The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) (8 page)

What kinds of worlds? my friend wanted to know.

I didn’t want to tell him that I was thinking about my nocturnal “revisions,” because I kept my little drowsy and solitary theater a secret, and this was not the moment to reveal it (that moment would never come). I squirmed out of it by telling him that I wanted to finish my explanation, and then maybe we could clear things up once and for all and return to a civilized conversation, without retro-algae or exo-phosphorus . . .

Or Señorita Wild Savage . . .

Ugh! I had forgotten. That, too, and so many other things. So many circles we had to run around in to get to the Rolex!

An entire lifetime, right? my friend said, and when I reached this remark in my memory, and only then, did I remember something else that subtly changed the tone and meaning of our conversation. I just said that I had never told him, nor did I ever plan to, about my habit of recalling at night the conversations we had had in the afternoon. Nor had I told my other friends I met and conversed with, nor anybody else. But I had told each of them, on some occasion brought about by the haphazard nature of conversation, about some of my obsessions or whims or little oddities, because I can say that I am a man without secrets. So, I must have told somebody that ever since I was a little boy, I had dreamed of owning a Rolex. It was completely gratuitous, and I had never taken it seriously, to the point that I had never even considered buying one, or even finding out how much one cost. Moreover, it didn’t fit my personality; and that’s precisely where the idea must have come from: from that vague longing we all have to be somebody else. What I didn’t remember was if I had told this friend in particular. If I had (and in my nocturnal reflection I had no reason to suspect that I had, besides the slight intonation in that “right?” of his), the whole conversation, from the moment I had brought up the movie, began to have a double bottom, and there emerged a new possibility for the interpretation of each remark.

It was a little too obvious for me to start speculating about where this old, never explored fantasy had come from; we all have fantasies, old and new, and that little luxury item was probably, at some moment in my childhood, a good vehicle for my imagination. Whatever the case, I glanced at it quickly and from afar (at the fantasy, at the always deferred work of analyzing myself and trying to understand my life), and with this distraction in addition to the previous reflections, I got behind as far as the movie was concerned. What I mean is: in the real conversation, in the café, I had kept talking about the movie; the entire parenthesis took place in the nocturnal reconstruction. And it really should have been a parenthesis, there was nothing preventing it from being a parenthesis, but, whether because of contamination by movies in general and by particular movies that keep playing while one is distracted and thinking about something else or going to the bathroom, the truth is that it was as if the conversation had continued, and I had been left behind. So, to catch up I had to sum things up and take a leap forward, violating my standard of rigorous step-by-step memory.

The goatherd was unable to fall asleep and went outside. He took a walk under the great Moon of Ukraine, then began to follow a strange stream of water flowing off the rocks. His goats must have also been suffering from insomnia because they had gotten out of their pen and were now floating in the night air, as light as kites, white and phosphorescent.
Th
ey were easy to make out, and for a moment he tried to follow them as they drifted about, but they dispersed, so he continued to follow the stream of water uphill, which brought him to the separatists’ secret laboratory. He managed to infiltrate it, taking advantage of the lapse in vigilance occasioned by the departure of the squadron of Cossacks on motorized sleds. He snuck through the enormous and ultramodern installation dug into the mountainside, where hundreds of technicians worked in overalls or radiation suits with hoods and visors. He overpowered one and put on his suit, which allowed him to reach the command room, where the reactor was controlled; there, he merely pressed a button, any button. Alarms went off, loudspeakers crackled with orders to evacuate, people ran helter-skelter, and he did the same. Since he didn’t know where he was going, he went the wrong way and was sucked into a particle accelerator of dehydrating water, which carried him into the unknown depths of the earth, from which he emerged, mounted on an atom of phenomenal size, accompanied by Bradley and the professor and encircled by swirling electrons. The three fell into the hands of the enemy. From the diamond plasma screen, Larionov greeted them ironically and with the classic, “We meet again, gentlemen.” In the midst of the general catastrophe, the security guards led the three prisoners to Larionov’s office: dark boiserie, an enormous library with bronze ladders that ran on tracks, leather armchairs, all in an English Edwardian style that was in sharp contrast to the aerodynamic high technology of the rest of the complex. Hanging on the walls in the niches of his library: masterpieces. Bradley walked up to one and contemplated it with a knowing look: “The stolen Gauguin.”
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ey sat down. The host poured out two shots for the older men, then turned to the young goatherd and said derisively, “What would you like? A glass of goat milk?”
Th
e visitors’ attention, and with it, the camera, was drawn to a bibelot on a desk. It was the head of a clown, which was constantly making faces. “Do you like my toy?” Larionov asked. He poked the clown’s nose, producing a cascade of comic expressions. He explained that it was made of liquid pig-iron. It wouldn’t be long before the world found out what he was capable of. But his bravado had no depth of conviction, nor could it.
Th
e laboratory was collapsing around him, the sirens were blaring, the Cossacks of his personal guard, who were standing at the door of his office, were exchanging worried looks. Bradley, who was watching them out of the corner of his eye while remaining engaged in a natural dialogue with the villain, took advantage of a blast (the explosion of some cauldron) to attack them, taking a machine gun from one and shooting the others; at the same time, the goatherd threw his glass of goat milk at Larionov, preventing him from pulling his gun out of his desk drawer. The fight intensified as the walls fell down around them — the thousands of books turning into projectiles — and the roof was violently blown off. Larionov, who had ended up in hand-to-hand combat with the professor, slipped out of his grasp and climbed one of the bronze ladders; above the roof, a helicopter was waiting for him; he climbed into the pilot’s seat and started the engine. With a sinister laugh, he began to rise, but the goatherd had run after him and managed to grab onto one of the helicopter’s landing skids.
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e laboratory was sinking inexorably, and on the plateau left behind stood the only survivors, Bradley and the professor, watching anxiously as the helicopter rose with the goatherd dangling from it. But he did not dangle there for long, for by sheer dint of strength, he hoisted himself into the cabin and came to blows with Larionov. The spectacle, visible from the top of the mountain, was quite odd: silhouetted against the black star-studded sky floated a constellation of phosphorescent goats and a parliament of burning owls. One of the owls touched one of the blades of the helicopter and broke it. The helicopter exploded, but not before the goatherd had jumped. His freefall was interrupted by one of the floating goats, which he mounted and rode away on, carried by the wind, toward the horizon, or perhaps to the Moon.

The time lag in my memory persisted, so much so that while I continued to enjoy the somewhat surrealistic spectacle of the starry heavens and the luminous travelers from my bed, my friend was already asking me, in the conversation, what I was trying to prove.

Nothing! was the response I blurted out automatically. At this point, the lag was erased, and again I was in the step-by-step of our conversation and its nocturnal representation, with no images in front of me besides my friend’s face and the café in the background. Nothing! I was recounting it to prove to him that it didn’t prove anything. It couldn’t. What could it possibly prove?
Th
e end of the epic in a world that had sold the legacy of the word for the lentil soup of the image? And this was nothing new, everyone knew it, everybody agreed, the two of us included. I had only wanted to remind him, in case he had forgotten.

My friend, with a complacent smile, thanked me for reminding him, because in reality, more than remind him, I had filled him in on a lot of details he hadn’t known. I had filled in the panorama, he said in a teasing lilt, because he had to admit that he had paid only partial attention to the movie: he had had to answer two phone calls, one long and one short. Even so, something told him that the story had not really come to an end, that there were still a few loose ends . . .

I also had to admit that my viewing had been partial. Not only because of the telephone, which I also had had to answer, but because I had watched all, or almost all, of the part I had just recounted without sound. I had pressed the “mute” button on the remote control because my wife, going in and out of the kitchen, had started talking to me. So, I had had to imagine the “sound,” or rather, the dialogues.

It was pretty amazing — about this we were in total agreement — that so much could happen in a two-hour movie. The word that explained it was “condensation,” but words also had to be explained. Moreover, in a movement that was inverse to that of condensation, there seemed to be a multitude of events because of the fragmentary nature of one’s perception.

My friend, surely taking into consideration what I had just told him about the button that muted the television — suggesting that I was constantly manipulating the remote control — asked me if by fragmentation I was referring to the curse of channel surfing. Without waiting for my answer, which he must have taken for granted, he asked me if I had noticed that the movie was shown on two channels at the same time. Though not precisely at the same time, he corrected himself, but rather, he figured, with more or less a half-hour time lag. He flipped back and forth between them a couple of times, without reaping any benefits other than seeing some scenes twice and entirely missing others.

No, I had not realized that, but now that he mentioned it I was less amazed by the coincidence that with sixty-four channels, we would have both independently tuned into the same one. We could have easily not tuned into the same channel but rather into two different ones, and still seen the same movie. Anyway, I didn’t know if this made it more or less of a coincidence.

And, though I didn’t say so, this fact explained something else: that both of us could have seen the entire movie in spite of the telephone interruptions. We had referred to these more than once in the course of our conversation, without saying, or perhaps without remembering, that the longest one had, in fact, been a phone call between the two of us, when we called each other to make the date to meet at the café the following afternoon, and we had prolonged it with remarks about our recent readings, as we always did, anticipating the conversation itself and touching on some topics we wanted to discuss.
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is shared distraction must have also created a shared blank, but the time lag (which, if it really was a half-hour long, coincided with the amount of time we spent on the phone) voided that blank.

But, to return to his previous question, which had been left unanswered: no, when I spoke of fragmentation I was not referring to channel surfing, or not exclusively to it. Experience itself, the experience of reality, already posited a model of fragmentation. Without needing to get philosophical, we could say that this happened in life the same way it happened in the movies. As real humans — imperfect and incomplete because real and human — we were always missing important things, essential links needed to understand the greater general story; afterward, full of doubts and errors, we pieced it together. It was memory that established the continuum; and since memory was also a reality of experience, it was also fragmented.

According to a well-conceived and well-executed constructivism, seeing half a painting should make it possible to know what the other half contained. And reading half a novel or poem, the same thing. Or half a symphony. Or half a movie, right? Though speaking of “halves” could lead one to think of bilateral symmetry, which is not what this was about. It could be any fragment, even a dinosaur’s worn-out vertebra.

But, haven’t we then fallen into the conventional and the predictable?

Yes, maybe so. But this was about a special kind of predictability, for it obeyed a convention created for that particular work, one that did not serve any other. At the end of the day, art was a convention, and if pushed, everything was a convention. Art was creation, and the first thing it created was its own convention.

My thoughts were fleeting, and I revisited them under less pressure while I was reconstructing this step in the conversation, in my conversations, to be more precise. Didn’t I re-
establish the continuum of what was naturally fragmentary and interrupted? Because a conversation, no matter how civilized and articulate it may be, is always made up of leaps and digressions, and steps backward, and, “I didn’t understand you,” and, “I understood you all too well.” The memory that organizes and completes them is a chance excrescence, which exists as it did for me: secretly, almost shamefully. Although it probably isn’t all chance, judging from the fact that memory is full of conversations.

Could a conversation be completed by deducing the recently born conventions after hearing only half of it? One would have to consider a conversation a work of art, which was not far from what I thought. But which half? Because it could be a temporal half, for example, the first hour, or the second, if it lasted two hours. Or the half that belongs to the responses of only one of the interlocutors. In this case it would be the kind of reconstruction — so common — that one performs when one hears someone talking on the telephone.