night a traveler (31 page)

There, at the end of that strip of nothing I continue to call the Prospect, I see a slender form advancing, in a pale fur jacket: it's Franziska! I recognize her stride in her high boots, and the way she keeps her arms hidden in her muff, and the long striped scarf flapping after her. The cold air and the cleared terrain guarantee good visibility, but I wave my arms in vain, trying to attract her attention: she can't recognize me, we're still too far apart. I advance, hastening my steps; at least I think I'm advancing, but I lack any reference points. Now, on the line between me and Franziska, some shadows can be discerned: they are men, men in overcoats and hats. They are waiting for me. Who can they be?

When I have come close enough, I recognize them: they're the men from Section D. How is it they've remained here? What are they doing? I thought I had abolished them, too, when I erased the personnel of all the offices. Why have they placed themselves between me and Franziska? "Now I'll erase them!" I decide, and concentrate. Nothing doing: they're still there between us.

"Well, here you are," they greet me. "Still one of us, are you? Good for you! You gave us a real hand, all right, and now everything is clean."

"What?" I exclaim. "Were you erasing as well?"

Now I can understand my sensation that, this time, I had ventured further than in my previous exercises of making the world around me disappear.

"But tell me something: weren't you the ones who were always talking of increment, of implementing, of expansion ... ?"

"Well? There's no contradiction.... Everything is contemplated in the logic of projections..... The line of development starts again from zero.... You had also realized that the situation had come to a dead end... was deteriorating. . . The only thing was to help the process along.... Tendentially, something that might seem negative in the short run, in the long run can prove an incentive...."

"But I didn't mean it the way you did.... I had something else in mind.... I erase in a different way ..." I protest, and I think: If they believe they can fit me into their plans, they're wrong!

I can't wait to go into reverse, to make the things of the world exist again, one by one or all together, to set their variegated and tangible substance, like a compact wall, against the men's plans of general vacancy. I close my eyes and reopen them, sure of finding myself on the Prospect again, teeming with traffic, the street lamps lighted at this hour, and the final edition of the papers in the kiosks. But instead: nothing. The void all around us is more and more void, Franziska's form on the horizon comes forward slowly, as if she had to climb the curve of the earth's globe. Are we the only survivors? With mounting terror I begin to realize the truth: the world I believed erased by a decision of my mind that I could revoke at any moment is truly finished.

"You have to be realistic," the officials of Section D are

saying. "Just take a look around. The whole universe is ... let's say it's in a transitional phase...." And they point to the sky, where the constellations have become unrecognizable, here clotted, there rarefied, the celestial map in upheaval, stars exploding one after the other, while more stars emit a final flicker and die. "The important thing is that now, when the new ones arrive, they must find Section D in perfect working order, its cadres complete, its functional structures in operation...."

"But who are the new ones? What do they do? What do they want?" I ask, and on the frozen surface that separates me from Franziska I see a fine crack, spreading like a mysterious trap.

"It's too early to say. For us to say it in our terms. At present we can't even see them. But we can be sure they're there, and for that matter, we had been informed, even before, that they were about to arrive.... But we're here, too, and they can't help knowing it, we who represent the only possible continuity with what there was before.... They need us. They have to turn to us, entrust to us the practical management of what remains.... The world will begin again the way we want it...."

No, I think, the world that I would like to begin existing again around me and Franziska can't be yours; I would like to concentrate and think of a place in every detail, a setting where I would like to be with Franziska at this moment; for example, a café lined with mirrors, which reflect crystal chandeliers, and there is an orchestra playing waltzes and the strains of the violins flutter over the little marble tables and the steaming cups and the pastries with whipped cream. While outside, beyond the frosted windows, the world full of people and of things would make its presence felt: the presence of the world, friendly and hostile, things to rejoice in or to combat.... I think this with all my strength, but by now I know my

strength isn't enough to make it exist: nothingness is stronger and has occupied the whole earth.

"To work out a relationship with them won't be easy," the Section D men continue, "and we'll have to be on our toes, not make mistakes, not allow them to cut us out. We had you in mind, to win the new ones' confidence. You've proved your ability in the liquidation phase, and of all of us you're the least compromised with the old administration. You'll have to introduce yourself, explain what the Section is, how they can use it, for urgent, indispensable jobs.... Well, you'll figure out the way to make things look best...."

"I should be going, then. I'll go look for them...." I hasten to say, because I realize that if I don't make my escape now, if I don't reach Franziska immediately and save her, in a minute it will be too late; the trap is about to be sprung. I run off before the Section D men can hold me, ask me questions, give me instructions. I advance over the frozen crust toward her. The world is reduced to a sheet of paper on which nothing can be written except abstract words, as if all concrete nouns were finished; if one could only succeed in writing the word "chair," then it would be possible to write also "spoon," "gravy," "stove," but the stylistic formula of the text prohibits it.

On the ground that separates me from Franziska I see some fissures open, some furrows, crevasses; at each moment one of my feet is about to be caught in a pitfall: these interstices widen, soon a chasm will yawn between me and Franziska, an abyss! I leap from one side to the other, and below I see no bottom, only nothingness which continues down to infinity; I run across pieces of world scattered in the void; the world is crumbling.... The men from Section D call me, they motion desperately for me to come back, not to risk going any farther..... Franziska! One more leap and I'll be with you!

She is here, she is opposite me, smiling, with that

golden sparkle in her eyes, her small face a bit chapped from the cold. "Oh! It's really you! Every time I walk on the Prospect I run into you! Now, don't tell me you spend all your days out strolling! Listen: I know a café here at the corner, all lined with mirrors, and there's an orchestra that plays waltzes. Will you invite me there?"

[11]

Reader, it is time for your tempest-tossed vessel to come to port. What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library? Certainly there is one in the city from which you set out and to which you have returned after circling the world from book to book. You have one hope left, that the ten novels that evaporated in your hands the moment you began reading them can be found in this library.

Finally a free, calm day opens before you; you go to the library, consult the catalogue; you can hardly repress a cry of rejoicing, or, rather, ten cries; all the authors and the titles you are looking for appear in the catalogue, duly recorded.

You compile a first request form and hand it in; you are told that there must be an error of numbering in the catalogue; the book cannot be found; in any case, they will investigate. You immediately request another; they tell you it is out on loan, but they are unable to determine who took it out and when. The third you ask for is at the bindery; it will be back in a month. The fourth is kept in a wing of the library now closed for repairs. You keep filling out forms; for one reason or another, none of the books you ask for is available.

While the staff continues searching, you wait patiently, seated at a table along with other, more fortunate, readers, immersed in their volumes. You crane your neck to left and right, to peek at the others' books. Who knows? One of these people may be reading one of the books you are looking for.

The gaze of the reader opposite you, instead of resting on the book open in his hands, wanders in the air. But his eyes are not absent: a fixed intensity accompanies the

movements of the blue irises. Every now and then your eyes meet. At a certain point he addresses you, or, rather, he speaks as if into the void, though certainly to you:

"Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust."

"I understand you perfectly," another reader interjects, raising his waxen face and reddened eyes from his volume. "Reading is a discontinuous and fragmentary operation. Or, rather, the object of reading is a punctiform and pulviscular material. In the spreading expanse of the writing, the reader's attention isolates some minimal segments, juxtapositions of words, metaphors, syntactic nexuses, logical passages, lexical peculiarities that prove to possess an extremely concentrated density of meaning. They are like elemental particles making up the work's nucleus, around which all the rest revolves. Or else like the void at the bottom of a vortex which sucks in and swallows currents. It is through these apertures that, in barely perceptible flashes, the truth the book may bear is revealed, its ultimate substance. Myths and mysteries consist of impalpable little granules, like the pollen that sticks to the butterfly's legs; only those who have realized this can expect revelations and illuminations. This is why my attention, in contrast to what you, sir, were saying,

cannot be detached from the written lines even for an instant. I must not be distracted if I do not wish to miss some valuable clue. Every time I come upon one of these clumps of meaning I must go on digging around to see if the nugget extends into a vein. This is why my reading has no end: I read and reread, each urne seeking the confirmation of a new discovery among the folds of the sentences."

"I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext."

A fourth speaks up: "If you mean to insist on the subjectivity of reading, then I agree with you, but not in the centrifugal sense you attribute to it. Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings. This does not come about without some effort: to compose that general book, each individual book must be transformed, enter into a rela-

tionship with the books I have read previously, become their corollary or development or confutation or gloss or reference text. For years I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book."

"In my case, too, all the books I read are leading to a single book," a fifth reader says, sticking his face out from behind a pile of bound volumes, "but it is a book remote in time, which barely surfaces from my memories. There is a story that for me comes before all other stories and of which all the stories I read seem to carry an echo, immediately lost. In my readings I do nothing but seek that book read in my childhood, but what I remember of it is too little to enable me to find it again."

A sixth reader, who was standing, examining the shelves with his nose in the air, approaches the table. "The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist. At times it is the
incipit
of the book, the first sentences.... In other words: if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough."

"For me, on the other hand, it is the end that counts," a seventh says, "but the true end, final, concealed in the darkness, the goal to which the book wants to carry you. I also seek openings in reading," he says, nodding toward the man with the bleary eyes, "but my gaze digs between the words to try to discern what is outlined in the distance, in the spaces that extend beyond the words 'the end.' "

The moment has come for you to speak. "Gentlemen, first I must say that in books I like to read only what is written, and to connect the details with the whole, and to consider certain readings as definitive; and I like to keep one book distinct from the other, each for what it has that