If on a winter's night a traveler (4 page)

You spend a restless night, your sleep is an intermittent, jammed flow, like the reading of the novel, with dreams that seem to you the repetition of one dream always the same. You fight with the dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don't yet know in which direction it will carry you. What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding, you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat everything from the beginning.

The next day, as soon as you have a free moment, you run to the bookshop, you enter, holding the book already opened, pointing your finger at a page, as if that alone were enough to make clear the general disarray. "You know what you sold me? . .. Look here.. .. Just when it was getting interesting..."

The bookseller maintains his composure. "Ah, you, too?

I've had several complaints already. And only this morning I received a form letter from the publisher. You see? 'In the distribution of the latest works on our list a part of the edition of the volume
If on a winter's night a traveler
by Italo Calvino has proved defective and must be withdrawn from circulation. Through an error of the bindery, the printed signatures of that book became mixed with those of another new publication, the Polish novel
Outside the town of Malbork
by Tazio Bazakbal. With profound apologies for the unfortunate incident, the publisher will replace the spoiled copies at the earliest possible moment, et cetera.' Now I ask you, must a poor bookseller take the blame for the negligence of others? We've been going crazy all day. We've checked the Calvinos copy by copy. There are a number of sound volumes, happily, and we can immediately replace your defective
Traveler
with a brand-new one in mint condition."

Hold on a minute. Concentrate. Take all the information that has poured down on you at once and put it in order. A Polish novel. Then the book you began reading with such involvement wasn't the book you thought but was a Polish novel instead. That is the book you are now so anxious to procure. Don't let them fool you. Explain clearly the situation. "No, actually I don't really give a damn about that Calvino any more. I started the Polish one and it's the Polish one I want to go on with. Do you have this Bazakbal book?"

"If that's what you prefer. Just a moment ago, another customer, a young lady, came in with the same problem, and she also wanted to exchange her book for the Polish. There, you see that pile of Bazakbal on the counter, right under your nose? Help yourself."

"But will this copy be defective?"

"Listen. At this point I'm not swearing to anything. If the most respected publishing firms make such a muddle, you can't trust anything any more. I'll tell you exactly

what I told the young lady. If there is any further cause for complaint, you will be reimbursed. I can't do more than that."

The young lady. He has pointed out a young lady to you. She is there between two rows of bookshelves in the shop, looking among the Penguin Modern Classics, running a lovely and determined finger over the pale aubergine-colored spines. Huge, swift eyes, complexion of good tone and good pigment, a richly waved haze of hair.

And so the Other Reader makes her happy entrance into your field of vision, Reader, or, rather, into the field of your attention; or, rather, you have entered a magnetic field from whose attraction you cannot escape. Don't waste time, then, you have a good excuse to strike up a conversation, a common ground, just think a moment, you can show off your vast and various reading, go ahead, what are you waiting for?

"Then you, too, ha ha, the Pole," you say, all in one breath. "But that book that begins and then gets stuck there, what a fraud, because it happened to you, too, I'm told; and the same with me, you know? Having given it a try, I'm dropping this one and taking this other, but what a coincidence, the two of us."

Hmm, perhaps you could have coordinated it a bit better, but you have at least expressed the main ideas. Now it's her turn.

She smiles. She has dimples. She is even more attractive to you.

She says: "Ah, indeed, I was so anxious to read a good book. Right at the beginning, this one, no, but then it began to appeal to me.... Such a rage when I saw it broke off. And it wasn't that author. It did seem right away a bit different from his other books. And it was really Bazakbal. He's good, though, this Bazakbal. I've never read anything of his."

"Me either," you can say, reassured, reassuring.

"A bit too unfocused, his way of telling a story, too much so for me. I rather enjoy that sense of bewilderment a novel gives you when you start reading it, but if the first effect is fog, I'm afraid the moment the fog lifts my pleasure in reading will be lost, too."

You shake your head pensively. "In fact, there is that risk."

"I prefer novels," she adds, "that bring me immediately into a world where everything is precise, concrete, specific. I feel a special satisfaction in knowing that things are made in that certain fashion and not otherwise, even the most commonplace things that in real life seem indifferent to me."

Do you agree? Then say so. "Ah, yes, that sort of book is really worthwhile."

And she continues: "Anyway, this is also an interesting novel, I can't deny that."

Go on, don't let the conversation die. Say something; just keep talking. "Do you read many novels? You do? So do I, or some at least, though nonfiction is more in my line...." Is that all you can think of? Now what? Are you stopping? Good night! Aren't you capable of asking her: Have you read this one? And this? Which of the two do you like better? There, now you have something to talk about for half an hour.

The trouble is that she's read many more novels than you have, especially foreign ones, and she has an orderly memory, she refers to specific episodes; she asks you, "And do you remember what Henry's aunt says when..." and you, who unearthed that title because you know the title and nothing more, and you liked letting her believe you had read it, now have to extricate yourself with generic comments, like "It moves a bit slowly for me," or else "I like it because it's ironic," and she answers, "Really? You find it ironic? I wouldn't have said..." and you are upset. You launch into an opinion on a famous author,

because you have read one of his books, two at most, and without hesitation she attacks frontally the
opera omnia,
which she seems to know perfectly, and if she does have some doubts, that's worse still, because she asks you, "And the famous episode of the cut photograph: is it in that book or the other one? I always get them mixed up...." You make a guess, since she gets mixed up. And she says, "Why, what are you talking about? That can't be right..." Well, let's say you both get mixed up.

Better to fall back on your reading of yesterday evening, on the volume you are both now clutching in your hands, which should repay you for your recent disappointment. "Let's hope," you say, "that we've got a perfect copy this time, properly bound, so we won't be interrupted right at the climax, as happens..." (As happens when, how? What do you mean? ) "I mean, let's hope we get to the end satisfactorily."

"Oh, yes," she answers. Did you hear that? She said, "Oh, yes." It's your turn now, it's up to you to make a move.

"Then I hope I'll meet you again, since you're also a customer here; that way we could exchange our impressions after reading the book." And she answers, "With pleasure."

You know where you want to arrive, it is a fine net you are spreading out. "The funniest thing would be if, just as we had thought we were reading Italo Calvino and it turned out to be Bazakbal, now that we hope to read Bazakbal we open the book and find Italo Calvino."

"Oh, no! If that happens, we'll sue the publisher!"

"Listen, why don't we exchange telephone numbers?" (This is what you were aiming at, O Reader, moving around her like a rattlesnake!) "That way, if one of us finds something wrong with his copy, he can ask the other for help.... If there are two of us, we have a better chance of putting together a complete copy."

There, you have said it. What is more natural than that a solidarity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book?

You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period when you could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book—of a reading experience you are impatient to resume—and the expectation contained in that telephone number—of hearing again the vibrations, at times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a short while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again ...

Who you are, Reader, your age, your status, profession, income: that would be indiscreet to ask. It's your business, you're on your own. What counts is the state of your spirit now, in the privacy of your home, as you try to re-establish perfect calm in order to sink again into the book; you stretch out your legs, you draw them back, you stretch them again. But something has changed since yesterday. Your reading is no longer solitary: you think of the Other Reader, who, at this same moment, is also opening the book; and there, the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived, the continuation of your story with her, or better still, the beginning of a possible story. This is how you have changed since yesterday, you who insisted you preferred a book, something solid, which lies before you, easily defined, enjoyed without risks, to a real-life experience, always elusive, discontinuous, debated. Does this mean that the book has become an instrument, a channel of communication, a rendezvous? This does not mean its reading will grip you less: on the contrary, something has been added to its powers.

This volume's pages are uncut: a first obstacle opposing your impatience. Armed with a good paper knife, you prepare to penetrate its secrets. With a determined slash you cut your way between the tide page and the beginning of the first chapter. And then ...

Then from the very first page you realize that the novel you are holding has nothing to do with the one you were reading yesterday.

Outside the town of Malbork

An odor of frying wafts at the opening of the page, of onion in fact, onion being fried, a bit scorched, because in the onion there are veins that turn violet and then brown, and especially the edge, the margin, of each little sliver of onion becomes black before golden, it is the juice of the onion that is carbonized, passing through a series of olfactory and chromatic nuances, all enveloped in the smell of simmering oil. Rape oil, the text specifies; everything here is very precise, things with their nomenclature and the sensations that things transmit, all the victuals on the fire at the same time on the kitchen stove, each in its vessel exactly denominated, the pans, the pots, the kettles, and similarly the operations that each preparation involves, dusting with flour, beating the egg, slicing the cucumbers in fine rounds, larding the hen to be roasted. Here everything is very concrete, substantial, depicted with sure expertise; or at least the impression given to you, Reader, is one of expertise, though there are some foods you don't know, mentioned by name, which the translator has decided to leave in the original; for example,
schoëblintsjia.

But on reading
schoëblintsjia
you are ready to swear to the existence of
schoëblintsjia,
you can taste its flavor distinctly even though the text doesn't say what that flavor is, an acidulous flavor, partly because the word, with its sound or only with its visual impression, suggests an acidulous flavor to you, and partly because in the symphony of flavors and words you feel the necessity of an acidulous note.

As Brigd kneads the ground meat into the flour moistened with egg, her firm red arms dotted with golden freckles become covered with particles of white dust with bits of raw meat stuck to them. Every time Brigd's torso moves back and forth at the marble table, her skirts rise an inch or two behind and show the hollow between her calf and femoral biceps, where the skin is whiter, crossed by a fine, pale-blue vein. The characters take on form gradually in the accumulation of minute details and precise movements, but also of remarks, shreds of conversation, as when old Hunder says, "This year's doesn't make you jump the way last year's did," and after a few lines you understand he means the red pepper; and "You're the one who jumps less with every passing year!" Aunt Ugurd says, tasting something with a wooden spoon and adding a pinch of cinnamon to the pot.

Every moment you discover there is a new character, you don't know how many people there are in this immense kitchen of ours, it's no use counting, there were always many of us, at Kudgiwa, always coming and going: the sum never works out properly because different names can belong to the same character, indicated according to the circumstances by baptismal name, nickname, surname or patronymic, and even by appellations such as "Jan's widow," or "the apprentice from the corn shop." But what counts are the physical details that the novel underlines—Bronko's gnawed nails, the down on Brigd's cheeks—and also the gestures, the utensils that

this person or that is handling—the meat pounder, the colander for the cress, the butter curler—so that each character already receives a first definition through this action or attribute; but then we wish to learn even more, as if the butter curler already determined the character and the fate of the person who is presented in the first chapter handling a butter curler, and as if you, Reader, were already prepared, each time that character is introduced again in the course of the novel, to cry, "Ah, that's the butter-curler one!" thus obligating the author to attribute to him acts and events in keeping with that initial butter curler.