If on a winter's night a traveler (9 page)

Torn between the necessity to interject glosses on mul-

tiple meanings of the text and the awareness that all interpretation is a use of violence and caprice against a text, the professor, when faced by the most complicated passages, could find no better way of aiding comprehension than to read them in the original. The pronunciation of that unknown language, deduced from theoretical rules, not transmitted by the hearing of voices with their individual accents, not marked by the traces of use that shapes and transforms, acquired the absoluteness of sounds that expect no reply, like the song of the last bird of an extinct species or the strident roar of a just-invented jet plane that shatters in the sky on its first test flight.

Then, little by little, something started moving and flowing between the sentences of this distraught recitation. The prose of the novel had got the better of the uncertainties of the voice; it had become fluent, transparent, continuous; Uzzi-Tuzii swam in it like a fish, accompanying himself with gestures (he held his hands open like flippers), with the movement of his lips (which allowed the words to emerge like little air bubbles), with his gaze (his eyes scoured the page like a fish's eyes scouring the seabed, but also like the eyes of an aquarium visitor as he follows a fish's movements in an illuminated tank).

Now, around you, there is no longer the room of the department, the shelves, the professor: you have entered the novel, you see that Nordic beach, you follow the footsteps of the delicate gentleman. You are so absorbed that it takes you a while to become aware of a presence at your side. Out of the corner of your eye you glimpse Ludmilla. She is there, seated on a pile of folio volumes, also completely caught up in listening to the continuation of the novel.

Has she just arrived at this moment, or did she hear the beginning? Did she enter silently, without knocking? Was she already here, hidden among these shelves? (She came

here to hide, Irnerio said. They come here to do unspeakable things, Uzzi-Tuzii said). Or is she an apparition summoned by the spell released through the words of the professor-sorcerer?

He continues his recitation, Uzzi-Tuzii, and shows no sign of surprise at the presence of the new listener, as if she had always been there. Nor does he react with a start when she, hearing him pause longer than the other times, asks him, "And then?"

The professor snaps the book shut. "Then nothing.
Leaning from the steep slope
breaks off here. Having written these first pages of his novel, Ukko Ahti sank into a deep depression which, in the space of a few years, led him to three unsuccessful suicide attempts and one that succeeded. The fragment was published in the collection of his posthumous writings, along with scattered verses, an intimate diary, and his notes for an essay on the incarnation of Buddha. Unfortunately, it was impossible to find any plan or sketch explaining how Ahti intended to develop the plot. Though incomplete, or perhaps for this very reason,
Leaning from the steep slope
is the most representative work of Cimmerian prose, for what it reveals and even more for what it hides, for its reticence, withdrawal, its disappearing...."

The professor's voice seems about to die away. You crane your neck, to make sure he is still there, beyond the bookcase-partition that separates him from your vision, but you are no longer able to glimpse him; perhaps he has ducked into the hedge of academic publications and bound collections of reviews, growing thinner and thinner until he can slip into the interstices greedy for dust, perhaps overwhelmed by the erasing destiny that looms over the object of his studies, perhaps engulfed by the empty chasm of the brusque interruption of the novel. On the edge of this chasm you would like to take your stand, supporting Ludmilla or clinging to her; your hands try to grasp her hands....

"Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond...." The professor's voice goes up and down; where has he got to? Perhaps he is rolling around beneath the desk, perhaps he is hanging himself from the lamp in the ceiling.

"Continue where?" you ask, perched on the edge of the precipice. "Beyond what?"

"Books are the steps of the threshold.... All Cimmerian authors have passed it.... Then the wordless language of the dead begins, which says the things that only the language of the dead can say. Cimmerian is the last language of the living, the language of the threshold! You come here to try to listen there, beyond....Listen...."

But you are no longer listening to anything, the two of you. You have also disappeared, flattened in a corner, one clinging to the other. Is this your answer? Do you want to demonstrate that the living also have a wordless language, with which books cannot be written but which can only be lived, second by second, which cannot be recorded or remembered? First comes this wordless language of living bodies—is this the premise you wish Uzzi-Tuzii would take into account?—then the words books are written with, and attempts to translate that first language are vain; then...

"Cimmerian books are all unfinished," Uzzi-Tuzii sighs, "because they continue beyond ... in the other language, in the silent language to which all the words we believe we read refer...."

"Believe.... Why believe? I like to read, really to read." It is Ludmilla who is speaking like this, with conviction and warmth. She is seated opposite the professor, dressed in a simple, elegant fashion, in light colors. Her way of living in the world, filled with interest in what the world can give her, dismisses the egocentric abyss of the suicide's novel that ends by sinking into itself. In her voice you seek the confirmation of your need to cling to the things

that exist, to read what is written and nothing else, dispelling the ghosts that escape your grasp. (Even if your embrace—confess it—occurred only in your imagination, it is still an embrace that can happen at any moment....)

But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. "I like to know that books exist that I will still be able to read..." she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?

The professor is there at his desk; in the cone of light from a desk lamp his hands surface, suspended, or barely resting on the closed volume, as if in a sad caress.

"Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead...."

"Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something desired, feared, possible or impossible," Ludmilla says. "Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be...." (There, now you see the Other Reader leaning forward to peer beyond the edge of the printed page at the ships of the rescuers or the invaders appearing on the horizon, the storms....) "The book I would like to read now is a novel in which you sense the story arriving like still-vague thunder, the historical story along with the individual's story, a novel that gives the sense of living through an upheaval that still has no name, has not yet taken shape...."

"Well said, sister dear, I see you're making progress!" Among the shelves a girl has appeared, with a long neck and a bird's face, a steady, bespectacled gaze, a great clump of curly hair; she is dressed in a loose tunic and tight pants. "I was coming to tell you I had found the novel you were looking for, and it is the very one our seminar on the feminist revolution needs. You're invited, if you want to hear us analyze it and debate it!"

"Lotaria, you don't mean to tell me," Ludmilla exclaims, "that you, too, have come upon
Leaning from the steep slope,
the unfinished novel of Ukko Ahti, the Cimmerian writer!"

"You are misinformed, Ludmilla. That is the novel, but it isn't unfinished, and it isn't written in Cimmerian but in Cimbrian; the title was later changed to
Without fear of wind or vertigo,
and the author signed it with a different pseudonym, Vorts Viljandi."

"It's a fake!" Professor Uzzi-Tuzii cries. "It's a well-known case of forgery! The material is apocryphal, disseminated by the Cimbrian nationalists during the anti-Cimmerian propaganda campaign at the end of the First World War!"

Crowding behind Lotaria is the vanguard of a phalanx of young girls with limpid, serene eyes, slightly alarming eyes, perhaps because they are too limpid and serene. Among them a pale man forces his way, bearded, with a sarcastic gaze and a systematically disillusioned curl to his lips.

"I'm terribly sorry to contradict an illustrious colleague," he says, "but the authenticity of this text has been proved by the discovery of the manuscripts that the Cimmerians had hidden!"

"I am amazed, Galligani," Uzzi-Tuzii groans, "that you lend the authority of your chair in Erulo-Altaic languages and literatures to such a vulgar fraud! And, moreover, one

connected with territorial claims that have nothing to do with literature!"

"Uzzi-Tuzii, please," Professor Galligani retorts, "don't lower the debate to this level. You know very well that Cimbrian nationalism is quite remote from my interests, as I hope Cimmerian chauvinism is from yours. Comparing the spirit of the two literatures, I ask myself this question: who goes further in the negation of values?"

The Cimbro-Cimmerian debate does not seem to affect Ludmilla, now occupied with a single thought: the possibility that the interrupted novel might contìnue. "Can what Lotaria says be true?" she asks you in a whisper. "For once I wish she were right, that the beginning the professor read had a sequel, no matter in what language...."

"Ludmilla," Lotaria says, "we're going to our study group. If you want to follow the discussion of Viljandi's novel, come along. You can invite your friend, too, if he's interested."

Here you are, enrolled behind Lotaria's banner. The group takes its place in a classroom, around a table. You and Ludmilla would like to sit as close as possible to the bundle of manuscript Lotaria is holding before her, which seems to contain the novel in question.

"We have to thank Professor Galligani, of Cimbric literature," Lotaria begins, "for having kindly put at our disposal a rare copy of
Without fear of wind or vertigo
and for personally taking part in our seminar. I would like to underline this open attitude, which is all the more admirable when you compare it with the lack of understanding in other teachers of related disciplines...." And Lotaria gives her sister a look, to make sure she doesn't miss the hostile reference to Uzzi-Tuzii.

To put the novel in context, Galligani is asked to supply some historical notes. "I will confine myself to recalling,"

he says, "how the provinces that made up the Cimmerian state became, after the Second World War, part of the Cimbric People's Republic. Putting in order the documents of the Cimmerian archives, which had been scattered at the time of the fighting, the Cimbrians were able to re-evaluate the complex personality of a writer like Vorts Viljandi, who wrote both in Cimmerian and in Cimbric, but of whose works the Cimmerians published only those in their language—a scant number, for that matter. Far more important in quantity and in quality were the works in Cimbric, concealed by the Cimmerians, notably the vast novel
Without fear of wind or vertigo,
whose opening chapter apparently also exists in a first draft in Cimmerian, signed with the pseudonym Ukko Ahti. It is beyond dispute, in any case, that it was only after his definitive choice of the Cimbric language that the author found his genuine inspiration for this novel....

"I won't give you the whole history," the professor continues, "of the variable fortunes of this book in the Cimbric People's Republic. First published as a classic, translated also into German so that it could be disseminated abroad (this is the translation we are using now), it later suffered during the campaigns for ideological rectification, and was withdrawn from circulation and even from the libraries. We now believe, on the other hand, that its revolutionary content was far ahead of its time..."

You are impatient, you and Ludmilla, to see this lost book rise from its ashes, but you must wait until the girls and the young men of the study group have been handed out their assignments: during the reading there must be some who underline the reflections of production methods, others the processes of reification, others the sublimation of repression, others the sexual semantic codes, others the metalanguages of the body, others the transgression of roles, in politics and in private life.

And now Lotaria opens her folder, begins to read. The

barbed-wire fences dissolve like cobwebs. All follow in silence, you two and the others.

You immediately realize that you are listening to something that has no possible connection with
Leaning from the steep slope
or with
Outside the town of Malbork
or even with
If on a winter's night a traveler.
You exchange a quick glance, you and Ludmilla, or, rather, two glances: first questioning, then agreeing. Whatever it may be, this is a novel where, once you have got into it, you want to go forward, without stopping.

Without fear of wind or vertigo

At five in the morning, military vehicles crossed the city; outside the food stores lines began to form, housewives with tallow lanterns; on the walls the propaganda slogans, painted during the night by the teams of the various factions of the Provisional Council, were not yet dry.

When the band's musicians had put their instruments back in their cases and came out of the basement, the air was green. For part of the way the patrons of the New Titania walked in a group behind the musicians, as if reluctant to sever the bond that had formed in the club during the night among the people gathered there, by chance or habit, and they went forward in a single party, the men inside the turned-up collars of their overcoats, assuming a cadaverous look, like mummies brought into the open air from the sarcophagi, which, preserved for four thousand years, in a moment crumble to dust; but a wave of excitement, on the contrary, infected the women, who sang, each to herself, leaving their cloaks open over their low-cut evening dresses, swishing their long skirts through the puddles in unsteady dance movements,