You are seated at a café table, reading the Silas Flannery novel Mr. Cavedagna has lent you and waiting for Ludmilla. Your mind is occupied by two simultaneous concerns: the interior one, with your reading, and the other, with Ludmilla, who is late for your appointment. You concentrate on your reading, trying to shift your concern for her to the book, as if hoping to see her come toward you from the pages. But you’re no longer able to read, the novel has stalled on the page before your eyes, as if only Ludmilla’s arrival could set the chain of events in motion again.
They page you. It is your name the waiter is repeating among the tables. Get up, you’re wanted on the telephone. Is it Ludmilla? It is. “I’ll explain later. I can’t come now.”
“Look: I have the book! No, not that one, none of those: a new one. Listen…” Surely you don’t mean to tell her the story of the book over the telephone? Wait and hear her out, hear what she wants to say to you.
“You join me,” Ludmilla says. “Yes, come to my house. I’m not at home now, but I won’t be long. If you get there first, you can go on in and wait for me. The key is under the mat.”
A nonchalant simplicity in her way of living, the key under the mat, trust in her fellow man—also very little to be stolen, of course. You run to the address she has given you. You ring, in vain. As she told you, she isn’t home. You find the key. You enter the penumbra of the lowered blinds.
A single girl’s house, Ludmilla’s house: she lives alone. Is this the first thing you want to verify? Whether there are signs of a man’s presence? Or do you prefer to avoid knowing it as long as possible, to live in ignorance, in
suspicion? Certainly something restrains you from snooping around (you have raised the blinds slightly, but only slightly). Perhaps it is the consideration that if you take advantage of her trust to carry out a detective investigation, then you are unworthy of it. Or perhaps it’s because you think you already know by heart what a single girl’s little apartment is like; even before looking at it, you could list the inventory of its contents. We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like?
What are you like, Other Reader? It is time for this book in the second person to address itself no longer to a general male you, perhaps brother and double of a hypocrite I, but directly to you who appeared already in the second chapter as the Third Person necessary for the novel to be a novel, for something to happen between that male Second Person and the female Third, for something to take form, develop, or deteriorate according to the phases of human events. Or, rather, to follow the mental models through which we live our human events. Or, rather, to follow the mental models through which we attribute to human events the meanings that allow them to be lived.
This book so far has been careful to leave open to the Reader who is reading the possibility of identifying himself with the Reader who is read: this is why he was not given a name, which would automatically have made him the equivalent of a Third Person, of a character (whereas to you, as Third Person, a name had to be given, Ludmilla), and so he has been kept a pronoun, in the abstract condition of pronouns, suitable for any attribute and any action. Let us see, Other Reader, if the book can succeed
in drawing a true portrait of you, beginning with the frame and enclosing you from every side, establishing the outlines of your form.
You appeared for the first time to the Reader in a bookshop; you took shape, detaching yourself from a wall of shelves, as if the quantity of books made the presence of a young lady Reader necessary. Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books. To understand this, our Reader knows that the first step is to visit the kitchen.
The kitchen is the part of the house that can tell the most things about you: whether you cook or not (one would say yes, if not every day, at least fairly regularly), whether only for yourself or also for others (often only for yourself, but with care, as if you were cooking also for others; and sometimes also for others, but nonchalantly, as if you were cooking only for yourself), whether you tend toward the bare minimum or toward gastronomy (your purchases and gadgets suggest elaborate and fanciful recipes, at least in your intentions; you may not necessarily be greedy, but the idea of a couple of fried eggs for supper would probably depress you), whether standing over the stove represents for you a painful necessity or also a pleasure (the tiny kitchen is equipped and arranged in such a way that you can move practically and without too much effort, trying not to linger there too long but also being able to stay there without reluctance). The appliances are in their place, useful animals whose merits must be remembered, though without devoting special worship to them. Among the utensils a certain aesthetic tendency is noticeable (a panoply of half-moon choppers,
in decreasing sizes, when one would be enough), but in general the decorative elements are also serviceable objects, with few concessions to prettiness. The provisions can tell us something about you: an assortment of herbs, some naturally in regular use, others that seem to be there to complete a collection; the same can be said of the mustards; but it is especially the ropes of garlic hung within reach that suggest a relationship with food not careless or generic. A glance into the refrigerator allows other valuable data to be gathered: in the egg slots only one egg remains; of lemons there is only a half and that half-dried; in other words, in basic supplies a certain neglect is noted. On the other hand, there is chestnut purée, black olives, a little jar of salsify or horseradish: it is clear that when shopping you succumb to the lure of the goods on display and don’t bear in mind what is lacking at home.
Observing your kitchen, therefore, can create a picture of you as an extroverted, clearsighted woman, sensual and methodical; you make your practical sense serve your imagination. Could a man fall in love with you, just seeing your kitchen? Who knows? Perhaps the Reader, who was already favorably disposed.
He is continuing his inspection of the house to which you let him have the keys. There are countless things that you accumulate around you: fans, postcards, perfume bottles, necklaces hung on the walls. But on closer examination every object proves special, somehow unexpected. Your relationship with objects is selective, personal; only the things you feel yours become yours: it is a relationship with the physicality of things, not with an intellectual or affective idea that takes the place of seeing them and touching them. And once they are attached to you, marked by your possession, the objects no longer seem to be there by chance, they assume meaning as elements of a discourse, like a memory composed of signals and em-
blems. Are you possessive? Perhaps there is not yet enough evidence to tell: for the present it can be said that you are possessive toward yourself, that you are attached to the signs in which you identify something of yourself, fearing to be lost with them.
In one corner of the wall there are a number of framed photographs, all hung close together. Photographs of whom? Of you at various ages, and of many other people, men and women, and also very old photographs as if taken from a family album; but together they seem to have the function, not so much of recalling specific people, as of forming a montage of the stratifications of existence. The frames are all different, nineteenth-century Art Nouveau floral forms, frames in silver, copper, enamel, tortoiseshell, leather, carved wood: they may reflect the notion of enhancing those fragments of real life, but they may also be a collection of frames, and the photographs may be there only to occupy them; in fact some frames are occupied by pictures clipped from newspapers, one encloses an illegible page of an old letter, another is empty.
Nothing is hung on the rest of the wall, nor does any furniture stand against it. And the whole house is somewhat similar: bare walls here, crammed ones there, as if resulting from a need to concentrate signs into a kind of dense script, surrounded by the void in which to find repose and refreshment again.
The arrangement of the furniture and the objects on it is never symmetrical, either. The order you seek to attain (the space at your disposal is limited, but you show a certain care in exploiting it, to make it seem more extensive) is not the superimposition of a scheme, but the achievement of a harmony among the things that are there.
In short: are you tidy or untidy? Your house does not answer peremptory questions with a yes or a no. You have
an idea of order, to be sure, even a demanding one, but in practice no methodical application corresponds to it. Obviously your interest in the home is intermittent; it follows the difficulty of your days, the ups and downs of your moods.
Are you depressive or euphoric? The house, in its wisdom, seems to have taken advantage of your moments of euphoria to prepare itself to shelter you in your moments of depression.
Are you really hospitable, or is the way you allow acquaintances to come into the house a sign of indifference? The Reader is looking for a comfortable place to sit and read without invading those spaces clearly reserved for you; he is forming the idea that a guest can be very comfortable in your house provided he can adjust to your rules.
What else? The potted plants don’t seem to have been watered for several days, but perhaps you deliberately chose the kind that don’t require much attention. For the rest, in these rooms there is no trace of dogs or cats or birds: you are a woman who tends not to increase responsibilities, and this can be a sign either of egoism or of concentration on other, less extrinsic, concerns, as also a sign that you do not need symbolic substitutes for the natural drives that lead you to be concerned with others, to take part in their stories, in life, in books…
Let’s have a look at the books. The first thing noticed, at least on looking at those you have most prominent, is that the function of books for you is immediate reading; they are not instruments of study or reference or components of a library arranged according to some order. Perhaps on occasion you have tried to give a semblance of order to your shelves, but every attempt at classification was rapidly foiled by heterogeneous acquisitions. The chief reason for the juxtaposition of volumes, besides the
dimensions of the tallest or the shortest, remains chronological, as they arrived here, one after the other; anyway, you can always put your hand on any one, also because they are not very numerous (you must have left other bookshelves in other houses, in other phases of your existence), and perhaps you don’t often find yourself hunting for a book you have already read.
In short, you don’t seem to be a Reader Who Rereads. You remember very well everything you have read (this is one of the first things you communicated about yourself); perhaps for you each book becomes identified with your reading of it at a given moment, once and for all. And as you preserve them in your memory, so you like to preserve the books as objects, keeping them near you.
Among your books, in this assortment that does not make up a library, a dead or dormant part can still be distinguished, which is the store of volumes put aside, books read and rarely reread, or books you have not and will not read but have still retained (and dusted), and then a living part, which is the books you are reading or plan to read or from which you have not yet detached yourself or books you enjoy handling, seeing around you. Unlike the provisions in the kitchen, here it is the living part, for immediate consumption, that tells most about you. Numerous volumes are scattered, some left open, others with makeshift bookmarks or corners of the pages folded down. Obviously you have the habit of reading several books at the same time, you choose different things to read for the different hours of the day, the various corners of your home, cramped as it is: there are books meant for the bedside table, those that find their place by the armchair, in the kitchen, in the bathroom.
It could be an important feature to be added to your portrait: your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition different times in which to stop or flow, to concentrate alternately on parallel channels. Is this enough to
say you would like to live several lives simultaneously? Or that you actually do live them? That you separate your life with one person or in one environment from your life with others, elsewhere? That in every experience you take for granted a dissatisfaction that can be redeemed only in the sum of all dissatisfactions?
Reader, prick up your ears. This suspicion is being insinuated into your mind, to feed your anxiety as a jealous man who still doesn’t recognize himself as such. Ludmilla, herself reader of several books at once, to avoid being caught by the disappointment that any story might cause her, tends to carry forward, at the same time, other stories also…
(Don’t believe that the book is losing sight of you, Reader. The you that was shifted to the Other Reader can, at any sentence, be addressed to you again. You are always a possible you. Who would dare sentence you to loss of the you, a catastrophe as terrible as the loss of the I. For a second-person discourse to become a novel, at least two you’s are required, distinct and concomitant, which stand out from the crowd of he’s, she’s, and they’s.)
And yet the sight of the books in Ludmilla’s house proves reassuring for you. Reading is solitude. To you Ludmilla appears protected by the valves of the open book like an oyster in its shell. The shadow of another man, probable, indeed certain, is if not erased, thrust off to one side. One reads alone, even in another’s presence. But what, then, are you looking for here? Would you like to penetrate her shell, insinuating yourself among the pages of the books she is reading? Or does the relationship between one Reader and the Other Reader remain that of two separate shells, which can communicate only through partial confrontations of two exclusive experiences?
You have with you the book you were reading in the
café, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others’ words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.
A key turns in the lock. You fall silent, as if you wanted to surprise her, as if to confirm to yourself and to her that your being here is something natural. But the footstep is not hers. Slowly a man materializes in the hall, you see his shadow through the curtains, a leather windbreaker, a step indicating familiarity with the place but hesitant, as of someone looking for something. You recognize him. It is Irnerio.
You must decide immediately what attitude to take. The dismay at seeing him enter her house as if it were his is stronger than the uneasiness at being here yourself, half hidden. For that matter, you knew perfectly well that Ludmilla’s house is open to her friends: the key is under the mat. Ever since you entered you have felt somehow brushed by faceless shadows. Irnerio is at least a known ghost. As you are for him.
“Ah, you’re here.” He takes note of you first but isn’t surprised. This naturalness, which a moment ago you wanted to impose, doesn’t cheer you now.
“Ludmilla isn’t home,” you say, at least to establish your precedence in the information, or actually in the occupation of the territory.
“I know,” he says, indifferent. He searches around, handles the books.
“Can I be of help?” you proceed, as though you wanted to provoke him.
“I was looking for a book,” Irnerio says.
“I thought you never read,” you reply.
“It’s not for reading. It’s for making. I make things with books. I make objects. Yes, artworks: statues, pictures, whatever you want to call them. I even had a show. I fix the books with mastic, and they stay as they were. Shut, or open, or else I give them forms, I carve them, I make holes in them. A book is a good material to work with; you can make all sorts of things with it.”
“And Ludmilla agrees?”
“She likes my things. She gives me advice. The critics say what I do is important. Now they’re putting all my works in a book. They took me to talk with Mr. Cavedagna. A book with photographs of all my works. When this book is printed, I’ll use it for another work, lots of works. Then they’ll put them in another book, and so on.”
“I meant, does Ludmilla agree with your taking away her books…”
“She has lots… Sometimes she gives me books herself, specifically for me to work on them, books she has no use for. But just any book won’t do for me. There are some books that immediately give me the idea of what I can make from them, but others don’t. Sometimes I have an idea, but I can’t make it until I find the right book.” He is disarranging the volumes on a shelf; he weighs one in his hand, observes its spine and its edge, puts it down. “There are books I find likable, and books I can’t bear, and I keep coming across them.”
And now the Great Wall of books you hoped would keep this barbarian invader far from Ludmilla is revealed as a toy that he takes apart with complete confidence. You laugh bitterly. “Apparently you know Ludmilla’s library by heart…”
“Oh, it’s always the same stuff, mostly… But it’s nice to see the books all together. I love books…”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Yes, I like to see books around. That’s why it’s nice here, at Ludmilla’s. Don’t you think so?”
The massing of written pages binds the room like the
thickness of the foliage in a dense wood, no, like stratifications of rock, slabs of slate, slivers of schist; so you try to see through Irnerio’s eyes the background against which the living form of Ludmilla must stand out. If you are able to win his trust, Irnerio will reveal to you the secret that intrigues you, the relationship between the Non-reader and the Other Reader, Ludmilla. Quickly, ask him something on this subject, anything. “But you”—this is the only question that comes to your mind—“while she’s reading, what do you do?”
“I don’t mind watching her read,” Irnerio says. “And besides, somebody has to read books, right? At least I can rest easy: I won’t have to read them myself.”
You have little cause to rejoice, Reader. The secret that is revealed to you, the intimacy between the two of them, consists in the complementary relationship of two vital rhythms. For Irnerio all that counts is the life lived instant by instant; art for him counts as expenditure of vital energy, not as a work that remains, not as that accumulation of life that Ludmilla seeks in books. But he also recognizes, without need of reading, that energy somehow accumulated, and he feels obliged to bring it back into circulation, using Ludmilla’s books as the material base for works in which he can invest his own energy, at least for an instant.
“This one suits me,” Irnerio says and is about to stick a volume in the pocket of his windbreaker.
“No, leave that one alone. It’s the book I’m reading. And besides, it’s not mine, I have to return it to Cavedagna. Pick another. Here, take this one… It’s almost the same…”
You have picked up a volume with a red band—latest best seller by silas FLANNERY—and this already explains the resemblance, since all of Flannery’s novels are brought out in a specially designed series. But that isn’t the only thing: the title that stands out on the dust jacket
is In a network of lines that… These are two copies of the same book! You weren’t expecting this. “Why, this really is odd! I would never have thought that Ludmilla already had it…”
Irnerio holds up his hands. “This isn’t Ludmilla’s. I don’t want to have anything to do with that stuff. I thought there weren’t any more of them around.”
“Why? Whose is it? What do you mean?”
Irnerio picks up the volume with two fingers, goes toward a little door, opens it, throws the book inside. You have followed him; you stick your head into a dark little storeroom; you see a table with a typewriter, a tape recorder, dictionaries, a voluminous file. From the file you take the sheet that acts as title page, you carry it to the light, you read: “Translation by Ermes Marana.”
You are thunderstruck. Reading Marana’s letters, you felt you were encountering Ludmilla at every turn… Because you can’t stop thinking of her: this is how you explained it, a proof of your being in love. Now, moving around Ludmilla’s house, you come upon traces of Marana. Is it an obsession persecuting you? No, from the very beginning what you felt was a premonition that a relationship existed between them… Jealousy, which has been a kind of game you played with yourself, now grips you relentlessly. And it isn’t only jealousy: it is suspicion, distrust, the feeling that you cannot be sure of anything or anyone… The pursuit of the interrupted book, which instilled in you a special excitement since you were conducting it together with the Other Reader, turns out to be the same thing as pursuing her, who eludes you in a proliferation of mysteries, deceits, disguises…
“But… what’s Marana got to do with it?” you ask. “Does he live here?”
Irnerio shakes his head. “He was here. Now time has passed. He shouldn’t come back here again. But by now
all his stories are so saturated with falsehood that anything said about him is false. He’s succeeded in this, at least. The books he brought here look the same as the others on the outside, but I recognize them at once, at a distance. And when I think that there shouldn’t be any more here, any more of his papers, except in that storeroom… But every now and then some trace of him pops up again. Sometimes I suspect he puts them here, he comes when nobody’s around and keeps making his usual deals, secretly…”
“What deals?”
“I don’t know… Ludmilla says that whatever he touches, if it isn’t false already, becomes false. All I know is that if I tried to make my works out of books that were his, they would turn out false: even if they looked the same as the ones I’m always making…”
“But why does Ludmilla keep his things in that storeroom? Is she waiting for him to come back?”
“When he was here, Ludmilla was unhappy… She didn’t read any more… Then she ran away… She was the first to go off… Then he went…”
The shadow is going away. You can breathe again. The past is closed. “What if he showed up again?”
“She’d leave once more…”
“For where?”
“Hmm… Switzerland… I don’t know…”
“Is there another man in Switzerland?” Instinctively you have thought of the writer with the spyglass.
“You can call him another man, but it’s an entirely different sort of story. The old thriller guy …”
“Silas Flannery?”
“She said that when Marana convinces her that the difference between the true and the false is only a prejudice of ours, she feels the need to see someone who makes books the way a pumpkin vine makes pumpkins—that’s how she put it…”
The door opens suddenly. Ludmilla enters, flings her coat onto a chair, her packages. “Ah, how marvelous! So many friends! Sorry I’m late!”
You are having tea, sitting with her. Irnerio should also be there, but his armchair is empty.
“He was there. Where has he gone?”
“Oh, he must have left. He comes and goes without saying anything.”
“People come and go like that, in your house?”
“Why not? How did you get in?”
“I, and all the others!”
“What is this? A jealous scene?”
“What right would I have?”
“Do you think that the time will come when you could have the right? If so, it’s best not even to begin.”
“Begin what?”
You set the cup on the coffee table. You move from the armchair to the sofa, where she is sitting.
(To begin. You’re one who said it, Ludmilla. But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest—for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both— must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story. )
You are in bed together, you two Readers. So the moment has come to address you in the second person plural, a very serious operation, because it is tantamount to considering the two of you a single subject. I’m speaking to you two, a fairly unrecognizable tangle under the rumpled sheet. Maybe afterward you will go your separate ways and the story will again have to shift gears painfully, to alternate between the feminine tu and the masculine; but now, since your bodies are trying to find, skin to skin, the adhesion most generous in sensations, to transmit and receive vibrations and waves, to compenetrate the fullnesses and the voids, since in mental activity you have also agreed on the maximum agreement, you can be addressed with an articulated speech that includes you both in a sole, two-headed person. First of all the field of action, or of existence, must be established for this double entity you form. Where is the reciprocal identification leading? What is the central theme that recurs in your variations and modulations? A tension concentrated on not losing anything of its own potential, on prolonging a state of reactivity, on exploiting the accumulation of the other’s desire in order to multiply one’s own charge? Or is it the most submissive abandonment, the exploration of the immensity of strokable and reciprocally stroking spaces, the dissolving of one’s being in a lake whose surface is infinitely tactile? In both situations you certainly do not exist except in relation to each other, but, to make those situations possible, your respective egos have not so much to erase themselves as to occupy, without reserve, all the void of the mental space, invest in itself at the maximum interest or spend itself to the last penny. In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn’t change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu’s, more separate and circumscribed than before.
(This is already true now, when you are still occupied,
each with the other’s presence, in an exclusive fashion. Imagine how it will be in a little while, when ghosts that do not meet will frequent your minds, accompanying the encounters of your bodies tested by habit.)
Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.
And you, too, O Reader, are meanwhile an object of reading: the Other Reader now is reviewing your body as if skimming the index, and at some moments she consults it as if gripped by sudden and specific curiosities, then she lingers, questioning it and waiting till a silent answer reaches her, as if every partial inspection interested her only in the light of a wider spatial reconnaissance. Now she dwells on negligible details, perhaps tiny stylistic faults, for example the prominent Adam’s apple or your way of burying your head in the hollow of her shoulder, and she exploits them to establish a margin of detachment, critical reserve, or joking intimacy; now instead the accidentally discovered detail is excessively cherished— for example, the shape of your chin or a special nip you take at her shoulder—and from this start she gains impetus, covers (you cover together) pages and pages from
top to bottom without skipping a comma. Meanwhile, in the satisfaction you receive from her way of reading you, from the textual quotations of your physical objectivity, you begin to harbor a doubt: that she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to construct for herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you.
Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time?
If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional model, perhaps four-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.
Already, in the confused improvisation of the first encounter, the possible future of a cohabitation is read. Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, each reads in the other the unwritten story. Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn
on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set against it?
You speak to Ludmilla of the novel you were reading while you waited for her. “It’s a book of the sort you like: it conveys a sense of uneasiness from the very first page…”
An interrogative flash passes in her gaze. A doubt seizes you; perhaps this phrase about uneasiness isn’t something you heard her say, you read it somewhere… Or perhaps Ludmilla has already stopped believing in anguish as a condition of truth… Perhaps someone has demonstrated to her that anguish, too, is a mechanism, that there is nothing more easily falsified than the unconscious…
“I like books,” she says, “where all the mysteries and the anguish pass through a precise and cold mind, without shadows, like the mind of a chessplayer.”
“In any case, this is the story of a character who becomes nervous when he hears a telephone ring. One day he’s out jogging…”
“Don’t tell me any more. Let me read it.”
“I didn’t get much further myself. I’ll bring it to you.”
You get out of bed, you go hunt for it in the other room, where the precipitous turn in your relationship with Ludmilla interrupted the normal course of events.
You can’t find it.
(You will find it again at an art show: the latest work of the sculptor Irnerio. The page whose corner you had folded down to mark your place is spread out on one of
the bases of a compact parallelepiped, glued, varnished with a transparent resin. A charred shadow, as of a flame that is released from inside the book, corrugates the surface of the page and opens there a succession of levels like a gnarled rind.)
“I can’t find it, but no matter,” you say to her. “I noticed you have another copy anyway. In fact, I thought you had already read it…”
Unknown to her, you’ve gone into the storeroom to find the Flannery book with the red band. “Here it is.”
Ludmilla opens it. There’s an inscription: “To Ludmilla … Silas Flannery.” “Yes, it’s my copy…”
“Ah, you’ve met Flannery?” you exclaim, as if you knew nothing.
“Yes … he gave me this book… But I was sure it had been stolen from me, before I could read it…”
“Stolen by Irnerio?”
“Hmm…”
It’s time for you to show your hand.
“It wasn’t Irnerio, and you know it. Irnerio, when he saw it, threw it into that dark room, where you keep…”
“Who gave you permission to go rummaging around?”
“Irnerio says that somebody who used to steal your books comes back secretly now to replace them with false books…”
“Irenerio doesn’t know anything.”
“I do: Cavedagna gave me Marana’s letters to read.”
“Everything Ermes says is always a trick.”
“There’s one thing that’s true: that man continues to think of you, to see you in all his ravings, he’s obsessed by the image of you reading.”
“It’s what he was never able to bear.”
Little by little you will manage to understand something more about the origins of the translator’s machina-
tions: the secret spring that set them in motion was his jealousy of the invisible rival who came constantly between him and Ludmilla, the silent voice that speaks to her through books, this ghost with a thousand faces and faceless, all the more elusive since for Ludmilla authors are never incarnated in individuals of flesh and blood, they exist for her only in published pages, the living and the dead both are there always ready to communicate with her, to amaze her, and Ludmilla is always ready to follow them, in the fickle, carefree relations one can have with incorporeal persons. How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words? Always, since his taste and talent impelled him in that direction, but more than ever since his relationship with Ludmilla became critical, Ermes Marana dreamed of a literature made entirely of apocrypha, of false attributions, of imitations and counterfeits and pastiches. If this idea had succeeded in imposing itself, if a systematic uncertainty as to the identity of the writer had kept the reader from abandoning himself with trust—trust not so much in what was being told him as in the silent narrating voice—perhaps externally the edifice of literature would not have changed at all, but beneath, in the foundations, where the relationship between reader and text is established, something would have changed forever. Then Ermes Marana would no longer have felt himself abandoned by Ludmilla absorbed in her reading: between the book and her there would always be insinuated the shadow of mystification, and he, identifying himself with every mystification, would have affirmed his presence.
Your eye falls on the beginning of the book. “But this
isn’t the book I was reading… Same title, same cover, everything the same… But it’s another book! One of the two is a fake.”
“Of course it’s a fake,” Ludmilla says, in a low voice.
“Are you saying it’s a fake because it passed through Marana’s hands? But the book I was reading was also one he had sent to Cavedagna! Can they both be fake?”
“There’s only one person who can tell us the truth: the author.”
“You can ask him, since you’re a friend of his…”
“I was.”
“Was it to him that you went, when you ran away from Marana?”
“You know everything!” she says, with an ironic tone that gets on your nerves more than anything else.
Reader, you have made up your mind: you will go to see the writer. Meanwhile, turning your back on Ludmilla, you have begun reading the new book contained inside the same cover.
(Same up to a point. The band latest best seller by silas flannery covers the last word of the title. You would only have to raise it to realize that this novel is not entitled In a network of lines that enlace like the other one; it is called In a network of lines that intersect.)